The colonisation of the Canaries
In 1418, Captain ‘One-eyed’ Zarco sailed out from Lisbon to plant the flag of Portugal on the islands first of Porto Santo and then of Madeira. In doing so, he not only claimed for Portugal a useful harbour and a staging post that would enable explorations further out into the Atlantic – first to the Azores and then to Brazil – he also secured a fertile, well-wooded, and well-watered island where sugar cane flourished, making Madeiran landowners and the Portuguese Crown extremely rich for a century by selling ‘white gold’ through the markets of Venice, London, and Antwerp.
It was Portugal’s good fortune that they faced no resistance to their claim to have ‘discovered’ Madeira. Though the islands were long known to sailors (Plutarch called them ‘the Isles of the Blest’ in AD 75, and they are clearly identifiable on a map of 1351 in the Laurentian Library in Florence), since there was no indigenous population, the first settlers had a free hand in exploiting the islands’ rich natural resources.
Not so the Spanish, who officially ‘conquered’ the Canary Islands in 1402, but then fought a bitter and long-drawn-out war with the earlier inhabitants of the archipelago, not securing absolute control until 1496. Those inhabitants – the so-called ‘Guanche’ people – have hitherto been little studied or understood, but researchers at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have recently published a paper on the chronology of the human colonisation of the Canary Islands (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2302924121) that has thrown new light on their arrival in the archipelago.
