At Sea
With a beautiful sunrise astern, we awoke to a leisurely day at sea as we made south-westward for Madeira in the wake of the Portuguese discoverers of the fifteenth century. The Infante Enrique as he is known to the Portuguese, or Henry the Navigator as he is known in English historiography, was the mastermind who laid the foundations for the Portuguese seaborne empire. No great sailor himself, he had sailed from his home in Oporto to Lisbon and led an expeditionary voyage to Ceuta, the first colony that Europeans established in Africa. But over several decades, from his base at Sagres, he sponsored, encouraged and cajoled Portuguese sailors to edge their way along the west coast of Africa. The uninhabited island of Madeira was discovered in 1420, named for its vast supplies of pine, so useful for ship building. The Cape Verde archipelago was charted by the 1450s. By the end of the century Portugal was in control of a sea route around the Cape of Good Hope to India and the Spice Islands. A poor country on the western fringes of the Mediterranean world had been transformed into an Atlantic maritime power.
Madeira was uninhabited when it was discovered by the Portuguese at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It was first settled in 1419. The arrival of the first Europeans led to a disastrous fire that burned for seven years but the soil was thus prepared for the hardy malavasia grape that is used to make Malmsey, a favorite British tipple. Sugar cane, introduced from Sicily, was ideally suited to the climate. Wild fennel - funcho, in Portuguese - gave the name to the island’s principal settlement.
The first sailors to head out into the vastness of the Atlantic were fearful of sea monsters, of boiling seas and of being unable to return against the prevailing winds. No sea monsters were spotted today. Rather striped dolphins and Atlantic spotted dolphins on different occasions visited the ship along with some migrating birds from northern Europe, hitching a ride on their way south: robins, skylarks and wagtails. Presentations on the Portuguese discoverers and on the migrating birds together with a wine tasting and an art class made for a varied day as we sailed the thousand kilometers from Lisbon to our first landfall in Madeira.
