by Josep Pla
In Begur live yokel bacanars
who gather coral from La Brama…
La Brama is an underwater mountain range that starts by Cape Begur and heads south, thus forming the so-called Fornells channel that all lobster catchers in my country know so well. The range forms a sharp angle with the coast, the vertex of which is the cape itself; its location is signaled by the name La Brama and the southwesterly facing cliff. The people of Begur – begurencs, whom we, their neighbors, dub bacanars, perhaps taking liberties – have fished coral around La Brama from time immemorial. Old local government documents are full of bans against foreign coral gatherers working in our waters, and those bans were predominately aimed at the Provençals who dominated the trade for centuries – though they yielded dominance to the Italians in the nineteenth century. One can say, then, that coral has been gathered along our shores for centuries, an area closed to the north by Cape Béar and the south by the Formigues Islands – that is, by the rocks and cliffs on the coast; don’t look for coral in sandbanks or silt. Coral grows in caves and underwater gullies, in crevices in rocks, in hollows, and it tends to flourish under what we might call shelves or eaves jutting out from rock formations. Generally, it grows from top to bottom, like stalactites. It requires a strong geological base, hard granite rock, pounded by currents in dark, shadowy places. The polyps embed themselves in areas of stone deposits crawling with bugs and dense underwater fauna. Growth is extremely slow. They don’t thrive in stagnant water. Naturalists say that the polyps aren’t hermaphroditic – that is, they are separate sexes that are fertilized by marine currents: the sea brings the male seed to the female cells, in the same way that the wind transports pollen from male stamens to certain plants. However, any reference whatsoever to such complex processes would distract us from the taste of those grilled lobsters, and I decide that the most sensible thing is to leave them in abeyance. It is a very tasty lunch enjoyed in the best of company and with the best of appetites.
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For centuries coral was gathered using a device known as a coralera, made up of two short staves of good strong wood in the form of a Greek cross, tied together by an iron ring, with a large stone or lump of lead on top to give it the necessary weight to ensure it would sink. Nets were hung from the four ends of the staves; they were broad meshed at the top ends and formed a much finer meshed bag lower down.
Gatherers anchored their craft by the cliff and lowered the coralera by rope over the side, so that the device rubbed against the wall of rock in an attempt to break off coral embedded in the underwater crag. The four ends of the staves, in the form of a cross, broke off branches of coral, and pieces fell – when they fell – inside the net; sometimes the nets got entangled with branches of coral and detached them from their base; other times the current took the coralera into a shelf and that could be very productive. When the coral was gathered in the open sea, the lay of the land helped gatherers determine the whereabouts of the coral and the underwater geological strata they must ravage, and then they would throw in the coralera and seek the help of nature through powerful currents. In all cases, part of the coral broken off was caught in the bag created by the nets, though it was too primitive a device to salvage everything and a good amount fell onto the seabed.
It was really too clumsy a method to ensure the coral fishers exhausted any one location and too imprecise a means of exploring the reefs for them to be completely stripped bare. If the coral was thought to be within easy reach, a man would be lowered three or four fathoms down to help activate the coralera by pushing it as far as he could into the caves within the cliffs. This made the friction against the reef more effective and brought it closer to the coral. These deep-sea swimmers are still called “chest divers” by the Greeks. They dove down like sponge or pearl-oyster divers. They were strong swimmers with powerful lungs. But it was a crude, primitive method and brought profitable returns only because there was such an undeniable abundance of coral. That can be the only explanation since so much coral was lost to the seabed and so little was caught in the net.
The coralera was also dragged and rubbed against the line of submerged rocks, within the undulating subaquatic orography, pinpointed perfectly by the lay of the land. In our view, coastal fishers were much more familiar with the ups and downs of that submerged geology than with those of the real mountains they could see against the line of the horizon. It is very likely that the true discoverers of our coast come from an ancient coral-gathering tradition that poverty stubbornly preserved. Their geographical knowledge of an invisible geology, established by groping in the dark when maneuvering the coralera, allowed them to trawl, longline fish, use lobster pots and catch painted combers.
The coralera was a clumsy, heavy device to handle. If coral fishers didn’t lead a dog’s life for centuries, they didn’t fall very short. The precipitous nature of underwater geography, the abundance of jutting shelves, rocky tailbones and peaks, meant the device often snagged on rocks. The small craft often had a pulley on deck to hoist up the coralera, but generally speaking it was of little use. It was hard to detach the device from rocks using purely mechanical means. It was an operation requiring strong arms and all the guile that comes with human sight. You had to use the strength of currents, call on past experience and a sensitive manual touch. It was long, exhausting, heavy toil – the staves weighed a lot – with no guarantee of positive results. A sudden change in the weather, wind or current might frustrate the operation. It would have to be abandoned. The rope would have to be cut, a cork buoy attached and the coralera left anchored where it was until the situation improved. That moment might or might not come – or come too late, given the archaic means people had on hand. I believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of coraleras have been lost on the subaquatic orography of our coast, an unbelievable number of wooden crosses the sea has destroyed leaving only the iron ring, lead piece or stone used to ensure immersion, objects that corrode more slowly. Perhaps today not even those vestiges of such forgotten efforts remain. The sea is an implacably corrosive cemetery, and a cemetery that remains unviolated.
The craft that specialized in coral fishing were small. It’s perfectly natural for Verdaguer in Canigó to speak of small craft in relation to the coral fishers from Begur…Verdaguer had sailed in the transatlantic ships of his day, and he must have found everything in the sea to be tiny by the side of those huge hulks. The fact is they were really tiny. They were eleven gúes – that is, thirty-three hands, because the gúa, an old measure used for boats, a measure still in use when I was a child, represented three hands. These boats hoisted a lateen sail and were long and narrow, with gangways and bridged prows and poops.
The crew’s berths were under the prow, and the wood and coal cooking stove next to the mast. Everything was squidgy, scant, uncomfortable and extremely hard – a real instrument of torture for those living on board. These craft used to carry four crew members and one ship’s boy. The skippers of these coraling craft haven’t left behind memoirs like the ones trawler skippers have written. With their black silk caps tilted at a rakish angle and a rather swaggering manner, trawler skippers were the aristocrats of the lateen sail. Their courage and willingness to take risks weren’t in doubt, nor was their liking for tasty fish stews in winter, healthy shots of roquill and racy songs or their ability to find a café despite the weather or blowing wind. Coral-boat skippers were like furtive dolphins: landlubbers, stuck between reefs and underwater rocks, and indefatigable toilers. Theirs were heavy-duty labors. Trawling was a joy ride, but coral fishers risked their lives less and their shoulders were thicker skinned against the wind.
In some towns you can still find remains of ancient coraleras. The one drawn on page 512 of the third volume of the Borja Moll dictionary is a faithful depiction of that age-old device. It is a very clear, useful dictionary drawing:
As I was saying a moment ago, the coralera was a heavy,
cumbersome tool. It clipped off the tops of branches of coral and caught only a fragment of the broken polyps, the youngest, softest and least valuable. The thickest, oldest, most compacted coral-bearing excrescence, what we might call the trunk of agglomerated polyps, was difficult to dislodge from the stone wall sustaining it. Obviously, it was possible for one of the stave ends to give the coup de grace to the basic membrane, to the body of coral. In that case, the arborescent creature might fall into the net or be lost forever on the seabed. Generally speaking, however, they collected only the thinnest, flimsiest outer branches, which were worth very little. Even so, if the trade in coral was not of much importance in the minds of gatherers, it was profitable for those who sold coral on an industrial scale.
At the end of the coraling campaign, the skippers of the small craft brought the unrefined coral to the towns where they were based – to Begur, L’Escala, Roses or Cadaqués – and their haul was auctioned in the market place like a catch of fish. Local traders bought the coral, and Italian buyers often appeared, which was not to the liking of local speculators. If the Italians didn’t come, local traders would send the coral off, first to Marseille and then to Genoa. Later, the European center for the coral trade moved to Livorno, with a subcenter in Torre del Greco, in the Gulf of Naples, just as when Marseille was in control, there was a smaller hub in Port-Vendres. Today Livorno retains its dominance over the coral trade, and the most powerful buyers are based there.
Curiously, some of the industrialists in Catalan coastal towns involved in the cork trade were also active in the coral market. Branches of families from the Ampurdan still live in Marseille and Genoa, and coral was the original reason for their moving there. Livorno became the center for the trade after the Greeks and Italians visibly began to dominate the industry. Livorno was well located to receive coral from Italy, Sardinia, Catalonia and Provence, and it was a good point of call for the Greeks.
When demand for coral began to rocket, both buyers and local agents invested in the small coral-gathering boats. The brilliant heyday for coral gatherers were the years 1840–1900. In my country there are many reminders of that fact:
There are so many people
who don’t mind giving
for a piece of coral
half a year’s earnings…!
It was the era of coral jewels and coral similes in poetry. Verdaguer will write of coral lips and coral’s various colors:
Lips are coral,
Cheeks rose…
The moment came when the demand for coral was so strong that local coral gatherers, backed by speculators who invested in their ramshackle barks, moved to other seas on a scale that seems quite beyond belief in the cold light of day. Those small craft worked close to land, by the rocks along the coast today known as the Costa Brava, even going out of the strict coraling area, past Béar and the Formigues, abreast of Cape Planes. If you have the experience to draw on, it is perfectly possible to get a grip on this coast and know it inch by inch.
And, at this juncture, I want to make a small aside that the context demands. The name “Costa Brava” given to these shores stuck rapidly. The title has been around only for a few days. It was first proposed in the dining room of the Paradís restaurant in Fornells, then owned by Don Bonaventura Sabater, by Don Ferran Agulló in the course of a lunch to celebrate an electoral victory. But, quite frankly, the adjective “brava” as applied to this coast has a small drawback that became obvious as soon as the importance of foreign tourism for the area grew: “brava” is untranslatable, and all the translations made into the different languages of Europe are inadequate, not to say fanciful. In French you can’t say the Côte Brave, because that epithet in that language is used to describe the heroic actions of gendarmes and the military and cannot be applied to geographical locations. You can say le brave caporal, but not the Côte Brave. Shall we translate it as the Côte Fière? That sounds horrendous, gives one the shivers and is unacceptable. It’s the same in English. Shall we dub the Costa Brava the Wild Coast – that is, the savage, untamed coast? It’s excessive and imprecise. So what should this coast have been called? I believe the most appropriate name for these shores would have been the Costa del Coral. People will object that only part of the coast is coral bearing. They’d be right, but so what? The issue was to find a name that would be intriguing in every culture and interchangeable in every language, one that would have been profitable internationally and lent a touch of exoticism somewhere between the Pacific Ocean and the opera house, undoubtedly attracting tourists. After all, when a country wants to exploit its beauty spots financially, it has a perfect right to adopt the name it feels will be most effective.
Catalonian coral gatherers’ travels to remote countries stem from ancient tradition. In the past, the old coral fishers of Catalonia – and this is a real, historical fact, not a myth generated by the lyrics of local choirs and written by old café hacks with only a smidgeon of musical talent – fished over hundreds and hundreds of miles away because the small craft they used received financial suppport from what today we would call the powers that be. They worked in Sardinia, Italy, Provence, in every corner of the Mediterranean, because these were our seas.
In the course of the past century, at the peak of the industrializing of the merchandise, when the memories of past dreams had faded, those small coral-gathering craft went on the most amazing journeys. They were able to do so because they used long-distance sailing ships, which in the Mediterranean were generally merchant vessels. It would have impossible for small, thirty-three-hand craft to reach, by their own means, the Cape Verde islands (where they worked), the Civitavecchia coast (where L’Escala coral fishers traveled) and the coast of North Africa. They were tiny, frail, defenseless craft without bridges, and even if they had sailed in summer, in periods of becalmed seas, the voyage would have been too long, too unwieldy, and with crews who were too inexperienced to embark lightheartedly on such an adventure. So instead, the coral gatherers’ minuscule boats were loaded onto larger vessels going to the Americas or distant Mediterranean ports, which deposited the coral gatherers along their routes in areas close to where they intended to work. That explains their presence in Cape Verde, among other places. If not, it would beggar belief that those derisory craft, crewed by men who knew practically nothing about sailing, could have reached such remote spots. Those seas were virgin, and anticipated earnings promised to be great: it was worth their while to leave home, especially when the voyage could be made without taking dangerous risks, and with all the guarantees of normal commercial trade.
Some of those campaigns in distant seas were highly profitable, as demonstrated by the existence in Begur of Carrer Vera, a street newly built with the fruits of coral campaigns in the second half of the last century and sheltered by the old castle from the mistral. It was a campaign conducted on the coast of North Africa that made the Begur coralers wealthy men. Other towns could provide examples of bourgeois architecture that originated in the coral trade. On the other hand, Begur at the time was also an important center for the cork business – much more so than nowadays – and the international, outward-looking mindset generated by that industry influenced the coral trade.
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When it is coffee time, the sunny afternoon still seems to be warming up. In the afternoon silence, the presence of the houses of L’Estartit continues to be striking: a cart rattles along in the distance. The water’s surface in the small port is as motionless as a mirror. The white, gelatinous umbrellas of jellyfish float two fathoms from the boat. Seated on the quayside, an angler looks to have dozed off, silhouetted with startling precision in the fresh air. A human figure sometimes walks by the white houses.
“A Greek from my homeland, the Dodecanese,” says old Contos at that point, “played a role in the coral trade. His name was Constantine Papaoekonomos. He was a sponge fisher off North Africa, and one fine day arrived in
Majorca ready to explore the potential for sponge fishing around the Balearic Islands. He had brought along a band of professional fishermen. At the time, the islands of the Dodecanese were the domain of the Ottoman Sublime Porte, so those men were officially Turkish nationals, though they were all one hundred percent Greek. They were strong, highly skilled deep-sea divers. A deep-sea sponge diver enters the sea holding a piece of smooth marble weighing twenty pounds. That stone helps him sink and reach a decent depth. When he lands on the sea floor where the sponges live, he puts the stone under his arm and uses his free hand to wrench out sponges. Sponges live on flat areas of the seabed and are easy to wrench out. A deep-sea diver can go down two hundred forty hands, stay underwater two or three minutes and bring to the surface three or four sponges. If the plants are good quality, two or three plunges are enough to bring in a good day’s income. There are lots of good sponges on the Barbary Coast. The type known as melati – its Greek name – fetches a high price in Port Said.
“Papaoekonomos found poor quality specimens deep off the coast of Majorca, so-called elephant ear, which is used by printing machinery. In view of those poor findings, he moved his men and business to Ibiza, where they found better sponges, the so-called Venetian sponge, which is delicate and good for bathroom use. However, there was very little, and all in all, the campaign was a failure and the gangs of deep-sea divers returned to Greek and North African waters with the sheepish look of men who left home to earn money and came back with nothing.
“In the course of the campaign, Papaoekonomos wrote my father on the island of Symi, in the Dodecanese, lauding the Majorcan coasts as sponge paradises. I don’t know if he was intending to trick him or was still confident that his expedition would be successful. The upshot was that my father arrived on those shores with his whole family, but must have realized immediately that prospects were minimal. He had no choice but to strike out for himself, which is just what he did.