A lovely, worldly quirk
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 9 February
In 1420, a genuinely epochal event took place on a small, isolated, previously uninhabited island in the Atlantic, some 360 miles west of Morocco. That year, the Portuguese fleet – the most advanced in the world at the time, thanks to Prince Henry the Navigator – located Madeira. Within two years they had established an agricultural colony there.
It was the first great stride in European imperialism, the first of the west’s extra-European, extra-Mediterranean possessions, the first overseas colony to be settled and developed for the benefit of the motherland. From the outset, and through its near 600 year history, Madeira’s economy and society have played a part in and been dependent on emergent global systems.
After seizing Madeira, the Portuguese ventured further south, rounding Cape Bojador in 1434, taking the Cape Verde islands in 1455, reaching Sierra Leone in 1460, Sao Tome in 1471, and the mouth of the Congo in 1482. With Madeira as their jumping off point, they “brought into being a coherent economic zone,” observed historian Fernand Braudel, “based essentially on trade in ivory, malaguetta (a pepper substitute), gold dust and the slave trade”.
In 1488, Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut, the long-prized wealth of India lay at Portugal’s feet, and the historic development of both south Asia and Europe was transformed. Soon after, sailing westward from Madeira, the Portuguese found and appropriated the coast of Brazil.
Little Madeira, barely thirty miles long by 15 miles wide, was the springboard for all this.
Madeira was from the first and remains intrinsically import-export reliant. Initially wheat was cultivated for the mainland market. But by 1460, wheat had been replaced by sugar, introduced by Genoese merchants who had financed sugar plantations from the eastern Mediterranean through Sicily, Spain and Portugal. Along with the sugar came slaves – Arabs, Berbers, west Africans – to work the fields and refineries. For 70 years, Madeira dominated the western European sugar market. Brazil, however, soon outstripped Madeira, producing greater quantities at lower costs
Madeira had to find another export crop. It turned to wine, and in so doing created one of the earliest global brand names. In Act II, Scene i of King Henry IV Part I, Shakespeare has Poins round on Falstaff: “Jack! How agrees the devil and thee about thy soul, that thou soldest him on Good-Friday last for a cup of Madeira and a cold capon’s leg?” The reference is anachronistic – in Falstaff’s day there was no Madeira – but it’s an indication of the popularity the drink had acquired in Shakespeare’s London.
Henry the Navigator had ordered malvasia vines transported from Crete to Madeira, where they flourished and became known throughout the English speaking world as malmsey. Other noble varieties were imported by the Jesuits, an early transnational institution. But what makes Madeira special is the wine-making process unique to the island, which evolved as a result of the wine having to make long sea voyages. The wine is warmed over a period of months, fortified with grape spirits, exposed to oxidation and aged in cask before being bottled, sometime decades later. All of which gives it an exceptional longevity and (in the not so cheap brands) complex taste.
English merchants came to dominate the Madeira wine trade, establishing a long-lasting connection between Madeira and another world system, the British empire. The island’s overseas market was secured in 1665 when King Charles II, who had just received Bombay from Portugal as a result of his marriage to Catherine of Braganza, guaranteed Madeira a virtual monopoly on wine shipments to British territories in the New World. In the 18th century, American colonists consumed a quarter of all wine produced on the island each year. The signing of the The Declaration of Independence, breaking with the British system and establishing a new one, was toasted in Madeira.
British troops occupied the island during the Napoleonic Wars; British merchants bought land and became the island’s leading wine makers. Soon after came the first tourists. The mid-Victorian steamboats that carried holiday-makers from the south of England were the pioneers of package tourism, another globe-entangling phenomenon.
Much of the 20th century was unkind to Madeira, especially the decades of fascist dictatorship, during which the island was neglected. As a result, from the 1940s onward, Madeira experienced decades of mass emigration, disseminating its population into the global labour market. Today Madeirans can be found in the hotel kitchens of the Channel Island, in the oilfields of Venezuela, and running shops and small businesses across South Africa, where there are said be more Madeirans or descendants of Madeirans than on Madeira itself.
Due to a convoluted last-minute change of plans, I recently found myself on this remarkable speck on the map. I had never thought of Madeira as a travel destination but it proved as surprising and intriguing as its history. It’s a singular place. Compact, yet astonishingly diverse. Most of the island is mountainous, rising to craggy peaks and fissuring into deep ravines. It’s said to have more than 30 micro-climates, from the tropical to the alpine, and given the rapidity with which the weather changes, sun-chasing-cloud-chasing sun, I believe it.
But it’s the profusion of plantlife, especially the flowers that carpet much of the island, changing by the month, that most astounds. There are said to be more than 120 wild plants unique to Madeira. But that’s only part of the story. Madeira’s outward-facing connections are reflected in the lush vegetation. Bulbs and seeds imported over the centuries from Europe, the Mediterranean, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and India sprouted easily in the rich volcanic soil and spread beyond the island’s innumerable gardens. For those in the know, Madeira is said to be a “phytogeographical” treasure.
Most ravishing of all, for me at least, were the primeval bay laurel forests that still cover some 20 per cent of the island. Several million years ago, such forests blanketed southern Europe and northern Africa. Now they can only be explored here: a majestic, mysterious, upward-soaring, downward-plunging density of dark green leaves and ancient thick tree trunks.
Luckily, they can be explored with relative ease thanks to Madeira’s unique 500-year old system of levadas, narrow aqueducts cut into steep mountain walls, carrying water from the high wet interior to the coastal farms. These make for ideal walking: you can get deep access into remote wilderness with little effort.
Despite the tourist industry, and too many poorly planned, unsightly new developments, Madeira remains a gently ageing, unpretentious backwater. It’s a bit of provincial Portugal plonked down on an exotic island. Untidied villages are adorned with black and white Baroque Churches (an international style). Agriculture and fishing remain the biggest employers. In places Madeira looks like a last redoubt of the long vanishing European peasantry. There’s hardly a tractor or mechanical device in sight. The land is cultivated in tiny plots on steep terraces and farmers walk to their fields with hoe in hand. The overwhelming majority are small holders or tenants. One third of all arable land is still under the latifundia system, controlled by distant landlords. Apart from wine grapes and bananas, production is for local consumption.
Since the granting of regional autonomy following the revolution of 1974, and Portugal’s admission to the EU in the 80s, Madeira has grown more prosperous, if also more unequal. The island is now ringed by a coastal expressway, as a result of which journeys that used to take two days along the old winding mountain roads can be completed in under an hour. A Free Trade Zone has been established and it’s hoped the island will become an offshore banking centre, though it may well be too late for Madeira to cash in on that particular world cycle.
Madeira is a quirk, a lovely quirk. But it’s a quirk made possible by its integration into a succession of wider horizons. The most famous Madeiran of this or any other era is one Cristiano Ronaldo, currently of Manchester United. Like the wine, he’s become a global brand, an icon of a competitive world system.
