Salt Water

by Josep Pla

  “It’s very likely. They are names that have an aura of shipwrecks…”

  “And you say the galleons were looted?”

  “That’s what the book says. The general situation favored such a finale. Spain was at war with France and the Ampurdan was in the hands of French troops. Only Cadaqués had yet to be captured. Just imagine the hunger and devastation there must have been in those parts. When news of the shipwrecked galleys reached Cadaqués, a large section of the population went to the scene of the disaster, following their civilian and religious leaders. They must, naturally, have helped those shipwrecked, if anyone was saved, and I’m not sure anyone was. Of course, they took everything else they could lay their hands on. Nobody held back, and according to the book the parish priest led the way. Even if the Ampurdan hadn’t been in such a parlous state, things wouldn’t have turned out differently. When boats were shipwrecked on more or less uninhabited coasts, they were always ravaged and robbed. It went with the times. There was no real, active ethical sense in the baroque era: there were only grandiloquent sermons and speeches and outward show. When the social history of the baroque era in this country is written, it will attest to an impressive amount of banditry and criminality. There was a lack of natural authority and that was the characteristic outcome…”

  As he heard my comments, the taciturn, misanthropic Captain Gibert seemed to cheer up.

  “Are you suggesting,” he said, “that the more fiery and eloquent the sermons, the more nefarious were the acts of the people?”

  “I’m not sure…In any case, they coincided, were parallel. I should tell you that, as Senyor Rahola, the book’s owner, explains, the looting of the galleons in the area we now call La Galera produced a hue and cry far and wide, and despite the remoteness of this area, it reached Barcelona and the ears of the highest authorities in the principality. Don Juan of Austria was viceroy of Catalonia at the time. When he heard the news, this gentleman decided that those wrecks belonged to His Majesty’s Royal Patrimony and he appointed Doctor Pastor de Costa to expedite in his name all the necessary steps to recover what had been lost. Part of the hoard being transported by the Great Pelican was money that belonged to the state and, apart from what had been looted, a good lot was at the bottom of the sea. The said Pastor de Costa moved to Cadaqués with the usual risks associated with those dangerous times: he probably went by sea. Once he’d arrived and been informed of the circumstances of the wrecks and visited the location, he initiated the salvaging of the silver using iron hooks that were immersed in the sea and then trawled the area where the Great Pelican had gone down. Solid silver and coins were in sacks, and if a hook chanced to catch a sack, the inevitable often happened: the hook tore the sack, and the contents were scattered over the floor of the sea, with the inevitable losses. They tore so many sacks that poor Senyor Costa suspended the operation, told Barcelona what had happened and asked them to send some other means to recover what was still underwater. At the time one Andreu Ximénez had invented a timber diving bell to go down to the bottom of the sea (that is, where it was relatively shallow), which allowed the person inside the bell to breathe, just about. Don Juan of Austria ordered one of these bells to be transported to Cadaqués, and that was done, with great difficulty, by sea, given that all roads overland had been cut off by the French occupation.”

  Gibert listened silently and passively, as if he were at the theater.

  “As soon as the bell reached Cadaqués, the crew began preparations to use it (which were long and complicated), until one day, when the weather was very good, the bell was moved to the area of the wrecks. A kind of nautical contingent set out from the port of Cadaqués transporting the bell. The leaders of the exercise were Andreu Ximénez and his colleagues on the expedition, Pere Joan Rams, a state prosecutor, and the friar Bernat Soler, representing the Jerusalem trust. Rams (his presence showed that Antonio Pastor de Costa had already fallen out of grace, probably for thieving) was to look after His Majesty’s silver and coins while Friar Bernat Soler was there to salvage the alms heading to the Holy Land. Once the retinue reached the site of the disaster, they probably had a bite to eat, because the sea makes you ravenous, and then got to work. The bell was positioned between two large vessels, both of which had a pulley to lift and lower it. The bell was made of timber, bound tight by iron hoops, and inside were crossbeams, where the divers sat as the bell was immersed in the sea. As it was quite a large size, it had to be given plenty of weight if it was to go down, and that was done with eight hundred pounds’ worth of lead pieces. It was a huge bulk. It was sunk four or five feet from the bottom of the sea and suspended there. Seated on the crossbeams, the divers recced the area, and if they spotted anything of value, they dove down and tried to secure it until their air ran out. In that event, they returned to the crossbeams, where there was one or two feet of air between the beams and the bell’s ceiling because (says the book) “the water didn’t reach that far because the air in the atmosphere kept it out, as experience teaches us according to the rules of Natural Philosophy.” So then, when the divers got hold of an item they’d glimpsed on the seabed, they placed it in a sack tied to a rope that passed through a hole in the bell (a rope that was pulled up from above when the sack was full of salvaged items). The book doesn’t reveal whether any silver or alms for the Holy Land were salvaged. Everything indicates that very little was reclaimed. What it does describe is the amount of damage wrought by the bell. Nature must be treated with respect; otherwise things can turn nasty. To begin with, the air in the bell wasn’t renewed in time, and that led to more than one fatality. Once the breath of the divers had poisoned the air so much, two people suffocated on the artifact’s crossbeams. On another occasion, a diver, finding that the air was unbreathable, decided to escape from the bottom and when he hit fresh air, he died. This was quite a natural outcome given the depth at which the bell was anchored: over thirty-two yards down. Those and other mishaps forced them to renew the air more frequently by constantly hauling up the bell, which was very heavy, and so they wasted lots of time. I imagine it made all concerned wiser rather than wealthier, and what with one thing and another, pickings were poor.”

  “I see that…” said Gibert, his eyes flickering over his deadpan features, as if he were watching the climax of the show.

  “Those operations lasted all that summer. Summers by Mar d’Amunt are usually short. Bad weather interrupted them at the end of September, as was to be expected. On 1 July of the following year, Cadaqués fell to French troops and everything was washed away. The bell, which must have been abandoned somewhere or other along the harbor front, was then used by the newcomers who tried to harvest what they could (which is rather sad). In the meantime, the trial of Senyor Antonio Pastor de Costa started, and in self-defense, he did what people always do: he tried to dismiss the accusations against him by steering them onto the backs of others. Costa tried to show that the looters were inhabitants of Cadaqués, including, in the front line, the most respected figures in the community. The town of Cadaqués defended itself implacably on every claim. The trial was such a raucous, juicy affair that its documentation forms the bulk of the book I mentioned. After all these years, the legal wrangles can give us some idea of the nature of the wrecked galleons and how they were looted by locals and by the people appointed to avoid thievery. That locals should loot is natural, because this kind of disaster in this kind of place has always ended with looting, ever since the world was the world. However, it’s quite amazing that the judges should have followed the example set by the people they were supposed to be stopping (and judging). But there you are…We shouldn’t be too upset. It’s not the first or last time such things have happened. It is an instinctive evil, so deeply rooted that it forms part of our most venerable traditions and ancient heritage. However, Captain Gibert, we have perhaps strayed from the point of our conversation. I’m not particularly interested in what we might call the ethical aspect of these wrecks, even
though I’m glad to have any excuse to reinforce my belief that baroque foliage camouflaged an abject, false society. I’m in fact more interested in the meteorological aspect of the wrecks, the cosmic context of the catastrophe.”

  “As I was saying a moment ago…” whispered Captain Gibert, as if he were just emerging from a dream. “Those weighty galleons were caught in a rat trap and battered on the rocks by the sea and the mistral. The causes of the wrecks are unclear. Out at sea you need water. Perhaps they were sailing too close to land. There’s no way out of the gulf of La Selva when the mistral is blowing. Wind and sea make a wall that can’t be broken down, a phenomenally strong wall. Blink for a moment and you’ll find yourself on the rocks, as if the sea and wind had driven you there on purpose. Those places are criminally hard. The rocks stick out like the sharpest of spears. They pierce your timbers; they shatter the wood. The Gulf of Lion is an evil place everywhere. It shuts its doors with the mistral, it becomes impenetrable. If you’re inside, it’s a horrible place to be. Now that boats have powerful engines, the sea has had to yield to their might. But I can tell you that, in the age of sailing, for hundreds and hundreds of years, one of the places where people have most suffered has been the gulf that begins in Cape Creus and ends with the most eastern of the Hyères Islands. The sea plus the mistral is a horrible combination. You don’t really know that until you’ve had a run in with the mistral and were in a vessel that could resist it. In the era of sailboats, which was mine, people suffered too much.”

  Gibert spoke of those things with complete indifference – as if he were talking about the harvest from his olive grove. Perhaps he might have emphasized the odd word in a way he didn’t usually. He continued: “I’ve never been the kind to complain. Complaining is a futile activity, generally practiced by good-for-nothings and often by people who are instinctive complainers, when there are no grounds. There’s a lot of playacting in this world, much more than we think, though we see plenty. In any case, what good does it do? The world doesn’t come ready-made: rather, it’s a place that’s hard to control, even in its tiniest detail. You must take it as it comes. That’s the only way, as I see it. On land, you can hope for a degree of safety; at sea, it’s more difficult. Everything is much more fragile, and in my time…”

  As I’d never heard Captain Gibert make general assertions or say anything in the way of a confession, my surprise must have been obvious from the expression on my face, which led him to interrupt his flow.

  “Well, you know!” he said, opening his tobacco pouch, “you know me, so no need to say any more…Sailors in my day knew the area and how tough it is, like today’s mariners. This gulf has a bad reputation everywhere. That’s recognized universally. Anyone who denies it is a freshwater sailor, spouting nonsense. Just talk to northern seamen, genuine mariners, and see what they tell you. I know the waters of the Mediterranean and other seas. I’ve crossed the Atlantic scores of time in ships that were a joke. Atlantic waves are different from waves in gulfs around here. They are hard, very deep waves, but very long; waves that flee and surface more gently, if I can use that word. Waves here are also very hard, but are less deep, narrower and choppier, and they seem on the slant, because the changing wind constantly alters the direction they are heading, obviously within limits. However, these changes are enough, even if you have a full head-on wind, for the waves to come from one side or the other and shake your boat from prow to poop, from starboard to port, so that it bobs around like a bottle cork in the churning waters. That means your body is subject to real torture, with pressure coming from the four points of the compass. After a few hours, you feel literally twisted, as if your body had been redrawn in a spiral. That’s why people who suffer from seasickness feel it more lethally in the Mediterranean than anywhere else. Seasickness that hurts only your flesh, your stomach, is unpleasant; one that penetrates your entrails and reaches your bones brings on a pitiful state beyond words. The twisting and turning are so insidious that the low spirits that follow are painful to witness. I can tell you, even though I’ve skippered many boats, I too have been sick. All us seamen have been sick at one time or another, and anyone who tells you the contrary is a fool…Nowadays, I sometimes read the newspapers in the café. I say in the café because if my wife saw me come home holding a newspaper, she’d throw me out of the house. So I’ve read most of your articles, though not all, on the horrors wrought by the sea through the ages on people from these shores and coasts. These horrors are a fact. You’ve quoted eyewitness accounts by ancient Greek and Roman writers. You didn’t need to go to so much trouble. Just going from door to door and talking to people locally, you’d have achieved the same results. Now there’s a reason for that, as I’ve just outlined. The Mediterranean can be a real force for evil. When the mistral is blowing, the Gulf of Lion is one hellish place. It’s hellish for people who get seasick and for those who don’t. The sea and the mistral are a nasty combination. They bring indescribable disorder, disorder to people by your side, who you have to rely on at every stage. And disorder is the worst thing that can happen on board ship. It signals the breakdown of trust…”

  Captain Gibert paused and relit the cigarette he was smoking.

  “Those galleons that sank in Mar d’Amunt all those years ago,” he said, “must have been half demolished when they reached land. The sea itself must have done the demolishing. I was really surprised by one thing you told me about the shipwrecks that you read about in the book owned by Rahola the dentist, son of the old Cadaqués doctor, who was a very fine doctor: that they fished out the sacks of silver using hooks. That probably means the sacks were already scattered over the seabed when the galley transporting them hit the bottom, because it would have been very hard to fish them out if they’d been inside the boat’s hull. Blindly trying to fish a sack of whatever from the bilge of a vessel, which one presumes is closed, using hooks that have to be dragged along would have been a fool’s game. That, at least, has been the experience of a man who has seen so much merchandise dragged out of the bilges of boats. Before the hooks reached the bottom they’d have caught on the countless obstacles offered by the ship’s hull. The ships probably reached the coast already battered and smashed up. When they hit the first rock, they must have literally fallen apart. It’s unthinkable that they built ships then as well as they did later, let alone as they do now. Now a vessel can be split in half, but it can’t be smashed to smithereens. So then the silver must have been fished out around the sunken hull (the silver that could be salvaged, because I don’t think they could have hoisted any coins). Because all that diving-bell business, you know, must have served to rescue the odd loose coins but not to bring up a single wretched sack. How could a bareheaded, deep-sea diver handle a sack at such a depth? Come on!”

  “Be that as it may, all that remains of the shipwrecks is the place-name on the coast – La Galera.”

  “Who knows?” replied Gibert, with a vague smile, rendered even hazier by the bluish smoke from his cigarette. “There may have been wrecks of other galleys and all kinds of ships by La Galera and Galera Beach. The Gulf of Lion, from Cape Creus to the island of Llevant, is a vessels’ graveyard. It’s an evil place, where much evil has been wrought, a place that has brought a lot of grief to people who have encountered the mistral.”

  * * *

  —

  I’m holding a piece of paper that refers to the shipwreck of Nostra Senyora de la Concepció, captained by Antoni Serra, Genoese by birth. The shipwreck took place on 22 March 1730 on the beach in Pals that is described as the beach of Torroella de Montgrí. It’s an intriguing date: the day after the spring equinox. One can almost be certain that the shipwreck was caused by the storm from the east that usually coincides with the equinox – as was the case with the 1688 “storm of beans.”*2 When an easterly wind blows, Pals Beach is no place to be. The wind and sea pound it furiously. As a result of the shallows in the area, there is a powerful swell – an undertow that is
impossible to defeat if one is too close to land. For whatever reasons, Nostra Senyora de la Concepció was thrown onto the sandbars by the breaking waters and couldn’t resist the sea’s might. After being battered against the sandbanks, it must have flapped like a wounded fish on the flat expanse of sand, where, over time, it was dismantled and rotted by corrosive salt water. At the time of the wreck, the area of the disaster – the spot where the River Massot flowed into the sea – was entirely uninhabited.

  Antoni Serra and the crew members who had managed to survive the wreck jumped onto dry land, and battling against the natural hardships of being in an unknown land, in virgin territory, they reached Mas Gelabert, where they were welcomed and helped by the steward, Domingo Torres, and other people in the house. After sleeping and eating, they were reinvigorated and went back to their ship and started to salvage what they could from the wreck, carrying lots of items to terra firma and storing them in a hut they’d built in the immediate vicinity. They posted a guard at night to avoid any looting of what they’d salvaged. The fact that Serra took such a precaution showed he was a wily old hand in times of misfortune. The first reaction is usually to think ingenuously that one can leave everything safe and secure in such forsaken spots, as if they were completely uninhabited. Now it’s very likely there is no such thing as a forsaken spot by the sea: there’s always some vagabond waiting behind a shrub for whatever turns up. Those who lurk in solitary places are no fools.

  Shortly after, the court in Pals ordered the skipper Antoni Serra and his crew to obey health regulations, and thus they were forced to move from Mas Gelabert and to endure a period of quarantine that was rigorously imposed by the presence of armed men. Serra succeeded – and one can imagine the passion with which he argued – in having a proper guard placed on the hut and the area where they’d stored the salvaged goods. The Pals authorities and health officers appointed completely trustworthy folk to keep those goods safe. Quarantine lasted until 6 April, when they were all set free.