by Jan Morris
But in my own view there is still no substitute for the big-ship ferries. It is a fine thing to see their hulking white shapes, one after the other, churning a passage across the English Channel; and nothing in European travel can beat the thrill of the first sight of the white cliffs of Dover, seen from an open deck on a fine blustery day, with Dover Castle standing like an ancient defiance above them, and the inviolate line of the English coast stretching away to the west. Could anything be more delicious than to prop yourself against a ventilation shaft on the foredeck of a little ship from Piraeus and watch the isles of the Aegean rise up in magical succession out of the sea? What could be more satisfying than to sail away in a snug cabin to the islands of the Scots – Orkney or Shetland or the windy Hebrides?
The biggest and grandest ferries of them all are the huge liners which sail back and forth, night and day throughout the year, between the European ports of the Baltic, half of them owned by those island shipmasters of page 88. For reasons I forget, I was once given the most luxurious stateroom on one of these ships, and went to sea early one morning all alone in what I remember as a vast glass-walled suite quite near the bows of the ship, below the bridge. Aft of me, I knew, multifarious restaurants, gambling-saloons, bars and floor shows already pulsated, to the beat of rock music, the scamper of excited children and the constant clink of money-tills (for many of the passengers on these vessels sail just for the shopping). In my stateroom all was infinite calm, with only a distant tread of engines, and I felt myself to be all alone in my plush eyrie above the pale but sunny Baltic. I rang for breakfast (there were four telephones in the cabin, and two television sets).
36 Watching the ships
Cuxhaven, a small port and resort at the mouth of the Elbe in Germany, is the best place in Europe for ship-watching, because all the multifarious sea-traffic of Hamburg passes it by. It is a pleasant town, with green promenades, a few hotels, and restaurants offering all possible varieties and combinations of herring. Beside its docks, which are lively with small freighters and fishing-boats, there is a viewing-pier at the river’s edge where old salts with binoculars and well-wrapped tourists (it can be very chilly on that North Sea shore) hang around hour after hour watching the ships go by. In stately procession, day and night, the vessels come looming down that fairway – tankers, coastal freighters, vast container ships like floating fortresses, a police launch occasionally, sometimes a cruise liner, ferries to Heligoland, trawlers, sometimes a lean grey warship pounding out to sea. Often it is misty at Cuxhaven, and one cannot see the opposite bank of the river very clearly: but dimly one can discern, along the low sandy shore of Schleswig-Holstein, a row of modern windmills slowly whirling, as the ships tread grandly by.
37 The old ships
Luckily for people like me, many Europeans have a sentimental affection for old ships, and there are lots of veterans still to be seen, and some still to be sailed in. Oh, the ships I have seen with my own eyes in Europe! I have seen the behemoth Jean Bart (1945, 38,000 tons), awaiting her end at Toulon, and Queen Victoria’s own royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert (1899, 4,700 tons), like an elegant old dowager among the destroyers at Portsmouth Dockyard, and the Queen Elizabeth (1939, 83,000 tons), the greatest of all passenger liners, decidedly showing her age, and the Aquitania (1914, 45,000 tons), last of the Atlantic four-stackers, apparently as sprightly as ever, and the Rex (1936, 51,000 tons), the pride of Mussolini’s merchant fleet, wrecked outside Trieste, and the Great Britain (1845, 3,500 tons), the first iron steamship, being towed home to Bristol on a pontoon after decades as a hulk in the Falkland Islands. I have walked the deck of Nelson’s Victory, and inspected Amundsen’s Fram, which in 1912 went further north than any other surface vessel before or since, and stood on the forecastle of the Cutty Sark, the most famous of all the clipper ships.
I never did see the legendary Nydamboot, an oaken rowing-boat of the ancient Germanic tribes, because its museum-house in Schleswig was closed for the season, and I could only make out the dark mass of the vessel, shrouded in tarpaulins, by jumping up and down to look through the windows, like women touching the lucky owl at Dijon. I did see the black fragments of the Kyrenia Ship, ‘the oldest trading vessel known to us’, still with its cargo of amphoras in northern Cyprus, and I peered through the bullet-proof glass portholes of the sealed container, at the German Maritime Museum at Bremerhaven, in which a fourteenth-century Hanseatic cog was spending a few years immersed in preservative liquid. All these venerable vessels are among the ornaments of Europe, and best of them all, one of the continent’s magical sights, is the stupendous seventeenth-century warship Vasa at Stockholm. To enter its huge museum hall beside the harbour and see this ancient marvel for the first time, towering there above you in the half-light, shadowy, glistening, immensely old, powerful, strange and beautiful – a first glimpse of the great ship Vasa is an almost mystic revelation.
38 From ‘The Old Ships’, 1914, by James Elroy Flecker
It was so old a ship – who knows, who knows?
– And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain
To see the mast burst open with a rose,
And the whole deck put on its leaves again.
39 Still working!
Less tremendous old ships are still working in several parts of Europe. On Lake Mjösa in Norway the oldest operating steamship in the world, the Skibladner (1856), gamely cruises in the summer months, and on many of the lakes and rivers of Germany and Switzerland (the French seem less susceptible) steamships and paddle-steamers are still earning their daily living. Half the river-boats of the Dresden Weisse Flotte are still steam-propelled: the oldest of them, the paddle-boat Diesbar, whose tall skinny funnel and green paddle-boxes make it one of the familiar sights of the city, has engines built in 1857 that are officially listed as monuments. The most endearing of such vessels, for my tastes, are the venerable paddle-steamers which maintain a scrupulously efficient service around the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. There are five beautiful old ships, and when I stay at Weggis, on the foreshore, it is largely for the pleasure of seeing them. A blast of the siren heralds the arrival of one of these indefatigable champions, the oldest of which was built in 1901, the youngest in 1928. Then there is the heavy plonking of the paddle-wheels, and sundry gasps and hissings. Finally the ship appears around the point, graceful as a sea-horse, punctual to the minute. Its prow is wonderfully gilded, its brasswork gleams, its paintwork is spotless, only a thin sliver of vapour escapes from its elegantly raked funnel, and on the wing of its high bridge its master stands, guiding it effortlessly into the jetty in all the splendour of captaincy. I think it would be as satisfying to command the Uri (1901) or the Schiller (1906) as it would be to command one of those blockbuster container ships we watched looming up the Elbe at Cuxhaven.
40 Par avion
When, in September 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, flew to Germany to negotiate with Adolf Hitler, he had never been in an aeroplane before. Now, of course, par avion is a norm for Europeans great and small. Most people fly. Most letters go by air mail, and it is a telling anachronism, in the late 1990s, that the British Post Office still recommends a blue air-mail sticker on letters for the European mainland. Almost anywhere over Europe one may see the vapour trails of the airliners, as they quarter the continent night and day. The very code-letters of the airports have become familiar – VCE for Venice, CPH for Copenhagen, FRA for Frankfurt, LHR for London Heathrow, ZRH for Zurich, CDG for Paris Charles de Gaulle (though not everybody would recognize SKG for Thessalonika, or VXO for Växjö). For people of my juvenile tastes, it is a grand thing to watch the parade of the airliners at one of the great hubs – Frankfurt, Rome, London or Paris – in all the splendid variety of their liveries, the crests and logos, flying dragons and rampant lions, gnomic folk-devices or insignia of long-dead feudalisms. Air travel has made my generation unprecedently familiar with the geography of Europe. Who has not crossed the snowy Alps? Who has not looked across th
e Straits of Gibraltar to the African shore? We have observed for ourselves the Skagerrak and Kattegat, and seen in one more-than-Homeric sweep all the islands of the Aegean.
I once flew between the Alps, rather than over them, with an airline that operated small Swedish turboprop airliners between Geneva, on the north side of the range, and Lugano on the south. This seemed to me an eerie experience. It was winter, and the mountains were filmed in a veil of cloud, through which I could only just make out hills and forests, gullies and gorges. We were skimming over a sea of vapour, a Caribbean in reverse, as in a negative rather than a print. Sometimes a rift ran away crookedly through the cumulus, like a deep-water channel. Sometimes the clouds were rippled and piled like surf. Sometimes islands showed – the sharp grey crags of mountain-tops, misty Grenadines, protruding through the white. And presently almost on a level with us there slid past our windows, lapped all around in cloud, fired in sunlight, the rocky snowdrifted summit of Mont Blanc. So absolutely empty and inaccessible did that mountain-top look, as though it really were floating there upon its white silent ocean, that I found it hard to imagine any human being ever setting foot upon it. It seemed close enough, as we flew steadily by, to step out of the aircraft door and take a jump into its snows: but that would have been, I thought with a shudder, like jumping on to a passing asteroid.
41 At the airports
Sometimes the airports of Europe seem busier, even bigger, than the cities they serve, and in less-developed countries the best roads serve them, in order to provide salutary first impressions. By the nature of things their buildings are modern too, or are so constantly in a condition of development that they offer a suggestion of national vigour. Most of them are never actually finished, because technology is always overtaking them, and no country is sufficiently modest to build them entirely of temporary, disposable or enlargeable buildings. Every airport has to be a monument. At the end of the twentieth century the busiest of Europe’s international airports was London Heathrow (LHR), with four big terminals and a fifth on the way – partly, I assume, a matter of habit, because not so long ago aircraft crossing the Atlantic found it expedient to refuel there. Fifty thousand people went to work at Heathrow every day, besides the odd quarter of a million who passed through it. Yet I can remember when the single terminal was nothing more than an assembly of huts and tents beside the Great West Road: a couple of customs men, as I remember it, sat at a trestle table, and we were all weighed at a big pedestal weighing machine, like something on a seaside pier, and sat about in wicker chairs drinking tea out of enamel mugs before boarding a converted bomber for our flight. Now Heathrow is a permanently unfinished city, known to some insiders as Terminal Bore, complete with one-way streets, subways, dozens of hotels of various nationalities, scores of restaurants, shops from the poshest of emporia to the junkiest of souvenir stalls, a chapel, a jail and an oyster bar, all put together in a kind of nightmare labyrinth, as though conceived in revenge by some insanely disgruntled town planner.
These are a few highly subjective assessments of other European airports I knew, during fifty years of varied experience:
¶ The most delightful was Dublin, where long ago they kindly cooked me scrambled eggs when they weren’t on the coffee-shop menu – ‘Ah well, the chef’s a kindly man.’
¶ The most beautiful was Barcelona, a thrilling thing of steel, glass and cool vistas especially built for the 1992 Olympics.
¶ The smoothest was Frankfurt, where countless million pieces of baggage were transferred this way and that, to and from every part of the world, but only 0.0002 per cent, so it was claimed in 1995, ever got lost.
¶ The most awful was Athens, where nothing ever went right.
¶ The most exciting was Aberdeen, where the helicopters took off for the North Sea oil rigs, and went clattering away with their thousands of workers – American, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Norwegian, Swedish, German – to wild windy destinations with magical names – Cormorant, Piper, Active King, Dogger Shore …
¶ The most promising was Venice, because there you could board a motorboat which would take you directly, across the desolate lagoon, into the canals of the most beautiful city in Europe – ravishing you with fulfilment when, having pottered slowly through the northern back-canals, the boat suddenly gathered speed and burst into the glory of the Basin of St Mark.
¶ The sleaziest was Kirkenes, in northern Norway, because in the late 1990s it was always full of dubious Russians from Murmansk, on their way to steal things from the local shops.
¶ The most surprising was Bucharest, because there, if you smiled nicely at the official lady, she might well let you off your entry tax.
¶ The most amazing was Tempelhof in Berlin, because the Nazis had built it bang in the middle of their capital.
¶ The most misleading was Nice, because its runways were on the edge of the Mediterranean, and made you feel, as you swooped down there out of the grey North, that you were already surrounded by the peace and sweet scents of the South, whereas in fact it would be several sweaty hours before you finally checked in at your characterless concrete hotel on some hideously developed stretch of polluted Riviera shore.
¶ The most brazen was Manchester, which had a large illuminated sign in its forecourt, generally a scene of shabby chaos, announcing it to be The World’s Best Airport.
¶ The most welcoming, in my memory, was Munich one sunny day in the 1950s: for actually beside the tarmac as we landed a rustic brass band was playing, in brass-buttoned uniforms, glowing with pleasure, beer and exertion, and led by a bandmaster who turned from his performers to wave us smilingly with his baton, one-two-three, one-two-three, down the steps from our aircraft door.
42 The Hansa
When I first walked into the Schiffergesellschaft, a famous old restaurant in the German Baltic seaport of Lübeck, I felt unmistakably that I was walking into Consequence. The restaurant is not particularly smart, or gastronomically remarkable, but it is housed in the ancient headquarters of the sea-captains’ guild, and is fully equipped with the heavy beams, high-backed benches, long wooden tables, copper lamps and pendant ship models that sailing-ship captains seem to have preferred when they came ashore. And these, in the medieval heyday of the Schiffergesellschaft, were no ordinary sea-captains. They were maritime swells of one of the great European trading networks, which extended its influence over much of northern Europe, had its factories and its agents all over the place, and became, through the skill of its traders and financiers, very nearly a Power in itself.
The Hanseatic League was born in Lübeck in the thirteenth century, when the European States were still in embryo, and it became so wide, powerful and aggressive an association of trading cities that it has left formidable traces to this day. Some 200 mostly German towns were members in the prime of the League, and between them they established for themselves near-monopolies in many commodities in many countries, besides maintaining peace and order wherever they operated. Every three years they sent delegates to a peripatetic assembly, and they built up a common body of law concerning commercial, maritime and financial matters. All around the coasts of northern Europe, far to the south along the ancient trade routes of the continent, the sailors, merchants and fixers of the League were at work – selling and swapping timbers, fun, honey, tar, cloth, copper, iron ore, salted herring; bribing susceptible foreign statesmen; establishing factories; imposing embargoes on unfriendly States; putting down pirates; founding their own churches (sometimes in rivalry with local bishoprics) – even engaging in a war once, against the Danes. By the time it came to an end in the seventeenth century, outclassed at last by the rise of the Nation-States, the Hansa had permanent semi-autonomous outposts in Bruges, Bergen, Visby, Novgorod, London and many another port and mart.
I have always been excited by the idea of the Hanseatic League, a Power that was not a Power, without a constitution, without a central Government, without a permanent assembly, generally without armed f
orces, created entirely for the protection and pursuit of trade (‘Hansa’ simply means ‘association’). When I first sailed into Bergen, in Norway, in the early 1950s, I was truly thrilled to find the long gabled row of the Hansa’s headquarters, looking as ancient as anything, still dominating the Tyskebryggen, the German Quay. Many of the buildings have been burnt down since, but in those days, standing there crooked, black and planked beside the harbour, they might still have been populated by the German businessmen, seamen, goldsmiths, shoemakers, tailors, furriers, bakers, bankers, cutlers who had worked away there for three centuries and more, as self-contained and separate from the indigenes as a European trading settlement in eighteenth-century China.
Even now the traveller in northern Europe can hardly help crossing the tracks of the Hansa. For instance in the walled city of Visby, in Gotland, a great Hanseatic centre in the fourteenth century, there are some terrific old Hanseatic offices, part warehouses, part dwelling-places – high tottering structures, with upstairs storage rooms for grain and salted fish, and family quarters for the merchants and their wives, occupied now by workers in silver or stained glass, and one or two restaurants offering saffron pancakes to tourists. At Kaunas in Lithuania, at the other end of the Baltic, the elaborately redbrick Gothic headquarters of the Hansa stands beside the German merchants’ church, around the corner from their comfortably mercantile homes. The most imposing churches in Tallinn are the two steepled churches of the Hansa – far larger than the Estonian bishop’s cathedral on the top of its hill.
Even away in Shetland, in the Viking seas of Scotland, I like to fancy the businessmen from Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen who built themselves booths upon the foreshore, and did their trade and bartering in the wind: hooks and nets, corn and flour, mead and linen, in return for wool, sealskins, beef, and fish for salting. The local Stewart earls were the patrons of this trade, and sometimes it seems the Germans grew to like life in those inhospitable parts: Segebad Detken, burgess of Bremen, lived for more than half a century on the inconceivably uncomfortable island of Uist, and is buried there. When I stood, near the start of this book, with my back to the London Stone, looking towards Cannon Street station, I felt a modest historical excitement there, too, for I was looking at the site of the Steelyard, the Hanseatic factory in England. There the all-male company of Hanseatic merchants lived richly aloof from the English, electing its own aldermen in its own guildhall. It had been there since the twelfth century, issuing its own currency, gradually enlarging its property in Upper Thames Street and docking its ships at a private jetty protruding into the River Thames. I do not doubt that my maternal great-great-grandfather, who himself died in Hamburg during a business trip in 1826, must have done business here too: for, although the Steelyard was closed in 1598, German merchants worked on the very same site on and off until the middle of the nineteenth century.
