COLUMBUS SLEPT HERE
Madeira Islanders feel very close to Christopher Columbus and say that he knew every cove along their splendid and rugged coastline. If you should ask them if Columbus really slept there, they'd certainly reply, “He sure did, and not only once, but every night for ten years”.
Columbus came out to Madeira from Portugal in 1477. Married to the governor's daughter, he lingered here with his wife for a whole decade. We in America mainly attribute his discovery of our Continent to this ten year sojourn, for it was here that Columbus undertook a long study of the sea and winds surrounding this mid-ocean mountain land.
Lovely Madeira was discovered “on order” from Prince Henry the Navigator. Knowing from legend that an island must be in that area, he sent his sailors out from the home country until they found it. When they did, they named it “Madeira” because of the stands of timber on its fertile slopes. Seeing crops of wild fennel growing around its principal bay, they called their first settlement “Funchal”, or “place of fennel”.
Columbus soon left for bigger places, and the timber was cut down to make way for vineyards and sugar crops, which crowd on the narrow terraces cut along the bold slopes of this precipitous Island - an Island which forms the tip-top of a great subterranean peak.
Madeira, the first port of call on the CARONIA'S SUMMER CRUISE to the Mediterranean is today a holiday land for sun-seekers, an island for fun and vacations, for fine embroideries, tropical-toboggan-car views, for its sweet Madeira wine, for flowers and happy people waiting to greet you to the “Threshold of the Mediterranean”.
[Produced for the Summer Mediterranean Cruise departing New York 26 August 1966]