Read Ebook: Maksimilian Aukusti Myhrberg by Krohn Julius

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 118 lines and 27882 words, and 3 pages

They were endeavouring to begin where we had left off. That which was abuse to us, and therefore, capable of remedy, came to be to them principle. "After all," said one of them, "look at the cloth you wear," putting his hand on my sleeve; "we make none such. Probably you have a penknife in your pocket;--at all events, you have shaved with a razor this morning: it is far beyond anything that we can make. We owe you a great deal of money, which you have lent us out of your superfluity." I replied that there was no connexion between individual dexterity and collective wisdom. They made the mistake of attributing our prosperity--the result of private industry--to our political institutions; and we, in like manner, attributed their disorders--the results of the political theories which they had copied from us--to their individual character.

The general Cortes of Spain has been constructed theoretically, without the consent or the presence of the separate kingdoms. They are thus figuratively merged, not in one of the kingdoms more powerful than the rest, but in an abstraction which they call "constitution." Lamentable would be the fate of humanity if follies such as these could profit or endure.

Cards and chess seem to have been combined and originally played by four persons, there being four suits of chessmen as well as of cards. The history of them would be a great book, if it could be written.

Next morning I came down to embark at the island; but a violent storm coming on, I took refuge in the house of the keeper of the lighthouse, on the point of the rock. The channel was covered with vessels: they had been all the morning sweeping away to the westward, with studding-sails on both sides, low and aloft; now they were fast measuring back their distance, and dashing past us under close-reefed topsails. We scrambled over the sharp points of the ledges of rock to watch the current where it is most straitened and convulsive. The dark deep current close in-shore was running out; a hundred yards or so from the rock it was running in; farther out again, there appeared another stream from the eastward. This must have been the spot where the action took place between Didius and the Carthaginian galleys, "when those were seen pursuing and these flying, who hoped not for victory and dreamed not of flight."

To provide against being carried down to the Mediterranean, had it fallen calm, which might have entailed a week's cruise, we stretched at once to the African shore. Despite the fears of my Scorpion pilot, and cook, we skimmed along the edge of the stream, and shaved every headland, until we reached the last point of the Straits, to which we had to give a wide berth, on account of the "race." Inquiring the name, the answer was, "Punta Leone." The man may paint the lion as he likes, but he has but one name to call him by.

But why call the point that looks towards Europe, Lion? A few centuries ago, and the question would not have been to be asked. Then from this spot the spectator who observed the hordes ferried in an uninterrupted stream of galleys across, and beheld the rock of Calpe, which from here, as from the north, is the very likeness of a lion crouching on the point, would have seen in the figure the emblem of the event, and turning to the hill above to look whence the beast of the desert had taken his spring, instinctively must so have named it.

FOOTNOTES:

"The battle of Cressy furnished the earliest instance on record of the use of artillery by the European Christians. The history of the Spanish Arabs carries it to a much earlier period. It was employed by the Moorish king of Granada, at the siege of Baza, in 1312. It is distinctly noticed in an Arabian treatise as ancient as 1249, and Casiri quotes a passage from a Spanish author at the close of the eleventh century, which describes the use of artillery in a naval engagement of that period between the Moors of Tunis and Seville."--PRESCOTT.

See "The Merchant and Friar." It has been imagined that explosive powder was known to the ancients. It is singular that the priests of Delphi could always protect their Temple against barbarians by thunder and lightning; but never against Greeks .

Bastions ? Or?illons were constructed by a canon of Barcelona, 1514. Vauban was born one hundred and twenty years later.--See LABORDE, vol. i. p. 58. The bastion is accidentally noticed, and not as then a new construction.

The bas-reliefs from the Palace of Ninus, lately brought home, exhibit battering rams in full play, and archers:--so there is nothing new under the sun.

It is singular how sentences like this descend and adapt themselves to the times. A Carthaginian being asked the same question above two thousand years ago, answered "June, July, and Mago."--Port Mahon was named after its founder.

I have only seen this book while revising these sheets for the press.

Miraflores.

The name given to those born on the Rock.

CEUTA.

Oct. 10th.

Two thousand years before Gibraltar was heard of, Ceuta was an important place. It is enumerated as one of the three earliest of cities. Since the discovery of Gibraltar their fortunes have been strangely similar. Each has been wrested from the land to which it belonged. Each is held by a foreign Power to which it is useless. Neither has been won in honourable war: the one usurped, the other pilfered--the wrongful possession of each is the tenure by which the other is held. Spain retained Ceuta when she abandoned Oran as a set-off to Gibraltar, and England, who abandoned Tangier, must have lost Gibraltar but for the help of the Moors, which was rendered because Spain occupied Ceuta; so that, if Ceuta were not Spanish, Gibraltar would not be English; and if Gibraltar were not English, Ceuta would not be Spanish. The Spaniards lose their own door-post of the Straits, and seize the post of their neighbours; the English abandon Tangier , and seize that of the Spaniards. In the history of sieges, they both present the most remarkable incidents, from the unparalleled amount of power directed against the one, and the length of time expended in attempts to reduce the other. Both have at various times exhausted the countries to which they belonged, and the nations by which they have been held. Ceuta brought on the fall of Gothic Spain. Gibraltar was the immediate cause of the war of the Spanish Succession; and finally the smuggling trade of Gibraltar furnishes the school for the proficients for whom Ceuta is the prison.

During the war the Spanish Government placed Ceuta, to defend it from France, in the possession of England. Several English establishments were formed, and considerable sums expended, in the belief that England would never give it up; but the immorality of the Government had not then overtaken the baseness of the people. The Moorish Government, however, thought this an opportunity of recovering its own, and having furnished supplies to Gibraltar, and to our fleet, and corn for our army in Spain, conceiving itself entitled to some favour, claimed the restitution of the place. The appeal proved ineffectual, although it was backed by the offer of a million of dollars. The English Government could not, as may be supposed, well urge on the Spanish Government the claims of its Moorish ally. Muley Suleyman expressed the anguish of his spirit in a distich which might have suggested Moore's celebrated lines on Poland:--

"There is no faith in our foe, There is no comfort in our friend."

We landed within a mole or jetty which corresponds with the Ragged Staff at Gibraltar, thence ascended by a stair to the gate, crossed a bridge, and found ourselves on a lively esplanade. An alley of trees opened upwards through the straggling town, and a terrace along the sea-wall stretched eastward to the extremity of the promontory. The buildings were in the Moresco style with the columned court. The arms of Spain are to be seen at Gibraltar beside those of England--here the arms of Portugal are beside those of Spain. To the whitewash of the Spaniards and the Moors, was here added the yellow of the Portuguese, running two or three feet as a skirting round the court-yards, and along the streets: everything was dazzlingly bright, exquisitely clean, and elaborately ornamented.

The streets are one continuation of tesselated pavement, green, white, and red. The white is marble, the black a very dark serpentine, and the red ancient tiles, which are used as outlines for the figures: the gutter is in the centre, the pattern running on each side with a border joining in the middle. The running pattern is a device, such as a sprig in a Tuscan border; but here and there, you find more ambitious conceptions--a snake, a stag, a ship, a coat-of-arms, a dog attacking a bull, and, in one place, the figure of a man. I have seen something of the kind in the garden of the fortress at Lisbon. There were also the hollow bricks along the tops of walls for flowers, and the demi-flower pots, which they nail against the walls and houses, converting them into perpendicular parterres. They have also adopted the Moorish tesselated pavements for the garden walks, and yet they have neglected to copy that garden architecture which I observed at Kitan--halls and alleys constructed of a lacework of reeds, than which there is nothing more beautiful; and as to its uses, what can be so well adapted to the training of foliage and flowers, so fitted to ensure the luxuries of the clime--that is, shade and air--and to afford protection against its inclemency--the sun with his heat and light?

But the Spaniards here are as little in Africa, as if they were in garrison at St. Juan d'Ulloa. There is not a man who knows the language of the country. They live like cattle in a pen, and spend their lives here without ever having been without the walls. They are under strict blockade--a vidette on the hill, a picket at the gate. Should a Moor bring in eggs, he has to steal out of sight of his own sentries; and to furnish an ox, is to commit a capital offence. When the Christians venture within reach of the Moors, they are shot like dogs: they meet only after despatching a flag of truce. What a ludicrous disproportion between this array of towers, battlements, materials, troops, and discipline, and the half dozen wild mountaineers in a reed hut on the other side. It was said of the Arabs by a French general, "Among them, peace cannot be purchased by victory." Defeat does not bring submission, nor hopelessness despair, because the brain has not robbed the heart, nor the tongue the brain. They cannot comprehend the wisdom, that a fact which is wrong should be submitted to because it is accomplished, and called a fact.

As I was, some time before, sailing by Ceuta in a bullock-boat, from Tetuan, a Spanish sailor called the attention of a young and delicate-looking Moor, who had embarked with us on his way to Mecca, to the Spanish flag flying on the fortress. The young man, who had scarcely spoken before, seemed absorbed in grief; started to his feet, his eyes glowing and his fists clenched, and roared out: "That no Christian, that Moor land."

The next morning I started early to visit the works on the lines, accompanied by a merchant of the place whom the governor sent to me, as the person best qualified to act as cicerone. Issuing from the first gate, we came on a drawbridge: below ran the sea over yellow sand, there being a clear passage by the ditch from one side to the other. Fishing-boats were splashing round the sharp angles. The old lofty Portuguese battlements rose above us; these masses of building are enormous, though the space of ground covered is small. The body of the place from which we had emerged, consists of a curtain and two bastions, three hundred yards in length, ninety feet in height; the bastion to the south carrying a second, is twenty feet higher. As we proceeded, ditch succeeded to ditch, and battery to battery. There are three lines and three ditches, with corresponding demi-lunes; in all six tiers of guns. The basis from sea to sea does not exceed four hundred yards, and the radius may be equal: I give the dimensions from memory. There are few guns mounted; I counted about one hundred and fifty embrasures for guns, and twenty beds for mortars. The inner curtain is completely pitted with shot and grape. The upper works and merlons are refaced.

Emerging from the fortification, we began to ascend the hill: the face of it was cut into by level spaces, the earth banked up by stone walls, lining which, infantry could level their pieces up the hill. The whole ground is mined and traversed by passages, the roofs of which project above the soil with loop-holes. The vidette on the hill pointed out to us on a brow opposite, at a short distance--but divided by a chasm--the Moorish post, a low shed of reeds: we saw no one. Some fig-trees in the gulley between, we were forbidden to pass; and he warned us to keep always in his sight. I came suddenly on a mass of ruins clustering round eminences, or running in long straight lines, castellated and turreted: the angles were fresh and sharp. The holes left in the walls by the fastenings of the planks, into which the compost is beaten, gave them the appearance of enormous pigeon-houses. There were no Roman blocks; yet the style was Roman. There was none of the massiveness of the Moorish, but their materials. There was more of the palm-like lightness of Fars than of the troglodyte of ancient or modern Africa. I hoped that these might belong to some remnants of the earlier and untraced races; but a nearer inspection soon decided that question. A gate on the western face is still almost perfect, and is Moorish; yet who can find the date of that style which may have belonged to the days of Juba, as well as to those of Almanzor and Abderahman.

My companion was excessively alarmed when I proposed to visit the ruins, as they are beyond the neutral ground. I endeavoured to relieve him, by making a forward cast through the brushwood. He followed, detailing how those savages would lie for hours in wait for a shot, and how a few days before a man had been wounded at the same place. Presently he exclaimed, "A Moor! a Moor!" I had, however, for some time seen the figure in a clear space on the opposite brow, wrapped in its haik, and motionless.

How pleasing would it not be to find the original of some dubiously-figured chimera! What then to discover a living representative of a race that has left behind it an undying name and immortal ruins? Such was to me that solitary figure. The Assyrian bowed his back to the burthen and his neck to the yoke, and the first of conquerors became the meanest of slaves. The Mede served in his turn, and so the Persian. The Egyptian, the first and greatest, became the outcast of nations. The Macedonian and Attic conquerors of the East were bondsmen at Rome. The Roman was a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, at the door of the Gothic hut and the Vandal tent. In all times, in all climes, the conquered have dwelt as Helot bondsman or slave with the conqueror. This wild man, this Moor, alone has followed no conqueror's car, and served no master's bidding. Vanquished, he has departed--disappearing from the land which ceased to own him lord. He has not by familiarity worn out the terrors of his name, nor the indignation of his heart; and there he stands to-day, not yielding to facts his reason, nor to fortune his fate.

But to compare the old Moor of Spain with the African Moor of to-day, might appear like comparing the British of to-day with their naked ancestors. It, however, seems to me doubtful whether the old light be all extinct. Look at the Moor! Is there not dignity in his deportment--grandeur in his costume? The produce of the looms of Morocco to-day equals in beauty and taste, if it does not surpass, that of any country. At Tetuan the Mosaics are now made which adorn the Alhambra. Science has departed, but is that an essential of greatness? When a nation sinks to the barbarism that follows light, it is indifferent to honour: it hates itself more than its foe or conqueror. The Moor is not such.

The Moors at home are more wedded than any Mussulman people to their usages; more fanatic, more abhorrent of all intercourse with strangers. When they come to Europe they make themselves at home. They are seen at Gibraltar, in the streets, on the battlements, sauntering in the public walks, as if they entirely belonged to us. The civil magistrate represents them as orderly and peaceable: the police-court may be said to ignore their existence: legal practitioners declare that the cases of litigation chiefly arise from their being overreached. They are an example of sobriety, industry, and integrity. Their community at Gibraltar is neither small nor select, nor composed solely of those in easy circumstances: they come and go, and many are flying destitute from war and persecution. No one has heard of a Moor being a drunkard, or a swindler: no one doubts a Moor's word: no one fears either his vengeance or his ferocity.

As we returned into town, a stone nearly the size of a man's head was shown to us, by which the skull of the Portuguese commander who first entered the place was, like that of Pyrrhus, broken by a woman from a tower. A Moorish sovereign, who was so wounded, despatched himself like Abimelech, with his own sword, to cover the disgrace.

The Romans at one time substituted this place for Tangier, as a provincial capital; yet it has neither a harbour nor road, being at the extreme point of the land, and shut out by a range of mountains from a fertile and peopled country, while Tangier is at the bottom of a bay, surrounded with rich lands, and is on the highway from Spain to Mauritania, from the ocean to the interior.

To us a capital is different from what it was to the Romans: we have a mass of organization and administration, which requires that it should be placed at the head in respect to the members. We expect to find all this in vigour under so rigorous a government as that of Rome. But Rome gave herself no such trouble; introduced neither principles, nor laws, nor language, nor costume. These spread, because not forced. The field of administration, down to her latter days, was kept sufficiently clear for each individual to embrace the whole: the subdivisions of modern statesmanship and government were unknown.

Her judicatories were solely appellant: the people were everywhere free to follow their own customs, execute their own laws, select their own magistrates, impose their own taxes. In fact, the Romans were kings: they reigned, they did not administer; nor did they scatter their strength in exciting irritation on every point; but remained with a force collected to smite resistance whenever it appeared, and which they were careful never to provoke by systematic interference.

Ceuta might thus, cut off from traffic and population, be a good provincial capital for those masters in the art of governing men--that art which, like health in the body and judgment in the mind, depends not on science and labour, but abstinence and simplicity.

I have met some Frenchmen who believed that the French went to put down piracy: I know no Englishman who doubts it. England attacked Algiers with the view of putting an end to Christian slavery, and relieving the smaller powers from the disturbance of their Mediterranean trade, she having no quarrel of her own with that State. She succeeded, retired--kept and claimed nothing.

Rome conquered the warlike west, and the rich east, and possessed the countries she conquered. The great people, lying in the heart of Europe, possessed of unparalleled power, in as far as warlike means go, and unequalled unity, subjugates a little state of pirates--or at least so called pirates--without numbers, wealth, service, or literature, and immediately France is subjugated by Algiers. I have heard Hassam Pacha, the Ex-Dey of Algiers, say, "the barricades of July have avenged me." Abd-el-kadir in like manner sees himself avenged by the barricades of February. Each African treachery is followed by a Parisian revolution. Had it been Rome, Abd-el-kadir might have become pro-consul, or like Severus, emperor: pro-consul or emperor, he could have become Roman. But it is a modern government: it is France which conquers Algiers; then the Frenchman becomes an Algerine, and order has to be restored in a constitutional state, by Algerine practices.

France, in putting down the Algiers of Africa, was preparing herself to become the Algiers of Europe.

With the same certainty that Pyrrhus foretold the destruction of Carthage or Rome, by the bone of contention which Sicily afforded, may the destruction of England or France, or both, be prognosticated from the French occupation of Africa. France by her mismanagement has only retarded the explosion, and she has not the courage to withdraw. Her invasion of Africa was as little her own purpose or will, as the invasion of Spain in 1823. A foreign hand planned and prompted it in mystery at Versailles, and publicly hailed and encouraged it from beyond the English Channel, whence alone was to be apprehended censure or dissatisfaction.

"Whoever says that Spain is poor or weak, lies.--Where do you see a people that work so little, and possess so much? Where in Europe is there a government so extravagant, or such a horde of public functionaries? The 'administrators' in Spain would supply France, Germany, and England put together; and what is all the political agitation, except a scramble for these posts? We want no new laws or constitutions; but only to administer those that our fathers have left us. One man, without genius or originality, but with courage and honesty, might make Spain the happiest country in Europe. As to resources, I say they are enormous. If you were to put in one heap the money that goes into the public treasury, and in the other, that which is kept back by the public functionaries, the latter would be the higher of the two. All we want is order. Look at our army. What can Europe show superior in vigour, endurance, discipline, intelligence, or docility? Look, too, at its numbers: two hundred thousand!"

I ventured to dissent on this last point, and showed that Spain entered on her war with France without any army, as on her war with England at the beginning of the previous century. On both occasions she had no fleet. Armies were requisite to attack, but incapacitated for defence: heroic defences were always made by a people, as shown in the contrast of Algeria with Poland; as shown in the contrast of Spain with Germany and Italy, which had all bowed before Napoleon: Spain's strength appeared after army, king, government, had been swept away; she was the only country in Europe whose people did not want soldiers to protect them, &c.

I observed that Spain stood in an anomalous position. Unlike a secondary state, she had nothing to apprehend on the score of her independence; unlike a first-rate one, she was engaged in no schemes against the independence of other people: that an army in Spain was consequently as needless as it was noxious.

He replied, that what I said did not apply specially to Spain, and might be predicated of the whole of Europe; to which I readily assented. His Spanish self-love, for a moment alarmed, was soothed when I showed him that I was as adverse to standing armies for the internal interest of the great and preponderating States, as he could be, because of the facilities which it gave them of interfering with and oppressing the others. I pointed to this, as the master-disease of our times, and as signalized as such even in the last century, by some of the greatest men; that it feeds, as Montesquieu says, upon itself, growing by competition; and that, independently of their misuse, standing armies by their pressure must ultimately bring every one of the existing European States to the ground.

Spain, separated by the Pyrenees from the rest of Europe, as she is distinct from them in ideas, could easily relieve herself; she had fewer obstacles to contend with than any other State, except England. Our whole parliamentary history had been a struggle of patriotic men against standing armies and funded debt. He himself had admitted, that one honest man might restore Spain; and how so, unless there were great abuses in practice which had not degenerated into principle? He had particularized the armies of functionaries; let him add to these this horde of two hundred thousand regulars.

"Where is the man," he said, "to do it?" I observed, that it could only be by seeing and showing what was wrong, that the man could ever be made or found to put it right.

This conversation was strikingly recalled to me by a book, entitled "Political Testament of Cardinal Alberoni," which, on my return, I found at a stall. I turned over the pages with extreme curiosity, to see if it presented any stamp of authenticity. One of the first sentences I fell upon was the following:

"It is an error of this and the preceding century to think that the strength of a nation consists in the large number of regular forces kept on foot. To be convinced of the falsity of this notion, we have only to cast an eye on the wars of Europe within these four or five hundred years. As soon as an army is beaten on the frontier, the prince, whose troops are vanquished, has no other resource left but to clap up a peace: his country lies open to the enemy, and he has only cowardly burghers and disheartened peasants to oppose to veteran soldiers. He loses a whole province as soon as the capital of it surrenders. He is reduced to bury himself under the ruins of his throne, or to comply with the conditions prescribed by the conqueror.

"But when princes undertook only to lead their people in defending their country, they reckoned as many soldiers as subjects: the whole state was a frontier against the enemy, who were sure to meet with opposition so long as they fought to conquer. Every inch of ground was disputed. When a city or town surrendered, after repeated assaults, it did not capitulate for the other towns within its jurisdiction. Every borough, every village cost a siege. So long as a prince kept but a corner of his country, he might hope to drive the enemy from what they possessed, and to recover all he had lost. The most powerful prince in Europe was dreaded only as his ambition might give disturbance and uneasiness to his neighbours. They were sure that time would impair his strength, like a body worn out by too frequent attrition.

"If the land forces of Spain had been upon this footing in the beginning of the present century, the nation would have beheld with as much security as contempt, the combination of the Courts of Vienna and London to impose a master upon her, and to divide her possessions. With the advantages in regard to war, which this kingdom has even from nature, it might have bidden defiance to France herself conspiring with the other Powers, to oblige her to submit to the treaty of partition."

He was above the arts of government, and knew where the greatness of his adopted country resided. He scouted acquisitions as a source of splendour to the state, or patronage as a means of strength to the government.

The great men of the period attained by peculiar powers the management of men; but there is not one whose words time has undertaken to confirm. Where is Richelieu's management; Colbert's finance; where are Fleury's devices; or Louis le Grand's victories? They have vanished with the fortunes they created, and have left us such instruction only as we may derive from the cell of a culprit, or the fragments of a column.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet