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With a camera in Majorca
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Excerpt:
In the spring of 1906, we found ourselves with three months to devote to foreign travel, and after some deliberation, we decided to spend them in exploring those " lies outlines " of the Mediterranean Majorca, Minorca, and Ibiza and in ascertaining for ourselves whether they were worth visiting and what were the possibilities of a stay there.
Their names, it is true, lingered in our memories like some familiar echo from far-off schoolroom days, but with regard to all practical details we were extremely ignorant, and it was without knowing a soul in the islands or a soul who had ever been there, that we set out on the last day of January to visit the Balearics those homes of famous slingers.
A railway journey of twenty-two hours takes the traveller from Paris to Barcelona by way of Toulouse. The change from France to Spain is an abrupt one. After racing through flatlands of vine, through sand dunes and salt lagoons, one crosses the frontier into a dry place of red and orange hills, where stone villages stand bare and unshrinking in the strong sunlight, and here and there a palm solitary outpost of the south waves her dusty plumes; and the night falls suddenly upon a sky crystal clear, as the sun slips in glory behind the strong outline of the purple Pyrenees.
An old writer has left it on record that the thing which chiefly repented him in his life was having gone anywhere by sea when he might have gone by land. Since it is decreed, however, that islands shall be reached by water, one subject of remorse was spared us as we boarded the steamship Miramar at half-past six on the evening of February 5th.
And so great is the power of comparatives to cheer, that though the worst of sailors, we derived certain happiness from the reflection that we had at any rate chosen the lesser evil in sailing from Barcelona instead of taking the twenty-four-hour crossing from Marseilles. Behold us then at dawn gliding into the Bay of Palma and gazing around us with that undefined expectancy that even in these prosaic days of travel tinges with romance the landing on an unknown shore.
We are sharply recalled from such visions: a sea of pale yellow-ochre tiles, unbroken, though intersected by narrow crevasse-like streets, stretches down to a strip of brilliant blue water in the harbour below. On flat housetops lines of wet linen flap wildly in sun and wind. Jutting up above the mass of irregular roofs are fantastic turrets and aviaries, painted blue and red, the homes of innumerable pigeons now wheeling in flocks over the town, their wings singing as they cleave the air above our heads.
From scattered belfries and towers un- melodious bells clash out wildly for a few moments and then relapse into silence; and like a running accompaniment to the murmur of the streets is heard the gobble, gobble of many turkeys, and the bright eye of one of these birds is seen watching us fixedly through the Venetian shutters of a small upper room across the way. No, truly! this is all very unlike a northern city. Majorca is in fact a stepping-stone between Europe and Africa, where the East and West rather than the north and south of her geographical position may be said to meet.
She has had many masters in her day: the earliest colonists of whom we have any record were the sea-faring Khodians, who was said to build " as though for eternity." But not the faintest trace of their occupation survives. Their successors were the Carthaginians, who left footprints in Minorca by founding Mahon, the capital, the reputed birthplace of Hannibal.
Then came the Romans, who in 123 B.C. founded Palma and Pollensa; With a Camera in Majorca, Balearic slingers fought under Julius Caesar in Gaul as they had done under Hannibal at Cannae. Five hundred years later the islands were captured by the Vandals- were retaken by the Byzantine general Belisarius, and fell subsequently with the greater part of Spain into the hands of the Visigoths. In the eighth century came the resistless tide of the Saracens, who held the island for an uninterrupted period of nearly five hundred years, and might have kept it longer had they not strained the patience of their Christian neighbours to breaking point by their piratical habits.
They had become such a menace to the marine commerce of Europe that the then Pope preached a crusade against the Balearic bandits, and an allied fleet sailed from Pisa and Catalonia in the twelfth century. The pirates' nest was smoked out, Palma succumbing after a long and stubborn siege. The allies, however, proved unable to retain their prize, and the island relapsed to the Moors, who so far took their lesson to heart as to somewhat amend their ways.
Author: Margaret D'Este
Publication Date: 1907
Author: Margaret D'Este
Publication Date: 1907
