The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  For Naples was right on the sea front at the head of a magnificent bay. It was older than Rome, and the territory around it was originally among the most fertile spots along the western Italian coast. Originally the Greeks, who founded Naples, had done their trading with the dangerous Apennine tribes from the safe distance of the island of Ischia. But Ischia proved too uncertain a proposition. It was for ever trembling with volcanic emotions, and the Greeks had moved to the mainland. The usual and apparently unavoidable quarrels between the colonists (bored because far away from home and badly administered by grasping governors) had caused civil strife, and three or four little settlements had been destroyed when a fresh batch of immigrants had decided to begin from the very beginning and had built themselves a town which they called ‘New City’ or ‘Neapolis,’ which eventually became Napoli, or in plain English, Naples.

  It was already a prosperous commercial centre when Rome was still a village inhabited by shepherds, and yet those shepherds must have had a veritable genius for administration, for already in the fourth century before our era Naples was an ‘ally’ of Rome, an agreeable-sounding term, much less harsh, than the word ‘subject’ but describing the same sort of relationship. And from that time Naples played an inferior part, was afterwards overrun, by whole hordes of barbarians and finally fell into the hands of one of the Spanish branches of the Bourbon family, whose rule became a byword for scandalous mis-management and suppression of every form of independent thought and action.

  Nevertheless, such were the town’s natural advantages that it became the most overcrowded city of the European continent. How all those people lived nobody knew and nobody cared, until the cholera epidemic of 1884 forced the modern kingdom to clean its house, which it has done with admirable intelligence and seventy.

  The foreground of this marvellous spot is most appropriately occupied by the ornamental Vesuvius. Vesuvius is the neatest and most systematic of all the known volcanoes in the way it spreads its ashes. It rises up to a height of about 4000 feet and is entirely surrounded by lovely little villages which grow a particularly fiery wine, the famous Lacrima Christi. The ancestors of those villages already existed in Roman days. And why not? Vesuvius was extinct. Since the memory of man, almost a thousand years, there had not been an eruption. There had been vague rumblings in the bowels of the earth in the year 63, but that meant nothing in a country like Italy.

  The great surprise was sprung sixteen years later. In less than two days Herculaneum and Pompeii and a third smaller city were so deeply buried beneath deep layers of lava and ashes that they completely disappeared from the face of the earth. Thereafter, at least once every hundred years, Vesuvius gave signs of being far from extinct. The new crater, rising 1500 feet above the ruins of the original one, is for ever belching heavy clouds of smoke. And the statistics for the last 300 years—1631, 1712, 1737, 1754, 1779, 1794, 1806, 1831, 1855, 1872, 1906, etc.—show that Naples is by no means sure of not being turned into another Pompeii.

  South of Naples we enter the province called Calabria. It suffers from the fact that it is so far away from the centre of the country. It has railway connexions with the north, but the coastal regions suffer from malaria, the central part is composed of granite, and agriculture is practised as it was in the days of the first Roman Republic.

  A narrow strait, the strait of Messina, separates Calabria from the island of Sicily. The strait, which is only a little over a mile wide, was famous in antiquity for the presence of two sea-monsters, called Scylla and Charybdis, that caused whirlpools which swallowed up whole ships if they ventured so much as half a yard out of their course. The fear those whirlpools aroused gives us an adequate idea of the helplessness of such ancient vessels, for a modern motor-boat putt-putts quietly right through the heart of these eddies without noticing that there is any commotion in the water.

  As for Sicily, its geographic position had made it the natural centre of the ancient world. Furthermore it enjoyed a delightful climate, was densely populated and highly fertile. But like Naples, life here was perhaps a little too good, a little too easy, a little too comfortable, for the Sicilians during more than two thousand long years submitted peacefully to every form of mis-government that foreign potentates wished to bestow upon them. When they were not being plundered or tortured by Phoenicians or Greeks or Carthaginians (they were only about a hundred miles away from the northern coast of Africa) or Vandals or Goths or Arabs or Normans or French or by any of the 120 princes, 82 dukes, 129 marquises, 28 counts and 356 barons who derived their titles from this happy island, they were repairing their houses from the damage done by the local volcano, Mt Etna. The eruption of the year 1908, which completely destroyed the most important city, Messina, is still in everybody’s memory. It killed more than 75,000 people.

  The island of Malta is really a sort of suburb of Sicily and therefore ought to be mentioned here, although politically speaking it does not form part of Italy. It is a very fertile island and lies midway between Sicily and the coast of Africa. It dominates the trade-route from Europe to Asia by way of the Suez Canal. After the failure of the Crusades, it was presented to the knights of St John who thereupon called themselves the Maltese Order, Knights of Malta. In 1798 Napoleon took the island on his way to drive the English out of India via Egypt and Arabia (a most ingenious plan which however failed). This was an excuse for the English to occupy it two years later and they have been there ever since, much to the chagrin of the Italians but not of the Maltese, who on the whole are better off than they would be under a Government of their own people.

  I have paid little attention to the east coast of Italy, but it is not very important. In the first place the Apennines used to reach almost as far as the shore, making large settlements very difficult. As the other side of the Adriatic was practically uninhabitable on account of the steepness of its hills, the development of trade was not encouraged. From Rimini in the north to Brindisi in the south (from where the mail leaves for Africa and India) there are no harbours of any importance.

  The heel of the boot is called Apulia. Like Calabria it suffers from the fact that it is so far removed from civilization, and like Calabria its agricultural methods are those practised in the days when Hannibal honoured this region with his presence, waiting twelve long years for the help from Carthage that was never to come.

  There is a city in Apulia which enjoys one of the finest natural harbours in the world but which, alas, has no customers. It is called Taranto, and it gave its name to a particularly venomous sort of spider and to a dance by which the people who had been bitten by that spider were prevented from falling asleep and entering into a deadly coma.

  The Great War has made geography very complicated, for no account of modern Italy is complete without mention of the Istrian peninsula, which was given to the Italians in recognition of the fact that they had turned against their own allies and joined with the enemy. The city of Trieste was the principal export harbour of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Having lost its natural hinterland, it is not doing so well. And finally, racked away at the further end of the bay of Quarncro, is Fiume, another former possession of the Habsburgs. It was the natural outlet for the German people who had no other good port along the whole of the Adriatic coast. But fear that it might eventually be a rival of Trieste made the Italians clamour for Flume. When the statesmen who concluded the Treaty of Versailles refused to give it to them, they simply took it, or rather, their poet d’Annunzio took it for them. Then the Allies turned it into a ‘free state,’ but finally, after prolonged negotiations between Italy and Yugoslavia, it was ceded to Italy.

  That ends the present chapter, except for the island of Sardinia. This is really a very big island, but it is so far away and so few people visit it drat we sometimes forget that it exists. But it does exist, the sixth biggest island of Europe, covering an area of almost 10,000 square miles. Being the other extreme of that mountain-range of which the Apennines were part, it turns its back upon the mother
country. The western coast has excellent harbours. The east coast is steep and dangerous and has not a single convenient landing place. During the last two centuries it has played a curious part in the history of Italy. Until the year 1708 it belonged to Spain. Then it fell into Austrian hands. In 1720 the Austrians swapped Sardinia against Sicily, which then belonged to the Dukes of Savoy, whose capital was the city of Turin, situated on the Po. Thereafter the Dukes of Savoy proudly called themselves Kings of Sardinia (from duke to king is a decided step upward), and that is how the modern kingdom of Italy happened to grow out of a kingdom called after an island which not one Italian in a hundred thousand has seen.

  Chapter X

  * * *

  SPAIN, WHERE AFRICA AND EUROPE CLASHED

  The people of the Iberian peninsula are famous for their very pronounced ‘racial’ characteristics. The Spaniard is supposed to be so ‘racially’ different from any other group of people that one will recognize him anywhere and under all circumstances by his racial haughtiness, his formal courtesy, his pride, his sobriety, and his ability to play the guitar and the castanets. For even music has been dragged in to bolster up the ‘racial theory.’

  Perhaps so. Perhaps it is as easy to recognize the Spaniard by his haughtiness and pride as by his ability to play the guitar and the castanets. But I have very serious doubts upon the subject. The Spaniards merely took to playing the guitar and the castanets because in their dry and warm climate they were able to use out-of-door instruments. When it comes, however, to playing them really well, both Americans and Germans are greatly superior to the native talent. If they play them less frequently than the Spaniards do, that is the result of the climate under which they live. You can’t very well play the castanets in the pouring rain of a cold Berlin evening nor the guitar when your fingers tremble with frostbite. And as for those qualities of pride and haughtiness and formal courtesy, weren’t they all of them the result of centuries of hard military training, and wasn’t this military life the direct outcome of the fact that Spain was, geologically speaking, quite as much a part of Africa as of Europe? Therefore wasn’t it bound to be a battlefield for Europeans and Africans until either one side or the other should have won? In the end, the Spaniard was victorious, but the land for which he had been obliged to fight for such a long time had left its imprint upon him. What would he have developed into if his cradle had stood in Copenhagen or Berne? Into a perfectly ordinary little Dane or Swiss. Instead of playing the castanets, he would have yodelled, because the steep walls of a mountain valley with their marvellous echoes invite one to yodel. And instead of living on a little dry bread and soar wine, raised with infinite care and patience on his own neglected soil (neglected again on account of that clash between Africa and Europe), he would have eaten a lot of butter, necessary to protect his body against the eternal dampness of the climate, and he would have drunk aquavitae, because the abundant presence of cheap grain would have made alcoholic liquors the almost inevitable national beverage.

  WE CAN ONLY LIVE ON THE LAND BETWEEN THE HIGH MOUNTAINS AND THE SUBMERGED VALLEYS CALLED OCEANS AND SEAS

  THE NEW CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD IN SPACE

  THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

  And now look, at the map. You remember the mountain-ranges of Greece and Italy. In Greece they ran diagonally across the country. In Italy they ran in an almost straight line from north to south, dividing the country into halves but allowing enough space on both sides for the construction of roads that coasted the country from one end to the other, while the salient of the Po plain made the Apennine peninsula an integral part of the European continent.

  In Spain the mountains make horizontal ridges which one might almost describe as visible degrees of latitude. After a single glance at the map you will understand how these mountain-ranges must have acted as barriers to any sort of orderly progress. They begin with the Pyrenees.

  The Pyrenees, 240 miles long, run in a straight and uninterrupted line from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. They are not as high as the Alps and therefore it ought to be easier to cross them by means of mountain passes. But that is not so. The Alps, although, very high, are also very wide, and the roads that run across them, although quite long, rise only very slowly and offer no special difficulties to either man or pack-horse. The Pyrenees, on the other hand, are only 60 miles wide, and as a result their mountain passes were much too steep for anybody except a goat or a mule. According to well-seasoned travellers, even the mules experienced difficulties. Trained mountaineers (mostly professional smugglers) were able to get through, but only during a few months of summer. The engineers who built the railways connecting Spain with the rest of the world realized this, for they built the two trunk lines from Paris to Madrid and from Paris to Barcelona along the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Whereas the Alps have half a dozen railway lines passing over them or under them, the Pyrenees, between Irun in the west and Figueras in the east, were not pierced by a single tunnel until 1928, when the first of two tunnels was completed. After all, one can’t very easily dig a tunnel sixty miles long. Neither can one send trains across a track with an inclination of forty degrees.

  A SPANISH CANYON

  There is one fairly easy pass in the west, the famous pass of Roncesvalles, where Roland, Charlemagne’s famous Paladin, died loyally serving his master’s interests until the moment he succumbed under the last of the Saracens’ attacks. Seven hundred years later, another army composed of Frenchmen used this pass as an entrance gate into Spain. They got across the pass itself but were stopped before Pamplona, the city that dominates the road on the southern side. During the siege, one of the Spanish soldiers, a certain Ignatius de Loyola, was desperately wounded through a shot in the leg. While recovering, he had those visions which inspired him to found the Society of Jesus, the famous Order of the Jesuits.

  The Jesuits afterwards did more to influence the geographic development of a vast number of countries than any other religious organization, more even than those indefatigable travellers, the Franciscans. It was here that the Order began.

  It was undoubtedly this inaccessibility of the Pyrenees which gave the famous Basque people their chance to maintain themselves from prehistoric times until to-day and which accounts for the independent Republic of Andorra, very high up in the eastern part of the mountains. The Basques, about 700,000 in number, inhabit a triangle that is bounded by the Gulf of Biscay in the north, by the Spanish province of Navarre in the east, while the western frontier follows a line from the city of Santander to the city of Logrono on the Ebro River. The name ‘Basque’ means the same as our word ‘Gascon,’ but it has nothing to do with the compatriots of the famous Captain d’Artagnan. The Roman conquerors called them Iberians and called the whole of Spain the Iberian peninsula. As for the Basques themselves, they proudly say that they are Eskualdunak, which sounds very un-European and quite like Eskimo.

  Just for good measure, and because your guess is apt to be as sound as mine, here are a few of the current theories about the origin of the Basques. Some of the professors who distil racial theories out of skulls and gutturals, believe them to be connected with those Berbers whom I mentioned several chapters ago as the possible descendants of one of the earliest tribes of prehistoric Europeans, the so-called Cromagnon race. Others claim that they are the survivors who saved themselves on the European continent when the romantic island of Atlantis disappeared beneath the waves of the ocean. Still others hold that they have always been where they are now and don’t bother to ask where they came from. Whatever the truth, the Basques have shown remarkable ability in keeping themselves aloof from the rest of the world. They are very industrious. More than a hundred thousand of them have migrated to South America. They are excellent fishermen and sailors and iron workers, and they mind their own business and keep off the front page of the newspapers.

  The most important city of their country is Vitoria, founded in the sixth century by a Gothic king, and scene of that famous battle
in which an Irishman called Arthur Wellesley, but better known by his English title of the Duke of Wellington, defeated the armies of a Corsican by the name of Buonaparte, but better known by his French title of the Emperor Napoleon, and forced the French to leave Spain for good and all.

  As for Andorra, this strange commonwealth numbering fully 5000 inhabitants, connected with the outside world by a bridlepath, is the only surviving specimen of those queer little medieval principalities which retained their independence because, as frontier posts, they might render valuable service to some distant monarch and because afterwards they were too far removed from the busy outside world to attract anybody’s attention.

  The capital has 600 inhabitants, but the Andorrans, like the Icelanders and the people of San Marino in Italy, were ruling themselves according to their own desire at least eight hundred years before the United States started their experiment in applied democracy.

  In one other respect, the Pyrenees are quite different from the Alps. They have practically no glaciers. Once upon a time they may have been covered more thickly with snow and ice than the Swiss mountains, but a few square miles of glacier are all that remain. The same holds true of practically all Spanish ridges. They are steep and difficult to cross. But even the Sierra Nevada, the range of southern Andalusia, only shows a few snow caps from October till March, if so long as that.

  The direction of the mountains was of course of immediate influence upon the Spanish, rivers. They all of them start on or near the barren high plateau in the centre—the remnant of a terrific mountain-range which has worn away in the course of millions of years, and they hasten to the sea, but at such speed and with so many waterfalls that none of them possesses the slightest value as a trade-route. Furthermore, the long dry summers deprive them of most of their water, as you may see in Madrid, where the sandy bottom of the Manzanares provides the children of the capital with a nice imitation sea-shore for at least five months of the year.