The Pillars of Hercules

Gibraltar’s historical notes satisfied my curiosity for meaningless facts and colorful atrocities. There was first the list of sieges, fourteen of them, going back to the year 410, when the Vandals overran the Roman Empire, and the later incursions of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. Franco’s closure of Spain’s frontier with Gibraltar is known as the fifteenth siege. In the seventh century King Sisebut persecuted Gibraltar’s Jews, tortured thousands, and forcibly baptized ninety thousand of them overall. Then there were seven hundred years of Moors in Gibraltar. And this: “In 1369, when Pedro the Cruel, who had succeeded Alfonso XI, was assassinated, the Count of Translamara seized the throne of Castile and became Henry II. The following year, 1370, Algeciras was destroyed by Mohammed V.” And on December 13, 1872, “the mystery derelict Marie Celeste arrived in Gibraltar.”

Lastly, Gibraltar is known as the scene of a sudden shocking multiple murder. The woman who told me where it had taken place described it in a whisper: “Walk down Winston Churchill Road, and just before the overpass, across from the Shell station, that’s where it happened.”

One Sunday in 1986, much to the horror of Gibraltarians, three civilians were shot dead by men wearing masks. Witnesses described the suddenness of it, all three cut down, and one masked man lingering over a supine wounded man and finishing him off. And then the masked men vanished. It was not hard for them to get away, since they were members of the British SAS sent on this deadly mission by Margaret Thatcher.

No one mourned the dead men. They were Irish. It was claimed that they were going to plant a bomb at The Convent, the Governor’s House, during a parade. That was not firmly established—the whole affair was obscured by official secrecy. Two years after the killings, a British minister in Mrs. Thatcher’s government blandly explained that the government briefings to journalists at the time of the incident had been inaccurate. The dead men had not been armed, as had been suggested. And the car parked in Gibraltar had not contained explosives. So why were these men killed?

The minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, said, “They made movements which led the military personnel operating in support of Gibraltar police to conclude that their own lives and the lives of others were under threat.”

The official version stressed that a bomb would have been devastating. The blast would have damaged two schools and a Jewish home for old folks and the marchers and the spectators. It would have been on a par with the bomb hidden under the bandstand in Hyde Park, that killed eleven members of a military band, one of the nastiest IRA crimes; it is very easy to plant a bomb in a peaceful trusting place. But no one ever knew whether there had been any good reason for the murders of the three Irishmen that day.

Gibraltar is still a garrison, though greatly reduced in numbers of men, and the steep town looks severe but is actually rather friendly. In common with an English village the Gibraltarians are friendly to the point of nosiness. It is small enough so that everyone knows everyone else, except the Moroccans who come and go. The Gibraltarian family names are all known—the English, the Spanish, the Jewish ones, especially. The great thing in Gibraltar is to be able to date your ancestry to the Genoese who emigrated early in the eighteenth century.

Because Gibraltarians asked me questions I returned the compliment and pestered people about their origins.

“I’m a Gibraltarian,” a man named Joe told me. His real name was José, and his surname sounded Spanish too. I asked him about that.

He said, “I’m not Spanish, I’m not English.”

“What does your passport say?”

“Colony of Gibraltar,” he said. “But we would rather be an English colony than part of Spain. The majority of people here want autonomy.”

In other words, for Gibraltar to govern herself and for Britain to pay the bills.

“We want independence and to be part of the EC. The frontier was opened in 1985 only to satisfy the EC—the Spanish were trying to make friends.”

“What did you do all those years when it was impossible to go across the road to Spain?”

“I went to Morocco.” He shook his head. “It was not like anything I ever saw before.”

“Interesting?”

“Awful.”

We talked about the absence of any manufacturing in Gibraltar.

“But we have shipyards,” he said. “We can repair ships.”

“You speak Spanish?” I asked.

“And English.”