The pillars of Hercules

Towards the end of August I determined to profit by the last of the fine weather, and to take a cruise in and about the Straits, shaping my course by the will of the winds. Police and quarantine regulations are in this neighbourhood perplexing; so I first sailed to Algeciras to get letters of introduction, and such papers as would admit me at Ceuta, and the other Spanish Presidios on the African coast.

The governor anticipated my request; the letters were folded, and the address put, in the Turkish fashion, across. The Spaniards use this form for official letters only; it is of course a remnant of the Moors.

I observed also at Algeciras, that a black cord tied to a walking stick, is the mark of judicial authority, whether civil or military, and is said to be a practice of the Goths.

As we were landing, the cargo of a smuggler, just brought in, was being conveyed on men’s shoulders to the royal stores. In coming across, we were enlivened with the chase of a little punt, by two scampanas. The Terrible, celebrated as a smuggler, and subsequently as a catcher of smugglers, lay at anchor beside us. Other vessels have been constructed on her lines, but none have equalled her speed. The rig of the smuggling boats is one large lateen-sail, the mast stayed forward, a long bowsprit, carrying a jib of like proportions, and a lateen jigger. Three sails thus compose the suit: they have nearly an upright stem, a round stern, and spread well out upon the water. The Terrible, as a smuggler, could have ‘run’ in one night goods to the value of £20,000.

We walked in very pretty gardens of a social kind—at once public and private; they are laid out in stars, the paths diverging from centres. The gardens are separated from the path by a small ditch and a low hedge, enough to keep out an intruder, but not to intercept the view; so that each person has the profit of his own grounds, and the sight of all the others.

After our walk, I was conducted to his house by the Fiscal, and we discussed ancient usages. He almost repeated Sir Francis Palgrave’s words in speaking of liberty, that the purpose of government is only to obtain adjudication. He laughed at the use of Greek words in politics, &c. I happened to refer to the address to Charles V. of the Cortes of Arragon, when they said, “How shall the king have strength to carry on war, unless the nation has examined into its causes, and found it to be expedient and just?” He expressed his astonishment at hearing such a maxim quoted by an Englishman. “For two hundred years,” said he, “Spain has injured no one, and has been unceasingly injured by England and France, without benefit to themselves.” On parting, he made me a present of Cornejo’s “Law Dictionary,” a rare work.

The following morning, accompanied by Mr. D. and Mr. B., I paid a visit to the general, who bore the old Iberian name of Lara; when a very interesting conversation took place. He was much excited by a reference to some discussions with the Governor of Gibraltar, about rebuilding the forts of St. Barbara and St. Philip, and took occasion to expatiate on the mistake of the English on the subject of Gibraltar. “By it,” he said, “you may irritate Spain, but you cannot injure her or benefit yourselves. You mistake these Straits for the Dardanelles: there is no padlock on the Mediterranean. Tarifa would command the Straits if they could be commanded: you blow up and abandon Tangier which, being to windward, might have served you, and hold Gibraltar, which can never serve you in any way, unless indeed your object be to convulse Spain, and fill her with hatred of the English name.” The gentlemen present dwelt much on the dishonourable nature of the capture of the place, and on the injury they suffered by our retention of it, and the use we made of it. One of them said it would be worth their while to give Cuba in exchange. They were surprised and delighted at hearing my opinion; but the note was changed when I referred to Ceuta.

Though I had been at Algeciras on several occasions, I now, for the first time, visited the walls. I commenced on the southern side, and I could trace them around the crest of a low flat hill. The towers are close to each other, and about twenty feet square, of solid Moorish tapia. To the north they are more remarkable. A large tower projects into the sea, and is still forty feet in height. I had to scramble over solid pieces of masonry, lying about like fragments of dislocated strata! It is not the carefully-chiselled and mathematically-adjusted blocks of the Egyptian, Persian, Greek, or Roman architecture. The materials of these walls, not their building, is the marvel. One mass, twelve feet thick, twenty-five feet high, and thirty long, has fallen fifty feet, without breaking. While examining these masses, I observed in the water large globes, and thought at first they were urns, but on closer inspection they proved to be shot, and I found one twenty inches in diameter, and weighing about seven hundred pounds. The governor was kind enough to permit me to have it carried away—indeed, he offered me one still larger from the store in the artillery-ground. These, it is true, might have been intended for the catapulta; but gunpowder was unquestionably known at the time to the Mussulmans.

Algeciras was rased immediately on its capture, and has never been restored. That event preceded, by two years, the battle of Cressy, which England gained partly by her first use of gunpowder. Was this art, then, learned at Algeciras? There were English auxiliaries in the ranks of the besiegers.

Looking on these remains, I tried to put myself in the place of our forefathers beleaguering this fortress, when, for the first time, they saw, heard, and felt this terrestrial lightning. It was not Neptune with his trident upturning the walls, but Jupiter with his bolts defending them. Algeciras, Troy-like, is memorable by its destruction. The Princes of Christendom and of Islam assembled from far and near to its siege. During this operation, the Spaniards so suffered from Gibraltar, then in the hands of the Moors, that Alonzo the Great, during whose minority it had been lost, vowed that he would retake it. After great and vain efforts, he ended his days in the camp before it. To raise money for the siege, excises were first invented. The French word Gabelle, and Gabella the Italian, come from the Spanish Al Cabala, which is from the Arabic.[37] This Bay is thus remarkable as the birthplace of two inventions, which have changed in modern times the features of war and the characters of peace. The other to which I refer is at Cressy, two centuries before that.[38]

The Chinese, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, used not merely gunpowder, but bombs, against the Moguls. Nothing can be more clear than the description of the latter in the Turkish writers quoted by D’Ohsson in his history of the Mogul conquests. From China and the Tartars, the discovery might have passed, as paper did, to the Arabs. The link was established between Pekin and the Amoor, the Amoor and the Oxus, the Oxus and Bagdad, Bagdad and Cordova. But indisputably the Saracens were working their way towards the discovery—the granulation of that composition, which was all that Friar Bacon, the pupil of the Moors, wanted to convert his crackers and squibs into cartridges.[39]

It is but natural that they should have possessed gunpowder before we did, for they anticipated us in guns. Artillery, at its very origin, attained in their hands perfection. Discoveries and practice only conduct us back to the kinds of ordnance at which they arrived per saltum and at once. Murat II. at the siege of Leodra, cast guns which carried ball of fourteen hundred weight. Such Titanic engines may still be seen at the Dardanelles, and Baron de Tott consulted respecting their use. At the battle of Chesme, in 1790, the Russian Admiral fell aboard the Turkish Admiral and drove in his guns. While the vessels were thus foul and grappling, the Turk discharged one shot from inboard; it broke through the Russian on the opposite side. She immediately filled and sank, but locked in her deadly grasp, her antagonist sank with her. They now lie side by side “full fathom five.” At that time, the armament of our heaviest vessels consisted of twenty-four pounders, and of course a “First Lord” would have scoffed at the idea of a sixty-eight or eighty-four pounder afloat.

I am afraid I should never get on if I entered on the subject of fortification; but I may say in two words, that the structures of the Moors, so long in advance of artillery, have borne unscathed its brunt. At the Gibelfar of Malaga, Tarifa, Alcala, &c., are to be found rudiments of advanced works, of glacis and counterscarp, with a regular system of flanking walls. At Estepona, I observed angular fortification, the link between the old system and the new. There are walls for the purpose of resisting artillery, twenty-five feet high and as many thick, on which the guns must have been mounted en barbette. Their Spanish pupils anticipated Vauban.[40]

This region has been fertile in destructive inventions. Gunpowder was first used for mining by the Spaniards at Baza, about 1480, superseding the old practice detailed in Timour’s Memoirs, which was, to set fire to the beams which supported the roof of the mine after it had been carried under the walls.[41]

It was in the Straits of Gibraltar, before Ceuta, that artillery was first introduced afloat, in 1518, by Don Gonzalo Zarto, in the service of Don John of Portugal.

It was at the last siege of Gibraltar that shells were thrown horizontally, and that red-hot shot were first used. But antiquity also furnishes her share of discoveries. It is not travelling too far to set down as belonging to the same list, the sling of the Balearic Islands, and the leaden bullets which, as Ælian tells us, the Romans obtained from Morocco. The battering-ram was first used at Cadiz, during the short struggle between the Phœnician colonists and their unnatural brothers of Carthage.[42] The Iberian sword borrowed by Rome, may also be recorded in presence of the first Roman colony—Carteia.

We were under weigh at daylight with a light wind; but were baffled all day by the currents. There was no room to complain of detention with such a panorama—so many monuments of man to recall, and such a phenomenon of Nature as the currents to pry into. Close on the right were the brows and bays of Andalusia bearing strange-looking towers. On the left the bold and beautiful mountains of Abyla. Behind, the rock of Gibraltar presents itself as a point isolated from the land, and in the middle of the Mediterranean. Before us opened the ocean, from which rushed in the never-tiring stream. In the bay which we had quitted stood Carteia, founded and peopled by the inhabitants of the coast of Palestine. On the African shore, opposite its rival in antiquity, if not in splendour, Ceuta. On the western coast of the African strait, the Bay of Tingis, the country of Danaus and Antæus, and round the European shore, opposed to it, Gadera, and the enchanted island of Circe. On the one side the gardens of Hesperus, on the other the fields of Hades, and between, the road to the Cassiterides. I saw before me the worshipper landing to visit the sacred groves of Calpe, and then threading his way through the then narrow passages of the channel, I could read in his thoughts and catch from his tongue the names of Atlas and of Hercules, as he saluted the one and invoked the other. Not Greece alone, nor Phœnicia, nor Egypt; not the known only, or the imagined, but all these together, seemed to converge to this passage and to settle on this spot. The great shades of the past wandered among the clouds, and the memory of every people floated upon the bosom of the stream. Had that forehead of Africa been adorned with its ancient clusters of the vine; had it borne hamlets, villages, and towns; had the ploughman and the herdsman been there, I might have admired the richness of the landscape, but should not have known its power.

I landed on Pigeon’s Island to fish, but was soon lost in the problem, what becomes of the water which pours in? But I have already bestowed upon the reader my thoughts on this subject. Suddenly the wind veered round to the north-east, so we were immediately on board, and dashing away for Ceuta; but the wind dropping as suddenly, we again made for the European coast, and, aided by the tide, about midnight reached the rocky island of Tarifa, which projects into the Straits at nearly the narrowest part, and is joined by a causeway to the land. Scarcely had we come to an anchor under the rock, when it began to blow heavily from the east, the current running strongly from the west. We were entirely sheltered from both, but not from the roll of the sea; yet in the midst of this raging storm and boiling sea, stunned by the one, and tossed by the other—we felt not a breath of wind.

As morning broke, a dismal prospect presented itself—the water white with foam, and the heavens black. We were close under the rock, with a sort of cave or cavern abreast of us: boats were lying within, for their masts appeared over a breakwater of loose rocks. We durst not attempt to weather the point, and every moment were exposed to the utmost peril by the slightest shift of wind or current. The long and varied sweep of the Moorish battlements became visible through the sleet, lighting up gradually, and changing as if presented on a stage: suddenly a long boat, well manned, emerged as if from under water, and casting us a line, towed us into the entrance, which looked landwards, and had hitherto been concealed from us. We struck once or twice on a bar, and the very moment that we cleared the jetty, a sudden gust from the north laid us on our beam-ends, and swinging inside instead of out, we were not dashed to pieces.

During three months, I had seen nothing but clear skies and smooth seas. I could now feelingly revert to the words of a Spaniard, who, when Philip V. asked which were the principal harbours of Spain, answered, “June, July, and Cadiz.”[43]

We had to stand nearly two hours, dripping and shivering, till the necessary sanitary formalities were gone through, and the permission of the governor to enter the town, received. Of this we availed ourselves with more alacrity than speed, in drenched clothes and water-logged boots, over soft wet sand. We entered this strange town through the gate of Guzman the Good.

I found myself at the Posada for the first time, under a gipsy roof. The author of “The Gipsies in Spain” has selected this house as the scene of the most salient incident of his work. In it he exhibits the gipsy race with diabolical features, and under circumstances scarcely credible. Nevertheless, the story tended rather to diminish my distrust, than to augment it, for here it was no midnight adventure; no meeting with an unarmed person in a nameless street—the names are all given. Little did I expect, at the time of reading the story, to have the opportunity of verifying it.

Mr. Borrow says that the innkeeper’s sister and cousin (as he severally makes her) had had a Spanish child to nurse, and in sheer spite had injured it, with the purpose and effect of depriving it of reason. The idiot is then brought in as a young “caballero,” to play a part in a very dramatic cozening scene, where a countryman and woman are cheated out of an ass; all this is narrated circumstantially, explained sensibly—there is no hearsay, no metaphor. Of this idiot “caballero” I could obtain no trace; he was neither known nor had been heard of at Tarifa in the memory of man, yet I made diligent inquiry for him, and sent out Mr. Stark, who, from long residence at Gibraltar, was familiar with the place and people, to see if he could hear of him; but all in vain. The Alcalde, to whom I told the story, contented himself with repeating the writer’s name, and laughing long and quietly. As a last resource I applied to the people themselves. The innkeeper had no “sister” and no “cousin;” there was, however, a sister-in-law, so I questioned her about “the child she had nursed.” She declared that she never had had a child of her own, and when I asked if her sister had nursed any child? she answered, that her sister’s youngest son was eight years old when they came to Tarifa. Her testimony was confirmed by the neighbours, and the fact was notorious. Mr. Borrow puts them in possession from father to son. They imagined him to be a gipsy, he says, by his talking their language. I, consequently, inquired about him as the English Gipsy. They did not comprehend me; but recollected a tall man who was always writing: holding up their hands, they exclaimed, “We thought he was writing some learned things, and not lies about poor people like us.” The story fills fourteen pages. Mr. Borrow sends a Jew before him to the Posada; he returns and reports that they were Jews, and then he addresses this Jew in “Moorish,” and tells him they are gipsies. As if a Jew could have been mistaken about Jews; and, as if a person who could speak Arabic, would call it “Moorish.” A few pages before he has told his readers in the most off-hand manner, that the Basques are Tartars, and that the Basque tongue comes between the Mongolian and the Manchou! all which is equally authentic and profound—to “his chum” Mr. Ford.

It is the misfortune of Spain to be misrepresented. She has been the subject of two standard and classical works—Don Quixote and Gil Blas. The former, by its sterling worth, has made its way into the literature of other countries. Being a satire upon a particular temper and habit of mind, the scene and personages of which are Spanish, it is accepted as a description of Spain. As well might England be studied in “Dr. Syntax.” Those peculiarities which it is intended to ridicule, and those extravagancies which are exaggerated in order that they may be exposed, are to the stranger the instructive portion of the work.

“Gil Blas” is a romance by a Paris bookmaker. It owes its celebrity to an admirable sketch of a great minister, another of his successor, and an episode portraying Spanish manners. The Barber, Olivarez, the Count-Duke, the Barber, and the story of the adventurer himself, in his retirement, are all taken from the Spanish, and give to the work its value. It is then dressed up with Spanish peculiarities, and Madrid or Paris morals, and passes from hand to hand as a mirror of the Spanish mind.

In reviewing the catalogue of recent works, I can point, as really influencing opinion or as referred to by travellers, only to Blanco White’s Letters, and the work out of which these remarks originated.

Blanco White[44] is a man who, writing upon any foreign country, could not fail to perplex the judgment. How much more in respect to his own, when describing it to another, where he had made himself at home? In some parts, by keeping distinct the Englishman and the Spaniard, he has been able to translate the one to the other. Those parts are the domestic only. In all the rest he has jumbled the two characters, and has made the prejudices of the one override the simplicity of the other; falsifying the commonest facts, distorting the plainest conclusions. The effect is to puff up the Englishman and to degrade the Spaniard.

To Mr. Ford’s book, however disagreeable the task, I had intended to devote a special chapter; but understanding that the two volumes are, in the second edition, reduced to one, I must infer that the author has anticipated my conclusion—that the work might be made valuable by cutting out the slang, ribaldry, opinions, and false quotations.

The Governor of Tarifa had somewhat the air of an English country gentleman. He afforded me all the facilities I could desire for landing and embarking, and sent his aid-de-camp with me to inspect the fortifications. On presenting to the Alcalde a letter from his brother at Algeciras, he declined to open it, saying, “You are expected.” He conducted me from his office to his house to see his family. Scarcely were we seated when he remarked that the arrival of a stranger was an extraordinary event at Tarifa, and still more so, of one interested in their country, and who busied himself in studying the laws and manners of different people. He then asked me whether I had thought of anything for their benefit? I said I had, and that it was, “Bury your new laws and return to your old customs.” Having explained that my meaning was to get rid of a general Cortes, not to substitute a despotism, but to revive the local constitutions—that is, the law, leaving to each the burthen of its own management and the conduct of its own business; he said, that indeed would be putting an end to theories of “liberty” or “despotism,” and that the plan would be most popular if any leading man brought it forward. He then asked me how I came to devise such a scheme? I told him it was as old as the hills—that it was, in fact, the law of the Peninsula, encroached upon, but not destroyed by Austrian or Bourbon—that these ancient customs were looked to with veneration by the profoundest men of those countries, which the Spaniards fancied they were imitating while they were destroying them.

Notwithstanding the war which the Spanish Government has for centuries waged against every vestige of the race who made Spain the strongest, most learned, chivalrous, and polished country in Europe, the women of Tarifa appear in the streets muffled up as Mussulman women, and expose but one eye.

I was invited in the evening to what I was told was a club. The place was an apothecary’s shop. I was introduced into a sort of vault, and I found myself in a gambling establishment. Their cards were like those used by the Greeks; the club being represented, not by the French trefoil, but by a club; the spade by a sword; the heart by a cup; and the diamond by a gold coin. The names being Bastones, Espadas, Copas, Oros. The conversation having turned upon cards, I mentioned its supposed astronomical origin: the four seasons represented by the four suits; the fifty-two weeks by the number of the cards; and the thirteen lunar months by the thirteen tricks, proving whist to be the original game. I was here stopped. They had only twelve tricks and forty-eight cards; and “Of course,” said a Spanish Major (a Mr. Kennedy), “our game is more scientific, because adapted to the Julian Calendar!”

Conversation having been thus substituted for gambling, I asked what they thought of the abolition of the Tithes and confiscation of Church property? They all shrugged their shoulders. I repeated my question, saying, that as a stranger I wanted to know if the nation had been benefited by the measures which its wisdom had devised for its own relief. This elicited a loud and general “No.” I then asked what had been the result of the experiment? The answer was, “The poor man pays more, and the rich less.” This, I said, was satisfactory, it having been laid down as the great object for Spain “to put her institutions in harmony with the spirit that rules those nations more advanced than herself.”[45] They at first thought I was in jest, but I explained to them something about the legislation of these advanced nations. The increased burthen on the poor was then explained—thus: the tithes are remitted, but a tax for public worship has been imposed; it is less in amount than the tithe, but a new set of fiscal officers has been introduced to collect it: the other taxes since the abolition of tithes have been increased. Pasturage and cattle, which bore under the tithe system equal charges with the cultivated land, have been spared in the new burthens: the rich are thus doubly benefited, possessing the pasturage and not suffering in the same proportion as the poor from tax-gatherers.

These grave politicians could not recover from their astonishment at perceiving that there existed a human being who could question the wisdom, far less the sanity, of their imitating England and France. I was called upon to declare my sentiments on the great question which I was told constituted the essential difference between England and France, viz., the principle of direct or indirect election; nor could they believe me in earnest when I assured them that I had never so much as heard the names of these “principles” in the countries referred to. “England and France,” said they, “are great and powerful; must we not imitate them and become so too?” I submitted, that imitation is not an easy matter; that it is more difficult than invention; that it requires a perfect knowledge of the thing imitated, in which case there could be no reason to copy; besides, it was impossible to copy institutions. “In what particular,” I asked, “would you copy us? Two things only have we to offer you as sanctioned by English consent—the Guelph Family and Johnson’s Dictionary. Will you have them in lieu of the Bourbons and the Castilian?”

As they would hear of neither, I then ventured to offer a Coburg for their Queen, on which there was an outburst of what, in the French Chambers, is called “Denegation.” I said that we were very well satisfied with a similar arrangement. “The very reason,” exclaimed one of the party, “why it will not suit us;” an avowal which I did not fail to turn to account. I was then questioned as to Parliamentary proceedings, currency laws, and so on, and I endeavoured to make them apprehend that in regard to the real business of Government, the liberties of England depended upon the Judges, with whom rested the interpretation of the law and who alone had the power of action; and to whom were rendered amenable the Executive and its functions, and the House of Commons, if ever it took upon itself by an act of its own to infringe the liberty of the subject. That these were the two elements at war in England—the unwritten and the written law: the last was the disease, and that alone they saw or dreamed of copying. “Then,” said they, “let us have your courts and judges.” I told them they could not have the Bench without the Bar, and that neither could be transplanted like lettuces, or grafted like slips of orange-trees.

They were endeavouring to begin where we had left off. That which was abuse to us, and therefore, capable of remedy, came to be to them principle. “After all,” said one of them, “look at the cloth you wear,” putting his hand on my sleeve; “we make none such. Probably you have a penknife in your pocket;—at all events, you have shaved with a razor this morning: it is far beyond anything that we can make. We owe you a great deal of money, which you have lent us out of your superfluity.” I replied that there was no connexion between individual dexterity and collective wisdom. They made the mistake of attributing our prosperity—the result of private industry—to our political institutions; and we, in like manner, attributed their disorders—the results of the political theories which they had copied from us—to their individual character.

The general Cortes of Spain has been constructed theoretically, without the consent or the presence of the separate kingdoms. They are thus figuratively merged, not in one of the kingdoms more powerful than the rest, but in an abstraction which they call “constitution.” Lamentable would be the fate of humanity if follies such as these could profit or endure.

But the cards out of which this conversation arose, are worth returning to. I was surprised to see the figures such as those used by the Greeks; to hear the suits designated as by them, and not according to the names used in Europe: but this is not all. The Spaniards are not content with the name which all other countries know them by: card, carte, carta, spielkarten, will not do for them—they call them naipes. A learned French abbé (Boullet) in his “Recherches sur l’Origine des Cartes à jouer,” makes them a French invention posterior to the use of paper, as proved by their being called cartes! introduced into Spain through the Basque provinces, where they took the name of naipes, from the Basque word napa, which signifies smooth! May not this, like so many other European inventions, turn out to be a mere copy, and Spain the transmitter to Europe rather than the debtor of Europe? If we go back to the once-famed game of Ombre, we shall find the terms of the game all Spanish, such as spadillo, matador, &c. If we go to Hindostan, we find the manner of playing to correspond with the game of ombre. Here is the link established between the Hindoos and Modern Europe through the Spaniards—that is, the Arabs. This latter point the name naipe confirms—Naib or Nawab, whence Nabob, being the equivalent to king. “The Four Kings” was the original name of cards in Europe. An old writer quoted in Bursi’s “Istoria della città di Viterbo,” has these words, “Cards were introduced into Viterbo in 1379, from the country of the Saracens, where they are called Naib. In Italy, they were formerly known by the name Naîbi. The two old Spanish lexicographers, Tamarid and Broceuse, derive the word from the Arabs. Alderete gives the fantastic origin of the initials N. and P. of the supposed inventor, Nicholas Pepin, which the moderns have followed. Islamism has driven cards out of use among the Arabs, and has thus left us to dispute about the origin of the name.

Cards and chess seem to have been combined and originally played by four persons, there being four suits of chessmen as well as of cards. The history of them would be a great book, if it could be written.

Next morning I came down to embark at the island; but a violent storm coming on, I took refuge in the house of the keeper of the lighthouse, on the point of the rock. The channel was covered with vessels: they had been all the morning sweeping away to the westward, with studding-sails on both sides, low and aloft; now they were fast measuring back their distance, and dashing past us under close-reefed topsails. We scrambled over the sharp points of the ledges of rock to watch the current where it is most straitened and convulsive. The dark deep current close in-shore was running out; a hundred yards or so from the rock it was running in; farther out again, there appeared another stream from the eastward. This must have been the spot where the action took place between Didius and the Carthaginian galleys, “when those were seen pursuing and these flying, who hoped not for victory and dreamed not of flight.”

About one o’clock, it suddenly cleared up, and the sun burst forth in brightness over the cooled and watered earth. The shroud of the heavens broke up into heaps of white clouds, “showing the dark blue,” as the Highlanders say, “through the windows of the heavens.” The bosom of the Straits and the brows and heads of the hills were mottled by their shadow, as they drifted along, chasing each other: at equal pace poured the current, and in the same direction. Soon reissuing from cove and rock, flocks of white sails were crowding on their way back over the course which they had already twice measured. Invited by the breeze, and shamed by the example, we lingered for a while to enjoy the pleasant mood of this fitful torrent, and then hurried on board, and were soon sweeping down before the batteries. We took good care to clear our colours and to make them blow out well, to save them the trouble of hulling us, as they did an American in the morning, because his stripes and stars had not been flashing to windward of the spanker, with as much coolness as if they had been firing at a partridge. That sort of thing is all very well at Gibraltar, with a thousand guns in battery, and four thousand men behind them; but four artillery-men with three mounted field-pieces, to be busy with rammer, sponge, cartridge, and ball, ready to blaze away at all the nations of the world, should any luckless wight forget to exhibit a bit of bunting by day, or a lantern by night, is about the most absurd prank one ever heard of. They will fire as glibly on a three-decker as on a cock-boat, if the ensign happens to draw to leeward, as was the case recently with the Phantom, at Ceuta; and yet they make no profit of the statistical information they seek with so much ardour. They have no toll to receive, as at the Sound; no sovereignty to assert, as at the Dardanelles; no neighbour to browbeat, and no smuggling to protect, as at Gibraltar:—besides, we sink their vessels.

To provide against being carried down to the Mediterranean, had it fallen calm, which might have entailed a week’s cruise, we stretched at once to the African shore. Despite the fears of my Scorpion[46] pilot, and cook, we skimmed along the edge of the stream, and shaved every headland, until we reached the last point of the Straits, to which we had to give a wide berth, on account of the “race.” Inquiring the name, the answer was, “Punta Leone.” The man may paint the lion as he likes, but he has but one name to call him by.

But why call the point that looks towards Europe, Lion? A few centuries ago, and the question would not have been to be asked. Then from this spot the spectator who observed the hordes ferried in an uninterrupted stream of galleys across, and beheld the rock of Calpe, which from here, as from the north, is the very likeness of a lion crouching on the point, would have seen in the figure the emblem of the event, and turning to the hill above to look whence the beast of the desert had taken his spring, instinctively must so have named it.