by The Rock
On Gibraltar, the sense of community was only now slowly beginning to develop. Below and alongside the governors, officers, staffs, troops, and sailors, all of whom were on passage, Gibraltarians began to merge as a people; and the town, or colony, began to compete and conflict with the fortress. Civil rights and a civil magistracy were granted in 1830 (Jews were put on the jury list in 1878); and the governments in London and on the Rock began to exercise themselves over a problem which they should have tackled a hundred years earlier. Now the Maltese immigration forced them to ask, and answer, the question: What is a Gibraltarian? That is, who has the right to live on the Rock, and under what terms?
From the beginning, governors had influenced the answer by the way they had attracted one sort of person and discouraged another, given some certain rights and denied them to others. The census of 1871 showed a population of 18,700. A couple of years later an orderin-council made "better provisions to prevent the entry into the residence in Gibraltar of unauthorized persons not being British subjects and to prevent the further increase of the overcrowded condition of Gibraltar." This was the thin end of a wedge, though London does not seem to have realized it, for if you define whom you can keep out, you define who has the right to stay in—thus creating something which is separate from the military complex. The governor in 1849, Gardiner, had already seen this and represented to the government that Gibraltar was and must be solely a fortress. The present problems would be much simpler if his opinions had been taken—but it aroused an enormous outcry from people whose human and financial interests were threatened, so the report was shelved and Gardiner removed.
Town and garrison together became the parents of the institutions British take or found wherever they go. First, of course, a pack of foxhounds. When the last British regiment (24th, South Wales Borderers) came out of Cadiz in 1814 at the end of the Peninsular War, it brought with it a pack of foxhounds belonging to the Real Isla de Leon Hunt (this is the old name of San Fernando, the military town at the head of the Cadiz peninsula). The pack, descended from hounds originally brought from England by the Duke of Wellington to while away the time between battles (see Conan Doyle's marvelous exploit of Brigadier Gerard, "How the Brigadier slew the Fox"), was taken to Gibraltar to found the Calpe Hunt and so give Spanish peasants and landowners the privilege of watching the unspeakable pursue the uneatable over their crops and through their cork oaks and olive groves.
After the hunt, the ornithological society, the horticultural society, the philosophical, the Garrison Library—a most important and permanent addition to Gibraltar's facilities this. Founded by Captain Drinkwater, historian of the Great Siege, and financed by Pitt, it is a fine building with a fine garden and provides the garrison not only with books, but many of the attributes of a quiet club. The Gibraltar Chronicle, later published by the library, in its early issues seldom bothered itself with local happenings—its eyes were focused on far places and imperial themes—but every now and then a snippet of news reveals more about life on the Rock than a thousand statistics.
June 8, 1805—Captain Fuller of the 20th Light Dragoons is drowned sailing behind the Rock when his boat capsizes. This was in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, which obviously did not seriously interfere with the normal amenities.... June 6, same year—a woman of bad character drinks herself to death in a shed near the castle; the shed, furniture, and clothes are destroyed by the authorities "as a useful lesson to the lower Classes for them to obey the regulations of the Board of Health respecting cleanliness of homes and persons... After 1806 there is a dentist advertising himself, Peter Seminara: before that the blacksmith? ... The HMS Beagle, the ship in which Darwin later sailed, serves from Gibraltar.... There is a fire in Mr. Israel's house in Engineer Lane: it was a Friday night of course, for Sephardic housewives put the Sabbath adafina in the oven before sundown on Friday and do not touch it or look at it before noon the next day. So, frequently there are runaway ovens and "Jewish" fires on Friday nights.... The venereal hospital of San Juan de Dios, which has become first an ordinary hospital and then a British barracks (Blue Barracks) is now pulled down and again becomes a hospital, successively called the Civil, the Colonial, and St. Bernard's.... A naval captain on his way to China with his ship bets a friend, after a late night, that he can knock down O'Hara's Folly in three shots. Next dawn he sails and, hangover notwithstanding, hits the tower with his third shot.
The most important event of Gibraltar's century was not much remarked at the time. In 1848 in the course of normal operations at Forbes Quarry, a smugglers' rendezvous at the foot of the north face, a human skull was found. It seemed to be of great antiquity and so was shown to the Gibraltar Society (this was one of those societies which in a small place keep forming and fading according as interested personalities come and go). The society thought it was "an old skull" and as such sent it to the Royal College of Surgeons. The College did not show much interest in it, either, although it had features markedly different from those of modem man or of any known previous race of man.
In 1859 German archaeologists—the science was in its infancy—discovered a skull and parts of a prehistoric skeleton which they could attribute to no known race of man. They therefore named this newly discovered race after the place where the remains were found —Neanderthal. Now the Royal College of Surgeons took another look at the Forbes Quarry skull and found that it was of a woman of the same race, the race driven to extinction by Cro-Magnon Man. If the Gibraltar Society in 1848 had numbered even one archaeologist, that race would now be called Gibraltar Man, not Neanderthal. Whatever we call him, he certainly used Gibraltar for a long time.
Cave exploring became fashionable. Two officers set out to explore St. Michael's Cave. They never came back, nor has any trace of them ever been found, though St. Michael's Cave has since been explored to a distance of 1,700 feet from the entrance and to depths of 600 feet below the entrance, which is 937 feet above sea level. But as to the vanished officers, some believe that they had troublesome wives or debts in England which a judicious "disappearance" would have much eased.
The most devoted cave explorer and scientist of the period was a Captain Brome, who was in charge of the convict labor. The prisoners did not work well for the navy, but they did marvels for Brome in helping to find and explore caves. His most notable find was a series of four, separate, on Windmill Hill Flats. They were later named Genista One, Two, Three, and Four in honor of their discoverer (genista is the Latin for "broom").
Genista One, of which Brome released full details to the Gibraltar Chronicle on January 23, 1865, is 200 feet deep and full of animal fossils, including rhinoceros, horse, pig, deer, aurochs, leopard, hyena, innumerable kinds of birds, fish, and shells, and man. Genista Two is a small cave at the foot of a steep ramp, which the reader may think he has already seen.
Brome's work soon received its just reward from a government always alert to reward scholarly initiative: he was fired.
Militarily the fortress attained its zenith of usefulness about 1870 when enemy artillery could hit, but not shatter, its defenses, while its guns could reach nearly across the strait. The largest gun installed, at the end of the muzzle loading era, was called the 100 Ton Gun. It is still there, on a semicircular railed mount near Rosia Bay. It fired a one-ton shell about eight miles, at the rate of one round every four minutes. The traversing, elevation, and loading were worked by steam, but the firing cartridge was electrical—the first in the world. It was never fired in anger and seldom in play. At a visit by an artillery general in 1902, a full-charge practice was arranged. The electric cartridge fired, but the main charge, of God knows how many hundredweight of powder, did not. After the compulsory wait of half an hour under cover, the general asked for a volunteer to extract the shell. This meant sliding head first down the barrel (about eighteen inches in diameter) and attaching a rope to the ring in the nose of the shell. Behind the shell was all that powder. The general's request evoked a clamorous silence. Finally a thin t
rumpeter volunteered, and the general, who was probably thirty inches in diameter said, "There's no danger." The trumpeter replied, in an excess of military effusiveness, "If you say so, sir!" slid down, and attached the cord. The general, in one of those scenes beloved of Victorian lithographers, pointed to him when he came out and cried, "This man's promotion to bombardier is to appear in orders tonight!"
It was a beautiful gun, but of course by the thin trumpeter's day quite useless. The time for a testing of Gibraltar's defenses was not yet at hand, fortunately. The British Navy was modern, reasonably efficient (though far from being the terrible instrument of Nelson's day), and enormously numerous; but by the end of the century the ground defenses were out of date and faced with an insoluble problem. The main line of defense had been drawn back from the sea wall to halfway up the Rock, where several modem big guns were installed; but other batteries looked like something left over from the American Civil War: and in some of the galleries cannon and cannonballs which had seen service in the Great Siege were still in position and on the books. Still, the fortress could throw a powerful weight of metal onto attacking ships or the Spanish mainland. The insoluble problem was that the Spanish mainland could now throw a powerful weight of metal back, not at the fortress' guns—they couldn't harm them much—but at the harbor.
To question the impregnability of Gibraltar at this time, after all it had been through, was, as someone said, equivalent to speaking disrespectfully about the equator. There is little doubt that it was in fact impregnable; but if it could not be used as a naval base and port, its impregnability was of no value. Nevertheless, when the Royal Navy surveyed its worldwide position in 1890, it decided to put larger and more modem facilities into Gibraltar to service and repair warships and to protect ships in harbor against mines, torpedoes, and submarines. As soon as the plans for the new dockyard on the western side were announced and work begun in 1895, anxious critics pointed out that the facilities and any ships using them would be subject to the direct fire of Spanish guns mounted in the semicircle of hills all around and now all within easy range. Parliament appointed a committee under Admiral Sir Harry Rawson to investigate. The committee concluded that the new dockyard was wrongly sited and that another one must be built at once on the east side of Gibraltar, where the mass of the rock itself would protect it from everything except perhaps high-angle howitzers. The government took careful note of this view and went on with the western site, the work being done by Spanish laborers under the supervision of British technicians. The only concession to the "western" threat was to put the oil fuel tanks on the east side and run a rail tunnel clear through the Rock near sea level, linking them with the harbor.
The critics now raised the general question of Gibraltar's real value to England, and there were again discussions about exchanging it for Minorca, one of the Canary Islands, or Ceuta.
Nothing came of any of it. The New Dockyard was completed—308 acres of sheltered anchorage, coaling facilities, three dry docks, all kinds of cranes, shops, forges. In view of its total vulnerability to Spanish fire, one must assume that its defense, in 1902, rested on a tit-for-tat threat, i.e., if Spain bombarded Gibraltar, the British fleet would bombard Santander, Cadiz, Cartagena, Barcelona, Bilbao, San Sebastian, Malaga, and a dozen other cities vulnerable to sea power. In other words, Gibraltar was to be protected by the general power of England, not the other way round.
In 1902 the Boer War—a focal theme for much of the long-massing anti-British sentiment in Europe—came to an end. England was again at peace. In Gibraltar officers, soldiers, merchants, traders, laborers, and petty bourgeois lived their ordinary lives in an extraordinary place. Though there were still brothels on the Rock, many favored the more open and alegre atmosphere of the establishments in La Linea, a city grown up, just across the Neutral Ground, for the sole purpose of feeding off, and on, Gibraltar's needs. Some of the girls of La Linea were public and cheap. Some were private and expensive. From there one got an extraordinarily clear view of Gibraltar, close up, seen from below....
A VIEW FROM LA LINEA
The ivory figurine of a naked woman, which hung over the head of her bed where the devout often had a crucifix, blurred and enlarged before her eyes. It always did in these final seconds of ecstasy, seeming to bless her lust. She spread herself, crying out, took him into her heart with a convulsion of her muscles, wrapped arms and legs about him, and immediately began to come in shivering transports. She felt his teeth in her neck, a sharp pain, and held him tighter. Minutes, hours later, the spasms calmed into long trembling waves. He was rolling off her. She held him, whispering, "Stay," but he got up, lit a cigarette, and inhaled deeply.
She could see him, back and front and side, in four full-length mirrors on the wall, and herself in another on the ceiling. He plucked her dress off a chair and slowly swirled it around him in a paso natural. He was insolently graceful, with narrow hips and long gypsy hair. Her neck hurt where he had bitten her.
"I need money, Dolores," he said.
"Again?"
"I have no work now. The count dismissed fifty of us. He needs money to serve the king, he said, so he could not afford to pay us."
She sighed and slipped out of bed, found a key in her purse, and opened a drawer of the ornate escritoire. "I will give you a hundred pesetas," she said.
"Make it two hundred," he said. "I have to live."
She shrugged and gave him the money. He was pulling on his trousers. She stood naked in front of him, wishing he would touch her breasts or enter again into the aching emptiness. But he sprawled in a chair, the cigarette dangling from his lower lip. "Put on my shoes," he commanded.
She knelt before him and slipped one battered, cracked brown shoe onto his bare foot. "You should go to Pablo Larios' stables," she said. "I heard he needs a man to look after the English hounds. You are good with dogs."
She picked up his other foot.
"I might," he said, "just to get a little money so I can leave La Linea for good." He put his foot on her shoulder and pushed hard, sending her flying over backward. "I'm going to be a torero?" he cried, striding away from her with the exaggerated, mincing walk a matador uses in the ring to show his dominance over the bull. "El Gato Moreno—the Black Cat."
"You're nothing but a gypsy," she said.
He brought the lighted end of his cigarette close to her nipple, so close that she felt the heat of it. She did not cringe, and he suddenly stooped, kissed the nipple, and swaggered out.
She went slowly to the window, pulled back the edge of one long velvet curtain an inch and watched him leave the front door. She heard him calling his dog. "Cabo? Cabo! Come!" Beyond the lights of the last houses of La Linea, beyond the lights at the frontier, Gibraltar glittered like a magic city in the sky.
She drew the curtain and said in an ordinary speaking voice, "Who's first, Juana?" She looked at the calendar: January 8, 1902. It would be...
The old maid waddled in from a side door. "Tomas Lopez. He's waiting."
"Ten minutes, Juana." She douched herself in the ornate bathroom, using a herbal concoction an old gypsy woman had recommended to her. It had not failed her yet, either with disease or pregnancy, and she had been at this trade thirteen years now—just half her life.
She dressed again and went through the side door into another bedroom identical to the first, even to the maroon curtains and the precise pattern of the heavy frames of the mirrors. Juana set to cleaning the bathroom and remaking the bed in the first room. These details cost money and took trouble, but they marked the difference between a whore and a courtesan.
Tomas Lopez was solid, square, about forty, a little grizzled. He liked a glass of wine and a little conversation before attending to business. Dolores did not mind humoring him, as his more particular demands, unlike those of most of her clients, were very simple.
He sipped the wine carefully. "That Court of Inquiry the English sent out are said to think that the dockyard could be made useless by our Sp
anish guns. That is a serious matter."
"Yes?" she said. "You mean they have wasted all that money?"
"Of course, yes. But perhaps they will close it. We will lose our positions. Not everyone can say, 'I work in the English dockyard, I receive so many pounds a week,' you understand."
"Naturally," she said. Tomas Lopez was Andalusian and poor, so the appearance, the position, mattered more to him than the reality.
"It is from my wages, and the goods I smuggle out every day, that I am able to visit you once a month. And that is known to all of the men, of course. It is not everyone who can afford your kindness."
"You are generous. All know it."
"A man's position, his wife's virtue, these have value. The Gibraltarians look down their noses at us because we work with our hands and go home dirty. To them it is only valuable that the wife should employ a cleaning woman. A Spanish woman, naturally, for their women won't demean themselves."
He got up and took off his coat. He had to have the lights out and would only approach her from behind. She pulled off her drawers, flipped up the back of her skirt, leaned over the bed, and waited.
Afterward he paid and gave her a bottle of Scotch whisky, his usual gift, smuggled out of Gibraltar. She poured him another glass of wine.
"I shall win the dog show," he said. He saw her look of mystification and said, "The English prince and princess are visiting Gibraltar to attend a dog show. The important class is for smooth-haired fox terriers. My Manolo is of pure race, and he will win. Unless the Freemasons rob us. Father O'Callaghan of the Gibraltar church says the Freemasons are at the bottom of all our troubles. He says they sent out the Court of Inquiry to do away with our positions.... The prize is fifty English pounds."
