by Josep Pla
Contos pauses, runs his hand over his shoulder and declares rather sententiously: “On the other hand, the diving trade, or oitis, as the ancient Greeks called it, isn’t a bad business. It’s not very comfortable being under water; it’s very pretty, but not what you call relaxing. I’d be lying if I told you otherwise. Nevertheless, it is very peaceful. I don’t recall ever being attacked…Even those thieving dolphins that eat the fish caught in nets are completely harmless. In that sense I’d much rather be twenty fathoms down than walking in many a street or square.”
*The remains of the medieval principality of Catalonia were split up by the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which was signed on 7 November 1659 to end the war that had raged between France and Spain from 1635 to 1659. France was ceded the Roussillon with Perpignan and a new border was established at the Pyrenees. Catalan continues to be spoken in “northern” Catalonia.
SHIPWRECKS: A REPORTAGE
Years ago I went through a phase where I loved reading about shipwrecks. People who are thought to be sensible and to prefer a quiet life react to disasters at sea as they do to wars and revolutions. These are events they don’t ever want to experience in the flesh. Conversely, narratives about the bloody catastrophes that intermittently have rocked this world make for pleasant reads, particularly when they are well written and are read during the winter, by the fire or in bed, as you listen to the rain splatter and the wind howl. In bellicose, irrational times, such thoughts may upset individuals who are professionally involved and their friends and relatives. In peaceful times – which do exist too – they entirely reflect what people generally feel.
Disasters at sea have prompted the noblest expressions of heroism and human tenderness. And in that sense the pages that describe them are uplifting and inspiring. However, they have also acted to expose in a naked, violent and grotesque manner the most abject acts of human selfishness, the instinct of self-preservation, which is a much stronger instinct than any ethical posturing and moralizing verbiage – an instinct that permanently keeps people who weren’t born with a saintly vocation on the implacable terrain of potential criminality. Often individuals who have had the misfortune to be shipwrecked, in the course of the catastrophe, have committed acts they’d never have carried out in normal conditions, acts we must describe as absolutely horrendous, even though we too might have reacted in the same way in the same circumstances.
On the other hand, shipwrecks along coasts have also unleashed, from time immemorial, pillaging, thieving and depredation on a grand scale enacted by those living near the disaster. Vessels have been sacked and the shipwrecked parties have been robbed. There is huge documentary evidence on that front. The worst enemy of the shipwrecked was the local landlubber. The sinister climax of their misfortunes was the sacking of their sinking vessels by the peaceful, sedentary folk living along nearby coasts.
Nowadays there has been a decrease in the number of shipwrecks. Engines provide a defense against the sea that sails never could. In Europe there are few remote beaches. Lighthouses, meteorological services and radio-telegraphic communications have increased safety levels. Over recent years, more crashed airplanes on barren heaths have been sacked than vessels.
* * *
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“What would be the point now of debating whether the disaster we’ve just experienced was the result of carelessness or whether the careless elements influencing our acts were as significant as they seem at first sight? I am one of those who believe that we act rashly in life all the time – perhaps, if you think about it, life is just one continuous rash act – and that not even people thought to be careful, cautious and cold-blooded are exempt from such behavior. Rash acts are committed on land and sea, but perhaps the latter seem more dramatic and spectacular because there are always fewer people involved at sea than on land. I must recognize one thing, quite unreservedly: in the whole of this regrettable business we displayed total ignorance of the local sea and weather…”
My interlocutor was a young French gentleman. Well built, fair, red cheeked and sturdy, he had all the traits of a French northerner in his midthirties, wearing a sailor’s outfit that hung loosely on him, which he’d bought the day before, upon reaching Cadaqués. These clothes did not detract from his magnificent male profile. This gentleman and his yacht had gone down by Cape Creus, and he was waiting for his repatriation papers to come through in order to return to France. Meanwhile, we were enjoying an aperitif on the terrace of the Bar Marítim in Cadaqués opposite a becalmed bay – with a sea that was so wonderfully placid you couldn’t hear the water breaking on the sand. It was twilight in early September and the sea had gone from that afternoon’s silken blue to a deep spongy gray, which was now changing with the last glimmers of light to the characteristic dark slate of the geology of the Pyrenees. Dim ripples of light from the town were beginning to shine on the still water, which seemed ironed flat.
The shipwreck had occurred at dusk on 4 September 194–…that is, two days earlier. The yacht – registered in Cannes, thirteen yards long, fitted out as a ketch, equipped with a twenty-four-horsepower engine – had been lost completely. The three-man crew, after lots of woe and chaos, managed to reach the coast in the vessel’s tiny dinghy, carrying their possessions in bundles. A curious detail: they took their most indispensable effects but forgot the money, which went down to the bottom with everything else the boat was carrying. When my interlocutor mentioned that, he didn’t fail to emphasize that this was one of the most careless acts of that scary evening. When they disembarked on the rocks along the shore, their abandoned dinghy was literally shattered to pieces by the sea and thrown onto the coast, and they had to claw their way painfully up crags, in complete darkness, constantly imperiling their lives. After an hour and a half of crawling they finally reached the entrance to the Cape Creus lighthouse, where the keeper on duty welcomed and helped them and communicated the incident to the authorities.
While we conversed, that gentleman seemed bewitched by the placid sea before us.
“It’s very difficult to square this calm,” he told me, “with the weather yesterday and the day before. I mean, it’s surprising how quickly and suddenly the weather changes in this country, and the sea along with it. It’s quite extraordinary. Perhaps the weather is worse to the north, but whether it’s bad or good, stable periods are much longer and I think the changes are much less sudden.”
Old Captain Gibert, a merchant seaman, was sitting next to me. He was very old and long retired from the sea, where he had sailed in the era of sailing ships. He lived in Cadaqués, where he’d been appointed secretary to the local magistrates’ court. Gibert listened to the owner of the shipwrecked yacht attentively, concentrating hard, not moving a muscle on his face.
“So your yacht was registered in Cannes, but you all come from northern France?” I asked my interlocutor.
“Yes, senyor, that’s exactly right. The seaman on board and my friend Burgoing, a professor of archaeology at Caen University, and I are all from Normandy. I was born in Honfleur and live there the whole year. We registered the yacht in Cannes because I don’t like taking my holidays in the north. I like the sun and I like sunny holidays. Personally I adore the Mediterranean. I think it’s unrivaled as a place to spend three weeks. And, as we’re on the subject, I’d like to make a confession. Do you know what the problem is with us northeners? We have a completely false idea of what the Mediterranean is like. We think it’s a picture-postcard sea – that’s why we like it so much – and we believe that the weather here is benign and placid. I think this leads to carelessness. We are much too trusting. That was probably the cause of the disaster I and my colleagues suffered.” “You’re quite right,” interjected Gibert, in a natural tone that precluded any riposte.
“Our ignorance led to the disaster. It’s the key to understanding what happened. That, and that alone.”
“Where were you coming from when you found yourselve
s opposite this shoreline?”
“Tarragona. We’d been anchored in the port of Tarragona for a few days because my friend Professor Burgoing was interested in visiting the Roman city.”
“Did you come straight from Tarragona to Cape Creus?
“No, senyor. We spent the afternoon of our third day in Palamós, stocking up on gas and provisions. We set out from Palamós at seven a.m. on day four.”
“Did you set out with a southwesterly?”
“No, senyor. It was completely becalmed. The southwesterly blew up when we were off the rocks known as the Formigues Islands on that coast. By these islands we hoisted the mainsail and jib and sailed with a tail wind for a good stretch. When we were opposite Cape Begur we noticed the wind had dropped.”
“So when the wind dropped, you lowered your sail, I presume?”
“No, senyor. We started the engine and progressed with sail and engine power toward Cape Begur. When we were by Cape Begur, the wind had completely dropped, but we met…”
“Go on, go on,” Gibert urged, ever more intrigued.
“We met a heavy sea, with a quite unexpectedly violent swell. A windless sea that was exceptionally fierce.”
“Against the current, naturally…” said Gibert, with the hint of a smile.
“Yes, senyor. A head current, a northerly, as they say in Cannes.” “You met the marrutxell,” said Gibert, using an old sailor’s term. “What did you decide to do then? Did you at least lower the sail?” “No, senyor, we did not.”
“But given there was no wind, and a head current, why didn’t you?”
“I expect it’s because we didn’t realize what was happening. In effect, we thought that swell was a sporadic occurrence, linked to the cape, and that once we’d passed the cape, we’d meet calm waters again. In fact, when we’d left the old Begur semaphore building behind, we sailed into what the chart called Pals Beach and found the sea to be more manageable.”
“Fine, fine…” said the old seaman. “In any case, that ‘we didn’t realize’ sounds rather odd. In my humble opinion you ought to have lowered the sail. If I might ask another question, I’d…”
“Ask as many as you want, captain…”
The French gentleman’s mouth relished that word “captain.” Gibert was totally unimpressed by the word. He was such an impoverished captain he was forced to run the local magistrates’ court to eke out an existence.
“I was saying, that if I was allowed one more question, I’d like to ask if, with that swell head on and the yacht pitching and heeling, you didn’t lose any tackle…”
“Yes, senyor, we broke a mast. The yard of the mainmast dislodged and fell on deck. It quite exhausted us trying to sort out the mess of ropes and rigging. It was quite a shock.”
“A shock up to a point. If you’d been sailing in your country’s seas, you’d have furled the sails and secured them properly. As you were sailing in the Mediterranean, you sailed lackadaisically, taking no precautions…”
“That’s perfectly true,” replied the Frenchman, despondently.
There was a pause. Old Gibert spoke a French you could understand: when he couldn’t find the right French word, he used the lingua franca that he knew well because he’d spent years crisscrossing the Mediterranean. If he couldn’t find a word, he looked at me for a moment, smiled and waited for me to help out. If I couldn’t, he continued.
“When the mast came apart,” said the old man, “you must have had to furl the mainsail.”
“Yes, senyor. It was a struggle because, as I was saying, the yard falling created a huge mess.”
“Once the sail was furled, it felt as if the sea wasn’t so rough…”
“That’s right.”
“Of course! That comes as no surprise at all.”
After brief lull, Gibert, very quietly, and making a real effort, said: “Now let’s examine your situation once you’d rounded Cape Begur. The wind was almost nonexistent, nothing out of the ordinary. But the swell of waves was too heavy for your craft, was too rough and difficult to handle. Did one of you look at the sky at the time? You did? What did it look like?”
“The south,” replied the Frenchman, “was a mass of clouds. It was a sky brought by a rainy wind. A procession of clouds was passing over Cape Sant Sebastià. To the north, the sky was clearer, but it was a glassy, livid blue, with shreds of clouds blowing the opposite way to the clouds on the coast we’d just left.”
“So then, you were in a spot where there was no wind, though with obvious signs that the wind was gusting to the north and south of where you were. What did you think was causing the heavy swell hammering your yacht so violently? How did you explain the swirling waters that coincided with the drop in the wind, the rough sea that stopped you from moving forward? Did you think that was something normal?”
“We never gave it a moment’s thought! We believed it was summer and that in summer, in the Mediterranean, hypothetical turbulence could only be sporadic. We believed the roiling sea would last a few moments…However, the barometer was tending to rise as we advanced.”
“That’s possible. Often when the north wind settles in, the barometer rises. Of course, where you really got it wrong was thinking that in early September along this coast you’d meet summer conditions. By early September, summer has come and gone. In fact, it has long since gone…”
“In your opinion, what are the limits of summer?”
“Ancient mariners used to say that there are three great ports in this sea: June, July and Port Mahón. You can work out the consequences of such a view, which I believe is quite accurate.”
“That’s a very short summer…”
“What can we do about that? It’s what there is…Just one more question please…Didn’t you notice the current in the sea? Were you sailing a long way from the coast?”
“No, senyor.”
“So you must have come across a set of lobster creels. What current did the cork buoys marking their location reveal? In which direction were they being pulled? I’d almost swear the current was going in the opposite direction to the swell. That’s why the sea was so rough and choppy.”
“The fishermen in Cadaqués told us as much. The truth is that we paid them no attention. We were overconfident. It was summertime and we were on holiday.”
“Yes, overconfident, that’s for sure.”
And Gibert suddenly changed tack and directed a question at me in Catalan: “They were on holiday, maybe with a bit of northern swagger. When out at sea in a boat, you can never be on holiday. You know that. You’ve always got to be on the alert. They’re the only holidays you can have.”
The Frenchman ordered another absinthe; I did too. After a brief exchange, Gibert agreed to drink a glass of water.
“I’d like,” he went on, after taking a sip of water, “to tell you the situation you were in, drawing on my long, if meager, experience. The swell came at you from the north, head on; the current that was driving you was from the south – that is, the opposite direction. The clash of those two forces, in key parts of the coast, like the capes, creates swirling, roiling waters that can exhaust the patience of a saint: a tremendous swell meets an extremely rough sea. On the other hand, in more inland gulfs, the clash is less violent and the water much calmer. You met the same turbulence by the Medes as you did in Begur. When you were in the gulfs between Montgó and L’Escala, the swell was much less dramatic.”
“Exactly so.”
“Now I’d like to know what you put that conflict of forces, that roiling water, down to…”
“I think I already told you, we didn’t give it a thought…”
“You never suspected…”
“We never suspected a thing…”
“You never suspected that the choppy waters might be a clear signal, a warning of a northerly gale settling in somewhere or other in the di
rection you were heading?”
“We didn’t think at all!” said the Frenchman, downing a copious amount of icy absinthe.
“That’s why you were lethally trapped. I’ve often seen it happen. When local fishermen told you that your experience by Cape Begur should have put you on your guard, they couldn’t have said truer words. You were sailing without a wind, but the presence of the sea hitting your prow was signaling to you that a wind was settling in from the same direction. The sea was acting like a special kind of messenger.”
“What would you have done?” asked the Frenchman, a touch anxiously.