The Pillars of Hercules

For years I was happy flopping along elsewhere, avoiding the Mediterranean. Such a trip had always been regarded as the Grand Tour, a search for wisdom and experience. Yet at the age of fifty I still had never been to Spain. All I had seen of Yugoslavia was the main line from Ljubljana to the Bulgarian border. Yugoslavia was now five separate nations. I had never been to Israel or Egypt or Morocco or Malta. Most people I met had been to many of these countries; everyone knew much more of the Mediterranean than I did. Everybody had been there. I suspected that from one end to the other it was nothing but urbanization and clip joints. James Joyce once wrote, “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” I assumed the whole Mediterranean was like that, tourism as ancestor worship and the veneration of incoherent ruins.

Then I began to think that this was perhaps the best reason for going to see this part of the world, that it was so over-visited it was haunted and decrepit, totally changed. Change and decay had made it worth seeing and an urgent subject to record. I was the man for it. Half a lifetime of traveling had given me a taste for the macabre.

Some countries swallow the traveler; certainly in Africa and Polynesia and South America I found this to be true. But Europe, and the Mediterranean in particular, is like a stage set. It gives drama to a trip—it is a background.

You know this already. You have been to Italy—very likely to Sicily, perhaps to Siracusa, and you stayed at the same little hotel I found. Near the harbor? Run by a grumpy man who wrote poetry? About twenty-five dollars, with breakfast? And you might read this and say: It was not that way at all! Siracusa was delightful, the hotel was clean, the poet was a cheery soul. Or it might be somewhere else we both visited, in Spain or Greece or Egypt. Never mind.

That was your trip, that was your Italy. This book is about my trip, my Italy. This is my Mediterranean.

My idea was to begin in Gibraltar, and go to Spain, and keep going, hugging the coast, staying on the ground, no planes; to travel by train, bus, ferry, ship; to make a circuit of the sea from the Rock of Gibraltar all the way around to Ceuta, from one Pillar of Hercules to the other. To travel the whole shore, from the fish and chip shops of Torremolinos to the gun emplacements of Tel Aviv, by way of the war in Croatia and the nudist beaches of Crete.

The Mediterranean, this simple almost tideless sea, the size of thirty Lake Superiors, had everything: prosperity, poverty, tourism, terrorism, several wars in progress, ethnic strife, fascists, pollution, drift nets, private islands owned by billionaires, Gypsies, seventeen countries, fifty languages, oil drilling platforms, sponge fishermen, religious fanatics, drug smuggling, fine art, and warfare. It had Christians, Muslims, Jews; it had the Druzes, who are a strange farrago of all three religions; it had heathens, Zoroastrians and Copts and Baha’is. It is over two thousand miles from end to end. It is noted for being salty. It ranged from the shoals and shallows of the northern Adriatic to the almost sixteen-thousand-foot depths in the Ionian Basin, west of Crete. Although it is deficient in plankton, it is still the home of dolphins, and in the deeps around Mallorca sperm whales (some of them entangled in drift nets) are often sighted. Giant loggerhead turtles—an endangered species in the Mediterranean—return in diminishing numbers every year to the Greek island of Zákinthos, where they struggle among tourists and beachside restaurants for nesting sites.

One of the many strange facts about the Mediterranean people is that compared with the British and the Northern Europeans they are not great fish eaters. This is Emil Ludwig’s observation and it is generally true. One of the more anticlimactic experiences in a Mediterranean market is surveying the fish goggling on marble slabs. There are not many, they are rather small, and the larger proportion have been caught outside the Mediterranean. Tuna is the exception, because it makes an annual journey through the Pillars and across the Mediterranean to spawn in the Black Sea. Dolphins are protected. With the exception of illegal drift-net vessels that use nets up to ten miles long (for example, Greenpeace France detected and documented 137 illegal Italian drift-netters between April and June 1994), fishing is small-scale and unrewarding. Deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean is almost unknown, apart from the illegal drift-netters and the competition for the migrating tuna.

It is not a fishy sea, but it is blessed with a beautiful climate, and though Mediterranean storms and high winds can be devastating, it has been noted for its calm waters. The very word Mediterranean signified sunny skies and balmy weather, and for thousands of years these shores had been a kind of Eden, fruitful with grapes and olives and lemons.