With a Camera in Majorca

by Margaret D'Este

At half-past five the following morning we entered the famous Minorcan port, and steamed up it for three miles before sighting Mahon, which occupies a commanding position on the edge of the precipitous rock walls of the harbour. Disembarking at a little quay below the town, we confided our valises to a porter and followed him up a steep, cobbled street to the Hotel Bustamante, a very respectable inn in the higher quarter, where we were promptly accommodated with rooms and board at a pension of six pesetas a day.

Seen at close quarters, Mahon is singularly uninteresting and commonplace. If the architecture of Palma is essentially Spanish, and that of Iviza Moorish, Mahon must be put down as painfully and typically English. The long, straight streets of ugly houses, without balconies or outside shutters, the dreary vistas of grey cobbles and foot pavements recall the outskirts of one of our own manufacturing towns; there are the same mean-looking painted street doors, the same sash windows, even the same lace curtains inside. We were shown the exercise ground, with its row of British-built barracks, the hideous Paséo, or Promenade, which resembles a cinder track, and the favourite drive along the harbour, a dismally unattractive road. The sole trace of the picturesque that the town can lay claim to consists of one small fragment of the old fortifications that spans a modern street—a turreted archway known as Barbarossa’s Gate, in memory of the corsair who sacked the city in the sixteenth century.

The inhabitants of Mahon share the general commonplaceness of their surroundings. They have neither the dignified bearing of the Majorcans nor their good looks; the men are not clean shaven like those of the other islands, but wear beards, and sometimes whiskers. The style of dress is also very inferior, and here and there we met with signs of actual untidiness among the women—frowsy heads and ill-fitting blouses, such as we had not set eyes on since landing in the Balearics.

Something of this lack of personal neatness may perhaps be set down to the tempestuous winds from which Mahon suffers almost perpetually, and which nearly tore our hats from our heads and our clothes from our backs as we drove out towards the mouth of the harbour to visit the ruined fortress of San Felípe. San Felípe is a strong position commanding the approach to Port Mahon upon the southern side, and it played an important part in the English occupation of Minorca. Twice captured by the British and twice retaken, it fell for the second time in the year 1782, when General Murray was forced to capitulate to a combined French and Spanish force under De Crillon, after a long and tedious siege which the allies had hoped to avoid by the offer of a bribe of £100,000 to the English general.

It was during this siege that the cook of the Duc de Crillon earned for himself undying fame by inventing as an adjunct to his master’s salads the sauce termed Mahonnaise—the familiar mayonnaise of all cookery books to come.

We had hoped to find objects of pictorial as well as sentimental value among the ruined fortifications, rock galleries, and nameless British graves at San Felípe, of which the guide book speaks, but our hopes were destined to be rudely dashed, for after a most uninteresting drive of a couple of miles between untidy stone walls we were unceremoniously stopped by a sentry, who informed us that no one was allowed to approach the fort without a permit from the commandant of Mahon. For our consolation he added that in any case there was nothing to be seen, as the ruins of the old fort had been replaced by modern defence works. A more unpicturesque scene could indeed hardly be imagined than the site of San Felípe now presents—a bleak headland traversed by long lines of masonry and intersecting trenches, with grass-grown embankments sloping down to the old sea wall on the side of the harbour, from whence one looks across to the new fortress built on the opposite peninsula.

Disappointed, we retraced our steps. It was now evident that neither Mahon nor its immediate surroundings would produce anything that need detain us in the town, and we decided to set out without further delay in search of those relics of a far older occupation than that of the British—the menhirs and dolmens of a pre-historic race.

These megalithic remains—of which there are said to be some two hundred groups in all—are found scattered over the whole of the southern half of the island; but the average traveller will be wise to confine himself to those specimens only which present most perfectly the different types of monument erected, i.e., the tumulus or talayót, the altar, the enclosure of monoliths, and the megalithic dwelling. Some of the finest specimens of all occur in the neighbourhood of Mahon itself, and can be visited in the course of a drive extending over some four hours. Acting on the recommendation of our very friendly host we chartered a galaréta driven by a swarthy native who knew the country thoroughly. Our host, to our great surprise, spoke very fair English, and even our driver could say “Yes,” which was a great advance upon anything we had yet met with.

It is singular that although so many English customs and traditions have survived amongst the Mahonese—who are dubbed Inglesos by the rest of the island—yet the only island to agree with ourselves in its rule of the road should be Majorca, both Minorca and Iviza following the opposite and continental fashion.

Mounting our galaréta we bumped and crashed away over the worn paving of the town and emerged by the Barbarossa gate into the open country. The surroundings of Mahon are not beautiful; flat, windswept, and practically treeless, save where a stunted olive-tree hunches its back to the blast, the most conspicuous feature of the landscape is its countless miles of stone walls. If we had thought Majorca stony, it was only because we had not seen Minorca. Majorca is a land of fields intersected by walls—Minorca a land of walls interspersed with fields. Once off the high road one becomes involved in a labyrinth of narrow lanes bordered by stone walls four or five feet thick, and varying in height from six to ten feet, between which one wanders as in an overgrown aqueduct. Every field, however small—and some of them are patches but a few yards square—is enclosed by a prodigious rampart of loose stones, within which cows and donkeys graze as though at the bottom of a quarry. These walls serve a double purpose in sheltering the crops and the animals from the wind, and in relieving the land of a certain proportion of superabundant stone.