112 EXCURSIONS IN MADEIRA 



produce sweetness. Gypsum is pretty generally used to clarify 

 and mellow the wines while working, vmless they happen to be of 

 a green vintage. The importation of foreign brandy is now 

 prohibited, and even that made in Portugal is subjected to a duty, 

 amounting to a prohibition ; it is made from the north wine, and 

 the lees of others. In the war time, all the houses were compelled 

 to ripen their wines by stoves, as they held no stocks : those who 

 managed this themselves, rose the heat gradually, from about 60° 

 to 90° ; others who trusted them to the pubhc stoves, generally 

 found, that they were neglected until the last moment, and then 

 all but boiled". 



The wheat grown in Madeira, scarcely amounts to f of the quan- 

 tity annually consumed. Near the sea the lands yield annual crops ". 

 The maximum of the proportion is fifteen to one, but the average 

 five to one. The sea maj/s is so easily procured from the neigh- 

 bouring continents and islands, that no one has thought it worth 

 the trouble of planting for any other purpose than to look at ; but 

 it would succeed extremely well^. I was assured at Lisbon, that 



" 22,314 pipes of wine (of which 101 went to the bishop) were made in Madeira, 

 in 1813. 



"77,604 English bushels of wheat, 11,616 of rye, and 12,76s of barley, were 

 produced in 1813. The Portuguese endeavoured to grow wheat in St. Thomas's in 

 the sixteenth century, trying all the different localities and seasons successively, but 

 it never ripened, or produced full ears. Collegao de Noticias, p. 101. Cadamosto 

 writes in 1445, that Madeira produced 30,000 Venetian stajas of wheat annually, 

 (equal to about 1966 P. bushels of 675 cubic inches each) adding, that the soil had 

 at first produced sixty for one, but then only forty and thirty for one, and that it daily 

 deteriorated. In the higher and northern parts of the island, they get but one crop 

 of wheat every seven years, allowing the broom to grow uncontrolled for six, and 

 then burning it on the ground as manure, using no other. 



y The variety most esteemed in Madeira, is the ' white-round,' imported from the 

 Cape Verde Islands and New York, which will always fetch twenty pence a bushel 

 more than the ' yellow-flat,' which is grown on the coast of Africa, and in the Azores. 

 The 'yellow-round' (imported from Philadelphia, the Azores, Genoa, and other parts 



