by Josep Pla
However, let’s return to the thread of our story.
The new situation didn’t seem to discourage Tayà. They first ordered a recce to be carried out by a Greek diver from the island of Symi in the Dodecanese, peremptorily Turkish by nationality, my dear friend Costas Contos. The Costas family had come to the peninsula to fish sponge and coral. When he was given this job, Contos was the head of a company of deep-sea divers in the port of Barcelona.
Younger than he is now, with the looks of an energetic adolescent, he went to Cadaqués and carried out a detailed recce of the vessel. The storm had so thoroughly embedded her on the sharp angles and points of those rocks he judged she was now impossible to refloat. “The vessel will have to be salvaged in bits and pieces,” thought Contos. “She will never be refloated on the surface as a whole.” And that was what he told old Tayà.
“Contos, you are too young, you don’t have the experience…” that fine man told Contos with a snigger. “You rush to conclusions. We, on the other hand, are ready to do whatever it takes to salvage that boat…”
Contos wished him a very good day with a dash of that ceremonial courtesy he’d learned from the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Tayà company immediately went into action. A team of Italian divers arrived to salvage the ship. A diver from the port of Barcelona, Roca, nicknamed Fleshy, joined them. Italian divers are first rate when it comes to salvaging ships. They probably last as long as Greek sponge divers in deep waters. However, objectively speaking, they are highly skilled.
The Italian divers decided the first thing they had to do to refloat the Llanisshen was to fill the holes. They asked for a fantastic amount of cement – what they thought was necessary to that end. A large steamer, the Teresa Tayà, began to transport goods from Barcelona to Cadaqués: cement, timber, machinery – all kinds of items, tackle and useful gear. At one point, over sixty people from Cadaqués worked on the salvaging of the Llanisshen. An aura of prosperity reigned. Activating all the required initiatives cost rivers of gold – and I say gold because at the time our currency was on the gold standard.
The Italian divers poured a colossal quantity of cement into the three holes that the dead weight of the Llanisshen was carrying. When they thought the holes were filled, they were ecstatic. A sheath of extremely strong material arrived, with which they more or less enveloped the vessel – I say more or less because there are always unknown factors in underwater work that those not experienced in the area find difficult to evaluate. Once it was sheathed, two pumps from the Port of Barcelona Works Department were attached to the ship to extract water, two powerful pumps that could shift eight hundred tons of water a day. As the sack gradually emptied, the Llanisshen should have started to rise spontaneously to the surface. However, the vessel didn’t budge. It was dead still down below. That could be explained by two incontrovertible facts: firstly, that it wasn’t absolutely true that the sheath totally covered the enormous tramp. And that wasn’t because there wasn’t enough material – there was material to spare. Something else had happened. The holes in the Llanisshen had been filled with vast amounts of cement when the vessel was touching rocks underwater. The cement stuck the vessel’s iron plating to the surrounding rocks. A homogeneous, indestructible, unmovable paste was created – huge cement fetters that bound her to the bottom of the sea, which wouldn’t let her die in the whole of eternity.
After wasting extraordinary sums of money on their salvage operation, the Tayà company abandoned the vessel for good.
The wreck has subsequently been brought up in bits and pieces, as the diver Costas Contos had foreseen after his first recce. In 1927, in the course of the first campaign, twenty tons of metal and eight hundred tons of wrought iron were hauled up. In 1951 there was a second fruitful campaign with excellent results.
Today the huge vessel no longer has the shape of a tramp. It has been dynamited so many times that all that remains is an unruly pile of iron fragments, which have melded into the dramatic underwater orography of the Caials.
* * *
—
In the winter of 1921, during a storm from the east, a French four-master merchant ship, the Douamont, registered as a four thousand tonner, was wrecked on S’Arenella Island off Cadaqués, the one many people still call Rahola Island (after Don Víctor Rahola). Years ago, I was the guest of the owner of this unforgettable island at the far eastern end of Cadaqués Bay. I wrote about that most pleasant experience in a previous story “A Frustrated Voyage.”
The Douamont was a large timber four-master that had originally sailed under a North American flag and was later transferred to France as a result of the famous 1920s American stock-market crash. She was named after the famous fort from the Battle of Verdun. Equipped as a merchant ship, she possessed two huge five-hundred-horsepower diesel engines. The triangular sails had been removed from her rigging, but she was still spectacular, a magnificent specimen, even if she couldn’t rival the great display made by the most recent clippers on the Australian corn race. Four masts will always be four masts.
The final decline of sailing ships began in the wake of the First World War. There was a great crisis in maritime transport and for several years sailing ships that weren’t old enough to be scrapped were provided with auxiliary engines. Sailing vessels were stripped of the sails that were difficult to handle, the ones people in the trade called “expensive,” and the only sails left were those that could be handled by the smallest of crews, crews that were generally halfhearted, ignorant of the trade and recruited from the rabble in ports. The Douamont’s triangular sails fell and only the lower ones were left, as a mere adjunct to the engines. That supposed a great loss of character, because it destroyed the slender, vertical profile of a sailing ship. In this case, it may also have been the reason she sank. Those hybrid sail and engine vessels always looked like birds with grapeshot in one wing. In an abuse of the language, those vessels continued to be described as sailing ships with auxiliary engines. They were exactly the opposite: vessels with engines and auxiliary sails.
In the specific case of the Douamont, it would have been difficult to pinpoint what the vessel was. For whatever reasons, her huge engines were in a dreadful state. They had a dubious, if not totally nil, level of efficiency. The Douamont was a sailing ship with few sails and clapped-out engines.
She had set out from Marseille laden with floor tiles and roof slates from the huge Provence brickworks and was heading for Havana and New York. She also carried an amazing amount of cargo on deck.
When she entered within view of Cape Creus, the weather was poor: the sky was overcast and low, and easterly squalls were roaring on the rocks along the coast, with intermittent heavy downpours. Perhaps the wind wasn’t gusting as much as it sometimes did, but high waves were surging. It was one of those winter days when people gathered by the fireside can’t imagine anyone might be out in that weather, let alone out at sea. The sight of the merchant ship in the blue-black light, swathed by curtains of water, in the middle of a wild, empty sea, wasn’t a happy one.
The Douamont was sailing with sea and wind battering its sides. It was progressing slowly using all available sails: the jib sail and four lower sails. Its speed suggested it wasn’t using its engines. Later that became obvious. It was clear to the naked eye that it was drifting toward the coast. From land it would have been difficult to determine whether that movement was voluntary or forced. There was more sea than wind, which meant that the vessel’s landward lurches seemed perilous – or at any rate most peculiar.
When she reached what her captain decided was a prudent distance from the coast, the merchant ship attempted to maneuver round and head out in search of deeper water. But the maneuver failed. The rudder didn’t respond and the maneuver simply failed – there’s no other way to describe the precise nature of the captain’s defeat. For the relatively small amount of sail the Douamont had raised there was too little wind
, and the power of the sea meant the rudder hadn’t enough pull to make the vessel turn. Soon after, she repeated the maneuver and failed again. The situation suddenly became alarming. Given its tonnage, the vessel hadn’t enough sails to achieve the necessary agility of movement. As she couldn’t use her engines, the ship’s maneuver had been calculated as if she were using all her sails. But as a large number of those had been removed, particularly those that were best in maneuvers when there was little wind, she was left like a bird with broken wings, with insufficient defenses.
She tried to turn for a third time, with the same outcome: nothing doing. The forward boom didn’t move. In the meantime, pressure from wind and sea kept forcing her landward.
The moment came when it was quite obvious they would be hard put to miss the rocks to the east of Cadaqués Bay: S’Oliguera Point. To say the ship had entered treacherous waters would have been an understatement: in truth, she had set out on a path to destruction that only a miracle – one must describe certain eventualities one way or another – could change in its favor.
From that point in time things unraveled quickly. The Douamont gave out signals that she was in distress. Someone on the coast saw these signals. The information was quickly relayed to Cadaqués. The lifeboat bell was rung. The lifeboat was speedily launched. The sound of the bell stirred the town from its slumbers. It had been years since anything so unusual had shattered the soporific winter haze over Cadaqués, and people spilled into the street instinctively, spontaneously. The most cautious – there are always cautious people in that neck of the woods – put on their clogs and grabbed their umbrellas. Most went onto the beach in their fireside attire. They saw the lifeboat rowing strongly, against wind and sea, out of the bay. It was clear a shipwreck was on the cards. By the way they were rowing, you could see it was an emergency. Rain was pouring down. The weather was appalling. There were huge pools of water on the Podritxó esplanade. The turbid sea seethed. Waves boomed against the coast. The whole country seemed immersed in distant church-organ music, produced afar by a surging sea. Reverberations that floated in the air, tangible and dynamic, only immediately to disappear into the immense, indifferent void. It wasn’t suitable weather to go and watch a shipwreck – it wasn’t weather to go and watch anything. Even so, people headed over to S’Arenella Island, because in the end, among other reasons, the presence of that lifeboat speeding out of the bay was quite unusual. It was impossible to quell the children’s curiosity. When they heard the word “shipwreck,” they were so intrigued that all but the sick and the meek followed en masse where everyone else was heading.
As the lifeboat left the bay, it encountered more obstacles, down to the poor weather. The floor of Cadaqués Bay is hospitable in all kinds of weather; however, when the storm comes from the east, as you leave the bay, past the Ros beach and reefs, the swell of the sea turns heavy and deep. The lifeboat began to hop over the waves like a nutshell. There have always been good rowers in Cadaqués. Moreover, the tiller was in the hands of Senyor Pío Ribas, a merchant navy captain and an intelligent, cold, taciturn gentleman, with lengthy experience at sea. Despite the difficulties, the lifeboat made progress, and when it found the endangered vessel, it redoubled its efforts to move closer. It was not an easy situation to resolve. It’s a well-known fact that when big waves hit shallow seas their volume assumes unheard-of proportions. That’s why vessels never intentionally come close to land: the deeper the water, the more confidently they can sail. The Douamont was fatally, tragically, entering shallow waters. As she did so, the sea swelled, and her position became more passive amid phenomenal squalls of water, and her hulk more resigned and dead, lurching dramatically this way and that. People had reached S’Arenella Beach; some, using whatever means, had crossed the small strait between the mainland and the island and were silently observing the tragedy with anguished hearts. The Douamont was three or four rope lengths from the island, and the waves were so tall that, though they were so near, the onlookers often lost sight of the hull and lower part of the masts. It was a depressing spectacle, as might be a beheading of the innocents, because there was no possible defense against the inevitable outcome.
The lifeboat finally reached the side of the merchant ship, and if it had been difficult to establish contact, it became even harder to maintain in those swirling waters. Nevertheless, Captain Ribas, with his hand on the tiller, performed wonderful operations. He was a man who had a real touch out at sea. They found the Douamont’s crew, driven crazy, rather than demoralized, and in a state of benumbed stupefaction. Why hadn’t they tried to anchor? They did so now, but it was already too late. They should have done that when the water was deeper, not so close to land where the waves surged so turbulently. Part of the crew was involved in the maneuver to anchor; the Senegalese sailors on board didn’t move from the corner where they lay cowering, more dead than alive, a black human mass that seemed to grow sallow as their fear heightened.
Nevertheless, it is absolutely true that, despite the terrible situation, the lifeboat was able to establish two lifelines with the Douamont. In the course of establishing the second, they managed to throw them a magnificent new hemp rope, more than seventy fathoms long, in case the crew needed to abandon ship. It was a struggle to tie the rope halfway up one mast, with the idea of creating a sloping lifeline with the other end tied to land, down which the crew could slide. In fact, nobody was sure the Douamont would remain at anchor as she was being so pounded by the sea. Any such prophecy was worth less than a puff of pipe smoke.
Very quickly reality confirmed that was the case. The anchorage was severed and the vessel was again a huge dead weight at the mercy of the crashing sea. She slowly lurched onto the coast off S’Arenella Island. It was only a matter of time before she hit the first line of rocks – the vessel could hardly float, she was so full of cargo.
It was time to rescue people. When they had managed to establish the sloping hemp lifeline, the crew started to slip down, each man using a sliding loop. The captain enforced perfect discipline during the operation: there was no violence or rushing. The crew reached land one after another. Their bodies exuded the stench of sopping wet animals. There was only one tragic case: a Senegalese crew member couldn’t keep his body in the loop and by the time he landed, he’d been strangled by the rope around his neck.
The Douamont had kept a small herd of live, tame animals on board: sheep, hens, chickens and a cow. The captain, who was the last to abandon ship, released them before doing so. The animals immediately hurled themselves into the sea and swam to the coast. The cow and sheep struggled to get a footing on land. The odd leg was broken, though they were all rescued. What most impressed the children watching: the frenzied attempts made by the cow to scramble onto the slippery coastal rocks, its anguished look as it emerged from the water.
Meanwhile, the denouement took place. The Douamont was thrown up like a feather on the crest of a wave, and as she crashed down, a loud crack was heard that echoed through the air. It was a violent blow, like a sudden discharge of electricity or a huge hammer striking a block of steel, coldly precise. The crash made it lurch, as if it was being decapitated: all the cargo on deck fell into the water. That first, almost metallic collision with the rocks shattered the thousands and thousands of tiles and slates the Douamont was carrying. The merchant ship was gripped by a second, hurtling wave, which, in a furious crescendo, hit the ship’s lower decks: the eyewitnesses were terrified: they watched the vessel burst like a grenade. Rigging clattered heavily into the sea. The ship rapidly began to sink. The tiles in the salt water created a murky, pinkish color around the wreck. The struggle between the half-submerged ship and the pounding waves lasted for two or three hours. Objects began to float on the surface of the surrounding water. Over subsequent days, those items were collected and sold to rag-and-bone men. After four hours of smashing against the rocks, no trace of the ship was left. All was lost and invisible, and the waves concealed the site of the c
atastrophe with a show of stunning might.
The strangled Senegalese sailor was buried in the sailors’ graveyard. Some sailors were kept in hospital for a few days. Others got drunk that very same night, crawling from tavern to tavern, in silent, elemental fashion. Once the paperwork was completed, they were all repatriated.
A few years later, the ship’s anchors and chains were salvaged.
Only a few remnants of that huge four-master are left. The floor of the sea around S’Arenella Island contains an enormous quantity of floor-tile and roof-slate fragments, between which purply-green or reddish-mauve seaweed grows. For many years there were also rusty iron deposits on the small beach nearest the island. These deposits pertained to the Douamont. However, the last time I was in those parts, I noticed they had vanished. Today, not a single trace remains of the wreck in the place where the disaster unfolded
* * *
—
“The Ferrera or Montjoi bau is right there. Take a look!” the boat’s skipper told me, leaning over the side of the boat.
I leaned over next to him.
“Can you see it?”
“I think so…Yes, it’s as clear as anything!”
Four fathoms down I could see a whitish, vaguely yellow colloidal shape that was bright and luminous. From under the water it pointed toward the surface like an upside-down pyramid of light, white and dazzling.