It was about this stage of the proceedings that among the men in uniform who were surrounding the new Governor on the poop we began to recognize different members of our hotel party.
The imposing captain of infantry was the tall man who sat next to us and spoke to nobody. The man with the bellowing voice and the beautiful eyes was the lieutenant in command of the Ivizan carbineers. The man at the end of the table was a captain of engineers. The man with the eye-glasses was the captain of the medical corps.
So much for our fancied astuteness. In place of sharing the table with a party of commercial travellers, as we had imagined, we had really been eating at the Ivizan equivalent to an officers' mess!
When everybody with any claim to the distinction had been presented and the company on the poop had dwindled down to a few, the family of the newly arrived Governor made its appearance, in the persons of three lively boys and a baby in a nurse's arms. Then, coincident with the appearance on deck of a lady in a hat and motor-veil, the six soldiers in fatigue uniform who had been in waiting sped up the gangway, to return laden with hand baggage, which, with other femininities, included a blue bandbox. And in their wake the Governor and his little tribe, accompanied by the colonel, stepped in stately measure across the wharf, and disappeared into the door of the hotel that gaped hospitably open beneath us.
As we drank the coffee that the overworked Paco had just brought us, we wondered a little what the new Governor's impressions of Iviza would be. He looked worn, we thought, as though weary with years of service; and we hoped that he would find his new home in this remote island a place of peace.
The little breakfast over, our black-garbed driver and the British Consul, who had suggested taking us to see the Salinas, were waiting. And we drove out in the sweet morning towards the curious series of lagoons where two great harvests of salt are yearly reaped.
The day was glorious, the air crisp, exhilarating, as we drove out over the country roads towards the wide stretch of flat land where the sea-water, prisoned by a cunning sequence of locks into vast shallow vats, was slowly evaporating in the strong sunshine.
Although lead and zinc are mined near Santa Eulalia, the Salinas at Iviza and at Formentera form the great industry of the Ivizan group of islands, salt to the amount of nine thousand tons being shipped each year to various parts of the world.
The history of these vast salt lagoons reaches back to before the conquest. In 1871 the Salinas, which for many years previously had belonged to the State, became the property of a private company, now known as the Salinera Española.