The Canary Islands

by Florence Du Cane

I

TENERIFFE

Probably many people have shared my feeling of disappointment on landing at Santa Cruz. I had long ago realised that few places come up to the standard of one’s preconceived ideas, so my mental picture was not in this case a very beautiful one; but even so, the utter hideousness of the capital of Teneriffe was a shock to me.

Unusually clear weather at sea had shown us our first glimpse of the Peak, rising like a phantom mountain out of the clouds when 100 miles distant, but as we drew nearer to land the clouds had gathered, and the cone was wrapped in a mantle of mist. There is no disappointment attached to one’s first impression of the Island as seen from the sea. The jagged range of hills seemed to come sheer down to the coast, and appeared to have been torn and rent by some extraordinary upheaval of Nature; the deep ravines (or barrancos as I afterwards learnt to call them) were full of dark blue mysterious shadows, a deeply indented coast-line stretched far away in the distance, and I thought the land well deserved to be called one of the Fortunate Islands.

Santa Cruz, or to give it its full title, Santa Cruz de Santiago, though one of the oldest towns in the Canaries, looked, as our ship glided into the harbour, as though it had been built yesterday, or might even be still in course of construction. Lying low on the shore the flat yellow-washed houses, with their red roofs, are thickly massed together, the sheer ugliness of the town being redeemed by the spires of a couple of old churches, which look down reprovingly on the modern houses below. Arid slopes rise gradually behind the town, and appear to be utterly devoid of vegetation. Perched on a steep ridge is the Hotel Quisisana, which cannot be said to add to the beauty of the scene, and all my sympathy went out to those who were condemned to spend a winter in such desolate surroundings in search of health.

Probably no foreign town is entirely devoid of interest to the traveller. On landing, the picturesque objects which meet the eye make one realise that once one’s foot has left the last step of the gangway of the ship, England and everything English has been left behind. The crowd of swarthy loafers who lounge about the quay in tight yellow or white garments, are true sons of a southern race, and laugh and chatter gaily with handsome black-eyed girls. Sturdy country women are settling heavy loads on their donkeys, preparatory to taking their seat on the top of the pack for their journey over the hills. Their peculiar head-dress consists of a tiny straw hat, no larger than a saucer, which acts as a pad for the loads they carry on their heads, from which hangs a large black handkerchief either fluttering in the wind, or drawn closely round the shoulders like a shawl.

Here and there old houses remain, dating from the days when the wine trade was at its zenith, and though many have now been turned into consulates and shipping offices, they stand in reproachful contrast to the buildings run up cheaply at a later date. Through many an open doorway one gets a glimpse of these cool spacious old houses, whose broad staircases and deep balconies surround a shady patio or court-yard. On the ground floor the wine was stored and the living rooms opened into the roomy balconies on the first floor. Here and there a small open Plaza, where drooping pepper trees shade stone seats, affords breathing-space, but over all and everything was a thick coating of grey dust, which gave a squalid appearance to the town. Narrow ill-paved streets, up which struggle lean, over-worked mules, dragging heavy rumbling carts, lead out of the town, and I was thankful to shake the dust of Santa Cruz off my feet; not that one does, as unless there has been very recent rain the dust follows everywhere. An electric tramway winds its way up the slopes behind the town at a very leisurely pace, giving one ample time to survey the scene.

The only vegetation which looks at home in the dry dusty soil is prickly pear, a legacy of the cochineal culture. In those halcyon days arid spots were brought into cultivation and the cactus planted everywhere. In the eighteenth century the islanders had merely regarded cochineal as a loathsome form of blight, and it was forbidden to be landed for fear it should spoil their prickly pears, but prejudice was overcome, and when it was realised that a possible source of wealth was to be found in the cultivation of the cactus, Opuntia coccinellifera, which is the most suited to the insect, the craze began. Land was almost unobtainable; the amount of labour was enormous which was expended in breaking up the lava to reach the soil below, in terracing hills wherever it was possible to terrace; property was mortgaged to buy new fields; in fact, the islanders thought their land was as good as a gold-mine. The following figures are given by Mr. Samler Brown to show the extraordinary rapidity with which the trade developed. “In 1831 the first shipment was 8 lb., the price at first being about ten pesetas a lb.; in ten years it had increased to 100,566 lb., and in 1869 the highest total, 6,076,869 lb., with a value of £789,993.” The rumour of the discovery of aniline dyes alarmed the islanders, but for a time they were not sufficiently manufactured seriously to affect the cochineal trade, though the fall in prices began to make merchants talk of over-production. The crisis came in 1874, when the price in London fell to 1s. 6d. or 2s., and the ruin to the cochineal industry was a foregone conclusion. Aniline dyes had taken the public taste, and though cochineal has been proved to be the only red dye to resist rain and hard wear, the demand is now small, and merchants who had bought up and stored the dried insect were left with unsaleable stock on their hands. Retribution, we are told, was swift, sudden, and universal, and the farmer who had spent so much on bringing land into cultivation foot by foot, realised that the cactus must be rooted up or he must face starvation.

Possibly there are many other people as ignorant as I was myself on my first visit to the Canaries on the subject of cochineal. Beyond the fact that cochineal was a red dye and used occasionally as a colouring-matter in cooking, I could not safely have answered any question concerning it. I was much disgusted at finding that it is really the blood of an insect which looks like a cross between a “wood-louse” and a “mealy-bug,” with a fat body rather like a currant. The most common method of cultivation, I believe, was to allow the insect to attach itself to a piece of muslin in the spring, which was then laid on to a box full of “mothers” in a room at a very high temperature.

The muslin was then fastened on to the leaf of the cactus by means of the thorns of the wild prickly pear. When once attached to the leaf the madre cannot move again. There were two different methods of killing the insect to send it to market, one by smoking it with sulphur and the other by shaking it in sacks. A colony of the insects on a prickly pear leaf looks like a large patch of lumpy blight, most unpleasant, and enough to make any one say they would never again eat anything coloured with cochineal.