But back to the same subject , where you did research , or query this data?
NB: In the minutes of Funchal Municipal Council , which has a lot, and also in the regional archives .
There are periods in which those documents are written by foreigners and not just Portuguese ?
NB : In general there are more Portuguese. Above all there was a lot monograph, many specific issues. An overview did not exist. For example , the island was known by Dom Afonso, in 1366 . Already we were going to the Canaries, the boats passed our island when the Portuguese crown decided to come to Madeira when we lost the Canary Islands to Castile and Guinea became ours. We were suppliers of cereals, particularly wheat, to underpin the expansion, this was already in 1418. So there was a great development because it stay here a third of wheat, the other was for Guinea and the rest went to the mainland, and what I found amazing is that in the first minutes of the Council of Funchal , they discuss the extra bags for North Africa, but there was no population pressure to justify it, but in 1489 there were people starving in Madeira. So what happened ? There was a large wheat production, but there was also a massive land conversion to sugar cane which gave more money and we had not much wheat. It was not the first, because I find subsistence crises since the fifteenth century to the present day. So why famines? If we earned money by sugar cane and could import? Firstly we produced wheat for survival, after the waters were infested with pirates that prevented the arrival of the boats and that meant hungry for the poorer classes. There were also international wars and another factor that is not given much importance is that the port of Funchal is from the late nineteenth century. Before everything was landed in the pebble beach, when there were storms from the south , with big waves , the caravels had to sail and so there has always been subsistence crises, because we did not have enough to live. The sugar that gave us enormous wealth was exported to Brazil and São Tomé, including production techniques, and ironically it caused a huge economic crisis, because we could not compete with those markets . And then we turned to wine, the famous Madeira wine.
In this research wehat other curiosities you found ?
RN : We exported people to Brazil in the sixteenth century, there were areas of the country calls the new Madeira. And we always had conflicts with the central government , there was always antagonisms since colonization .
But why at the very beginning of colonization we had conflicts with Lisbon ?
RN : Prince Henry wanted just 1/3 of the sugar that was produced and so we struggled a little bit against it, then became fifth, were mainly tax issues .
It was because we were islanders and were away from it all ?
RN : No, were their characteristics then. The real powers lived because of large estates that were painful for regions and sometimes they fought against it. Now we fight against taxes and is equal, although this time the fight was bigger . In the fifteenth century when the sugar cane plantations industrialized , there was separation of tasks and processes were no longer manuals and became mechanics, the Crown also applied a higher tax. Sure, there was resistance and we almost went to strike but we managed to win, but there were always conflicts against the system . In the twentieth century, before the 25th of April, I and a small group of young islanders had serious problems with the political police, the PIDE , in 1968 , because we invoked the autonomy to Madeira and also democracy against fascism, because of taxes generated at the time of Salazar, only a third stayed here and the rest went to the continent. We always opposed. When the Carnation Revolution arises was decided that all taxes are raised on the island stay here, also came a tranche of the national budget to the islands and then we entered the European Union and reached millions of euros. Now, look at the need that our ancestors had to go thru and because of war.
Think the younger generations know the true history of the island of Madeira ?
NB : I do not know. We have gained political autonomy and addition of all tax revenues, we have a legislature that makes laws for Madeira, plus a regional government, it deserved at least one study of the geographical and economic history, but no ,why? Because teachers not studied it, it is as simple as that. What are the lessons of history in our schools? From the People are trained in the universities of Lisbon , Porto and Coimbra not have specific programs in their classes on the history of the islands. The current government was not interested so much in culture there, because that would prove who invented the whole autonomic instrument were our grandfathers in 1920 /25, after Salazar came and ended our claims. And I think it never mattered much to the regional authorities culture, because uneducated people do not challenge the system .
