Sea History 079 - Autumn 1996

Page 10

THE CAPE HORN ROAD, PART

IX:

Spain Charges Ahead-Around the World! by Peter Stanford We heard it on our fast evening in port- an oddly peaceful kind of music that sounded like distant cellos tuning up. Seeking she lter from the fresh westerly gale that had sprung up to oppose her progress down the coast, the cutter lolaire had put in at the fishin g port of De Vares, where the Barquera River tumbles down the hill s of Spain ' s rugged north coast to join the Bay of Biscay. The rocky hill sides form a kind of amphitheater around the small harbor, giving lolaire's seasoaked crew a sense of being well and truly out of the insensate battl e with boarding seas. Those short, steep, unkind seas ari se quick ly on the Galician coast when the wind gets up! The ga le continued unabated the next day, as we could tell from the roar of fru strated ocean waves crashing on the rocky shore outside our sheltered corner, and the three of us aboard the old cutter went ashore for coffee and rolls . We handed over a large bundle of laundry to the proprietor of the coffee bar that stood at the head of the wharf, where I imag ine he had rece ived other sa ilors come to hi s corner of the world from stress of weather. As gentlemen of le isure (or scruffy vagabonds, take yo ur pick), we had our coffee, then stro lled up the unpaved main street of the fishing haml et, a dirt road which led up into the hill s. On our way, we saw some vi ll age women washing clothes , pounding them with small round stones against flat rocks in a brook streaming down the hill side, without benefit of soap . I recognized an old US Navy shirt of mine-the clothes were ours, for heaven' s sake! As we made our toilsome way onward, we met a few rough carts, each drawn by a team of oxen, whose solid wooden wheels turning the ir mass ive treelike axles made the haunting music we had heard echo ing off the hillsides the ni ght before. The wind died down at sunset, and , thinking of an early start nex t morning, the sk ipper asked the impos ing innkeeper, who had served as our ship ' s agent, for our bill. No bill , our man sa id- no bill for anything, coffee, rolls, laundry, nada. He expl ained : fo/aire was the first English yacht he had seen since the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, in fact the first vessel from abroad. This was in the summer of 1950, fourteen years later. He added that Spain stood ready to lead the common defense against the Russians when the day came that their tanks rolled forward to invade Wes tern Europe. We were to hear this message again and again in Spaina nation intractably proud , iso lated in that era from mainstream Europe, with much of the population li ving in a preindustrial economy. The Spanish sense of mission survived the C ivil War that had ravaged the country, and it flourished in the most remote reg ions of a nation whose aimies had dominated Europe, and whose fleets once straddled the world .

The Spanish Sally Forth "The Spaniards," wrote Peter Martyr, an Italian expatriate who joined the Spanish court, "are of a restless character, and constantly seek to accompli sh great undertakings. " Martyr wrote of Spanish voyaging of the 1490s and earl y 1500s, as Spanish captains invented a who le new trans-Atlantic trading system, conquering most of Central and South America and the Caribbean islands in the process. He had met and talked with Columbus , whose voyage to the Americas in 1492 owed much of its impact on the European consciousness to Martyr' s fe rvent writing about the importance of the di scovery by Europe of the "New World "-a name for the Americas whi ch he was among the first to use. Martyr understood-as few others did , Columbus included- that the world was just too

8

big for the newly discovered lands to be part of Asia; they had to be a new continent. How had the Spanish come to be the people who opened up the New World to the rest of the world? And how , in the next few decades, had they gone on to build an oceanic empire stretching beyond the Americas into the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean? There was more to this tremendous surge than the growing Iberian profi c iency in navigation . After all , Columbu s was not the first European to reach the Americas. Besides unknown voyagers who mi ght have made the passage- and there may have been such voyages, though Native American vulnerability to common European diseases arg ues that few people could have been involved- there is the welldocumented Viking settlement in Newfoundland, and very likely ventures beyond that, at the hei ght of the Scandinavian voyaging around 1000 AD. Co lumbus's biographer Samuel E li ot Morison explains the difference: Co lumbus's first voyage proved to be the avant-garde for thousands of hidalgos who, weary of sustaining their haughty pride in poverty, were ready to hurl themselves on the New World in search of gold and glory. Mori son, a deeply sympatheti c student of the Spanish nation and culture, states a raw fact here with candor. The fact is that restless warriors of the still medieval Spanish nation, formed of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, were at a loss as to where to go next. The Muslim invader had been expelled after nearly 800 years of struggle, intensifying toward the end in the crusading campaigns known as the Reconqui sta. Significantl y, the decision to sponsor Columbus ' s first voyage followed immediate ly upon the negotiated surrender in early 1492 of Granada, that beautiful southern province of Spain which echoes today with the heritage of the art, architecture and enchanted garden s of the last Muslim footho ld in the Iberian peninsula. Where, then, were the crusading hidalgos-the young Spanish knights-to go nex t in the service of God, and inquest of earthly riches? They had vanquished the powerful , and to them very threatening, western branch of the Muslim imperium , whose eastern branch in the Ottoman Empire had recently overthrown Constantinop le, the last stronghold of the ancient Roman Empire. In the wake of thi s cu lminating victory in the Near East, Muslim fo rces were sweep ing through Greece and the Balkans (with consequences we see in Bosnia today) and wo u Id soon threaten Vienna itself, in the heart of the emerging European polity. Later in the century Spain was to lead in the seaborne effort that turned back the Ottoman advance that would be financed with gold from the Americas. The Americas had yet to be won , but- here on horseback were the warriors who had won al1of Iberia to the edge of the sea! What more natural th an for the horseman to continue on by ship? An earlier monarch of Casti le had called the ship " the horse of them that fi ght by sea," as Fe li pe Fernandez-A1mesto reminds us in a recent essay. It is important to remember that Spain was strongly medi eva l in its governing concepts, its nobility striving to live up to chivalric values. The very word "chivalry" recalls the age of the horseman-the word derives from the Latin for "horse." In Engli sh, the word "knight, " describing the rank of the junior nob il ity, comes from a Germanic word for "young man "; but in the Continental languages a quite different idea is expressed . The Spanish fo r "kni ght" is caballero, or " horseSEA HISTORY 79, AUTUMN 1996


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Sea History 079 - Autumn 1996 by National Maritime Historical Society & Sea History Magazine - Issuu