In the first warmth of discovering them we never doubted that these were the Purple Islands of King Juba, the very Garden of the Hesperides, found anew by us after so many hundreds of years; or that we had aught to do but sit still in our governments and grow rich while we feasted.  But that was in the year 1420, and the eight years between had made us more than eight years sadder.  In the other island the great yield of timber had quickly come to an end:  for Count Zarco, returning thither with wife and children in the month of May, 1421, and purposing to build a city, had set fire to the woods behind the fennel-fields on the south coast, with intent to clear a way up to the hills in the centre:  and this fire quickly took such hold on the mass of forest that not ten times the inhabitants could have mastered it.  And so the whole island burned for seven years, at times with a heat which drove the settlers to their boats.  For seven years as surely as night fell could we in Porto Santo count on the glare of it across the sea to the south-west, and for seven years the caravels of our prince and master, Dom Henry, sighted the flame of it on their way southward to Cape Bojador.

In all this while Count Zarco never lost heart; but, when the timber began to fail, planted his sugar-canes on the scarcely cooled ashes, and his young plants of the Malmsey vine—­the one sent from Sicily, the other from Candia, and both by the care of Dom Henry.  While he lives it will never be possible to defeat my friend and old comrade:  and he and I have both lived to see his island made threefold richer by that visitation which in all men’s belief had clean destroyed it.

This planting of vines and sugar-canes began in 1425, the same year in which the Infante gave me colonists for Porto Santo.  But if I had little of Count Zarco’s merit, it is certain I had none of his luck:  for on my small island nothing would thrive but dragon-trees; and we had cut these in our haste before learning how to propagate them, so that we had at the same moment overfilled the market with their gum, or “dragon’s blood,” and left but a few for a time of better prices.  And, what was far worse, at the suggestion surely of Satan I had turned three tame rabbits loose upon the island; and from the one doe were bred in two or three years so many thousands of these pestilent creatures that when in 1425 we came to plant the vines and canes, not one green shoot in a million escaped.  Thus it happened that by 1428 my kingdom had become but a barren rock, dependent for its revenues upon the moss called the orchilla weed of which the darker and better kind could be gathered only by painful journeys inland.

You may see, therefore, that I had little to comfort me as I paced before my house that morning.  I was Governor of an impoverished rock on which I had wasted the toil and thought of eight good years of my prime:  my title was hereditary, but I had in those days no son to inherit it.  And when I considered the fortune I had exchanged for this, and my pleasant days in Dom Henry’s service at Sagres, I accused myself for the most miserable among men.