"Let us no more contend
Each other, blamed enough elsewhere, but strive
In offices of love, how we may lighten
Each other's burden in our share of woe."
MILTON.
I do not know a spot on the globe which astonishes and delights, upon your first landing, as the island of Madeira.
The voyager embarks, and is in all probability confined to his cabin, suffering under the dreadful protraction of sea-sickness. Perhaps he has left England in the gloomy close of the autumn, or the frigid concentration of an English winter. In a week, or even in a shorter period, he again views that terra firma which he had quitted with regret, and which in his sufferings he would have given half that he possessed to regain.
When he lands upon the island, what a change! Winter has become summer, the naked trees which he left are exchanged for the most luxuriant and varied foliage, snow and frost for warmth and splendour; the scenery of the temperate zone for the profusion and magnificence of the tropics; fruit which he had never before seen, supplies for the table unknown to him; a bright sky, a glowing sun, hills covered with vines, a deep-blue sea, a picturesque and novel costume; all meet and delight the eye, just at the precise moment when to have been landed, even upon a barren island, would have been considered as a luxury. Add to all this, the unbounded hospitality of the English residents, a sojourn too short to permit satiety; and then is it to be wondered that the island of Madeira is a "green spot" in the memory of all those who land there, or that they quit it with regret?
The Bombay Castle had not been two hours at anchor before the passengers had availed themselves of an invitation from one of the English residents, and were quartered in a splendid house, which looked upon a square and one of the principal churches in the city of Funchal. While the gentlemen amused themselves, at the extensive range of windows, with the novelty of the scene, and the ladies retired to their apartments to complete the hasty toilet of their disembarkation, Captain Drawlock was very busy in the counting-house below, with the master of the house. There were so many pipes of Madeira for the Honourable Company; so many for the directors' private cellars, besides many other commissions for friends, which Captain Drawlock had undertaken to execute; for at that period Madeira wine had not been so calumniated as it latterly has been.
A word upon this subject. I am a mortal enemy to every description of humbug; and I believe there is as much in the medical world as in any other. Madeira wine had for a century been in high and deserved reputation, when on a sudden some fashionable physician discovers that it contained more acid than sherry. Whether he was a sleeping partner in some Spanish house, or whether he had received a present of a few pipes of sherry that he might turn the scale of public favour towards that wine, I know not; but certain it is, that it became fashionable with all medical gentlemen to prescribe sherry; and when once anything becomes fashionable, c'est une affaire decidée.
I do not pretend to be much of a pathologist; but on reading Mr F——'s analysis on the component parts of wine, I observed that in one hundred parts there are perhaps twenty-two parts of acid in Madeira, and nineteen in sherry; so that, in fact, if you reduce your glass of Madeira wine just one sip in quantity, you will imbibe no more acid than in a full glass of sherry; and when we consider the variety of acids in sugar and other compounds, which abound in culinary preparations, the fractional quantity upon which has been grounded the abuse of Madeira wine appears to be most ridiculous.
But if not a pathologist, I have a most decided knowledge of what is good wine; and if the gout should some day honour me with a visit, I shall at least have the consolation to know that I have by potation most honestly earned it.
But allowing that the medical gentlemen are correct, still their good intentions are frustrated by the knavery of the world; and the result of their prescriptions is that people drink much more acid than they did before. I do every justice to good old sherry when it does make its appearance at table; it is a noble wine when aged and unsophisticated from its youth; but for once that you meet with it genuine, you are twenty times disappointed. When Madeira wine was in vogue, the island could not produce the quantity required for consumption, and the vintage from the north side of the island, or of Teneriffe, was substituted. This adulteration no doubt was one cause of its losing its well-established reputation. But Madeira wine has a quality which in itself proves its superiority over all other wines—namely, that although no other wine can be passed off as Madeira, yet with Madeira the wine-merchants may imitate any other wine that is in demand. What is the consequence? that Madeira, not being any longer in request as Madeira now that sherry is the "correct thing," and there not being sufficient of the latter to meet the increased demand, most of the wine vended as sherry is made from the inferior Madeira wines. Reader, if you have ever been in Spain, you may have seen the Xerez or sherry wine brought from the mountains to be put into the cask. A raw goat-skin, with the neck-part and the four legs sewed up, forms a leathern bag, containing perhaps from fifteen to twenty gallons. This is the load of one man, who brings it down on his shoulder exposed to the burning rays of the sun. When it arrives, it is thrown down on the sand, to swelter in the heat with the rest, and remains there probably for days before it is transferred into the cask. It is this proceeding which gives to sherry that peculiar leather twang which distinguishes it from other wines—a twang easy to imitate by throwing into a cask of Cape wine a pair of old boots, and allowing them to remain a proper time. Although the public refuse to drink Madeira as Madeira, they are in fact drinking it in every way disguised—as port, as sherry, &c.; and it is a well-known fact that the poorer wines from the north side of the island are landed in the London Docks, and shipped off to the Continent, from whence they reappear in bottles as "peculiarly fine flavoured hock!"