dispose of it that share passes to his heirs. In this way the tenant
practically enjoys fixity of tenure, for the landlord is seldom in a
position to pay the price at which the tenant’s share is valued. Money
rents are rare, the métayer system regulating almost universally
the relations between landlord and tenant; that is, the tenant pays
to the owner a certain portion of the produce, usually one half or one
third. The holdings are as a rule rarely larger than one man can
cultivate with a little occasional assistance. There are few meadows
and pastures, the cattle being stall-fed when not feeding on the mountains.
Horses are never employed for draught, all labour of that
kind being done by oxen.
The two staple productions of the soil are wine and sugar. The vine was introduced from Cyprus or Crete soon after the discovery of the island by the Portuguese (1420), but it was not actively cultivated until the early part of the 16th century. The vines, after having been totally destroyed by the oidium disease, which made its first appearance in the island in 1852, were replanted, and Wine. in a few years wine was again made. The phylloxera also made its way to the island, and every vineyard in Madeira was more or less affected by it. The wine usually termed Madeira is made from a mixture of black and white grapes, which are also made separately into wines called Tinta and Verdelho, after the names of the grapes. Other high-class wines, known as Bual, Sercial and Malmsey, are made from varieties of grapes bearing the same names. (See also Wine.)
The sugar cane is said to have been brought from Sicily about 1452, and in course of time its produce became the sole staple of the island. The cultivation languished, however, as the more abundant produce of tropical countries came into the European market, and sugar had long ceased to be made when the destruction of the vines compelled the peasants to turn their attention to other things. Its cultivation was resumed and sugar machinery imported. A Sugar. considerable quantity of spirit is made by the distillation of the juice or of the molasses left after extracting the sugar, and this is consumed on the island. The cane does not flourish here as luxuriantly as within the tropics; but in localities below 1000 ft., where there is a good supply of water, it pays the cultivator well.
The grain produced on the island (principally wheat, barley and Indian corn) is not sufficient for the consumption of the people. The common potato, sweet potato and gourds of various kinds are extensively grown, as well as the Colocasia esculenta, the kalo of the Pacific islanders, the root of which yields an insipid food. Most of the common table vegetables of Europe are plentiful. Besides apples, pears and peaches, all of poor quality, oranges, lemons, guavas, mangoes, loquats, custard-apples, figs, bananas and pineapples are produced, the last two forming articles of export. The date palm is occasionally grown, but its fruit is scarcely edible. On the hills large quantities of the Spanish chestnut afford an item in the food of the common people. A little tobacco is grown, and is made into cigars of inferior quality.
The total foreign trade of Madeira was valued at £628,000 in 1900. The principal exports are wine, sugar, embroidery, vegetables, fruits and wicker goods. Coal is imported for the ships calling at Funchal, which is the headquarters of Madeiran commerce and industry. Spirits, beer, olive oil, soap, butter, linen and woollen goods, straw hats and leather, are manufactured for home consumption, and there are important fisheries.
Chief Towns and Communications.—Funchal (pop. 20,850) is described in a separate article. The other chief towns are Camara de Lobos (7150), Machico (6128), Santa Cruz (5876), Ponta do Sol (5665), São Vicente (4896), Calheta (3475), Sant’ Anna (3011) and Porto Santo (2311). Each of these is the capital of a commune (concelho), to which it gives its name. Madeira is connected by regular lines of steamships with Great Britain, Germany, Portugal, Cape Colony, Brazil and the United States. There is no railway in the archipelago, and partly owing to the irregularities of the surface of the roads, of which there are some 580 m., are bad, except in the neighbourhood of Funchal. Wheel carriages are rare, and all heavy goods are transported either on the backs of mules or upon rude wooden sledges drawn by bullocks. When horses are not employed, locomotion is effected either by means of hammocks or by bullock cars. The hammock (rêde) is a piece of stout canvas gathered up and secured at each end to a long pole carried by a couple of bearers. In place of cabs, curtained cars on sledges, made to hold four persons, and drawn by a pair of bullocks, are employed. They are convenient, but the rate of progress is very slow.
Administration.—The archipelago is officially styled the district of Funchal; it returns members to the Portuguese Cortes, and is regarded as an integral part of the kingdom. The district is subdivided into the eight communes already enumerated, and is administered in accordance with the same laws that regulate local government on the mainland (see Portugal). Funchal is a Roman Catholic bishopric in the archiepiscopal province of Lisbon. Education is compulsory in name only, for less than 2% of the population could read when the census of 1900 was taken. An infantry regiment and a battery of garrison artillery are permanently stationed in Madeira.
History.—It has been conjectured, but on insufficient evidence, that the Phoenicians discovered Madeira at a very early period. Pliny mentions certain Purple or Mauretanian Islands, the position of which with reference to the Fortunate Islands or Canaries might seem to indicate the Madeiras. There is a romantic story, to the effect that two lovers, Robert Machim, à Machin, or Macham, and Anna d’Arfet, fleeing from England to France (c. 1370) were driven out of their course by a violent storm and cast on the coast of Madeira at the place subsequently named Machico, in memory of one of them. Both perished here, but some of their crew escaped to the Barbary coast, and were made slaves. Among them was the pilot Pedro Morales of Seville, who is said to have been ransomed and to have communicated his knowledge of Madeira to João Gonçalvez Zarco (or Zargo). How far this story is true cannot now be ascertained. It is, however, certain that Zarco first sighted Porto Santo in 1418, having been driven thither by a storm while he was exploring the coast of West Africa. Madeira itself was discovered in 1420. It is probable that the whole archipelago had been explored at an earlier date by Genoese adventurers, and had been forgotten; for an Italian map dated 1351 (the Laurentian portolano) shows the Madeiras quite clearly, and there is some reason to believe that they were known to the Genoese before 1339. When Zarco visited Madeira in 1420 the islands were uninhabited, but Prince Henry the Navigator at once began their colonization, aided by the knights of the Order of Christ. Sanctioned by the pope and by two charters which the king of Portugal granted in 1430 and 1433, the work proceeded apace; much land was deforested and brought into cultivation, and the Madeiran sugar trade soon became important. For the sixty years 1580–1640 Madeira, with Portugal itself, was united with Spain. Slavery was abolished in Madeira in 1775, by order of Pombal. In 1801 British troops, commanded by General Beresford, occupied the island for a few months, and it was again under the British flag from 1807 to 1814. It shared in the civil disturbances brought about by the accession of Dom Miguel (see Portugal: History), but after 1833 its history is a record of peaceful commercial development.
See A. S. Brown, Madeira, the Canary Islands and the Azores (1903), a comprehensive study of the three archipelagoes. The Land of the Wine, by A. J. D. Biddle (Philadelphia, 1901) is generally valuable, but its history cannot be trusted. See also P. Langerhaus, Handbuch für Madeira (1884) and Vahl, Madeira’s Vegetation (Copenhagen, 1904).
MADELENIAN, a term derived from La Madeleine, a cave in the Vézère, about midway between Moustier and Les Eyzies, France, and given by the French anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet to the third stage of his system of cave-chronology, synchronous with the fourth or most recent division of the Quaternary Age. The Madelenian epoch was a long one, represented by numerous stations, whose contents show progress in the arts and general culture. It was characterized by a cold and dry climate, the existence of man in association with the reindeer, and the extinction of the mammoth. The use of bone and ivory for various implements, already begun in the preceding Solutrian epoch, was much increased, and the period is essentially a Bone age. The bone instruments are very varied: spear-points, harpoon-heads, borers, hooks and needles. Most remarkable is the evidence La Madeleine affords of prehistoric art. Numbers of bones, reindeer antlers and animals’ teeth were found, with rude pictures, carved or etched on them, of seals, fishes, reindeer, mammoths and other creatures. The best of these are a mammoth engraved on a fragment of its own ivory; a dagger of reindeer antler, with handle in form of a reindeer; a cave-bear cut on a flat piece of schist; a seal on a bear’s tooth; a fish well drawn on a reindeer antler; and a complete picture, also on reindeer antler, showing horses, an aurochs, trees, and a snake biting a man’s leg. The man is naked, and this and the snake suggest a warm
