A Wind From the North by Ernle Bradford Page B

and the small ship soon began to drop the familiar island astern. As they drew nearer, the cloud ahead of them thickened until it seemed to the sailors as if it blotted out the whole horizon. They felt the humid mist on the decks and rigging, and crossed themselves. Zarco and Morales peered ahead. They were men of more intelligence and experience than the others, but they too had been brought up in a climate of legend and superstition.
    “Do you hear anything?” asked one.
    The ship had begun to lift in an uneasy way, as if she felt a new movement of the ocean. It was no longer the swell from the following wind. Her bow began to lift and bump.
    “Surf?”
    They were feeling the cliff wash from an unknown shore.
    “The sea is boiling!” cried the sailors. “Turn back! The sea is boiling!”
    But one man, calmer or more phlegmatic than the rest, shaded his eyes against the dazzle of sun on mist, and saw a line of broken water.
    “Breakers ahead!”
    The mist began to thin and the flapping sail to draw again in a new light air. The sound of breaking waves was all around them now.
    Suddenly they slid out into the sunlight, and the land was warm ahead of them. Tall peaks were clothed with forest and twined with cloud. Streams were falling in silver ribbons down emerald green, and startled birds were rising in bright clouds. In front of them lay the friendly arm of a bay. They had discovered Madeira.

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    Zarco’s discovery of Madeira was the first important step in the exploration of the Atlantic. It was the first gleam of light to be cast upon the Sea of Darkness. It would be many years before Prince Henry could induce any of his mariners to round Cape Bojador and sail south of the Canaries down the African coast, but the discovery of Madeira was like the lifting of a curtain.
    They called the island Madeira from the Portuguese word for “wood,” and it was the dense forests of this fertile, well-watered island that at first seemed to promise the major profit from the discovery. Wood for shipbuilding was essential for a maritime country, and its importance in a thinly forested land like Portugal had been recognized from very early days. So much was this so that, among early edicts, there is one that reads: “Whoever shall cut a pine tree, let them hang him”— pine, then as now, being of great value for the planking of boats.
    Prince Henry and his father were delighted with the discovery—the former because he saw in it further proof that his ships could be made to sail where men had always maintained there was nothing but the horrors of ocean, the latter because it justified his trust in his son’s endeavors. Zarco was made a count, and the island was divided between him and his fellow captain, Tristao Vaz. The southern half of the island, with Funchal (after the Portuguese word, funcho, for fennel, which was found there) as capital, was given to Zarco. The northern half, with Machico (reputedly called after Robert Machin) as capital, was given to Tristao Vaz.
    It was not for some five years after its discovery that the colonization proper of the island began. In the meantime, vast areas of the virgin forest had been devastated by a fire which, started deliberately with a view to clearing land for cultivation, soon got out of hand. The fire, so one report has it, burned steadily for seven years. Although at the time this seemed a major disaster, it proved a boon in the end. On the mountain slopes where trees had once grown, the vine took root, and in the fertile valleys enriched by the potash from the wood, the sugar cane flourished. Both of these importations were due to Prince Henry. It was he who sent to Sicily for sugar canes, and it was he who sent to distant Crete for the hardy stock of the malvasia grape. The best wine was ultimately produced near Machico, and it was this malvasia Madeira, corrupted into “malmsey,” that later became a favorite tipple of the English. It is an odd thought that