For you can see the lighthouse on Cape Trafalgar, and the Bay of Cadiz itself has been the scene of some of England's most glorious and desperate feats of arms. There is little stirring now in the wide harbour, where the ships ride lazily at anchor, and their crews crowd to the bulwarks and exchange pleasantries with your boatman as he pulls you towards the quay. And so you step on shore, and enter the fair city.
It looks so fresh and fragrant that you would not think it ancient. But Cadiz is the first-born city of Spain, probably the first foothold of civilization on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. It marks a new and tremendously important step forward in the world's progress. After Heaven knows how many attempts and false starts, the Phœnicians dared what no people of the ancient world had dared before. The Pillars of Hercules were regarded as the western boundary of the world: beyond was nothingness. And one day, with the east wind filling his sails and fear in the hearts of his crew, some forgotten Columbus of Sidon or of Tyre passed through the strait, and turning northward, beached his little galley on the peninsula where we stand. Civilization—arts and letters, commerce and social life, and all that makes life dear to modern men—had burst the narrow limits of the Middle Sea, and first hoisted its flag o'er Cadiz.
The thought is not uninspiring. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the first keel that ever ploughed the Atlantic grazed this strand. It is likely enough that the fleets of lost Atlantis, if that mystical isle possessed a ship, resorted hither, for the copper and precious metals of Tarshish. What voyages have begun from this port, from the little Phœnician craft setting forth in quest of the Tin Islands of the far north, to brave Cervera leading out his squadron to its preordained doom!
| "It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down, |
| It may be we shall touch the happy isles." |
And careless of fate, all these dauntless sailors have adventured forth into the deep.
In after years, the Phœnicians and Carthaginians had settlements here, and built great ugly palaces overlooking the sea and the estuaries. With their curling black beards I seem to see them, robed in the real Tyrian purple, reclining on their terraces even as their forefathers are shown in that strange picture in our National Gallery, "The Eve of the Deluge."
Their deluge was the Roman Invasion, when, in a good hour for humanity, Latin superseded Semitic civilization, and the cruel gods of Sidon bowed before the young and beautiful gods of Rome. Gades or Gaddir—I give it its two oldest names—did not suffer by its change of masters. Its mart was crowded, its merchants known from Britain to the Fortunate Isles, from Lusitania to Arabia. Much wealth engendered luxury. Life in Gades was feverish and distempered. The people had not forgotten the worship of Astarte, and the Gaditane dancing-girls proved themselves worthy daughters of the goddess. When the gods were dethroned the sensual city pined; and under the austere yoke of Islam it languished and all but faded away. It is interesting to note that its Moslem inhabitants were drawn from the old race of Philistines, some of whose gods had probably been worshipped here in the Punic days.
When Seville fell, the port continued subject to the Almohade Emir of Fez. Alfonso the Learned subdued it without difficulty in 1262, and filled it with colonists from the north coast of Spain, from such places as Santander and Laredo. But the Philistine taint in two senses was never eradicated; Cadiz remained ever financial and commercial, and cared nothing for art. Her brightest and blackest days followed the discovery of America, when she soon eclipsed Seville as the mart for the produce of the New Indies. Her wealth, not once but many times, wellnigh proved her downfall. Threatened again and again by the Barbary corsairs, she saw a far more terrible foe before her walls in 1587, in the person of Sir Francis Drake, who inflicted incalculable injury on her shipping. Worse was to come nine years later, when the English, under the command of the Earl of Essex, scaled the walls, sacked the city from end to end, slaughtered the inhabitants, profaned the churches and burnt the public buildings, and sailed away with enormous booty. Yet so quickly did Cadiz recover from this terrific catastrophe, that she again tempted the cupidity of our countrymen in 1625. But this time the Dons were well prepared and gave our fleet so warm a reception that we were compelled to retire with heavy loss.
The city attained its zenith of opulence in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, when it had become almost the exclusive entrepôt for the traffic between Southern Europe and the Americas. Numerous royal privileges and concessions secured it almost a monopoly of the trade. But no one organ can hope to escape an infection attacking the whole system. Spain in the eighteenth century was dying from that commonest of national diseases—dry-rot. Yet as late as 1770 Adam Smith did not hesitate to say that the merchants of London had not yet the wealth to compete with those of Cadiz, and a few years later the value of the bullion landed at its quays was estimated at 125 millions sterling.
Yet it was this bloated, purse-proud city, strangely enough, that proved the ark of refuge for Spain when the innumerable hosts of Napoleon swarmed over the land. Here were preserved the insignia of national independence, and here, amid the thunder of guns and in the lap of the ocean, was born the New and Free Spain. Cadiz proved a second Covadonga. The focus of the constitutional movement, she was savagely assailed by the Absolutists and their French allies. The defence of Trocadero, on the other side of the bay, against the forces of the Duc d'Angoulême popularized the name of the place throughout Europe. The pages of Balzac abound in allusions to that mischievous and futile attempt of the Government of the Restoration to rivet on Spaniards fetters that no Frenchman would wear. Then came a French invasion of another sort, of the Romanticists—of De Musset and Gautier, and the long-haired followers of Byron.