Extended History of the Ukulele © 2012 Dan Scanlan Two Hot Spots The Atlantic Ocean began to widen some 20 million years ago as the Earth distributed its lands globally. Southwest of the Rock of Gibraltar, off the coast of Morocco, a hot spot grew on the ocean’s floor where the Earth’s hot liquid center began to ooze through a thin spot in its skin. The ooze grew and coagulated ever larger until some seven million years ago, a series of islands appeared Madeira Island bubbled and hardened above the surface of the sea. Meanwhile, the Pacific Ocean was shrinking as the Americas drifted westward. Hot spots emerged near the center of that ocean, too, and seven million years or so ago a series of islands began to bubble to the surface of the water, an action that continues to build Hawaiian Islands islands today. Millions of years later humans found these island groups — Madeira in the Atlantic and Hawaii in the Pacific — and centuries after that their finding of one another would spawn the ukulele. Embracing that history is the first step to Love Uke. Two Peoples, Two Melting Pots Some historians believe that Phoenicians, Romans and North Africans must have stumbled onto Madeira Island some 2000 years ago. Others have suggested that Scandinavians approached it even earlier. Maps from the 1300s seem to show the islands. And there’s a legend of two lovers who were stranded and died there. But no humans were living on the islands in 1418 when João Gonçalves Zarco, a sea-faring explorer working for Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator, found refuge from a storm at a small island he named Porto Santo, “Holy Port”. He didn’t see the larger neighboring island thru the mist. Two years later he revisited, saw the other island and named it “Madeira”, Portuguese for “wooden” because it was covered by a forest of trees. Earlier, in the 8th century, Moors migrated to or invaded what is now Spain and Portugal. The upper reaches of Portugal had already been peopled by Lusitani, Iberians and Celts. The Moors brought their musical instruments with them, later to be called lutes, and others, some of which most likely had re-entrant tunings. (Lusitani are said to have manufactured a braguinha as early as 139 BC. It did not have re-entrant tuning.) The Moors would rule and fight Christians in Portugal and Spain for 600 years. Meanwhile, on the the other side of the planet, in the Pacific Ocean, Polynesians probably from the Society Islands near New Zealand and Australia, migrated by boat to the Hawaiian Islands. (They would be undisturbed by Europeans until British explorer Captain James Cook came upon the islands in 1778. He would die there the following year after naming them the Sandwich Islands after an English noble and got himself into a pickle with the natives.) The Christians in Portugal defeated the Moors by 1249, but immediately had to fend off the attempts of Spain to take over the country; Spain was turned back for good in 1385, and Portugal has maintained its borders ever since. The ensuing peace allowed Portugal to take to the sea and the great exploration of the oceans began, and with it, the modern rediscovery of Madeira Island, and hence the Americas. The first to become Madeirans were Celts from Braga, a village in northern Portugal. When they arrived they set fire to clear some of the island of the heavy woods to make space for food crops —grapes and sugar cane. The fire raged for seven years, at times driving many settlers into the sea for safety; but the fire left the soil rich in phosphate, good for vines. The imported Malmsey grape thrived and the resultant Madeira wine eventually became the wine of choice for hundreds of years around the world, including the Americas once they were “discovered”. (It has been asserted that the American founding fathers celebrated with Madeira wine when they issued the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Unlike America, Portugal abolished, without war, slavery in 1775.) Like all Celts, the people of Braga were celebratory people and they brought their musical instrument with them — the braguinha, sometimes called the machete de Braga. This would become one of the primary instruments in a Madeiran folk music ensemble. The rajão would be invented and join the braguinha, in more ways than one. By 1425 the world’s first sugar cane plantation had been established in Madeira. Sugar would play a role in the economies of both Madeira and Hawaii and would facilitate the creation of the ukulele. In 1478 Christopher Columbus visited the Madeiran Islands to buy sugar and married the daughter of the first governor of Santo Porto. He found flotsam of various plants of foreign origin on the beach of Porto Santo, a find that helped inculcate the theory that there were other lands or islands even further west from Madeira which led ultimately to his voyage to the Americas. Nearly 300 years later British Captain James Cook visited Madeira on his first voyage of discovery, had an altercation with a local and returned later to plant a tulip tree near the beach to make amends. (The tree lived until 1963.) On his third voyage of discovery, Cook led the first crew of Europeans to set eyes on the Hawaiian Islands, landing there January 1778. He returned the next year after an unsuccessful hunt for the non-existent “Northwest Passage” across the North American continent. He died on Valentine’s Day 1779 at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii, slain by natives. The first of the Portuguese who came to Hawaii were sailors who came aboard the Eleanora in 1790, 11 years after Cook’s demise. By 1805 after King Kamehameha unified the Hawaiian islands, a sandalwood trade was established — Hawaii’s first foray into international commerce. It faded away, along with the sandalwood itself, 30 years later. In 1819 Kamehameha’s successor Liholiho ended the kapu system of religion and temples and the following year Protestant missionaries from New England rushed in to fill the void and pave the way for less adventerous businessmen. By 1835 a single sugar plantation had been started, and numerous churches built. In 1844, the Hawaiian government began a 12-year program called The Great Mahele, in which the Hawaiian lands were re- distributed. At first foreigners were not allowed to own land, but that changed in 1850. The sugar industry expanded, and when the Civil War came to the United States, Hawaii sugar exports accelerated, but went into decline at the war’s end. But in 1876, King David Kalakua, who had been elected with the support of the sugar barons, was able to get a trade agreement with the US that eliminated a tariff against sugar. And the need for laborers in Hawaii grew right along with the sugar production. A Marriage of Peoples In 1849 thousands of seekers joined the California gold rush, across both land and sea. But Dr. Wilhelm Hillebrand of Paderhorn, Germany didn’t need gold, he needed fresh air. Infected with tuberculosis and financially secure, he set out to find his breath. He tried the climates of Australia and the Philippines and attempted his medical practice there. But his practice failed and he remained ill. In December 1850 he arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii. Apparently the climate was good to him and he stayed in Hawaii for 21 years. In that time he was befriended by Queen Emma, the wife of King Kamahameha IV. Like the Queen, Hildebrand was an avid amateur botanist and between the two of them they brought to Hawaii a wide variety of plants from the Asian mainland, including the plumeria used in weaving leis, the traditional floral wreaths Hawaiians wear and present to visitors. In 1848 thousands of Hawaiians had died of influenza and in 1850 the island of Oahu lost half its population to smallpox. (Faster ships had made it possible for the smallpox virus to survive the trip from San Francisco to Honolulu.) Kamehameha and Emma raised funds for a hospital and Hillebrand became its first director and doctor. Queens Hospital is still one of the largest in the South Seas. He returned to his homeland in 1871 and was dissatisfied with the new German Reich, so he left for Madeira Island, which had become by then the major stopping off point for firewood, food and water before crossing the Atlantic. There he published a book “Flora of the Hawaiian Islands”. He also became aware of the dismal agricultural condition in Madeira due to a recent drought. He knew, too, of the need for laborers on the sugar plantations in Hawaii, and Madeirans had experience growing sugar, so he wrote his friends and eventually hired the bark Priscilla which brought 120 Madeirans to work in Hawaii in September 1878. Although there were traditional Madeiran musical instruments on board the ship, apparently no one on the boat knew how to play them. The Priscilla Madeirans joined the nearly 1100 Portuguese who were already in Hawaii, perhaps 900 from Madeira. These were primarily sailors who came by way of Timor, Batavia and Macao. The following year Hillebrand hired another ship, the Ravenscrag, and that bark brought woodworkers Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias and Jose Espirito Santo and 350 other Madeirans to Hawaii. This time there were musicians on board— Joao Luiz Correa and Joao Fernandes. João Gomes da Silva was a passenger on the Ravenscrag who had a braguinha, but he didn’t know how to play it.