Salt Water

by Josep Pla

  Serra and his men, their papers in order, returned to the hut and found that everything had been looted: boxes and chests had been broken into and a large number of items had disappeared. All the efforts made by the shipwrecked men to save what they could from the wreck had come to naught. If one analyzes the situation, the decision to put the survivors into quarantine was strange and seems quite suspicious. No doubt there was a solid case from a legal perspective. But fulfilling the requirements of the law seems like a facile pretext to facilitate the looting officially, robbery by the hand of the authorities. It’s not a rare occurrence in life, and one has seen it happen quite frequently.

  Faced by that second catastrophe, Serra must have shouted to high heaven and knocked on every door – to no avail. He thanked the people in Mas Gelabert, who’d been so hospitable, and gave them the ship’s bell – a bell that still exists in the grand farmhouse of the Coll family, the present owners of the land and house – which they use to signal the time for the various tasks on the farm. The time came when Serra and his men returned to their country. They reached Genoa absolutely on their uppers, flat broke.

  They issued a protest from Genoa and started legal action against the Pals authorities, concretely against Pere Bou i Marès, a local farmer and representative of the navy and deputy of the authorities on the shore where the ship was wrecked. The piece of paper I am looking at now is in fact one sent by Pere Bou to the main minister for the navy, asking for His Majesty’s consul in Genoa to give the skipper Antoni and his shipwrecked crew a questionnaire, which they should answer in the presence of a judge. It is a paper that was destined to be forwarded as evidence in the case over looting initiated against the said deputy. It is all frankly curious: shipwrecks inevitably lead to looting, and when this happens, the local powers that be are usually quick to join the fray.

  *1 The House of Austria frittered away all the riches they plundered from South America and depended on loans from northern European bankers.

  *2 One of a series of peasant uprisings against landowners and the Spanish monarchy, the so-called storm of beans took place in Manresa in 1688.

  ON THE ROCKS

  The oldest known shipwreck on the Cape Creus coast (and here I mean coast in the broadest sense of the word, including the Roses and Mar d’Amunt to Tres Frares stretches, the latter being where Selva de Mar’s legal powers begin) is to be found in Galladera. Of course, there must be more ancient wrecks, but they have left no trace in human memory.

  At the entrance to the Galladera inlet, at the bottom of the sea, are remnants of the Boxhill, an English steamship that went down in 1884 in mysterious circumstances nobody ever clarified.

  Galladera is a remote, desolate spot, beyond the plain of Tudela, one of the last inlets of Mar d’Amunt, by the bend in the coast as it traces the gulf of La Selva. It is a purely rocky incision, forged by the sea and reasonably protected from the north wind and mistral. Galladera hasn’t the grace or charm of Portaló, the adjacent cove, one of the most elegant coves in this country. Portaló is so beloved it even sports a communal hut where you can lodge and a strand so white, unspoiled, and rarely trod, you feel the pull of pristine nature. It is the jewel of this coast – though it has one small defect: it is so shallow only small boats with little depth can enter.

  The dark, elevated islet between Galladera and Portaló goes by the name of Portaló Island. This rock is located in such a way that it protects Portaló from the mistral and Galladera from “provençades,” as they are known locally. It is a providential presence. The strait it creates with the coast is navigable, if challenging. For a vessel holed up in Galladera, the strait guarantees a feasible escape route – something that’s unthinkable in Culip. When it rains in the first and fourth quadrant, Culip is a cathedral of nature, Galladera, a cul-de-sac, but if you must flee those places in a squall, I really hope you are in Galladera and not Culip, though please forgive me for offering this unsolicited advice.

  There’s been a lot of speculation locally about the sinking of the Boxhill, and Senyor Pell, who made paintings for parlors in Cadaqués, turned the catastrophe into a marine drama. I’ve only ever seen a single copy; Senyor Pell didn’t have the popular naïveté of makers of ex-voto images or the interest in blood and gore of those ignorant folk; he knew about line and perspective and endowed his works with the touch of frosty realism that prints had in his day. His shipwreck is a chocolate-box picture.

  His little painting gives an idea of what the vessel was like: a tall, thin funnel, a forward mast with two yards, which shows it did use its sails to sail, a practice still common in those times. The engines had little power and sails not only helped in that respect but also gave more stability. The Boxhill’s hull was long and thin, like a cigar.

  Oral tradition around the shipwreck indicates that the vessel went aground on the island of Portaló, which it hit head on, wham, quite inexplicably. I use the word “inexplicably” because it is the word the last living eyewitnesses of the wreck usually use. The word is meaningless when applied to maritime matters – except for things one has actually witnessed, and even then…! It seems there’s always something dark and beyond our grasp in matters of the sea.

  What caused the ship to sink? Was it a deliberate, provoked accident? Was it carelessness, a silly trifle, a momentary loss of the notion of reality triggered by an excessive concentration of alcohol in the brains of the captain and his officers? That hypothesis is always feasible particularly when it’s a vessel from the north. So many of them navigate with a shot of alcohol in their wing! The weather wasn’t poor on the night of the disaster: it was a winter’s night like so many.

  It must have been a violent crash. The Boxhill was left like a grenade about to explode. The next day the mistral began to blow. All efforts to extricate the ship were to no avail. Wind and sea battered her so fiercely that naturally she shattered like a wicker basket and sank to the bottom of the sea.

  She has rested there for nigh on seventy years, and now nobody remembers the shipwreck. Senyor Pell’s little pictures have disappeared from parlors and tastes have changed. Some three hundred tons of iron were salvaged along with other things of value. The wreck is now in an advanced state of deterioration inflicted by active forces in the sea. Drawn to mineral deposits, a whole botanic and zoological invasion encrusted the ship’s hull; deep-sea divers who have recced her speak of a hull in the process of becoming unreal and phantasmagoric.

  * * *

  —

  The Llanisshen was a large steamboat – eight or nine thousand tons – registered in Glasgow. What the English call a tramp.

  One day in August 1917, the Llanisshen set out from the port of Marseille, carrying only ballast, and headed toward the Strait of Gibraltar. It was the most hazardous, dangerous moment of submarine activity in the First World War. She was a magnificent, new vessel, solidly built and of the highest quality. A Clydesider.

  When she left Marseille, she sailed within sight of land but followed her own set route; she wasn’t in a convoy. Halfway across the Gulf of Lion, she was torpedoed by a submarine. The torpedo sliced through her, from one side to the other, right through the engine room. She was left with a hole in both sides and completely at the mercy of the elements. After a detailed investigation, on captain’s orders, it was revealed that the boilers had been totally destroyed. There was very little to ponder: the vessel was declared a complete loss, beyond salvation. The order went up to lower the lifeboats and the whole crew disembarked. These craft landed on the Nouvelle-Aquitaine coast.

  The Llanisshen drifted without a soul on board, haltingly, dead, dramatically silent – a pathetic listlessness that augured total destruction. I have the impression that when the captain abandoned ship after his crew, he presumed she would sink rapidly, ineluctably. But she continued to float, lurching slightly to one side.

  Across a tranquil sea, the sunset that day seemed straight out of p
aradise, a protracted death agony of light and color, voluptuousness on a cosmic scale. However, in the early hours of the night, the mistral began to blow, and the Llanisshen was dragged out to sea in a southeasterly direction, and if the wind had continued in that vein, the vessel would have been blown into the waters of Cape Creus, the southern horn of the Gulf of Lion. I can imagine the spectacle of the abandoned vessel meandering in the gulf’s murky waters, in solemn, anguished silence, the wind whining through its masts and defunct rigging.

  After drifting for hours like a ghost, the huge wreck was spotted by a small steamer registered in Barcelona (belonging to the Freixas company) that was involved in coastal trade transporting foodstuffs – it was the era for smuggling on the grand scale – to Port-Vendres and Sète. The ship was the Colón, an old, shabby, stinking hulk like the Empordanès, which belonged to the same company – except that the Colón had a funnel in her stern and masts to the fore. She was a cockamamy, undersized clingfish.

  The Colón approached the torpedoed vessel and lowered a boat into the water. The reconnaissance – carried out in a state of amazed astonishment – concluded that the vessel had been abandoned. It was intact, except for the engine room, which the torpedo had cut through and devastated.

  The Colón’s captain judged that it was worthwhile taking her in tow, but when he made that decision, he must have thought the English vessel offered few guarantees in terms of safety. He put her on a towrope but left nobody on the tiller, no doubt fearing she would sink and drag down the man steering. If there had been a man in the stern of the wreck, it would have made towing much easier. At any rate, he put her on a towrope and prepared to drag her to one harbor or another.

  Sailing at a slow pace they rounded Cape Creus – it was like watching an ox being dragged along by a rat – and skimmed past the ends of Cadaqués Bay. Unfortunately, by Cape Creus they met a southwesterly wind and towing turned into a struggle. With nobody steering, the wreck zigzagged. Now and then the towrope tensed and vibrated dangerously. The Colón was a mere empty shell; the Llanisshen, despite carrying no cargo, was a terrific weight. The towrope snapped by Figuera Point.

  Faced by that unhelpful development, the Colón’s captain had, objectively speaking, three options: a challenging path consisted of renewing the tow and dragging the steamship, against wind and sea, to the port of Roses; an easier possibility was to tow her with a tail wind and sea into Cadaqués Bay, which is welcoming in all weathers and has good anchorage; the easiest of all would have been to abandon the hulk.

  So, despite the tramp’s huge value, even after she had been torpedoed, the Colón’s captain decided to abandon her. He was probably worried by the amount of work towing had already involved. It’s also possible he thought it was too much bother to go back, that he’d wasted too much time. Once the towrope snapped, the Colón continued on her course toward Cape Begur and the solitary wreck was once more left to drift. The mistral had dragged her toward Cape Creus for hours on end and a southwesterly was now pushing it the same way but from the opposite direction.

  That was when a few people in Cadaqués spotted a strange vessel beyond the ends of the bay, driven willy-nilly by wind and sea. No sign of life was visible on board; not the slightest whiff of smoke emerged from her funnel; the vessel was huge and unreal. She progressed slowly, drifting with the wind, tending to lean toward the coast, no doubt subject to the strong currents that reign in those waters. She had been abandoned off Figuera Point, under a mile from land. That distance had now shortened.

  Encouraged by the apparition, a group of idlers from Cadaqués manned a boat and headed toward her. Senyor Iu Sala, a well-known figure in the town, owner of a fish-salting house, agreed to sponsor them. Once they had drawn near, the spectacle with the Colón was repeated: they were astonished by the sight of such a huge, abandoned, empty vessel. It was a vision that sent their heads into a spin, even though they saw things only in the shape of the wealth being sent their way. Something or other had to be done…A man by the name of Baîlon, a sturdy, corpulent fellow, who’d been a sailor and then worked transporting the luggage of people who came and went from Cadaqués, climbed on board the vessel. He’d barely begun his spellbound explorations when a deep, dull noise came up from the bilge – as if something had collapsed. In the end he realized that nothing had happened. The vessel had simply lurched more sharply and a load of coal in her hold had been displaced making a loud, lugubrious din. Nevertheless, Baîlon was scared and lowered himself down on a rope. He was so nervous and agitated he almost fell into the water.

  The people in the boat looked at each other; they were perplexed and worried. What was to be done? At sea, any problem is massive, because nothing can be limited and controlled by human might alone – I mean another source of power is necessary to fight its onslaught.

  If at that time – it was 1917 – any relatively powerful motor had existed in Cadaqués (let’s say with the power of a small, present-day fishing boat), the Llanisshen might have been saved. It would have taken much less time to tow her into Cadaqués Bay, and considerable patience, but there’d have been no insuperable difficulties. However, in Cadaqués at the time, there were no engines of note. Everything was done with sails – if you were lucky. Given the urgency of the situation, there was no time to wait for one to be brought from outside…The wreck was drifting visibly and ineluctably toward the coast.

  In any case, a decision had to be made; after tedious, specious deliberations – as people could see the vessel wouldn’t get past S’Oliguera Point, which is the far, eastern end of the bay – they decided to pluck up courage, climb on board and anchor her before she hit the rocks I just mentioned. They climbed on board scared stiff, though increasingly amazed, and after a lot of hard work, they cast the anchors into the sea. At that moment, the vessel was opposite and just outside the treacherous Caials Bay. The rocks around this bay, like so many on that coast, look worm eaten, but they are strong and razor sharp. They cast out the anchors too late. By the time they hit the bottom, the Llanisshen had already hit and been trapped by rocks.

  Several strange things ensued. The vessel was anchored and grounded on those rocks on an August afternoon when a southwesterly was blowing. However, the mistral usually blows at night, and this wind produced a miracle, no doubt because the vessel was only superficially grounded on the rocks. The mistral pushed the ship out to sea so hard she came off the rocks. Once released from those obstacles, she swung round on her anchor chains and by next morning was completely freed up and perfectly anchored in deep, manageable waters. By dint of the strength of the mistral, the Llanisshen had totally changed position: the previous night, with the southwesterly, her prow had pointed seaward, and now, with the mistral, she pointed landward. If she had been able to maintain that position for a reasonable amount of time, it would definitely have been possible to save her. However, in her present state she had become a plaything at the mercy of the weather: possible salvation depended on which weather predominated from one moment to the next. When one thinks of the Llanisshen, one is astounded by the many possible ways that she might have been rescued before she finally went down, the powerful resistance she sustained in the course of a protracted death agony.

  With that latest development, the news of the vessel’s abandoned presence started to spread. When it reached the attention of the Barcelona firm of Tayà, then at the height of its commercial activity, they quickly contacted the vessel’s owners. When Tayà purchased the wreck, she was still afloat.

  The firm immediately went into action, showing it was really interested in salvaging the vessel. The rumor mill said the company had offered a million pessetes to Captain Ferriol, the company’s inspector, if he saved the ship. Be that as it may, while a large, showy rescue operation was being mounted and the paperwork signed, the weather changed radically. After a gusting westerly wind filled the sky with clouds and tinged the air blue, an easterly sea breeze set in. Storms at sea
never hit like a round of grapeshot. First, long, tall waves come, ushering in the approaching wind. The waves swell. The wind settles in, unfettered. The waves’ swell increases with the wind. The waves reach unheard-of heights, race powerfully, sweep along with the foam, the wind floating on their crests – waves that spread, invading coast, rocks, beaches and cliffs in a fantastic tumult.

  The last hours – we would say – of the Llanisshen’s life were those when the westerly blew. The storm from the east settled in, and her huge bulk was thrown onto the Caials rocks and began to be shredded down below. She resisted the onslaught of sea and wind like a dying animal. Perhaps the anchors helped her resist – perhaps they broke her. Curiously, for a few days the vessel was abandoned completely. The storm was accompanied by a tremendous downpour: the horrendous squalls of 1 September of that year, which so ravaged Cadaqués and which so many people still remember. As long as the storm lasted and for hours afterward, few in Cadaqués had time to think about the Llanisshen. Probably nobody at all. They had other tasks at hand dealing with the water that had descended from the heavens. This is why there are no eyewitness accounts of the boat sinking. When calm was restored and people went back to the Caials rocks, the Llanisshen had already sunk to the bottom of the sea.

  The divers who later recced her noted that as a result of the storm the iron plates of bilge number two had crashed against the rocks so violently they’d eventually caved in. A gash was opened up and that started the flooding. The two holes made by the torpedo accelerated the process. The vessel went down slowly. As it sunk, rushing waves overwhelmed it and floored it. Nothing more of the vessel was ever seen above water. The Llanisshen was sunk more or less twenty-five fathoms deep. Tayà had bought a floating wreck; a few days later they owned an invisible wreck, sunk for good.