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 accu