The Pillars of Hercules

There was a time when I wanted to see only wild places, and was reluctant to go to a place that had been written about extensively. But then—it is so funny about travel—I would go to a place that everyone had been written about and it was as though I was seeing something entirely new. I felt that when I was writing about Britain. My Britain was different from anything I had read. It made the going good because I was unprepared for what I saw. That was always the best part of travel, the sense of discovery. When there was none and it was all predictable I wanted to go home.

The Mediterranean was not one place, but many; and I was at last calm enough to venture into its complexity without the risk of getting lost. I was happier with love in my life. I was not looking for a new home, traveling hopefully down the road rejecting places as I passed through. I was traveling in the purest way, without envy or a spirit of acquisition. I was setting out on an extensive trip around the shores of the Mediterranean, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and heathen; to meet the people, eat the food, get rained on and shot at.

My idea was to see it out of season, when the tourists were back home, spending the fall and winter in the northern half, the spring and summer in the Levant and North Africa, going from one Pillar to the other; and to make a modern Grand Tour, seeking out wise people.

An inland sea is perfect for a journey, because the coastline determines the itinerary.

• • •

The day I arrived in Gibraltar, the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Joe Bossano, was at the United Nations, explaining to the assembly why Gibraltar wanted to remain itself, autonomous. But Gibraltar has nothing but the rock and its strategic location. It makes nothing, it sells nothing, it imports everything it needs to sustain life; it is tiny in both land area and population (a mere twenty-eight thousand people, of which sixteen thousand are voters). It is just a few streets at the base of the rock, and on the lower slopes there are some luxury homes and gun emplacements. There is not enough room for an airport, and so when a plane is due the main road into Spain is closed—barriers swing shut—and traffic is halted until the plane has landed. The aircraft taxis across the road, and the portion of Gibraltar known as The Neck, and continues to the terminal. At the All Clear, the road reopens.

The Spanish dictator Franco, El Caudillo (his title is the Spanish equivalent of Hitler’s Führer or Mussolini’s Duce), with his iron hand in a chokehold on the throat of every Spaniard until just the other day, closed his border with Gibraltar in 1969.

“He died in 1975,” a Gibraltarian told me, “but it was another ten years before the border was opened again.”

That was ordered by Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales, in 1985. But Spain has never wavered in insisting that Gibraltar be given back to Spain.

So for sixteen years Gibraltar was hemmed in like a little penal colony. And it did no good for the people in Gibraltar to harangue the Spaniards with the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave Britain sovereignty over the Rock in 1713. In this same treaty the island of Manhattan was swapped for Surinam. In the most casual conversation in Gibraltar, people quoted the relevant clause of the Treaty of Utrecht. I took a closer look at the Treaty and saw that the terms of Article 10 prevented “residence or entry into the town of Gibraltar by Jews and Moors.”

The anonymous author of How to Capture and Govern Gibraltar (1865) stated that Protestants ought to be encouraged and given low rents and hospitality. But “Papists, Moors and Jews” should be discouraged.

And in some ways this sentinel rock became a bigoted British island at the entrance to the Mediterranean. As a British garrison it could hardly fail to be reactionary, backward, philistine and drunken, as it upheld the Royal Navy tradition of rum, sodomy and the lash. For years it was noted for its vast number of taverns. But there is something so wonderful and stark about the rock—and it is the only grand work of nature for miles around—that its enchantment is transferred to the people who live on its lower slopes and at its base. It stands enormous and immutable, dwarfing everything and everyone nearby; and so Gibraltarians seem like a tribe of tiny idolaters, clinging to their mammoth limestone shrine.

It is pretty clear that shrunken bankrupt Britain finds Gibraltar too expensive to run, no more than an inconvenient relic of a former age. It even looks it. Apart from the Rock it looks like an English coastal town, much smaller but with the same seediness and damp glamour of, say, Weston-super-Mare; a little promenade, and tea-shops, and fish and chip shops, and ironmongers, and respectable-looking public houses, and bus shelters and twitching curtains. Its Englishness makes it safe, tidy, smug, community-minded.