Madeira’s Two Caps: A Knitted Earflap Hat and the Carapuça

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Research and writing: 뜨자뜨개 / DDUJA KNIT

A pointed cap in a photograph of Madeiran dress may look like an obvious piece of traditional knitting. Yet its name, fibre and method of construction are three different questions. The Madeira Ethnographic Museum explicitly catalogues one twentieth-century barrete de orelhas, an earflap cap, as hand knitted. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes a nineteenth-century carapuça as a wool cap but does not identify its technique as knitting. Keeping those records apart makes the island’s textile history more interesting and more accurate. Madeira Ethnographic Museum record · The Met record

Wool is a material; knitting is a technique

The Met dates cap 2009.300.2357 to the last quarter of the nineteenth century and identifies its culture as Portuguese, Madeiran. Its catalogue gives wool as the material and a length of 31.8 centimetres. The museum calls it a carapuça or pigtail cap and says men and women wore this form, sometimes tilting its shallow crown. In the first photograph the long extension, low crown and small red accent are visible. None of these features alone proves that the cap was knitted, cut and sewn, or made by another process. A description of its fibre does not settle that question. The Met, 2009.300.2357

Madeira’s own ethnographic collection provides a different kind of evidence. Accession MEM96/245 is a twentieth-century earflap cap. Its inventory specifies hand knitting, dark-brown sheep’s wool and measurements of 29.3 by 11.5 by 25 centimetres. It describes an inverted-funnel form with a fringed tassel and two triangular earflaps that can be raised or lowered. Reuse conditions for the museum’s photographs were not established, so they are linked as catalogue evidence rather than reproduced here. The words “hand knitted” come from the object record, not an attempt to infer stitches from a distant image. Museu Etnográfico da Madeira, MEM96/245

An 1882 traveller saw knitted caps replacing the carapuça in one district

In Madeira: Its Scenery, and How to See It, published in 1882, Ellen M. Taylor describes shepherds around Prazeres in the island’s west knitting small brown caps while watching their flocks. In her account, those caps were beginning to take the place of the carapuça there. Taylor also says that knitting with fine thread, silk and aloe fibre provided employment. This is an identifiable visitor’s observation, not a census of every district or a technical examination of every cap. Its value lies in showing that different forms could coexist and change in use. Taylor, 1882, printed page 78

A colour postcard dating to around 1900 stages a couple in Madeiran costume. The man wears a high, dark pointed cap; the woman has a different head covering. It is useful for seeing how costume was presented to a camera. Because it is a posed postcard, it cannot establish how common that dress was in daily life or which construction method the photographed cap used.

A photograph of a Funchal boatman published in the 1909 book Madeira: Old and New shows another pointed cap in a working scene. The printed source helps date the image, but the caption does not identify the photographed cap as museum object MEM96/245. The comparison is about visible silhouette and setting, not a claim that the same physical object or construction method appears in both records. The 1909 photograph

Earflaps and tassels are clues to use, not proof of stitches

The ethnographic museum says older caps varied by locality. It describes a flat-topped form with three short raised projections at Ponta do Sol, a very small “bird’s nest” at Santana, and longer coloured-wool forms with frayed tassels around Caniçal and Machico, particularly associated in the record with fishermen. In other settlements, the two earflaps could be lowered and tied under the chin in winter or raised in summer. The museum attributes these regional distinctions to earlier writers. They should not be used to guess the exact village of every person in a photograph. Museum account of regional variants

These questions matter to a maker reading a modern pattern. Were the earflaps knitted continuously from the crown or attached? How were edge stitches formed? Was the long point worked in one piece, and was the tassel made separately? A photograph and a short inventory entry cannot answer all of these questions. A contemporary pattern that resembles an old cap should therefore be distinguished from a measured reconstruction of that particular museum object.

A festival costume is evidence of present representation

A 2006 photograph of Madeiran folklore performers and a 2008 photograph from Funchal’s Flower Festival both show pointed dark caps among participants. Red headscarves in the same scenes are different head coverings and should not all be relabelled as knitted caps. These images record contemporary presentation of regional dress. They cannot by themselves prove how nineteenth-century shepherds produced their clothing.

The museum also explains that although local sheep’s wool once supplied this craft, many current makers use industrially produced wool. A description by a contemporary workshop says maker Isabel da Eira hand knits an earflap cap in the round with five double-pointed needles and no seam. That is useful evidence of one maker’s current method, credited to the workshop; it is not proof that every historic cap was made identically. Museum on changing wool supply · Workshop account

When you next encounter a Madeiran cap, ask three separate questions: What does its own catalogue call it? Does that record establish knitting? Does the image show original use or a later performance? The answers need not match. Preserving those distinctions is a way to see more, rather than less, in regional knitting.

Primary sources and image reuse

1. Madeira Ethnographic Museum, earflap cap MEM96/245 — technique, dimensions, local forms and material changes.
2. The Met, carapuça 2009.300.2357 — date, material, dimensions, use and Public Domain image.
3. Ellen M. Taylor, Madeira: Its Scenery, and How to See It (1882), printed page 78 — shepherds knitting caps in the west.
4. Madeiran costume postcard, circa 1900 — staged dress, Public Domain Mark.
5. “A Funchal Boatman,” Madeira: Old and New (1909) — published working-scene photograph, Public Domain.
6. Koshelyev, folklore performance, 2006 — photographer’s public-domain release.
7. Paul Mannix, Flower Festival dancers, 2008 — CC BY 2.0.
8. Contemporary workshop account — attributed as a maker’s description only.

Sources and reuse terms checked 15 October 2026. All five images are real, individually linked photographs with recorded reuse terms; no AI image was used. The Madeira museum’s own object photographs were not reproduced because their reuse terms could not be verified. Each image is labelled by its particular date and context.