John Masters (34 page)

"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."

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 expect 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:

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.

" 'All's Well' is very pleasant when sung decently in tune; and inspires noble and poetic ideas of duty, courage, and danger; but when you hear it shouted all the night through, accompanied by a clapping of muskets in a time of profound peace, the sentinel's cry becomes no more romantic to the hearer than it is to the sandy Connaught-man or the bare-legged Highlander who delivers it.... Men of a different way of thinking, however, can suit themselves perfectly at Gibraltar; where there is marching and countermarching, challenging and relieving guard all the night through. And not here in Commercial-square alone, but all over the huge rock in the darkness—all through the mysterious zigzags, and round the dark cannonball pyramids, and along the vast rock-galleries, and up to the topmost flagstaff where the sentry can look out over two seas, poor fellows are marching and clapping muskets, and crying 'All's Well.'... The young men in the coffee-room tell me he [the Governor] goes to sleep every night with the keys of Gibraltar under his pillow. It is an awful image, and somehow completes the notion of the slumbering fortress. Fancy Sir Robert Wilson, his nose just visible above the sheets, his nightcap and the huge key (you see the very identical one in Reynold's portrait of Lord Heathfield) peeping out from under the bolster..."

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 trumpeter 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!"