No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly
imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and
gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape of
Madeira, when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a tearful
afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of drop-curtains is often very
boldly beautiful, but here Nature, if she had taken a hint from art, had
certainly bettered her instruction. During the waits between acts at the
theatre, while studying the magnificent painting beyond the trouble of
the orchestra, I have been most impressed by the splendid variety which
the artist had got into his picture, where the spacious frame lent
itself to his passion for saying everything; but I remembered his
thronging fancies as meagre and scanty in the presence of the stupendous
reality before me. I have, for instance, not even mentioned the sea,
which swept smoother and smoother in toward the feet of those precipices
and grew more and more trans-lucently purple and yellow and green, while
half a score of cascades shot straight down their fronts in shafts of
snowy foam, and over their pachydermatous shoulders streamed and hung
long reaches of gray vines or mosses. To the view from the sea the
island is all, with its changing capes and promontories and bays and
inlets, one immeasurable mountain; and on the afternoon of our approach
it was bestridden by a steadfast rainbow, of which we could only see one
leg indeed, but that very stout and athletic.
There were breadths of dark woodland aloft on this mountain, and
terraced vineyards lower down; and on the shelving plateaus yet farther
from the heights that lost themselves in the clouds there were scattered
white cottages; on little levels close to the sea there were set white
villas. These, as the ship coquetted with the vagaries of the shore,
thickened more and more, until after rounding a prodigious headland we
found ourselves in face of the charming little city of Funchal: long
horizontal lines of red roofs, ivory and pink and salmon walls, evenly
fenestrated, with an ancient fortress giving the modern look of things a
proper mediaeval touch. Large hotels, with the air of palaces, crowned
the upland vantages; there were bell-towers of churches, and in one
place there was a wide splotch of vivid color from the red of the
densely flowering creeper on the side of some favored house. There was
an acceptable expanse of warm brown near the quay from the withered but
unfailing leaves of a sycamore-shaded promenade, and in the fine
roadstead where we anchored there lay other steamers and a lead-colored
Portuguese war-ship. I am not a painter, but I think that here are the
materials of a water-color which almost any one else could paint. In the
hands of a scene-painter they would yield a really unrivalled
drop-curtain. I stick to the notion of this because when the beautiful
goes too far, as it certainly does at Madeira, it leaves you not only
sated but vindictive; you wish to mock it.
The afternoon saddened more and more, and one could not take an interest
in the islanders who came out in little cockles and proposed to dive for
shillings and sixpences, though quarters and dimes would do. The
company's tender also came out, and numbers of passengers went ashore in
the mere wantonness of paying for their dinner and a night's lodging in
the annexes of the hotels, which they were told beforehand were full.
The lights began to twinkle from the windows of the town, and the dark
fell upon the insupportable picturesqueness of the prospect, leaving one
to a gayety of trooping and climbing lamps which defined the course of
the streets.
The morning broke in sunshine, and after early breakfast the launches
began to ply again between the ship and the shore and continued till
nearly all the first and second cabin people had been carried off. The
people of the steerage satisfied what longing they had for strange
sights and scenes by thronging to the sides of the steamer until they
gave her a strong list landward, as they easily might, for there were
twenty-five hundred of them. At Madeira there is a local Thomas Cook &
Son of quite another name, but we were not finally sure that the alert
youth on the pier who sold us transportation and provision was really
their agent. However, his tickets served perfectly well at all points,
and he was of such an engaging civility and personal comeliness that I
should not have much minded their failing us here and there. He gave the
first charming-touch of the Latin south whose renewed contact is such a
pleasure to any one knowing it from the past. All Portuguese as Funchal
was, it looked so like a hundred little Italian towns that it seemed to
me as if I must always have driven about them in calico-tented
bullock-carts set on runners, as later I drove about Eunchal.
It was warm enough on the ship, but here in the town we found ourselves
in weather that one could easily have taken for summer, if the
inhabitants had not repeatedly assured us that it was the season of
winter, and that there were no flowers and no fruits. They could not, if
they had wished, have denied the flies; these, in a hotel interior to
which we penetrated, simply swarmed. If it was winter in Funchal it was
no wintrier than early autumn would have been in one of those Italian
towns of other days; it had the same temperament, the same little
tree-planted spaces, the same devious, cobble-paved streets, the same
pleasant stucco houses; the churches had bells of like tone, and if
their facades confessed a Spanish touch they were not more Spanish than
half the churches in Naples. The public ways were of a scrupulous
cleanliness, as if, with so many English signs glaring down at them,
they durst not untidy out-of-doors, though in-doors it was said to be
different with them. There are three thousand English living at Funchal
and everybody speaks English, however slightly. The fresh faces of
English girls met us in the streets and no doubt English invalids
abound.
We shipmates were all going to the station of the funicular railway, but
our tickets did not call for bullock-sleds and so we took a clattering
little horse-car, which climbed with us through up-hill streets and got
us to the station too soon. Within the closed grille there the
handsomest of swarthy, black-eyed, black-mustached station-masters (if
such was his quality) told us that we could not have a train at once,
though we had been advised that any ten of us could any time have a
train, because the cars had all gone up the mountain and none would be
down for twenty minutes. He spoke English and he mitigated by a most
amiable personality sufferings which were perhaps not so great as we
would have liked to think. Some of us wandered off down a pink-and-cream
colored avenue near by and admired so much the curtains of
red-and-yellow flowers--a cross between honeysuckles and trumpet
blossoms--overhanging a garden-wall that two friendly boys began to
share our interest in them. One of them mounted the other and tore down
handfuls of the flowers, which they bestowed upon us with so little
apparent expectation of reward that we promptly gave them of the
international copper coinage current in Madeira, and went back to the
station doubtless feeling guiltier than they. Had we not been accessory
after the fact to something like theft and, as it was Sunday, to
Sabbath-breaking besides? Afterward flowers proved so abundant in
Madeira in spite of its being winter, that we could not feel the larceny
a serious one, and the Sunday was a Latin Sabbath well used to being
broken. The pony engine which was to push our slanting car over the
cogged track up the mountain arrived with due ceremony of bell and
whistle, and we were let through the grille by the station-master as
politely as if we had been each his considered guest. Then the climb
began through the fields of sugar-cane, terraced vineyards, orchards of
fruit trees, and gardens of vegetables planted under the arbors over
which the grapes were trained. One of us told the others that the
vegetables were sheltered to save them from being scorched by the summer
sun, and that much of the work among them was done by moonlight to save
the laborers from the same fate. I do not know how he had amassed this
knowledge, and I am not sure that I have the right to impart it without
his leave. I myself saw some melons lolling on one of the tiled roofs of
the cottages where they had perhaps been pushed by the energetic forces
of the earth and sky. The grape-vines were quiescent, partly because it
was winter, as everybody said, and partly because the wine culture is no
longer so profitable in the island. It has been found for the moment
that Madeira is bad for the gout, and this discovery of the doctors is
bad for the peasants (already cruelly overtaxed by Portugal), who are
leaving their homes in great numbers and seeking their fortunes in both
of the Americas, as well as the islands of all the seas. It must be a
heartbreak for them to forsake such homes as we saw in the clean white
cottages, with the balconies and terraces.
But there were no signs of depopulation either of old or young. Smiling
mothers and fathers of all ages, in their Sunday leisure and their
Sunday best, watched our ascent as if they had never seen the like
before, and our course was never so swift but we could be easily
overtaken by the children; they embarrassed us with the riches of the
camellias which they flung in upon us, and they were accompanied by
small dogs which barked excitedly. Our train almost grazed the walls of
the door-yards as we passed through the succession of the one- and
two-story cottages, which dotted the mountain-side in every direction.
When the eye could leave them it was lured from height to height, and at
each rise of the track to some wider and lovelier expanse of the sea. We
could see merely our own steamer in the roadstead, with the Portuguese
war-ship, and the few other vessels at anchor, but we could never
exhaust the variety of those varied mountain slopes and tops. Their
picturesqueness of form and their delight of color would beggar any
thesaurus of its descriptive reserves, and yet leave their beauty almost
unhinted. A drop-curtain were here a vain simile; the chromatic glories
of colored postal-cards might suggest the scene, but then again they
might overdo it. Nature is modest in her most magnificent moods, and I
do not see how she could have a more magnificent mood than Madeira. It
can never be represented by my art, but it may be measurably stated: low
lying sea; the town scattering and fraying everywhere into outlying
hamlets, villas and cottages; steep rising upon steep, till they reach
uninhabitable climaxes where the woods darken upward into the
everlasting snows, in one whole of grandeur resuming in its unity every
varying detail.
[Illustration: 02 FUNCHAL BAY]
I dwell rather helplessly upon the scenery, because it was what we
professedly went up or half up, or one-tenth or-hundredth up, the
mountain for. Un-professedly we went up in order to come down by the
toboggan of the country, though we vowed one another not to attempt
anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch,
we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people
at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness
from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a
facade so satisfyingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly
Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the people were at
prayer within; irregular files of them attended our progress to give us
the opportunity of doing charity. The beggars were of every sort, sex,
and age, and some, from the hands they held out, with fingers reduced to
their last joints, looked as if they might be lepers, but I do not say
they were. What I am sure of is that the faces of the worshippers--men,
women, and children--when they came out of the church were of a
gentleness which, if it was not innocence and goodness, might well have
passed for those virtues. They had kind eyes, which seemed as often blue
as black, and if they had no great beauty they were seldom quite ugly. I
wish I could think we strangers, as they gazed curiously, timorously at
us, struck them as favorably.
An involuntary ferocity from the famine which we began to feel may have
glared from our visages, for we had eaten nothing for three hours, which
was long for saloon passengers. At the first restaurant which we found,
and in which we all but sat down at table, our coupons were not good,
but this was not wholly loss, for we recouped ourselves in the beauties
of the walk on which we wandered along the mountain-side to the right of
the restaurant. At the point where we were no longer confident of our
way an opportune native appeared and Jed us over paths paved with fine
pebbles, sometimes wrought into geometric patterns, and always through
pleasing sun and shade, till we reached a pretty hotel set, with its
gardens before it, on a shelf of level land and commanding a view of our
steamer and the surrounding sea. Tropic growths, which I will venture to
call myrtle, oleander, laurel, and eucalyptus, environed the hotel, not
too closely nor densely, and our increasing party was presently
discovered from the head of its steps by a hospitable matron, who with a
cry of comprehensive welcome ran within and was replaced by a
head-waiter of as friendly aspect and much more English. He said our
coupons were good there and that our luncheon would be ready in two
minutes; for proof of the despatch with which we should be served he
held up the first and second fingers of his right hand. Restored by his
assurance, we did not really mind waiting twice the tale of all his ten
fingers, and we spent our time variously in wandering about the plateau,
among the wonted iron tables and chairs in front of the hotel, in being
photographed in a fairy grotto behind it, and in examining the visitors'
book in the parlor. The names of visitors from South Africa largely
prevailed, for the Cape Town steamers, oftener than any others, touch at
Madeira, but there was one traveller of Portuguese race who had written
his name in bold characters above the cry, “Long live the Portuguese
Republic.” Soon after the Portuguese monarchy ceased to live for a time
in the person of the murdered king and his heir, but it is doubtful if
the health of the potential republic was as great as before.
That bright Sunday morning no shadow of the black event was forecast,
and we gave our unstinted sympathy to our unknown co-republican. The
luncheon, when we were called to it, had merits of novelty and quality
which I will celebrate only as regards the delicate fish fresh from the
sea, and the pease fresh from the garden, with poached eggs fresh from
the coop dropped upon them. The conception of chops which followed was
not so faultless, though the fruit with which we ended did much to
repair any error of kid which may have mistaken itself for lamb. Perhaps
our enthusiasm was heightened by the fine air which had sharpened our
appetites. At any rate, it all ended in an habitual transaction in real
estate by which I became the owner of the place, without expropriating
the actual possessor, and established there those castles in Spain
belonging to me in so many parts of the world.
There remained now nothing for us to do but to toboggan down the
mountain, and we overcame our resolution not to do so far enough to go
and look at the toboggans under the guidance of our head-waiter. When
once we had looked we were lost. The toboggans were flat baskets set on
iron-shod runners, and well cushioned and padded; they held one, two, or
three passengers; the track on which they descended was paved, in gentle
undulations, with thin pebbles set on edge and greased wherever the
descent found a level. A smiling native, with a strong rope attached to
the toboggan, stood on each side of it, and held it back or pulled it
forward, according to the exigencies of the case. It is long since I
slid down hill on a sled of my own, and I do not pretend to recall the
sensation; but I can remember nothing so luxurious in transportation as
the swift flight of the Madeira toboggan, which you temper at will
through its guides and guards, but do not wish to temper at all when
your first alarm, mainly theoretical, passes into the gayety ending in
exultant rejoicing at the bottom of the course.
Our two toboggan men were possibly vigilant and reassuring beyond the
common, but one was quite silently so; the other, who spoke a little
English, encouraged us from time to time to believe that they were
“strong mans,” afterward correcting himself in conformity to the rules
of Portuguese grammar, which make the adjective agree in number with the
noun, and declaring that they were “strongs mans.” We met many toboggan
men who needed to be “strongs mans” in their ascent of our track, with
their heavy toboggans on their heads; but some of them did not look
strong, and our own arrived spent and panting at the bottom. Something
like that is what always spoils pleasure in this world. Even when you
have paid for it with your money, some one else has paid with his person
twice as much, and you have not equalled his outlay when you have tipped
him your handsomest.
A shilling apiece seemed handsome for those “strongs mans,” but
afterward there were watches of the nights when the spirit grieved that
the shilling had not been made two apiece or even half a crown, and I
wish now that the first reader of mine who toboggans down Madeira would
make up the difference for me in his tip to those poor fellows. I do not
mind if he adds a few pennies for the children who ran before our
toboggan and tossed camellias into it, and then followed in the hopes of
a reward, which we tried not to disappoint.
The future traveller need not add to the fee of the authorized and
numbered guide who took possession of us as soon as we got out of our
basket and led us unresisting to a waiting bullock sled. He invited
himself into it, and gave himself the best of characters in the
autobiography into which he wove his scanty instruction concerning the
objects we passed. A bullock sled is not of such blithe progress as a
toboggan, but it is very comfortable, and it is of an Oriental and
litter-like dignity, with its calico cushions and curtains. One could
not well use it in New York, but it serves every purpose of a cab in
Funchal, where we noted a peculiar feature of local commerce which I
hesitate to specify, since it cast apparent discredit upon woman. It
was, as I have noted, Sunday; but every shop where things pleasing or
even useful to women were sold was wide open, and somewhat flaringly
invited the custom of our fellow-passengers of that sex; but there was
not a shop where such things as men's collars were for sale, or anything
pleasing or useful to man, but was closed and locked fast. I must except
from this sweeping statement the cafes, but these should not count, for
women as well as men frequented them, as we ascertained by going to a
very bowery one on the quay and ordering a bottle of the best and dryest
Madeira. We wished perhaps to prove that it was really not bad for gout,
or perhaps that it was no better than the Madeira you get in New York
for the same price. Even with the help of friends, of the sex which
could have been freely buying native laces, hats, fans, photographs,
parasols, and tailor-made dresses, we could not finish that bottle.
Glass after glass we bestowed on our smiling guide, with no final effect
upon the bottle and none upon him, except to make him follow us to the
tender and take an after-fee for showing us a way which we could not
have missed blindfold. It was rather strange, but not stranger than the
behavior of the captain of the tender, who, when he had collected our
tickets, invited a free-will offering for collecting them, and mostly
got it.
When we were safely and gladly on board our steamer again, we had
nothing to do, until the deck-steward came round with tea, but watch the
islanders swarming around us in their cockles and diving for sixpences
and shillings, which they caught impartially with their fingers and
toes. With so many all shouting and gesticulating, one could not venture
one's silver indiscriminately; one must employ some particular diver,
and I selected for my investments a poor young fellow who had lost an
arm. With his one hand and his two feet he never failed of the coin I
risked, and I wish they had been many enough to enable him to retire
from the trade, which even in that mild air kept him visibly shivering
when out of the water. I do not know his name, but I commend him to
future travellers by the token of his pathetic mutilation.
By-and-by we felt the gentle stir of the steamer under us; the last
tender went ashore, and the divers retired in their cockles from our
side. Funchal began to rearrange the lines of her streets, while keeping
those of her roofs and house-walls and terraced gardens. We passed out
of the roadstead, we rounded the mighty headland by which we had
entered, and were once more in face of that magnificent drop-curtain,
which had now fallen upon one of the most vivid and novel passages of
our lives.
[Illustration: 03 BOATS AND DIVING BOYS, FUNCHAL]