Part 7

Menorca, the second largest of the islands, is bare and bleak and flat round the coast, though at one point in the interior it rises to a height of nearly 6000 feet. Here and there are picturesque spots, notably the Barranco of Algendar; but speaking generally the island is the Holland of the Mediterranean. Cleanliness, well-being, industry and good conduct are the characteristics of the inhabitants, who live farther outside the world of romance even than most Latin people. We flatter ourselves of course that they learned their good qualities from our ancestors, when they ruled the island, and certainly there are frequent reminders of our influence to be traced in the daily life of Menorca. “Ashes to Ashes,” though seldom heard now, was in Ford’s time an oath or exclamation often on the lips of the natives, and children use English words when playing marbles, a game that we taught them among other perhaps less useful arts. We sent to the island a Governor Kasie, who made roads and built market-halls, and did all that a worthy and unimaginative English gentleman might feel it is his duty to do in such a position; but the natives do not sigh once more to be under our dominion, as they are sometimes polite enough to tell English folk they do, and a Spanish writer actually refers to our paternal government as the Babylonish captivity.

Puerto Mahon was founded, as we have said, by the Carthaginians, and was appropriately enough occupied by us, the Carthaginians of later days. Its harbour is one of the best in the Mediterranean, and is very strongly fortified. Except for the forts, the town contains no public monuments of interest. The streets are very clean and rather quiet, and you remark the absence of the running water in the gutters characteristic of so many European towns. The streets are well paved, often with tombstones from the English cemetery; the dustman goes his rounds as he does in London, and many of the houses have English windows. The domestic life is held in high honour at Mahon, and the chief occupation and delight of the women is cleaning their houses. “It is an amusing spectacle” says M. Vuillier, “to see them armed with brooms of dwarf palm and immense pails of lime-water, gossiping along the walls from early morning, while they scrub and wash as if their lives depended upon it, fastening their brooms to long poles the better to reach the higher parts of the wall. Should a death occur in a house the walls are not whitened for a week, a fortnight or even a month, according to the closeness of the relationship or the degree of grief felt for the deceased. In rare cases the walls are not touched for six months.” The traveller comments on the absence of the tribe of unwelcome bedfellows, so persistent in their attentions in other parts of Spain.

This does not sound very interesting. Mahon is not, however, wholly devoid of the picturesque element. The old gate of Barbarossa is named after that famous pirate, by whom the city was surprised and sacked in 1536, and the fortifications still bear traces of the siege of 1781. Ciudadela, the old capital, at the opposite end of the island, is more suggestive of old times and memories. The streets are quaint and arcaded, and lined with fine old mansions: and there is an old palace, and a vast dim cathedral, which no one has ever properly explored. Ten minutes will be enough in which to exhaust the sights of Ciudadela, and you may then go and look at the Buffador, a blow-hole like those to be seen at Sark.

The people of Menorca have long since abandoned their native dress--presuming that they ever had one; but M. Vuillier remarked the continuance of the old custom, observable in other countries, of strewing the path of a bridal party with obstacles and building a wall before the house of the bride and bridegroom, the morning after their marriage. We see one of the innumerable survivals here of marriage by capture. The people are strangely fond of the practice of vaccination, and will perform it on each other with the least possible excuse. In blood-letting they also entertain an ineradicable belief.

Speaking of Alazor, a large village, Ford says: “It is worth the traveller’s while to go into any of the peasants’ houses and convince himself that in no other part of the world do the lower (_i.e._, working) classes live in greater comfort and even luxury. A man who has only a franc and a half a day as wages, and a little bit of garden, has a large and commodious house, well furnished, exquisitely clean, and always with a spare bed for the stranger. The character of the people is in exact harmony with their surroundings. They are polite and hospitable, crime is unknown, and their hygienic condition being so favourable they are healthy and long-lived. If is difficult to write of them without exaggeration and using too many terms of admiration for the good and wholesome life they lead.”

To the economist, then, the island of Menorca must be of interest, but it is infinitely more so to the archæologist. From end to end it is strewn with the works of prehistoric man, whose record in stone is hard to read. These megalithic remains present a strong resemblance to the mirage of Sardinia and Malta, but have also local characteristics which have puzzled and delighted the learned. M. Cartailhac has traced the sites of many ancient villages. The most considerable may be seen at Torre d’ea Galines, south of Alazor. There, on the summit of a slight eminence, a vast pile of stones is all that remains of the “city” to which the naked aborigines fled wildly the instant a sail rose above the horizon. In the constant and arduous struggle waged by the present inhabitants with the stones and the rock, the limits of the stronghold have, ages ago, disappeared, and if it had an outer wall it can no longer be traced. The dwellings were grouped together so closely that no streets can be distinguished. No chariot or beast of burden could have been known to the citizens. They communicated with each other by corridors leading from cabin to cabin. Here and there the doorways remain intact and uphold a heavy lintel of stone.

In each of these villages is to be found a single huge monument, composed of two blocks of stone, arranged =T=-shape. It is surrounded by a semicircular wall of unhewn stones, which probably once rose higher and higher and supported a roof of flat stones. These monuments are termed altars by the people of Menorca, and such they may, in fact, have been, but nothing definite can be said on this point.

Equally uncertain are the nature and purpose of the monuments called talayots, a word allied to the Arabic term for watch-tower. These are structures of uncemented blocks of stone in the form of a tower, slightly conical or cylindrical, sometimes square at the base. None of them is wholly intact. Whether the summit was a dome or a platform we have no means of knowing. “I observed, however, at Torranba de Salort,” says M. Cartailhac, “a detail which throws some light on this point. The tower is among the highest at the summit and at two steps from the centre lies a great stone more than a metre in diameter, in the shape of a thick mushroom, almost circular, flat on one side and with a protuberance on the other. It is possible that this block once crowned the culminating-point of the edifice.”

Among the largest talayots are those of Torre Ilafuda. They measure sixteen metres across the base and fourteen at the summit. The stones are laid horizontally and are carefully adjusted. The walls are three or four metres thick, and skilfully constructed. The interior usually forms a single chamber, and where this was large the roof was supported by a column formed of huge blocks of stone. The wall itself is often threaded by a passage to the roof or upper chamber, so narrow that it could only have been ascended by crawling. The entrance to the talayot is through a square opening large enough to permit a short man to walk through upright. All sorts of theories and guesses have been made as to what these towers originally were. Near every =T=-shaped altar one or two are to be found; there was always one at least on every town site. Perhaps, suggests our authority, they existed before all the other structures and were used as centres by a later population. Though they are often placed on eminences, it has been established that they were not fortresses; it can be proved more or less satisfactorily that they were not dwelling-places, storehouses, or tombs.

The boat-shaped piles, called navetas or naves, on the other hand had clearly a sepulchral character. The front or prow is slightly concave. The entrance measures about half a metre across and three-quarters of a metre in height, the edges are grooved as though to admit some sort of door. Inside, the passage widens and conducts you to a second opening as narrow as the first, through which you penetrate into the mortuary chamber itself. Filled now with rubbish, filth and carrion, these are the tombs of the fathers of the Mediterranean races, whose bones are brought to light each time the Menorcan ploughs his stubborn soil.

Stones must always have been a plague to the people of the island, and this, besides accounting for their selection of the sling as their peculiar weapon, may partially explain, as Ford reasonably remarks, the abundance of these monuments. “The erection of a large tumulus was not a piece of barbaric extravagance. It provided an unperishable monument for the person it was intended to honour (?) and it got rid of an immense mass of loose stone which greatly impeded agriculture.”

“One fact,” adds this lively writer, “is very curious. The Menorcans, even now, are in the habit of constructing just such tumuli as the talayots for the use of their cattle, though of smaller stones. In the distance they present an appearance not at all unlike the older structures.”

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Ibiza, the third largest island of the group, is one of those spots which can afford no sort of justification for its existence. It is a mere backwater, a stagnant pool of humanity, interesting, though, as a place buried beneath prejudices and customs hundreds of years old. How should they be blown away in so out-of-the-way an island? The town stands on a fine harbour and reminds one rather of Guernsey. The collegiate church, formerly a cathedral, was founded by the Archbishop of Tarragona, in the thirteenth century, at the time the island was granted to him by Jaime the Conqueror. It is uninteresting, except for the view from the belfry. Better worth a visit is the fortified church of San Antonio at the other end of the island, wherein the people took refuge at the approach of the Corsairs. It is flanked with two massive towers and the apse has a parapet pierced with embrasures for guns. The walls are nearly eight feet thick, and the doorway is protected by a machicolation.

There is little else to be seen at Ibiza during the short time the traveller will be disposed to stay there, but M. Vuillier, who lingered there longer than he had intended, is able to tell us much that is interesting about the people and their customs. The islanders are a savage primitive stock. The recognised form of salutation between man and maid is for the former to hurry after the latter and without any warning discharge his gun into the ground at her feet. After spending the evening at her house, he fires at the ceiling, so that it should be easy to tell at a glance on going into a house for the first time if the daughters have been much sought after. The men do not confine their shooting to this sort of practice, however; duels, assassinations, and vendettas are frequent, and the feuds partake of the mysterious brutal character of those of Kentucky and Tennessee. In such a country animals fare badly, and one is not surprised to learn that throwing stones at a live cock is one of the favourite pastimes. When the youths come a-courting, each sits with the girl for a few minutes in turn and if he overstays the allotted period is punished by the others with the knife or pistol. Abduction is the rule rather than the exception; but for all the anxiety shown to possess them, the women have a wretched time, being hardly allowed to stir out of their dingy poverty-stricken cabins. Altogether it must be as difficult to make yourself happy at Ibiza as at any spot on or off the planet.

Of the remaining islands of the group, only one deserves mention and that only for its sad memories. This is Cabrera. It is little better than a bare rock, incapable of affording subsistence to more perhaps than two or three score of men, yet here during the Peninsular War the Spaniards were thoughtless enough to confine 5500 French soldiers, the victims of Dupont’s surrender at Bailen. Their sufferings were more severe than those of many a shipwrecked mariner. Each man was allowed only 24 ounces of bread and a few beans every four days. There was but one spring in the island and the thirst-maddened men would fight each other desperately to get a drink from this. Murder was common, and in one instance a man was detected in the act of preparing a meal from the remains of a comrade. It is touching to relate that for many months the men made a pet of a donkey they found wandering on the island, and it was not till the boat which brought them their miserable ration was long overdue that the poor famished wretches could find it in their hearts to kill and eat their only four-footed companion. As time went on, the captives made some attempt to cultivate their island, and their lot greatly improved, as the Spaniards continued to send the same rations, though their number was now reduced by two-fifths. Finally, in 1814, the last survivors were taken off by a French transport. The bones of those who died on the island were interred by the crew of a French warship and a monument was erected over their remains.