I must now return to my personal recollections of my command, which began, as usual, with a sojourn at the Salins d'Hyeres, to knock the crews into shape a bit. Thence I was expected to take the squadron to Tunis, thus following the usual custom.
These two anchorages, Hyeres and Tunis, had been for a considerable period the only ports in which the squadron was allowed to lie. It oscillated between the two; a most tiresome bit of navigation it was. In the open roads at Tunis, too, we could only lie and roll, a long way from shore, with no possibility of giving our crews any relaxation whatsoever. I do not hesitate to say that I objected to being tied to this rigorously circumscribed field of operations, beyond which it looked as if we dared not go.
"Crews," said I to the minister, "are like schoolboys. If you want them to work well you must divert their minds, and give them something to think about and look at. Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of life on board ship."
I gained my point, and we went first of all to the Golfe Jouan. Will it be believed that our squadrons never went near that excellent anchorage and lovely spot? They used to be at the Islands of Hyeres. They used to go out to drill in the open sea, and every Saturday they went straight back to those same islands, so as to let the married men in the squadron get back to Toulon to their family duties on the Sunday. I was the first admiral to break through this rule.
The Golfe Jouan and Cannes, and all that lovely country, were not at that time what they now are. There was only one single villa at Cannes, the Villa Eleonore, built by Lord Brougham, the Christopher Columbus of the locality. He always came to the Tuileries on his way backwards and forwards between his villa and England; and he invariably sang the praises of that exquisite coast to us. One evening he made a sketch of his villa for my mother, which I still possess.
The only gaieties at Cannes in those days consisted in village festivals, which are known in Provence as Romerages, the equivalent of the Pardons in Brittany. People went to them on foot, there not being a carriage in the country I remember I went to the Romerage at Valauris. The little Provencales in their short petticoats and brown stockings, and their broad-brimmed black hats, enjoyed themselves to their hearts' content in the shade to the sound of the galoubet, while my eyes wandered between the umbrella pines across the wide sea horizon, of that lapis-blue peculiar to the Mediterranean. It was more primitive then than it is nowadays, but not a whit less lovely.
From Cannes we were obliged to go to Tunis, but we put in, on our way, at the Balearic Islands, and at Palma in Majorca, where the Spanish authorities gave us an excellent reception, and granted me permission, with the best of grace, to practise some very interesting disembarkation drill. The captain-general who authorised me to do this bore the name of Tacon, and had received the title of Duqtie de la Union de Cuba in recognition of the services he had rendered as governor-general in that island.
He was a very superior man, under whose most enlightened, but at the same time most absolute, of governments, the colony rose to the highest degree of prosperity. Some difficulties with the Home Government had led to his recall, and he was at Majorca in a state of semi-disgrace. No longer a young man, he wore a wig of the deepest black, which, so local tradition affirmed, was made out of the hair of a lady friend whom he had had shaved in a fit of jealousy.
The King of Aragon, Don Jaime, is buried in the fine cathedral of Palma His body rests in the sacristy, in the drawer of a kind of press, in which I saw it lying, while one of the canons, to impress me with a sense of its perfect preservation, drummed with his fingers on the stomach of the corpse!
On our way to the Balearic Islands we fulfilled a pious duty. After the unhappy capitulation of Baylen and its shameful violation, our unfortunate soldiers, victims of this piece of weakness and disloyalty, were cast upon an island called Cabrera, a bare and desert spot, where most of them died of hunger, abandoned and forgotten by the whole world. Having heard that their bones were lying scattered about unburied on the isle, I had them laid in consecrated soil, and over them, through the agency of our consul, M. Cabarrus, we raised a monument, subscribed for by the whole squadron, with this inscription: