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Updated: June 15, 2025
Tenerife, though considerably without the tropic, is so nearly within the limits of the tradewind that navigators generally steer to it from the eastward. The road of Santa Cruz lies on the east side of the island, at the end of a range of craggy hills, barren and very lofty, along with you sail west by south by compass into the road, with a sea unfathomable until near the shore.
Tenerife is considered of more value than all the other Canaries: the inhabitants however, in scarce seasons, receive supplies from the Grand Canary; but their vineyards here are said to be greatly superior.
Garachico was the only port in Tenerife, with a breakwater of rocky isle and water so deep that the yardarms of men-of-war could almost touch the vineyards. Its quays were bordered by large provision-stores, it had five convents, and its slopes were dotted with villas.
The resting took longer than the walking up the steep talus; and at 7.45: after a total of nine hours and a morning's work of two hours and a half, which occupied two in descending, we stood upon the corona or lip of 'Teyde. The height of the Tenerife Pike, once held the loftiest in the world, is 12,198 feet, in round numbers 12,200. The slope from the base is 1 in 4.6.
Not melancholy no, for it is green. They are perfectly happy in the Arabian desert, and even in Tenerife, where others feel as if living perpetually on the verge of high fever. To this 'little misery' were added the displeasures of memory. Our last long visit was in 1863, when the Conde de Farrobo ruled the land, and when the late Lord Brownlow kept open house at the beautiful Vigia.
The Peace of 1815 was a severe blow to the trade. Between 1830 and 1840, however, the vintage of the seven chief islands averaged upwards of 46,000; of these Tenerife supplied between 4,000 and 5,000, equivalent to the total produce since the days of the oidium. In 1852 Admiral Robinson reduced the number of pipes to 20,000, worth 200,000l.
An inscription upon the old theatre, the usual neat building of white and grey-brown basalt, informs us that it was built in 1852, ad honorem of two deputies. But Santa Cruz, the modern capital, has provided herself with a larger and a better house; ergo Las Palmas, the old capital, must fain do the same. The metropolis of Grand Canary, moreover, claims to count more noses than that of Tenerife.
The so-called 'Seals of the Kings' were dark stones, probably used for painting the skin; they bore parallelograms enclosed within one another, diaper-work and gridirons of raised lines. In fact, the Guanches of Tenerife were unalphabetic.
Thus we can correct M. Berthelot, who follows others in asserting that only the Guanches of Tenerife mummified their dead. The oldest description of this embalming is by a 'judicious and ingenious man who had lived twenty years in the island as a physitian and merchant. It was inserted by Dr. Eden, an Englishman who visited Tenerife in 1662.
In the evening we passed the south end of Tenerife which is a round lump of land that, from the lowness of the contiguous land, has at a distance the appearance of a separate island. By our run from the bay of Santa Cruz I make the latitude of the south end of Tenerife to be 28 degrees 6 minutes north. We ran all night towards the south-south-west having the wind at south-east.
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