I have just returned from a first visit to the island of Madeira. Politically it is a constituent part of Portugal but geologically, as I was told by Ronaldo, the driver I hired (not to be confused with his more famous namesake, the footballer, who also comes from the island) it is part of Africa. In various places I saw signs marking the 600th anniversary of the discovery of the island in 1418 by two Portuguese mariners, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vex Teixeira. (The first landing happened the following year.) Dates of ‘discovery’ can, of course, be disputed, and it now seems likely that Vikings visited the island (and its small surrounding archipelago), and it is possible that Pliny knew of it even earlier.
It dawned on me after a few days that there was something very distinctive about the history of Madeira. This was the very first place I had visited anywhere in the world where there had been no inhabitants prior to the arrival of European settlers – which happened within a year or two of Zarco and Teixeira’s report back to Henry the Navigator in Lisbon. Madeira was genuinely a terra nullius – or unoccupied land, unlike other parts of the world (particularly Australia) where that epithet was inaccurately accorded in order to eliminate any native people’s claims.
I have visited every continent except Antarctica, and everywhere I have learned of histories of contact between Europeans and already-resident populations. I have been to certain West Indian islands (for example St Lucia and Barbados in the Lesser Antilles) where European settlement was preceded by Caribs and Arawaks. The Smithsonian Institution has an ongoing project showing how there are continuing legacies of these people in the islands today.
There were Algonquin peoples in what is now New York a thousand years before the Dutch settled the site, and the curious line of Broadway, cutting across the grid pattern of streets of today’s Manhattan, is a legacy of the native hunters’ Wickquasgeck Trail. (The name ‘Manhattan’ is itself of native American origin). In San Francisco I have heard about how thousands of native Americans were killed in an apparent policy of genocide or ethnic cleansing in the mid nineteenth century to make way for the new settlers of the state of California. Throughout Canada I have been impressed by the way in which the ‘first nations’ of that country are now celebrated and their history commemorated, providing some form of atonement for previous persecution of these groups.
In Australia I have participated in conferences where, at the start of proceedings, there is formal recognition of the so-called ‘aboriginal’ group from whom the land for the conference building was taken. And in New Zealand I have seen, and commented on in earlier blogs, the ways in which the whites (pakeha) and Maori came into contact, generally to the disadvantage of the latter. And no one with the slightest knowledge of South Africa can be in ignorance about the issues of contact between European settlers and original populations.
These examples are all drawn from places I have visited outside Europe. (I might add that within Europe I have also heard of the effects of contact for the Sami peoples of northern Scandinavia, told to me while sitting in the house of a Sami man in northern Finnmark.) I am excepting China and Japan here, both of which I have also spent time in: in both of those cases European travellers were faced with societies of similar levels of development as themselves.
In every one of the other cases the arrival of Europeans brought upheaval, disease, the expropriation of land (or the disavowal of the rights of earlier peoples to use it), and sometimes genocide. The role of Christian churches and their insistence on a ‘civilising’ mission of conversion was particularly profound, dismantling existing societies and belief patterns and often prohibiting practices that had tied peoples to their land for generations. Through almost every other country I have visited there have been long-term effects that have hugely damaged not just the ways of life of ‘first nations’ peoples (to use the Canadian term, which I rather like) but in most cases have also drastically reduced the viability of their societies and decimated their numbers. (Again, I except Japan and China from this generalisation, although contact in 19thcentury China and the Opium Wars were not exactly beneficial episodes in China’s history).
So was Madeira a paradise where European settlers found virgin territory and were able to establish an economy and a society without destroying something that pre-existed it?
Ronaldo, the driver, took us on a tour of the Eastern part of the island. And for an hour or so we walked alongside one of the levadas or irrigation channels (from the Portuguese ‘levar’ – to carry) that run along the contours of the mountains to bring fresh water from the heights, particularly in the north, down to the fields below and to the lower-lying towns. There are no underground water sources on volcanic Madeira, so the use of surface water was essential. There are between 1400 and 2000 km of levadas in total, although some are in disrepair. They are one of the great joys of Madeira, providing easy walking with stupendous views surrounded by plentiful wild flowers. We were accompanied on our walk by local Madeiran chaffinches.
A levada walk
A Madeiran chaffinch
Most written and web materials on Madeira and the levadas use the passive tense in describing their construction: ‘they were built’, ‘they were constructed’, ‘a network of levadas was created’ and so on. But by whom? Some sources are more explicit – they were built by Arab and African slaves who were brought to the island in the later fifteenth century to work on the sugar plantations set up by the Portuguese and to construct the all-important water channels that supplied the irrigation water. Constructing the levadas along the precipitous mountainsides was dangerous work, and slaves were suspended from above to cut the channels with hand-tools. The first slaves on the island were recorded in 1452, from both North Africa and from the Canary Islands (the Guanches – indigenous peoples: unlike Madeira, the Canaries were already inhabited by non-Europeans). In 1614 the population of Madeira was enumerated as just over 28,000, of whom 3,000 (11%) were slaves. But the sugar plantation economy collapsed later that century in the face of Caribbean competition. And Portugal abolished slavery in 1775.
So although Madeira is unique in my travels as a territory where the first European settlers faced no indigenous populations whatsoever, subsequent history reflects so many patterns elsewhere – of the exploitation of an ethnically and culturally different population – in this case through the operation of the slave trade. The South African media company IOL describes Madeira as ‘The Portuguese island with slave roots’. And it is true that some of the most distinctive tourist attractions of the island – and therefore the basis of one of the three pillars of the island’s contemporary economy of tourism, Madeira wine, and bananas – are the product of slave labour.
Every place has its elements of uniqueness, but beneath these there are always general patterns of historical, sociological and economic evolution that respond to wider forces. Despite its unique origins in terms of European settlement Madeira shares its history of the exploitation of ‘non-European’ populations with other European powers’ colonies around the world.
