I

THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR

IF YOU HAVE ALWAYS CROSSED the Atlantic in the spring-time or in the summer months, as do most tourists, you will find that leaving New York in the winter is more like a relief expedition to the north pole than the setting forth on a pleasure tour to the summer shores of the Mediterranean.

There is no green grass on the hills of Staten Island, but there is, instead, a long field of ice stretching far up the Hudson River, and a wind that cuts into the face, and dashes the spray up over the tugboats in frozen layers, leaving it there like the icing on a cake. The Atlantic Highlands are black with bare branches and white with snow, and you observe for the first time that men who go down to the sea in ships know nothing of open fireplaces. An icy wind keeps the deck as clear as a master-at-arms could do it; and sudden storms of snow, which you had always before associated with streets or fields, and not at all with the decks of ships, burst over the side, and leave the wood-work wet and slippery, and cold to the touch.

And then on the third or fourth day out the sea grows calm, and your overcoat seems to have taken on an extra lining; and strange people, who apparently have come on board during the night, venture out on the sunlit deck and inquire for steamer chairs and mislaid rugs.

These smaller vessels which run from New York to Genoa are as different from the big North Atlantic boats, with their twin screws and five hundred cabin passengers, as a family boarding-house is from a Broadway hotel. This is so chiefly because you are sailing under a German instead of an English flag. There is no one so important as an English captain—he is like a bishop in gold lace; but a German captain considers his passengers as one large happy family, and treats them as such, whether they like their new relatives or not. The discipline on board the Fulda was like that of a ship of war, where the officers and crew were concerned, but the passengers might have believed they were on their own private yacht.

There was music for breakfast, dinner, and tea; music when the fingers of the trombonist were frozen and when the snow fell upon the taut surface of the big drum; and music at dawn to tell us it was Sunday, so that you awoke imagining yourself at church. There was also a ball, and the captain led an opening march, and the stewards stood at every point to see that the passengers kept in line, and “rounded up” those who tried to slip away from the procession. There were speeches, too, at all times, and lectures and religious services, and on the last night out a grand triumph of the chef, who built wonderful candy goddesses of Liberty smiling upon the other symbolic lady who keeps watch on the Rhine, and the band played “Dixie,” which it had been told was the national anthem, and the portrait of the German Emperor smiled down upon us over his autograph. All this was interesting, because it was characteristic of the Germans; it showed their childish delight in little things, and the same simplicity of character which makes the German soldiers who would not move out of the way of the French bullets dance around a Christmas-tree. The American or the Englishman will not do these things, because he has too keen a sense of the ridiculous, and is afraid of being laughed at. So when he goes to sea he plays poker and holds auctions on the run.

There was only one passenger on board who objected to the music. He was from Detroit, and for the first three days remained lashed to his steamer chair like a mummy, with nothing showing but a blue nose and closed eyelids. The band played at his end of the deck, and owing to the fingers of the players being frozen, and to the sudden lurches of the ship, the harmony was sometimes destroyed. Those who had an ear for music picked up their steamer chairs and moved to windward; but this young man, being half dead and firmly lashed to his place, was unable to save himself.

On the morning of the fourth day, when the concert was over and the band had gone to thaw out, the young man suddenly sat upright and pointed his forefinger at the startled passengers. We had generally decided that he was dead. “The Lord knows I’m a sick man,” he said, blinking his eyes feebly; “but if I live till midnight I’ll find out where they hide those horns, and I’ll drop ‘em into the Gulf Stream, if it takes my dying breath.” He then fell over backwards, and did not speak again until we reached Gibraltar.

There is something about the sight of land after one has been a week without it which supplies a want that nothing else can fill; and it is interesting to note how careless one is as to its name, or whether it is pink or pale blue on the maps, or whether it is ruled by a king or a colonial secretary. It is quite sufficient that it is land. This was impressed upon me once, on entering New York Harbor, by a young man who emerged from his deck cabin to discover, what all the other passengers already knew, that we were in the upper bay. He gave a shout of ecstatic relief and pleasure. “That,” he cried, pointing to the west, “is Staten Island, but that,” pointing to the right, “is Land.”

The first land you see on going to Gibraltar is the Azores Islands. They are volcanic and mountainous, and accompany the boat for a day and a half; but they could be improved if they were moved farther south about two hundred miles, as one has to get up at dawn to see the best of them. It is quite warm by this time, and the clothes you wore in New York seem to belong to a barbarous period and past fashion, and have become heavy and cumbersome, and take up an unnecessary amount of room in your trunk.

THE MAN FROM DETROIT

And then people tell you that there is land in sight again, and you find how really far you are from home when you learn that it is Portugal, and so a part of Europe, and not an island thrown up by a volcano, or stolen or strayed from its moorings at the mainland. Portugal is apparently a high red hill, with a round white tower on the top of it flying signal flags. Its chief industry is the arranging of these flags by a man. It is, on the whole, a disappointing country. After this, everybody begins to pack and to exchange visiting-cards; and those who are to get off at Gibraltar are pursued by stewards and bandmasters and young men with testimonials that they want signed, and by the weak in spirit, who, at the eleventh hour, think they will not go on to Genoa, but will get off here and go on to Tangier, and who want you to decide for them. And which do you think would pay best, and what is there to see in Tangier, anyway? And as that is exactly what you are going to find out, you cannot tell.

When I left the deck the last night out the stars were all over the heavens; and the foremast, as it swept slowly from side to side, looked like a black pendulum upside down marking out the sky and portioning off the stars. And when I woke there was a great creaking of chains, and I could see out of my port-hole hundreds of fixed lights and rows and double rows of lamps, so that you might have thought the ship during the night had run aground in the heart of a city.

The first sight of Gibraltar is, I think, disappointing. It means so much, and so many lives have been given for it, and so many ships have been sunk by its batteries, and such great powers have warred for twelve hundred years for its few miles of stone, that its black outline against the sky, with nothing to measure it with but the fading stars, is dwarfed and spoiled. It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base, and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which England holds the key. And even while you feel this, and are greedily following the course of each rampart and terrace with eyes that are tired of blank stretches of water, some one points to a low line of mountains lying like blue clouds before the red sky of the sunrise, dim, forbidding, and mysterious—and you know that it is Africa.

Spain, lying to the right, all green and amethyst, and flippant and gay with white houses and red roofs, and Gibraltar’s grim show of battlements and war, become somehow of little moment. You feel that you have known them always, and that they are as you fancied they would be. But this other land across the water looks as inscrutable, as dark, and as silent as the Sphinx that typifies it, and you feel that its Pillar of Hercules still marks the entrance to the “unknown world.”

Nine out of every ten of those who visit Gibraltar for the first time expect to find an island. It ought to be, and it would be one but for a strip of level turf half a mile wide and half a mile long which joins it to the sunny green hills of Spain. But for this bit of land, which they call “the Neutral Ground,” Gibraltar would be an island, for it has the Mediterranean to the east, a bay, and beyond that the hills of Spain to the west, and Africa dimly showing fourteen miles across the sea to the south.

THE ROCK FROM THE BAY

Gibraltar has been besieged thirteen times; by Moors and by Spaniards, and again by Moors, and again by Spaniards against Spaniards. It was during one of these wars between...