A Strum Through ‘Ukulele History, from Madeira to Hawaii to the San Francisco Bay

by John King and Jim Tranquada

On April 23, 1907—almost a year to the day following San Francisco’s great earthquake—Jack London and his wife, Charmian, sailed London’s yacht Snark through the Golden Gate bound for Hawaii on the first leg of a projected round-the-world cruise. Twenty-seven days later, overdue and feared lost, the Snark limped past throngs of well-wishers lining the wharves of Honolulu Harbor. The following day, Mrs. London took notice of a dark-skinned young man delivering the mail and recorded the moment in her journal: “My first Hawaiian on his native heath.” However, she was mistaken; he was full-blooded Portuguese. “Alack, my first Hawaiian is Portuguese,” she lamented, “and Jack is hilarious.”

Organized emigration of Portuguese to Hawaii began in 1878 with the arrival of 120 passengers from Madeira; within ten years, 11,000 Pokiki would call Hawaii home—most of them recruited as laborers for sugar plantations. When 423 men, women, and children disembarked from the British ship Ravenscrag on August 23, 1879 after a four-month voyage from Madeira, twenty-five-year-old Joćo Fernandes staged an impromptu celebration, bursting into song while accompanying himself with a machete de braga, a stunted pinewood guitar “with scale marks [frets] all the way down to the [sound] hole and with the top left unpolished to improve its tone.”

At the time of the Ravenscrag’s arrival, the machete de braga—more often referred to as the machete—was the most popular musical instrument in Madeira, a small island group off the coast of Morocco. Described as a “viola pequena,” or little guitar, by Raphael Bluteau in 1716, the machete went largely unnoticed until the mid-nineteenth century. “The machete is peculiar to [Madeira],” visitor Robert White observed in 1851. “It is a small guitar, with four strings of catgut…used by the peasantry to accompany the voice and the dance. The music consists of a succession of simple chords, but, in the hands of an accomplished player, the machete is capable of much more pleasing harmony; and the stranger is sometimes agreeably surprised to hear the fashionable music of our ball-rooms given with considerable effect, on what appears a very insignificant instrument.”

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