Lagos Bay, as one comes to it along the Portimão road and the stone bridge that crosses the long, thrusting inlet of sea, is a lovely sight: the huge blue spread of harbour, full of ships, between two enclosing promontories, and above the harbour and the earthquake-ruined church, the steep town rising, narrow-streeted, difficult for cars, twisting and climbing about from praça to praça. You pass the arcaded slave market; the descendants of those terrified, weeping Africans and Canarians walk the streets to-day in blithe liberty; their piccaninnies, with little white shirts and great shining black eyes, goggle at strangers with the same merry astonishment with which the Lagos children gaped at the poor blackamoors five hundred years ago. In the highest praça is the little church of S. Antonio, very pretty, charmingly rebuilt after the earthquake that ruined most of Lagos, decorated gorgeously within with gilt carving and lovely blue and white azulejos running all round the walls below the gilt. There is a pretty white belfry tower, and in the church is a museum, which treasures among other interesting objects a little eighteenth-century statue of Major General S. Antonio in a field officer’s crimson sash over his monk’s habit. From this height one looks down on the harbour and the long coastline of sandy beach, strewn with fantastic coloured rocks, for south of Lagos stretches the most beautiful and famous beach in Algarve, where the rocks are a labyrinth of marine castles, arches and grottoes and communicating tunnels; a fairy city, stretching out to the lovely grotto and green bathing pool at the Ponta da Piedade. To these beaches and grottoes visitors go to bathe; Prince Henry and his friends did not do so, and nor did I; they thought bathing an infidel perversion; I thought the Outer Ocean swept too coldly among the pierced and tunnelled rocks and that the beaches were already too inhabited. Besides which, I wanted to go on to Sagres and Cape St. Vincent.
There are charming corners in the narrow streets of Lagos; some are pre-earthquake, and here and there one comes on a manueline carved window or doorway. The houses are not all of the uniform white of some Algarve towns; some are a delightful rose colour, canary yellow, or deep blue; some have gardens and terraces of bright flowers and shrubs, and flights of stone stairs outside. The streets are sharp-angled and steep, and full of donkeys.
It is twenty miles to Sagres, about ten to the village of Raposeira, ‘a place remote from the tumult of men, propitious for contemplation and study,’ where Prince Henry had a country house, half-way between Lagos and Sagres. The house, or inn, must have perished; Raposeira is now a post-earthquake village of white houses and tiled roofs, blue azulejos and blue paint, with a pretty church tower. Prince Henry must have ridden continually along this Lagos–Raposeira road, through this hilly country planted with sugar canes, almonds, olives, figs, vines and maize, his African slaves working among them, shivering in the wind that blew from the sea and filled their master’s mind with dreams and charts.
After Raposeira the country becomes less cultivated; the Algarve garden lies behind; bleak moorland and mountains begin. At Vila do Bispo, a tiny earthquake-ruined hamlet, women in men’s felt hats did the washing in a large stone tank, and a few houses spared by the quake (none looks later) stood round them. After Vila do Bispo the desolate road bends south down the rocky promontory which ends in Sagres and Cape St. Vincent and the ocean.
The cape of Sagres, as one comes down to it across that windswept jut of massive limestone rock, is startlingly Europe’s end; the end, said the ancients, of the whole inhabited world (for who was going to believe Marseilles liars like Pytheas, with his tales of strange seas, dense like the air, like jelly-fish, and remote shores and islands round and beyond the Lusitanian coast? Strabo considered him very misleading, and did not believe that he had ever got so far).
There is a village of Sagres; a road of small cheerful houses, a tiny praça, a church; beyond it, at the end of a narrow neck of land, is the treble-walled, ramparted fortress, that was stormed and burnt by Drake in 1587, built up again, overwhelmed by the great earthquake seas in 1755, later repaired, and now stands formidably within its massive gates, with a huge geometric circle, a rosa dos ventos, drawn in white stones on the ground inside the gates (said, but not by scholars, to have been used by Prince Henry; it was discovered in 1921, on the site of an ancient church, and the best informed Portuguese do not think it very old). On the cape’s end there stands a lighthouse, and a high-ramparted view-point. The whole cliff plateau is a jumble of limestone boulders; thyme and saxifrage and cistus thrust up among them. I walked over them to the cliff’s steep edge, looked down the frightening precipice into the clear deep bay where fishing boats rowed and sailed, saw how the wild coastline stretched west, point beyond point, with narrow green gulfs between the points, all round the great bay of Beliche to where the tremendous bluff of Cape St. Vincent stood out to sea four miles to the north-west. The Promontorium Sacrum: it is not clear whether they gave the name to the whole promontory, or which of the two great capes was the Sacred Mount. Probably Cape St. Vincent. On old Portuguese maps one reads ‘Cabo de S. Vincente. En outro tempo Promontorio Sacro.’ ‘From there,’ wrote Avienus, ‘the sacred mount of Saturn rises jagged with rocks. The sea boils, and the rocky strand stretches far. Many shaggy-haired goats belonging to the natives wander always over the rough turf.’ And Strabo: ‘But as to the Cape itself, Artemidorus, who says that he visited the place, likens it to a ship.’ There is no temple or altar to Hercules, Artemidorus said, but only stones. And it is not lawful to offer sacrifice there, or even to set foot in it at night, because the gods, the people say, occupy it at that time; those who come to see the place spend the night in a neighbouring village and visit the Cape by day, taking water with them, for there is no water there. ‘Now these assertions of Artemidorus,’ says Strabo, ‘are allowable, and we should believe them; but the stories he has told, in agreement with the common multitude, are by no means to be believed.’ As, for example, that the sun sets in the ocean beyond the Cape with a noise of sizzling.
But, standing on that great fissured cliff of Sagres, with those wild rocks and bays running out to the western cape, and the limitless Atlantic heaving beyond, I can, with Artemidorus and the common multitude, believe that anything might here occur. The waves thrash at the craggy rocks far below. It was in the Bay of Beliche that Drake, having retreated foiled from Lagos, landed eight hundred troops and led them scrambling up the cliff to the assault of the great castle of Sagres, piling faggots and pitch against the gates, firing them until the castle surrendered, and with it the forts and monastery on Cape St. Vincent. All Prince Henry’s fortresses, and his two towns, the Vila do Infante and the Vila de Sagres, were burnt and blackened heaps of stones.
Discussions have been carried on by scholars for many years as to how much the Navigator ever lived at Sagres, whether he had a school of navigation, and if so where, and where he died. Anyhow he had two towns, one on each cape, the Vila do Infante on St. Vincent, the Vila de Sagres on the other. There are letters written by him from Sagres about both these; the town ‘which anciently was Sagres, for long depopulated and destroyed by Moors’ was ordered to be repeopled as of old, for the furnishing of expeditions to Guinea; and on ‘the other cape, called Terçanabal,’ was to be built ‘my town of Vila do Infante,’ and from there provisions and water were to be supplied to the ships which sheltered in the bay. There was to be a chapel of the Virgin, and a church to St. Catherine, and masses were to be said every Saturday. There was a fortress and a monastery of St. Vincent. It was probably in his Vila on Cape St. Vincent that Henry died in 1460.
All the Infante’s town, fortresses, monastery, church and chapel, are now desolate in ruin. Sagres has been restored, but not the buildings on the other cape. The earthquake seas broke off great chunks of the Sagres cliff, wrecked the fortress gates and much of the walls, and nearly all the houses, including those of the governor and prior. Sagres town was never rebuilt on its old scale; in 1798 a traveller saw only a couple of houses outside the fort; the present little town is nineteenth century; all its hou
ses are said to be built on the ruins of earlier buildings. All about the promontory lie shattered fragments of masonry. The boulders over which we walk are perhaps parts of ancient vanished dwellings. Prince Henry’s own house at Sagres, which used to be shown, is said to be a nineteenth-century myth; so is his Sagres observatory, by those who peer more closely into history than is seemly or wise. Still, Henry did stay at Sagres, and also in his town on Cape St. Vincent where he died.
There was a Portuguese picnic party seeing Sagres fort and being photographed and enjoying the view. I left them there, and drove to Cape St. Vincent, round the four-mile curve of Beliche Bay, among the rocks and the shaggy goats that strolled about the turfy borders of the road. It was like a road in the Highlands, and smelt of thyme and sea, and the Atlantic winds blew down it.
The other cape, when one arrives at it, is even grander than Sagres; a bleak, tremendous bluff, jutting out to sea like, as Artemidorus said, a ship, with a tall lighthouse on the prow. There is no house, except that of the lighthouse keeper (which is said to be built on the ruins of the old monastery). The Infante’s town is a desolation of ruins; chapel-shaped, roofless buildings spread about the cliff; the silence and solitude are eerie. I do not know when the monastery was finally abandoned. There were Capuchins there in 1798; they related to Dr. Heinrich Link ‘particulars of the engagement between the Spaniards and Lord St. Vincent, which they distinctly saw from the monastery. Such incidents alone can render a residence on this remote point of land interesting.’
Indeed yes. But such incidents are sadly rare, though less so off Cape St. Vincent than elsewhere. What engagements have been fought there, what fleets captured, what tyrant powers o’er-thrown! Had the Capuchins abandoned the monastery too early to have watched Dom Pedro’s small all-British Constitutionalist fleet (of which they cannot have approved), under Admiral Sir Charles Napier, capture the navy of Dom Miguel in 1833? If so, they must have foreseen in that victory their coming doom, for they were probably victims of the Liberal Constitution.
Besides the monastery and the town and fortress and chapels, Henry built on Cape St. Vincent a great palace and park; eighteenth-century maps show remains of the walls still standing, stretching from the Fort of St. Vincent to the Fort of Beliche; in the palace wall were balconied windows. Little of it is now to be seen.
The wind sighed over the thymey boulders of the royal sea town; where sailors had once climbed up from their ships in the rocky roadstead, seeking food and water, now only goats scrambled. The evening darkened; the sun had long since sunk sizzling into the sea; it would soon be night, when no one might be on the Sacred Cape, because it would be occupied by the gods. It was time to seek a bed. My guidebook had assured me that there was an inn at Sagres, unpretentious but well spoken of. ‘Recommended by those who know it,’ said another guide, cautiously; the conhecida e afamada Pensão de Sagres, a Portuguese book called it, and Hachette told me it was a, petit hôtel très propre et accueillant. Even the disdainful Murray (in Portugal the Reverend J. M. Neale), who thought Sagres ‘beyond all question the most wretched and barren place in Portugal,’ and that ‘church, houses, fortifications and inn are all the picture of wretchedness,’ at least agreed with the rest that there was an inn. But, as so often occurs in the Peninsula there was no inn; there had not been an inn for years. It is time (as I have probably remarked before in the course of this book) that some one produced up-to-date guides to Spain and Portugal. I am weary of these inns, so unpretentious, so well spoken of, so vanished into the questionable limbo of past years, which leave me stranded, supperless and roofless, at the world’s end, to sleep in a moonlit pine forest among mosquitoes at the gates of a monastery in the mountains of Valencia, or on a windswept cape at the end of the inhabited world, among the dark and ghost-trodden ruins of Prince Henry’s town.
I made my bed in the roofless apse of what must have been once a chapel; all night the wind whispered and moaned coldly about the Sacred Cape; the long beams of the lighthouse, and of that of Sagres, speared and shafted the desolate wastes of the sea which bounds the known world. Turn back, oh Pindar, to the mainland of Europe….
My journey was over. I had come to where the Outer Ocean sweeps darkly northward round the Cape. ‘There are the springs and the ends of dusky earth, and of misty Tartarus, and of the unharvested sea, and of starry heaven, dark and terrible, which even the gods abhor: a mighty chasm … And there stand the terrible habitations of murky night, shrouded in dark clouds….’
Into this I was to drive northward to-morrow, leaving Ora Maritima behind me, its blue Mediterranean waves, its silver Atlantic tides, rustling among the ghosts of wrecked Tyre, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Gothia and Islam, on its two thousand miles of sun-soaked shore, where still, as through the long bright centuries before the first Tyrian ship swam into Gadir bay, Iberians and Lusitanians sailed and fished and fought and grew the olive and the vine.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © 1973 by Constance Babington Smith
First published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd
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