John Masters
Page 29
Eliott muttered a prayer, then went slowly up the last ladder. A few minutes after he reached the upper deck the Ark Royal's list increased suddenly, and as she went over, he jumped into the sea. Ten minutes later he found himself almost alone on the water, sharing a spar with three sailors. It was late afternoon, the sea was rising, and the warring ships were fading to the west.
One by one the three sailors slipped, exhausted, off the spar and vanished into the sea, their mouths open, but Eliott heard nothing. Near dark the waves became shorter and steeper, and he felt sand under his feet. Holding to the spar, swimming, trying to walk, being knocked down, rising again, he struggled at last to the shore. On hands and knees he crawled up the beach till he felt sharp reed grass and the slope of a high dune. There he fell, lay down, and slept.
He awoke screaming, for in his sleep he had seen the sand covered with dead men, and others rolling in the waves, and men on land hacking each other with swords and spears. He staggered to his feet, for an elderly man in a torn and soaked uniform was coming toward him barefoot. A river ran into the sea on the right, and beyond there was a low sandy cape and a steep green hill beside. Dead men, mostly naked, did indeed cover the sand, and others rolled in the waves; but of the warriors with swords there was no trace.
"You cried out?" the other man said in classical Castilian. "You are wounded?"
"No," Eliott said. "I was deafened yesterday, but now I can hear.... I was going to England to study to be a rabbi."
"You are a Jewish priest?" the gray-haired man said, still polite but obviously baffled. "Spanish?"
"I was. I thought I was," Eliott said. "But I'm not. I'm a physician. Gibraltarian. I was assistant surgeon on Ark Royal."
The other's face cleared, and he bowed. "You have won a famous victory, sir. I am Luis Santangel, Count of Grazalema and lately Captain of His Catholic Majesty's ship Covadonga. I own an estate near here. We will go there, and..."
"Where are we?" Eliott interrupted.
The count pointed. "That low cape is Trafalgar. This is the River Barbate. You must be my guest for as long as you wish. I shall be honored to show you..."
"Thank you, sir, thank you," Eliott said, "but I must get back to Gibraltar at once. I have to start all over again, properly."
BOOK TEN
VICTORIAN HEYDAY
The Jewish years 5564-5662
AUC 2557-2655
A.D. 1804-1902
A.H. 1219-1320
Nelson was killed in the battle. They cut off his hair to give to Lady Hamilton, put his body in a large barrel, filled it with brandy, and lashed it to the Victory's mainmast below decks, with a sentry over it. On the slow stormy voyage to Gibraltar the body rose and lifted the lid in the night. The sentry's thoughts are not recorded. In Gibraltar, alongside at Rosia Bay, the brandy was drawn off and replaced by less volatile spirits of wine. The Victory, her wounds patched, sailed for England with her much loved admiral, neither ever to see the Rock again.
The four chief admirals at Trafalgar were Nelson; Cuthbert Collingwood, who succeeded him and died at sea five years later, without ever again setting foot ashore; Villeneuve, who committed suicide before reaching Paris; and Federico Carlos de Gravina, the Spanish commander—he died of wounds received at Trafalgar. On his deathbed he said, referring to his conqueror that day, "I go now to join the greatest hero the world has ever known." Over 8,500 men were killed, wounded, or drowned in the battle.
But the glory must be shared by others. There were Black Jack Jervis and the nameless officers and boatswains who had forged the weapon that Nelson so terribly wielded. It took Spanish ships of the line twenty-four hours to unmoor—a British ship as many minutes; when Spanish ships had to cross their yards for a harbor ceremony they started the day before—the crew of a British man-of-war did it in one minute from the deck. After Trafalgar a tremendous storm blew up, but Collingwood stayed on his post, reporting: "I kept the sea after the action with the least injured ships. I had another view in keeping the sea at that time (which had a little of pride in it) and that was to show the enemy, that it was not a battle or a storm which could remove a British Squadron from the station they were directed to hold."
And there was the common sailor, the brutalized, press-ganged subhuman who yet at such times became superhuman. During all that week in 1801 when the Gibraltar dockyard maties were working night and day to get Saumarez' squadron ready for action again, there were no drunks and no desertions in the fleet—except several wounded and sick sailors who "deserted" from hospital to rejoin their ships. During and after Trafalgar the sailors not only did their duty, as the famous signal expected of them, but in their conduct toward each other and toward wounded and defeated enemies they lived up to the far more severe standards Nelson had set in his noble and moving prayer before battle (written into his diary an hour before action was joined): "May the Great God whom I worship Grant to my Country and for the benefit of Europe in General a great and Glorious Victory, and may no misconduct in anyone tarnish it, and may humanity after Victory be the predominant feature in the British Fleet." The only permanent relics of Trafalgar at Gibraltar are the so-called Trafalgar Cemetery, where among victims of other battles and fevers he buried two men who died of wounds received at Trafalgar, and the huge figure of Sir Augustus Eliott in the patio of the convent. This was carved from the bowsprit of the San Juan Nepomuceno, one of the four prizes which reached Gibraltar (the other sixteen were all wrecked or driven ashore in the storm). Captain Churruca fought the San Juan Nepomuceno until she was a shattered hulk, her decks in the state described of the imaginary Ark Royal. When dying, he was asked which of the six ships engaging him he wished to surrender to, he said, "To all, for surely no one of them alone could have brought us down." His ship was a prison hulk in Gibraltar Harbor for many years, the captain's cabin locked and left as it was in memory of Churruca's gallantry.
By Trafalgar the epidemic in Gibraltar was just past its worst but by no means yet over. Its effects were so shattering that the Spanish general Francisco Javier de Castanos had arranged a conference of French, Spanish, and British medical officers on the neutral ground outside Gibraltar to discuss measures that might be jointly taken to prevent a recurrence. Nothing seems to have been decided except the usual arrangements for quarantine, which the Spanish had used and were to use so often for non-medical reasons; and the failure is not surprising when there was as yet no knowledge of the cause of the disease. This particular epidemic finally faded, having killed some 6,000 people in four months, as against the Great Siege's loss of 300 in four years.
The war continued, bringing Gibraltar an increased prosperity. One chief cause was the establishment of an Admiralty Court there, which enabled merchants based on Gibraltar to buy—often at bargain prices—ships and cargoes seized by British warships and privateers operating in the western Mediterranean and central Atlantic. This prosperity increased still more when on May 2, 1808, the Spanish people rose against Napoleon. There was now plenty of scope for legitimate trade, but that was never enough for Gibraltar, and on July 12, 1808, we find the governor issuing a proclamation:
"His Excellency [the Spanish governor of Algeciras] having complained that much smuggling of tobacco and other goods has been carried on between this place and Algeciras and St. Roque by inhabitants of Gibraltar: This is to give notice that any persons so transgressing against the laws of Spain are not to expect any Protection from the passport granted them by [the British Governor]; nor are they to suppose that His Excellency wishes to screen inhabitants of this place who have made so unworthy a use of the indulgence granted them...
Three years earlier, replying to London about some Gibraltar merchants' complaints against the imposition of quarantine, the then Governor-General Fox (brother of Charles James) had written:
"About the letters from Messrs Faulkner and Turnbull, I will pay great attention to the matter, but I am much afraid Mr. Turnbull and the merchants and traders of Gibraltar are inclined to ex
pect such Facility to their Commercial Intercourse as is inconsistent with the Safety of the Garrison either with regard to the Enemy or the prevention of the return of the Disease; and are more indifferent than they ought to be to the King's Service where there is a possibility of its interfering with their smuggling goods into Spain."
The previous chancellor of Spain was Godoy, who had taken the unusual title of "Prince of Peace," which is usually reserved, in England at least, for Jesus Christ. He had worked out an ingenious scheme to get back Gibraltar by arranging for it to be attacked by an Irish army while Irish regiments were serving in the garrison; in return Spain would back and guarantee the setting up of an independent Irish state.
But that was all past, and now Spain and England were friends on the surface. Forts San Felipe and Santa Barbara, which had guarded the isthmus for so long, were leveled and the fortifications between them razed. Spanish armies were supported and supplied from Gibraltar, and British soldiers went out from there to fight against the French invaders. Particularly heroic actions were fought at Tarifa and Bar ossa. Yet it was alas, only a surface friendliness. England's aim was certainly not the emergence of a free and powerful Spain, nor Spain's the strengthening of England's grip on Gibraltar; and when the histories came to be written, the English consistently underrated the enormous sacrifice of the Spanish people in the war against Napoleon, while the Spanish, going farther, gave the impression that no English troops fought in their war of independence at all, whereas all but one of the successful actions were fought with a majority of British troops and British casualties.
When Napoleon fled from Waterloo in 1815, the Victorian Era began, though she herself was not yet born. It was the century of the Pax Britannica, the British Empire, and laissez-faire. Peace reigned, with the usual unsettling effects on Gibraltar's role as a trading entrepot, for there was now no need for ships to change or pick up cargoes there, as there had been when most of Europe was under blockade. Politically, England was steady as another rock, Spain unstable as a weathervane. Time and again through the century Gibraltar was to give shelter to victims of failed or successful coups of the right, left, and center.
In the town itself the population rose steadily from about 7,500 after the effects of the fever had been overcome to 17,000 in 1831 (nearly 2,000 Jews) and stayed close to that figure to the end of the century. Spaniards began to enter as the Napoleonic Wars ended, until by the end of the century there were 1,900 of them out of a total population of 19,000. The largest single group of Spaniards were females, who came in as servants to prosperous Gibraltarians. The prosperity seems to have been based on cigar making. There were only a handful of cigar makers in 1800, but 2,000 by 1900; and cigar making was an excellent cover for tobacco smuggling.
There was also much work at the dockyard, but it did not benefit the Gibraltarians directly. The headquarters of the Mediterranean fleet moved to Malta in 1833, but at the same time plans were made to enlarge the facilities at Gibraltar, and this work was put in hand about 1842. For some unclear reason convict labor was imported for the job. Barracks for 1,000 convicts were built, and soon 600 were actually at work. They worked with notable inefficiency, and they had an effect on the Gibraltarian outlook that has not yet died: an association of manual labor with degradation. When convict labor was ended in the 1870's, it was not Gibraltarians who filled the vacancy but Spaniards.
About the middle of the century the population of some 15,500 was occupied as follows:
Local government
132
Professions
72
Commerce
681
Trade
1297
Agriculture
28
Miscellaneous
5565
At school
2633
Unemployed
4994
Paupers
60
As for revenue, Gibraltar was still nominally a free port, and most of the local government revenue came from wine and spirit duties, liquor licenses, and the like. A considerable number of ships passed through Gibraltar —about 3,300 a year in the 1850's—but they cannot have caused a general prosperity when the figures for unemployment are considered. When the high prices of food, rent, and clothes (endemic in Gibraltar) are thrown in, the Rock is seen as a depressed area for the poor; yet—and this must never be forgotten—it was a paradise of luxury compared with the Andalusia that bordered it. There, entrenched in their latifundias, the Spanish rich could starve whole villages into accepting sub-starvation wages by leaving acreage out of cultivation until the peasants surrendered.
In 1869 the Suez Canal was opened, and Gibraltar's strategic and mercantile importance still further increased. Though individual fortunes were being made, there was still no general prosperity; but a stable government and at least a chance of something better than most of Europe knew kept the immigrants coming—Dutch, Belgian, Russian, and Maltese. These last started arriving in 1871 and were particularly unwelcome to the resident Gibraltarian, for their skills and ways of life were in direct competition with his own.
The Jewish population reached its height about the middle of the century and then declined. The great families began to go; by 1900 there were no Benoliels and no Cardozos (of the latter some had gone to London, some to Portugal, and thence to the United States).
But one famous Jew had visited Gibraltar, the twenty-five-year-old dandy Benjamin Disraeli. He went there on part of a "Grand Tour" in 1830. His letters to his father are as informative as a contemporary print:
"This Rock is a wonderful place, with a population infinitely diversified. Moors with costumes radiant as a rainbow or an Eastern melodrama: Jews with gaberdines and skull-caps; Genoese, Highlanders, and Spaniards, whose dress is as picturesque as that of the sons of Ivor.... We were presented to the Governor, Sir George Don, a general and G.C.B., a very fine old gentleman, of the Windsor Terrace school, courtly, almost regal in his manner, paternal, almost officious in his temper.... His palace, the Government House, is an old convent, and one of the most delightful residences I know, with a garden under the superintendence of Lady Don, full of rare exotics, with a beautiful terrace over the sea, a berceau of vines, and other delicacies which would quite delight you.... Tell [Washington] Irving he has left a golden name in Spain...."
And two weeks later:
"After dinner ... it was the fate of Meredith and myself to be lionised to some cave or other with Sir George. What a scene and what a procession! First came two grooms on two barbs; then a carriage with four horses; at the window at which H. E. sits, a walking footman, and then an outrider, all at a funeral pace.... In spite of his infirmities he will get out to lionise; but before he disembarks, he changes his foraging cap for a full general's cock with a plume as big as the Otranto one; and this because the hero will never be seen in public in undress, although we were in a solitary cave looking over the ocean, and inhabited only by monkeys. The cave is shown, and we all get into the carriage, because he is sure we are tired; the foraging cap is again assumed, and we travel back.... Meredith, myself, the Governor, and the cocked hat, each in a seat.
A little later (in 1844) another famous man visited it—William Makepeace Thackeray. His comments, too, are sharply evocative, particularly of the "feel" of Gibraltar to a civilian:
"If one had a right to break the sacred confidence of the mahogany, I could entertain you with many queer stories of Gibraltar life, gathered from the lips of the gentlemen who enjoyed themselves round the dingy table cloth of the club-house coffee-room, richly decorated with cold gravy and spilt beer.... All the while these conversations were going on, a strange scene of noise and bustle was passing in the market-place in front of the window, where Moors, Jews, Spaniards, soldiers were thronging in the sun; and a ragged fat fellow, mounted on a tobacco barrel, with his hat cocked on his ear, was holding an auction, and roaring with an energy and impudence that would have done credit to Covent Garden.