The English accident of hitting upon Madeira, and the romantic tale of Master Robert à Machim, or Machin, or Macham, and Mistress Anne d'Arfet, or Darby, or Dorset, which would have suited Camoens, and which I have told elsewhere, [Footnote: Wanderings in West Africa, vol. i, p. 17. Chapter II., 'A Day at Madeira,' was written after my second and before my third visit.] and need not repeat, was probably an 'ingenious account' invented for politico-international ends or to flatter Dom Enrique, a Britisher by the distaff-side. It is told with a thousand variants, and ignored by the learned Fructuoso. According to the apocryphal manuscript of Francisco Alcoforado, the squire who accompanied the Zargo, this elopement took place in the earlier days of Edward III. (A.D. 1327-77). The historian Antonio Galvão fixes upon September 1344, the date generally accepted. Thus the interval between Machim's death and the Zargo's discovery would be seventy-four years; and—pace Mr. Major—the Castilian pilot, Juan Damores (de Amores), popularly called Morales, could not have met the remnant of the Bristol crew in their Moroccan prison, and could not have told the tale to the Portuguese explorers.
M. d'Avezac (loc. cit. p. 116) supports the claims of the Genoese, quoting the charts and portulans of the fourteenth century in which appear Italian names, as Insule dello Legname (of wood, materia, Madeira), Porto Sancto, Insule Deserte, and Insule Selvaggie. Mr. R. H. Major replies that these Italian navigators were commandants of expeditions fitted out by the Portuguese; and that this practice dated from 1341, when two ships officered by Genoese, with crews of [footnote: Amongst the 'ridiculous little blots, which are "nuts" to the old resident,' I must confess to killing Robert Machim in 1334 instead of 1344; 'Collegio' was also translated 'College' instead of 'Jesuit Church.'] Italians, Castilians, and Hispani (Spanish and Portuguese), were sent to explore the Canaries.
'Holy Port' began badly. The first governor, Perestrello, fled from the progeny of his own she-rabbit. This imprudence was also committed at Deserta Grande; and, presently, the cats introduced by way of cure ran wild. A grass-clad rock in the Fiume Gulf can tell the same tale: sheep and lambs were effectually eaten out by rabbits and cats. It will be remembered that Columbus married Philippa, third daughter of the navigator Perestrello, lived as a mapper with his father-in-law, and thence travelled, between 1470 and 1484, to Guinea, where he found that the equatorial regions are not uninhabitable by reason of the heat. He inherited the old seaman's papers, and thus arose the legend of his learning from a castaway pilot the way to the New World. [Footnote: Fructuoso writes that in 1486 Columbus gave food and shelter to the crew of a shattered Biscayan ship; the pilot dying bequeathed to him papers, charts and valuable observations made on the Western Ocean.]
Long years rolled by before Porto Santo learnt to bear the vine, to breed large herds of small cattle, and to produce cereals whose yield is said to have been 60 to 1. Meanwhile it cut down for bowls, mortars, and canoes, as the Guanches did for shields, its thin forest of 'Dragons.' The Dragoeiro (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. At first it bears only bristly, ensiform leaves, four feet long by one to three inches broad, and sharp-pointed, crowning the head like a giant broom. Then it puts forth gouty fingers, generally five, standing stiffly up and still capped by the thick yucca-like tufts. Lastly the digitations grow to enormous arms, sometimes eighteen feet in girth, of light and porous, soft and spongy wood. The tree then resembles the baobab or calabash, the elephant or hippopotamus of the vegetable kingdom.
Amongst the minor uses of this 'Dragon,' the sweet yellowish berries called masainhas were famous for fattening pigs. The splinters made tooth-picks which, dipped in the juice, secured health for human gums. But the great virtue resided in the Sanguis Draconis, the 'Indian Cinnabaris' of Pliny, [Footnote: N.H. xxxiii. 38.] who holds it to be the sanies of the dragon mixed with the blood of the dying elephant. The same semi-mystical name is given to the sap by the Arab pharmists: in the Middle Ages this strong astringent resin was a sovereign cure for all complaints; now it is used chiefly for varnishes. The gum forms great gouts like blood where the bark is wounded or fissured: at first it is soft as that of the cherry, but it hardens by exposure to a dry red lump somewhat like 'mummy.' It has no special taste: when burnt the smell is faintly balsamic. The produce was collected in canes, and hence the commercial name 'Dragon's blood in reeds.'
Mr. P. Barker Webb believed the Dragoeiro to be a species peculiar to the Madeiras and Canaries. But its chief point of interest is its extending through Morocco as far as Arabo-African Socotra, and through the Khamiesberg Range of Southern Africa, where it is called the Kokerboom. As it is utterly African, like the hippopotamus, the zebra, and the giraffe, we must account, by transplantation from Socotra, for the D. Draco seen by Cruttenden in the mountains behind Dhofar and on the hills of El-Yemen. [Footnote: Journ. R. Geogr. Soc. p. 279, vol. viii. of 1838.] The line of growth, like the coffee-shrub and the copal-tree, suggests a connection across the Dark Continent: thus the similar flora of Fernando Po Peak, of Camarones volcano, and of the highlands of Abyssinia seems to prove a latitudinal range traversing the equatorial regions, where the glacial epoch banished for ever the hardier plants from the lower levels. When Humboldt determined it to be a purely Indian growth, he seems to have confounded the true 'dragon' with a palm or some other tree supplying the blood. It was a 'dazzling theory,' but unsound: the few specimens in Indus-land, 'its real country,' are comparatively young, and are known to have been imported.
The endogenous monster, indigenous to the Elysian Fields, is to the surrounding vegetation what the cockatrice is to the cock, the wyvern to the python. I should say 'was,' for all the replants at Madeira and the Canaries are modern, and resemble only big toothsticks. But 'dragons' proper have existed, and perhaps memories of these portents long lingered in the brain of protohistoric man. Even if they had been altogether fabulous, the fanciful Hellenic mind would easily have created them. The Dragoeiro with its boa-like bole, its silvery, light-glancing skin, and its scars stained with red blood, growing in a wild garden of glowing red-yellow oranges, would easily become the fiery saurian guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides.
Porto Santo and Madeira, though near neighbours, are contrasts in most respects. The former has yellow sands and brackish water, full of magnesia and lime, which blacken the front teeth; the latter sweet water and black shingles. The islet is exceedingly dry, the island damp as Devonshire. Holy Port prefers wheeled conveyances: Wood-and-Fennel-land corsas or sledges, everywhere save on the New Road. Finally, the wines of the northern mite are comparatively light and acidulous; of the southern, luscious and heady.
Both scraps of ground are of kindred although disputed origin. Classicists [Footnote: Plato, Timaeus, ii. 517. His 'fruit with a hard rind, affording meat, drink, and ointment,' is evidently the cocoanut. The cause of the lost empire and the identity of its site with the Dolphin's Ridge and the shallows noted by H.M.S. Challenger, have been ably pleaded in Atlantis, &c., by Ignatius Donnelly (London, Sampson Low, 1882).] find in these sons of Vulcan, the débris of Platonic Atlantis, a drowned continent, a 'Kingdom of Nowhere,' which some cataclysm whelmed beneath the waters, leaving, for all evidence, three shattered groups of outcrops, like the Channel Islands, fragments of a lost empire, the 'bones of a wasted body.' Geologists, noting that volcanoes almost always fringe mainlands, believe them destined, together with the Cape Verdes, to rampart in future ages the Dark Continent with a Ghaut-chain higher than the Andes. Other theorists hold to a recent connection of the Madeiras with Mount Atlas, although the former rise from a narrow oceanic trough some 13,000 to 15,000 feet deep. Others again join them to Southern Europe and to Northern America. The old Portuguese and certain modern realists make them a continuation of the Serra de Monchique in the Algarves, even as the Azores prolong Cintra; and this opinion is somewhat justified by the flora, which resembles in many points the tertiary and extinct growths of Europe. [Footnote: Such is the opinion of M. Pégot-Ogier in The Fortunate Islands, translated by Frances Locock (London, Bentleys, 1871). Moquet set the example in 1601 by including Madeira also in the 'Elysian Fields and Earthly Paradise' of the ancients.]
Porto Santo was till lately distinguished only for pride, poverty, and purity of blood. Her soil, according to the old chroniclers, has never been polluted, like São Thomé and other colonies, by convicts, Jews, or other 'infected peoples.' She was populated by Portuguese 'noble and taintless'—Palestrellos, Calaças, Pinas, Vieyras, Rabaçaes, Crastos, Nunes, Pestanas, and Concellos. And yet not a little scandal was caused by Holiport when the 'Prophet Fernando' and the 'Prophetess Philippa' (Nunes), 'instigated by the demon and the deceitfulness of mankind,' induced the ecclesiastics to introduce into the introit, with the names of St. Peter and St. Paul, the 'Blessed Prophet Fernando.' The tale of murder is told with holy horror by Dr. Gaspar Fructuoso, and the islanders are still nicknamed 'prophetas.' Foreigners, however, who have lately visited them, speak highly of their simple primitive ways.