Above the long strip of Main Street and the town squares, the side of the great limestone Rock rises sheer, and up it wind the steep Zigzags of road that climb, bend on bend, to the top - awkward bends for a car. At the southern end of the Rock is Europa Point, and a stupendous view of Africa and the sea. At the northern end, the ruined Moorish Tower stands high, all that remains of the citadel and palace that once covered the hill-side. Over the rugged tower now waves, incongruously, impudently, the banner of a people who, when Tarik occupied Gebel-Tarik, were fighting one another, tribe against tribe, on an island of forests and swamps in a cold northern sea five thousand miles away. Such are the fantastic turns and tilts of fortune: poor Tarik pushed back to Africa whence he came, the Spanish pushed off the Rock whence they pushed the Moors, the northern islanders in possession. The islanders have now held it for two hundred and forty years; the Spanish held it for the same; the Moors for seven centuries and a half. Whether the Visigoths or the Romans fortified Calpe, it is difficult to tell; there is no mention of any town or stronghold there. Strabo, writing in the first century, calls it merely ‘a mountain belonging to the Iberians,’ which ‘rises to so great a height and is so steep that from a distance it looks like an island’; he goes on to refer to the ancient city of Calpe-Carteia, forty stadia from the Rock; Ptolemy and other geographers speak of it only as a mountain, a column in the sea; even the fourth-century Avienus refers to no dwellers on the ‘Herculanae columnae, saxa prominentia, Abila atque Calpe.’ Probably Calpe was only lived on by Iberian fishermen when Tarik took it; there is no record of his meeting resistance there.
From then on, the Rock has been attacked and besieged continually, and its fortifications and defences have strengthened year by year; it is a walled, gated and embattled fort, to which the town is a mere appendage. To live there would be oppressive: roads and tunnels are barred and guarded by armed sentries, going and coming to and from Spain is an enterprise attended by tedious circumstance and fuss; scarcely any money may be taken across, and the frontier closes after a certain hour of the night. The Rock bristles with regulations, bayonets and guns, and casual explorations about it are let and hindered. The climate is tiringly hot in summer, often with an exhausting wind, and in winter beaten by the Levanter and by chilly and damp Atlantic gales. ‘Gibraltar is with reason called the Montpellier of Spain,’ one reads; but with what reason is not clear. The bathing is not good; there are a few crowded beaches, and one or two for local clubs; no solitary rocks or coves. As I had discovered, some English drive down the Mediterranean coast to bathe; others bathe and stay round the bay, at Puente Mayorga and elsewhere. A pleasant, friendly, hospitable, insular social life flourishes among the garrison, which has its club house, library and other amenities. Local papers and journals are published, which have the immature provincial brightness of school or parish magazines. Could there be, has there ever been (I enquire without dogmatism, pre-judgment or enough information), art, letters or music created in Gibraltar, by any race or any mixture of races? One imagines not. The Rock is too circumscribed for the literary activities of a recording Kipling; possibly a Jane Austen might make something of its social and personal relationships (she was good at garrison life); poetry or music would be stultified in a garrison atmosphere.
The place has an odd, fantastic charm, apart from its magnificent views; the charm, I suppose, of incongruity. If the Spanish had it, it would rapidly become more florid and more picturesque, more attractive and a great deal less efficient.
I liked the local museum, with its memories of the great siege, and its portraits of Gibraltar worthies - Rooke, looking very pleased with himself, as well he may, in a full-bottomed wig; Elliot, the commander during the great siege, looking contentious, indomitable and purple-faced in a tie-wig, and so on. The keeper of the museum, a friendly Irish-Spanish Gibraltarian, told me some Gibraltar gossip - why there were so many Irish accents to be heard; why evacuation had been necessary; how, during the war, a Spanish German agent had tried to blow up the fort by means of bombs concealed in bananas, but had been betrayed by a Gibraltarian and foiled, in fact, hanged; how Barbarossa, the Turkish pirate, had landed on Europa Point in 1540, sacked the town, and carried off a thousand captives, after which Charles V had built his great defensive wall; and how the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria’s father, had been governor for a time and had made himself unpopular with the troops by cutting down the public-houses, so they mutinied and he had them shot, and retired under a cloud.
To attempt to describe Gibraltar without describing some of the fortifications, bastions, galleries, great caves, and (I suppose) monkeys, that adorn its Rock, seems inadequate and poor of spirit; but I do not understand fortifications and do not care for and did not see caves or monkeys, so (like Spanish bull-fights and for the same reasons) I omit them. Enough for me was the magnificent galleried Rock, with its cactus-grown heights and enormous blue views, that extraordinary setting for the odd little pale-brown town snuggling in its shelter with its early nineteenth-century British houses and gardens, its eucalyptus, bougainvillaeas, cheerful, amorphous population, gaudy shops, and dark-eyed, obliging, polite small policemen in British uniform and helmets, who answer questions so kindly in clipped English and curious idiom. ‘It is straight on,’ they say. ‘You will not miss it,’ which has a sound more reassuring and prophetic than the London ‘You can’t miss it.’ At the Post Office an extraordinary, un-Spanish briskness and efficiency reigns: if there are letters addressed to you, you get them; if there are none when there should be, it is because letters forwarded from Spain, even from places so near as Malaga, often take weeks to reach Gibraltar; as the Post Office clerks remark, ‘You can’t hurry the Spanish.’ One could not stay long in Gibraltar; but, as a change from Spain, the masculine, efficient vigour and intelligence of the British is restful. Intelligence. Is this where our often-maligned race perhaps shines, in comparison with some others more attractive? Stupid as many of us are, on the whole we do seem to have invention, and a kind of active power of performance, of getting things done. We have also our share of courage, some sense of fair play, fairly cool heads, a not unkindly tolerance, and (in these days, though certainly not of old, but then no race had) a certain humaneness. Set against these our snobbery, our widespread philistinism and vulgarity, our often ungracious manners, our supposed contempt for foreigners (but is this greater than the contempt of foreigners for us and for one another?), our drunkenness and gluttony (we are, it is said, the only nation in the world which likes to eat five, sometimes six, large meals a day, and certainly Gibraltar was the only place in Spain where I saw bacon being eaten at breakfast, ‘elevenses’ in mid-morning, and sailors and soldiers drunk) - and the balance between us and the foreigners seems about even. But in the matter of efficiency, I have a notion that we tip it.
After some difficulty in getting another visa to enter Spain (the Spanish consulate is crowded all day with aspirants for this; I suppose those who live there have season permits) I left my country’s fortress, passing down the long, narrow causeway that leads out by Waterport and the air-field to the British Lines, retrieved the pesetas I had left with the frontier police, filled up a great number of forms at the Spanish frontier and customs, and found myself at last in Spain again, driving through La Linea and round Algeciras Bay. It was very hot on the shadeless road.
I was still in the Straits, still, I suppose, in the Mediterranean: I do not think it becomes the Atlantic until Tarifa, the most southern point of Spain, is rounded. But I should soon be past the Pillars, once to the Greeks the bourne of the known world, for from 500 B.C., when the Carthaginians made themselves masters of Andalucia, to 200 or so, when the Romans beat them out of Spain, Greek voyagers trespassed into the ocean beyond the Straits at their peril. Even Polybius, in the second century B.C., could write, ‘The channel at the Pillars of Heracles is seldom used, and by very few persons, owing to the lack of intercourse between the tribes inhabiting those remote parts, and owing to the scanti
ness of our knowledge of the outer ocean.’ The Tartessian shores, once known, had slid gradually into the regions of myth. To the Greeks, the Pillars guarded the Mare Tenebrosum, the dark, shadowy and alarming ocean beyond the Middle Sea. It was an intimidating thought, even to me, though those far-western shores had been free of the Punic menace now for over two thousand years.
Those extraordinary Pillars - were they once joined together, one mountain, and dug through by that remarkable man Heracles, as some have supposed? ‘But the traditions respecting Hercules I conceive to be fabulous in the highest degree,’ said Pliny, and one cannot help agreeing with him. He was accurate, too, in his comment on the Straits - ‘From so small a mouth as this does so immense an expanse of water open upon us.’ It strikes, as he said, as they all said, the mariner with alarm. Indeed, even on land, on the road that runs round Algeciras Bay, the approach to the great Outer Sea is faintly alarming. It has storms, strange monsters, wild tribes, mists; it is fathomless, bourneless, it runs up and down in tides, it is chill, and has great waves. So, at least, the ancients complained, and so one has always found. ‘It is not easy,’ said Pindar, ‘to pass further than the Pillars of Heracles into the not to be trodden sea beyond. Those pillars fixed by the hero god are glorious witnesses of his furthest voyaging’; and again, ‘Into the world beyond neither the wise nor the unwise may fare. I will not strive to penetrate there: I should be one of the witless if I did so.’
From these columns [wrote Avienus’s sixth-century sailing-book] going west one finds an illimitable abyss; the ocean stretches far … no one takes his ships through that ocean, for there are no winds to sail by …always mists swathe the abyss and the day is continually darkened by clouds. This is the ocean which spreads over the great expanse of the world, this is the largest sea, the sea which goes round the world’s shores, supplying the inner sea with water; this is the source of our sea…. Many monsters abound in it, and many terrors from the wilds….
These melancholy and intimidated geographers were, it seems, sometimes vague as to whether they referred to the bay of Cadiz beyond the Straits, or to the vaster and even less known ocean beyond Cadiz; when Pindar wrote, ‘It is not possible to pass beyond Gades towards the darkness of the west; set thy sails back again, oh Pindar, to the mainland of Europe,’ he may have believed Cadiz much nearer to the Pillars than it is; he calls them ‘the gates of Gades,’ But some believed (as Strabo remarked) that the Pillars were actually the bronze pillars of the temple of Hercules in Cadiz city; those who ended their voyage there ‘have had it noisily spread abroad that this is the end of both land and sea.’ In fact, everything west of the Straits was for three centuries obscure and dubious to the Greeks, shut from the Outer Ocean by their victorious Punic rivals after a brief eighty years or so of adventuring and trading along the Tartessian shores. Through those three centuries they only knew that ocean and its shores from the reports of such incredible romancers as Pytheas, and from intimidating Carthaginian propaganda. Heracles, Odysseus, Jason, and other epic heroes, adventure about this fabulous world, stealing cattle, and golden fleece, visiting the Hesperides and the Islands of the Blest, but only here and there a Greek sailor or merchant dares the Straits; the silver-rich Tartessian lands and trade remain a Carthaginian monopoly. ‘To this day,’ Strabo wrote, long after the Carthaginians had gone from Spain, ‘almost all the cities of Turdetania are inhabited by Phoenicians.’
The road that rounds Algeciras Bay from Gibraltar runs past the ghosts of Phoenician, Carthaginian and Roman cities. The cities are long gone: coming to what I believed to be El Roquadillo farm on the river Guadarrante, where once Carteia flourished, I looked for the site of that noble city in vain. Unless I searched in the wrong place, every vestige of what were, as late as the present century, called ‘traces still to be seen (‘some low mounds’ were observed by Baedeker) has vanished. The total disappearance of a once great and prosperous city always has fascination. Carteia was founded by Phoenicians, perhaps before Cadiz; it was long famous as a mercantile port, a stronghold, a fishery, a populous and noble city. It fought for Carthage against Rome, and Carteian soldiers joined Hannibal’s army; later, in the second century B.C., the Romans planted there a colony of the half-Spanish children produced by the Roman legionaries, and called it Colonia Libertinorum. Pompey, defeated at Munda, fled there and was betrayed to Caesar; Crassus hid there for three months; it was a headquarters of the Roman fleet, as it had earlier been for the Carthaginian, and before that, says Livy, for the Spanish. The cargoes going in and out of that splendid harbour were rich and numerous. Was it founded by Heracles and called Heracleia? Was it the ancient Tartessos, or perhaps built on the Tartessian ruins, as asserted by Pytheas, Pliny (‘Carteia Tartessos a Graecis dicta’), Pomponius Mela (‘Carteia, aliquando Tartessos, et quam transvectiex Africa Phoenices habitant’) and most other historians, until the present century, which has placed Tartessos in or near the mouth of the Guadalquivir? Not that the classical historians were agreed; Artemidorus called the Tartessos identification ‘another false statement of Eratosthenes, who made many, relying on Pytheas’ (who had a notorious reputation for travellers’ lies), and the argument has continued until recently. One would like to think that here, in the crook of this horseshoe bay, stood Tarshish, in whose fairs the world traded, that from this very harbour sailed the navies that brought to King Solomon every three years gold, silver, ivory, peacocks and apes, perhaps the monkeys from Calpe round the bay, the peacocks that strut on the sierras behind Carteia, the elephants’ tusks from Africa across the Straits. One would like to place here the questionable, the fabulous Tartessos, to which, as Herodotus relates, Kolaius the Samian came driven by the easterly winds through the Straits, four centuries before the Romans took it, and met there Argonthonius, the Tartessian king. One would like to, merely because here, at least, is an identifiable site, unlike the Tartessian sites in Cadiz Bay and in the mouth of the Guadalquivir; but the evidence on the whole seems against us, and we must be content with knowing that here was the great Carteia, which fell from sight, probably destroyed by the Vandals about the time when the empire also fell. It stood on the east bank of the Guadarranque river, a furlong from its mouth; above the harbour rose a noble city of marble, temples, statues, towers and walls. Its ruins lay about for centuries; they served as a quarry out of which the Moors rebuilt the destroyed Algeciras, and the Spaniards, when they fled Gibraltar in 1704, the town of San Roque. In 1771 there were still to be seen the remains of a stone quay, a mole, town walls climbing over the hill, some towers, a Roman theatre (‘in a deplorable state of ruin,’ but rows of seats and arches could be distinguished), a line of buildings, great blocks of carved marble lying by the farm-house that stands on the foundations of some great building; in the walls of the farm-house Mr. Francis Carter, in 1771, saw a marble slab carved with satyrs and boys; near it lay a broken statue, moss-grown. A hundred and fifty years before that, a visitor reported seeing the illustrious ruins of great buildings and the entire mole. This was, of course, before San Roque quarried it. Ford, in the 1840’s, saw substantial remains; I, in the 1940’s, nothing, not even the large purple shell-fish in the bay from which the Phoenicians got their dye, nor bonitos biting fishermen, nor one of the sea monsters of which Pliny tells, which used to raid the fishermen’s yards for fish. So far as I was concerned, Carteia was gone. I was sorry, but did not stay to mourn in the eloquent manner of earlier visitors, such as Mr. Carter in 1771 and Señor Ayala a few years later.
O Carteia! [cries Mr. Carter] thou once favoured and renowned city, whose beauty captivated the merchant, drawing all nations of the earth to thy port, can I contemplate without compassion thy present desolate state? Behold thy noble theatre is destroyed, thy populous streets are ploughed up and sown, thy walls are taken away, thy sacred temples are beat down, and thy beauteous head once crowned with turrets is now levelled with the dust. Where are thy Senators, thy purpled Quatuor-viri, thy Aediles, thy streets swarming with people? Thy port is d
eserted, no fleets are to be seen in it, nor the shouts of mariners any more heard; thy fields for want of culture are turned to morasses, the very air over thee is become heavy and unwholesome, and the chilling ague drives man from thine habitation; in thy latter end, as in thy prosperity, one common fate attends thee with the mighty Babylon!
Señor Ayala was moved to similar lamentations. ‘O’! he exclaimed, ‘what does not yield to the slow workings of numerous years; and what may not be found buried in the depth of the ocean! Buried now in silence and ruins art thou,’ and so on.
Reflecting duly but more briefly on all this, I left Carteia and drove on to Algeciras, the Roman Portus Albus, that large and flashy white Moorish city which, seen from the Rock, shines so luminously across the bay, a magnificent cluster of pale cubes, roofs, towers and gardens by day, of sparkling lights by night, all reflected in shining water.
Of the city’s history, less is known than one would wish. Between the Roman period and the coming of Tarik the Moor, Gothic darkness hides it. If the barbarians destroyed it with Carteia, it must have been rebuilt, for Tarik took it from the Visigoth Count Julian on landing in Spain, and built it up into a great stronghold, fortifying it with huge walls, towers and castle, and calling it el-Gezira el-Khadra, ‘green island,’ from the island, now Isla Verde, which they also walled and fortified, half a mile offshore. The Moors held it, continually assaulted, teased and battered by Spaniards on land and Norman pirates from the sea, until the great twenty months’ siege of 1342–4, at which Alfonso XI of Castile was assisted by Christian chivalry from all Europe (Chaucer’s much-campaigning knight was there). Seldom have so many members of the nobility assisted at a siege; seldom have they besieged so ineffectually for so long. At last, however, the city yielded; Alfonso marched in with his great cosmopolitan procession of knights and prelates, purified and consecrated the mosque, christening it Santa Maria de la Palma, repaired the fortifications, and rewarded his warriors with the beautiful Moorish houses and gardens of the city. Alfonso was so delighted with his conquest that he added to his titles that of King of Algeciras.
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