by Josep Pla
So this is my Fornells roll call of fish. It was the one that sparked the least argument. I wouldn’t dare to claim it is a definitive list or champion it dogmatically. It is a list produced as a result of the experience of individuals who more or less know what they are about – the list could, of course, be challenged in terms of personal taste rather than from any general perspective.
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Simple, modest, unconventional and straight talking, the people of Fornells would finish their long discussions of fish and the best way to cook them with a single, inevitable conclusion that someone or other would utter: “All in all, the best fish in the sea will always be meat.”
People inland love fish. Fishermen and maritime folk in general prefer meat, and the meat dish they like best is beef stew with green peas. They also love sweetmeats: anything sweet and sugary.
“I could live on beef stew with peas, cream sponges and strong wine…” I once heard a fisherman exclaim emphatically.
That’s not as farfetched as it seems.
CORAL AND CORAL DIVERS
As a child, like everyone of my age in my part of the world, I first heard about the coral business as if it were a mythical activity linked to a love of adventure and the fascinating freedom of a seafarer’s life. The ancient substrata buried deep in the national consciousness has always held within it a maritime perspective. The presence of the sea in our forebears’ memory is still deeply felt today, and most intensely in the countryside. Even so, this memory is beginning to fade among people along the coast. When Catalans were able to work out at sea in the past, pursuing that spirit of adventure and fabled dream, their role was rather modest. When it came to involve sailing without the old freedoms and subject to the new factory regulations, Catalans abandoned ship. In our collective life today, the sea doesn’t carry the slightest weight or have any importance – except in summer when people go for a swim. Catalonia is no longer a country with any real relationship to the sea and has become a country of earthbound, sedentary, prickly folk. The last vestige of this part of our past are the soporific snipe regattas.
Senyor F.S.’s father, whom we all knew as the old Cardinal, a fat, ruddy, sarcastic fellow, who could be very pro-church and very pro-usury, owned a bakery in Plaça Nova and was himself tied up in the coral trade. Many said that the Cardinal made most of his money through that line of business. It could be that legend prompted such talk, as legends can sometimes outlast the truth. When Senyor F. S. was appointed the Cardinal banker in Palafrugell after his father died, he had to declare himself bankrupt. This news shocked large swaths of the less educated in town. Susceptible to legends, they couldn’t understand how a fortune made from coral could vanish so quickly.
Some well-known families were purchasers of coral from the small reefs on our coast whose boundaries are Cape Béar at the entrance to Port-Vendres and Cape Sant Sebastià – the Formigues Islands, to be precise. The Ponts of Cadaqués; the Forgases of Begur; the Elieses of L’Estartit; the Sunyers of Port de la Selva; the Alberts of L’Escala; possibly the Riberas of Palamós, who were always very involved in trade with Italy – each of these families bought and exported coral. Port-Vendres was another very important center for the trade – perhaps the most important.
The legendary aura surrounding the coral trade has its origins in a really sensational fact – that at its peak people paid an ounce of gold for an ounce of top-quality coral. People today are astonished that such a derisory amount – an ounce of coral is the smallest of handfuls – of a substance that later lost most of its value could command such a fantastic price. An ounce of gold! An ounce of coral for an ounce of gold – for sixteen gold duros! It beggars belief. When I was a child, an ounce of gold could buy you a fine working animal – a young mare or a five-year-old horse.
We should perhaps set aside our astonishment and find a plausible explanation for this situation. It’s crucial to try and shed light on the enigma. It is hard to study this country’s real history, the things that have happened, the factors that have stirred people’s passions – even the most basic – because there is a dearth of case studies that could help us grasp the general situation. If we had access to the accounts or correspondence of one of those families involved in the coral trade, we might be able to clear up this peculiarity. But families in our country generally bring nothing at all to our historiography.
If a tiny handful of coral came to be worth an ounce of gold, it was down to a series of reasons.
In the first place, coral has always been a rare substance. Good, ox-blood-red coral is found only in the western Mediterranean and only in very few areas on the sea’s perimeter. Firstly, along the coast of historic Catalonia* between Cape Béar and the Formigues Islands. Coral is nonexistent beyond those rocks as far as Gibraltar, and beyond there, to the Portuguese coast. It can also be found on the north coast of Majorca, from Sóller to Cape Formentor, but apart from a small space around the Sant Vicenç – the Gorg Blau inlet sung by Costa i Llobera and painted by Joaquim Mir – the coral growing on the north coast is poor quality: it is coral eaten away and damaged by voracious microbes. There is an area of coral on the French coast east of the Rhône estuary and east of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, way past Esterel. The Italians have coral on the west coast of Sardinia and in an area between Livorno and Civitavecchia – as far as Santa Marinella to be precise. Corsica, the Tyrrhenian islands, Sicily and the Adriatic are completely barren in terms of coral. Not a gram of coral has been discovered beyond the Messina lighthouse – in fact, no known coral exists along the Greek coast or in the sea around the Greek islands. There is one last area: the Barbary Coast, the stretches facing Italy as well France: Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers. In the Red Sea, white coral, which is worthless, creates reefs that have the same formation as those in the tropics, Pacific or Caribbean. They produce very little coral for making jewelry. So that’s all there is. Coral-growing areas are few and far between, and some – like those along the French coast – have been practically exhausted.
So there is scant raw material and for centuries the small portion of coral gathered by ancient coral-fishing devices just about supplied the needs of the market. Coral always had an outlet as a luxury item. It was considered decorative and fashionable and was only within the reach of wealthy people – aristocrats, courtiers and clerical dignitaries. Ancient Mediterranean poetry – Catalan, Provençal or Italian – contains numerous allusions to coral as a quality good, the equivalent of a luxury jewel, for the most sophisticated decorative ends.
Then all of a sudden there was a fantastic increase in the demand for coral. As soon as the bourgeoisie began to take ownership of property and goods belonging to the Church and the aristocracy, its first move was to imitate the dying class: their style, their way of life and, naturally, their jewelry. That’s when nascent capitalism invents wealth creation that can be hidden and external signs of wealth begin to burgeon. Jewelry is an ancient, distinguished phenomenon; jewelry as a sumptuous sign of riches is the creation of the bourgeoisie. In ancient family inventories, one finds coral by the side of gold and precious stones but given an inferior ranking. Much inferior, to be sure, but it’s always there.
The establishment of free trade, the onset of industrialization and consequent destruction of the simplicity of the artisan and guild life, created a working class that had a degree of acquisitive power and sufficient freedom of movement to increase it. The working class was imbued with the same tendencies as the bourgeoisie. Just as the bourgeoisie had displayed a style similar to the defeated traditional classes, the working class felt the same love of luxury and the same drive to imitate, but as the petty bourgeoisie and working classes on the rise couldn’t aspire to buy gold, diamonds, pearls or amethysts, they bought coral jewels: bracelets, necklaces, earrings, crosses, broaches and rings. Coral became one of the jewels of the poor, which explains the sudden surge in demand and the fantastic prices obtained.
When trinkets make their appearance next to real jewels, the value of coral rockets.
It would be inaccurate to say that the growth in demand didn’t lead to an increase in what the market offered. When the volume of buyers grows, the old device for coral extraction – la coralera – is replaced by the first attempts at submarine exploration and gathering, carried out by divers wearing deep-sea diving suits. Production increased but never enough to satisfy the market. Prices inevitably soared. The coral that is highly prized continues to be rare. The sea is full of coral: white coral can be found in abundance; it forms the atolls in tropical seas, but those polyps have never been valued or valuable. The only coral with a high price is red coral – corallium rubrum – which is found only in the areas of the Mediterranean we have mentioned and in the tiniest amounts in the Red Sea. Within the vast range of existing corals, the families of red coral are rare, which explains why the appearance of trinketry increased coral’s value at an astonishing rate.
Conversely, there are many degrees of quality of red coral. Coral that has been eaten away by microbes has little value. Average, thin, basic coral is worth slightly more. Thick, whole coral with hints of ox-blood red and angelic pink – as coral gatherers say, with pink adolescent cheeks in mind – is what caused coral values to soar.
As well as the clientele we might describe as “Christian,” customers from more exotic climes have always existed. In Arabia they bury their dead with coral necklaces. Hindus and the indigenous peoples of Australia hold it in high esteem. The peoples of the Orient, generally speaking, use it to decorate their clothes, abodes and weapons. It was an object of exchange used to negotiate with the caravans that came from the depths of Asia to the markets of the eastern Mediterranean. When the ports of China and Japan were opened to trade with Europe, it was discovered that wealthy and sentimentally inclined Chinese and Japanese placed wreaths of coral on the tombs of their ancestors to commemorate them. When European merchants offered them red coral from the Mediterranean to make these wreaths they were taken aback. Their astonishment translated into excellent sales. Wreaths of flowers last only a second on tombs, because even those flowers we call immortelles, in a leafy leap of the imagination, droop after one night. When those peoples from the East entered the “civilized” market and surrendered to its claim that the most expensive is the best and longest lasting, they decided that coral’s evident eternity made their feelings toward their dead all the more durable.
All these considerations perhaps help to explain why, at a certain point in time, an ounce of coral came to cost an ounce of gold. When coral’s value reached that level, it was quite natural for the lady or young woman bedecked with its subtle shades to think she was wearing proper jewels – or at the very least, that her coral was much more proper than the ugly tinkling tin trinkets now worn on avenues, side streets and squares.
Anchored in the small harbor of L’Estartit on an early September afternoon, we are settling down to eat lobster in the poop of a coraling boat. The Greek divers on board the small craft have invited me to their table to eat crustaceans they’ve caught by hand in one of the underwater caves of the Medes Islands, where they have been gathering coral. They are at the end of their campaign and about to return to the port of Cadaqués, where they will winter this year. The Greeks seem very happy: they’ve curled their hair finely, gleamingly so. They like to adapt to popular taste and stylize themselves by emphasizing the glamorous profile we all cherish of ourselves, presenting themselves in the guise of a photo taken by an arty photographer, a photo complete with skylight, art object and potted palm. With them is their Cadaqués crew, poor folk dressed poorly, rather melancholic but excellent company.
It’s a magnificent autumn afternoon. The delicately filtered luminosity seems to bring things closer to one’s eyes and underline their wealth of sophisticated shades. The placid, pale-blue sea seems to be relaxing, languid and voluptuous. Sunlight has lost its dazzling summer strength, and everything can be seen more exactly. At noon, Begur Castle stands out against the sky as does the white ribbon of the road winding obliquely down the steep landscape to Sa Riera Beach. The sand on Pals Beach covers a broad arc – at once slender and gentle. The sand is lightly toasted, a honeyed gold. The dark-green pine groves of Torre de Pals float above that gilded brushstroke, and farther away, a silvery haze hangs over paddy fields and marshes. The foliage over the slow-flowing, haughty River Ter weaves a wall of greenery that autumn dashes with salt and pepper. The spire of Torroella’s church soars above the trees. The blue buttresses of the ancient and sedate Gavarra mountains, with the white splash of the Angels hermitage on its peak, make up the horizon to the west. The arid Montgrí sierra, in contrast, is purple gray. A bright-red expanse of flatland extends above the long, white strip of houses that is L’Estartit. The warm, blue sky is high and pristine.
The cook is grilling the lobsters, and the aroma from their singed shells is a delicious presence in the fresh air that the sun’s heat transforms into pure joy. I ask an old diver sitting next to me what he knows about coral. He says it is a peculiar stone that fattens and expands in response to the sea’s mineral deposits. Another diver, Costas Contos, the craft’s skipper, also getting on years, disagrees. The skipper’s son, a tall, thin lad, blond and straight-backed, with a sharp eye and mustache, agrees with his father and says that coral isn’t stone. He backs his claim with a few arguments.
“So what is coral then?” my neighbor asks. “Is it a plant?”
“No, it’s not a plant.”
“A plant…!” comments the sarcastic fellow from Cadaqués. “Don’t rely on pruning the fresh sprouts from that plant this summer!”
“It’s an animal!” said old Contos, with the gravitas conferred by his skipper status, folding his arms over his chest.
This clash of opinions immediately took me back to the ancient world. If the old diver had read at all, he could have recalled the wonderful mythological fable. But I think he’d read very little, because I’d only ever seen him with one book: a book on the winds of the Mediterranean and the best way to sail them. After Perseus killed the Gorgon, a monster that turned to stone everything that met her gaze, he went to wash his hands on the beach and threw the fabled animal’s head into the sea. The blood from the Gorgon’s head and Perseus’s dirty hands turned to stone when it touched the water, though it preserved its original color. This petrified blood was coral.
The first diver was closer than the myths. He didn’t believe, as did the ancient Greeks, that coral was the petrified blood of the Gorgon. He simply believed that it was an underwater stone, a compound of the salts of the sea. The other diver and his son were more advanced in history. In between those two opinions lay the one defended by Theophrastus and Pliny the naturalist who argued that coral was a plant.
In 1700, Tournefort, in a paper addressed to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, stated that the vegetable nature of coral couldn’t be questioned. Confirming his conclusion, the renowned Réaumur maintained that corals were stony secretions produced by plants in the same way that seashells were stony secretions produced by animals. Réaumur was a man of the eighteenth century, which was in so many regards an enlightened century.
The collapse of piracy in the Mediterranean and the conquest of the North African coast by the French at the time of the Restoration coincided with the early enrichment of the bourgeoisie and the beginning of industrialization (and the increase in the size of the market) and allowed coral to be gathered and studied with relative tranquility. Those scrutinizing the coral then analyzed whether it was stone, plant or animal. They declared it to be an animal – to be precise, a cylindrical polyp in its oldest, mature parts and generally in a trihedral form in its newest areas, as a result of three branches spanning out around a common axis. Sometimes the angle is tetrahedral. If you examine a branch via a series of transversal cuts (the moment coral comes out of the water), you can observe a soft, vertical system of du
cts surrounded by the hardest accretions. There is constant contact between the polyp and the system of deep ducts, which means that the calcareous branch can’t be considered to be alien to the animal’s nature. Now it would have been really pointless, pedantic and out of place to speak of such things to those men whose state of knowledge was so precise, fixed and unshakable.
The real nature of coral was discovered relatively few years ago, when the volume of trade, for the reasons mentioned, became considerable. Conversely, as I understand it, coral fishing is one of the oldest, most ancient activities off our coastline. Coral was sought in our seas especially throughout the Middle Ages. There is a stanza by Anselm Turmeda that goes:
Near the royal throne
all hewn
from a single piece of coral
and a majestic red…
There are innumerable references to coral, coral gatherers and the coral-catching device in medieval Catalan writing and official documents. There is a verb “coralar” for gathering coral and there was a lot of legislation around the activity. Verdaguer experienced the last years of the ancient manner of coral gathering, because in the final third of the last century coral was still collected in the same way as it had been since the time of Jaume I.
In his Canigó:
The coral gatherers of Begur
fish coral from their barks…
There is also mention of the Begur coral gatherers in the song about the coast: