Gatherings from Spain

by Richard Ford

But even in those perilous times, robberies were the exception, not the rule, in spite of the full, whole, and exact particulars of natives as well as strangers; the accounts were equally exaggerated by both parties; in fact, the subject is the standing dish, the common topic of the lower classes of travellers, when talking and smoking round the venta fires, and forms the natural and agreeable religio loci, the associations connected with wild and cut-throat localities. Though these narrators’ pleasure is mingled with fear and pain, they delight in such histories as children do in goblin tales. Their Oriental amplification is inferior only to their credulity, its twin sister, and they end in believing their own lies. Whenever a robbery really does take place, the report spreads far and wide, and gains in detail and atrocity, for no muleteer’s story or sailor’s yarn loses in the telling. The same dire event,—names, dates, and localities only varied,—is served up, as a monkish miracle in the mediæval ages was, at many other places, and thus becomes infinitely multiplied. It is talked of for months all over the country, while the thousands of daily passengers who journey on unhurt are never mentioned. It is like the lottery, in which the great prize alone attracts attention, not the infinite majority of blanks. These robber-tales reach the cities, and are often believed by most respectable people, who pass their lives without stirring a league beyond the walls. They sympathize with all who are compelled to expose themselves to the great pains and perils, the travail of travel, and they endeavour with the most good-natured intentions to dissuade rash adventurers from facing them, by stating as facts, the apprehensions of their own credulity and imagination.

SPANISH ROBBER HISTORY.

The muleteers, venteros, and masses of common Spaniards see in the anxious faces of timid strangers, that their audience is in the listening and believing vein, and as they are garrulous and egotists by nature, they seize on a theme in which they alone hold forth; they are pleased at being considered an authority, and with the superiority which conveying information gives, and the power of inspiring fear confers; their mother-wit, in which few nations surpass them, soon discovers the sort of information which “our correspondent” is in want of, and as words here cost nothing, the gulping gobemouche is plentifully supplied with the required article. These reports are in due time set up in type, and are believed because in print; thus the tricks played on poor Mr. Inglis and his note-book were the laughter of the whole Peninsula, grave authorities caught the generous infection, until Mr. Mark’s robber-jokes at Malaga were booked and swallowed as if he had been an apostle instead of a consul.

As it was our fate to have wandered up and down the Peninsula when Ferdinand VII. was king of the Spains, and Jose Maria, at whose name old men and women there tremble yet, was autocrat of Andalucia, the moment was propitious for studying the philosophy of Spanish banditti, and our speculations were much benefited by a fortunate acquaintance with the redoubtable chief himself, from whom, as well as from many of his intelligent followers, we received much kindness and valuable information, which is acknowledged with thankfulness.

Historically speaking, Spain has never enjoyed a good character in this matter of the highway; it had but an indifferent reputation in the days of antiquity, but then, as now, it was generally the accusation of foreigners. The Romans, who had no business to invade it, were harassed by the native guerrilleros, those undisciplined bands who waged the “little war,” which Iberia always did. Worried by these unmilitary voltigeurs, they called all Spaniards who resisted them “latrones;” just as the French invaders, from the same reasons, called them ladrones or brigands, because they had no uniform; as if the wearing a schako given by a plundering marshal, could convert a pillager into a honest man, or the want of it could change into a thief, a noble patriot who was defending his own property and country; but l’habit ne fait pas le moine, say the French, and aunque la mona se viste de seda, mona se queda, although a monkey dresses in silk, monkey it remains, rejoin the Spaniards.

GUERRILLEROS.

Armed men are in fact the weed of the soil of Spain, in peace or war; to have their hand against all mankind seems to be an instinct in every descendant of Ishmael, and particularly among this Quixotic branch, whose knight-errants, reformers on horseback, have not unfrequently been robbers in the guise of gentlemen. During the war against Buonaparte, the Peninsula swarmed with insurgents, many of whom were inspired, by a sense of loyalty, with indignation at their outraged religion, and with a deep-rooted national loathing of the gabacho, and good service did these Minas and Co. do to the cause of their lawful king; but others used patriotic professions as specious cloaks to cover their instinctive passion for a lawless and freebooting career, and before the liberation of the country was effected, had become formidable to all parties alike. The Duke of Wellington, with his characteristic sagacity, foresaw, at his victorious conclusion of the struggle, how difficult it would be to weed out “this strange fruit borne on a tree grafted by patriotism.” The transition from murdering a Frenchman, to plundering a stranger, appeared a simple process to these patriotic scions, whose numbers were swelled with all who were, or who considered themselves to be, ill used—with all who could not dig, and were ashamed to beg. The evil was diminished during the latter years of the reign of Ferdinand VII., when the old hands began to die off, and an advance in social improvement was unquestionably general, before which these lawless occupations gave way, as surely as wild animals of prey do before improved cultivation. These evils, that are abated by internal quiet and the continued exertions of the authorities, increase with troubled times, which, as the tempest calls forth the stormy petrel, rouse into dangerous action the worst portions of society, and create a sort of civil cachexia, as we now see in Ireland.

SMUGGLERS.

Another source was, not to say is, Gibraltar, that hot-bed of contraband, that nursery of the smuggler, the prima materia of a robber and murderer. The financial ignorance of the Spanish government calls him in, to correct the errors of Chancellors of Exchequers:—“trovata la legge, trovato l’inganno.” The fiscal regulations are so ingeniously absurd, complicated, and vexatious, that the honest, legitimate merchant is as much embarrassed as the irregular trader is favoured. The operation of excessive duties on objects which people must, and therefore will have, is as strikingly exemplified in the case of tobacco in Andalucia, as it is in that, and many other articles on the Kent and Sussex coasts: in both countries the fiscal scourge leads to breaches of the peace, injury to the fair dealer, and loss to the revenue; it renders idle, predatory and ferocious, a peasantry which, under a wiser system, and if not exposed to overpowering temptation, might become virtuous and industrious. In Spain the evasion of such laws is only considered as cheating those who cheat the people; the villagers are heart and soul in favour of the smuggler, as they are of the poacher in England; all their prejudices are on his side. Some of the mountain curates, whose flocks are all in that line, deal with the crime in their sermons as a conventional, not a moral, one; and, like other people, decorate their mantelpieces with a painted clay figure of the sinner in his full majo dress. The smuggler himself, so far from feeling degraded, enjoys the reputation which attends success in personal adventure, among a people proud of individual prowess; he is the hero of the Spanish stage, and comes on equipped in full costume, with his blunderbuss, to sing the well-known “Yo! que soy contrabandista! yo ho!” to the delight of all listeners from the Straits to the Bidasoa, custom-house officers not excepted.

The prestige of such a theatrical exhibition, like the ‘Robbers’ of Schiller, is enough to make all the students of Salamanca take to the high-road. The contrabandista is the Turpin, the Macheath of reality, and those heroes of the old ballads and theatres of England, who have disappeared more in consequence of enclosures, rapid conveyances, and macadamization (for there is nothing so hateful to a highwayman as gas and a turnpike), than from fear of the prison or the halter. The writings of Smollett, the recollections of many now alive of the dangers of Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common, recall scenes of life and manners from which we have not long emerged, and which have still more recently been corrected in Spain. The contrabandista in his real character is welcome in every village; he is the newspaper and channel of intelligence; he brings tea and gossip for the curate, money and cigars for the attorney, ribands and cottons for the women; he is magnificently dressed, which has a great charm for all Moro-Iberian eyes; he is bold and resolute—“none but the brave deserve the fair;” a good rider and shot; he knows every inch of the intricate country, wood or water, hill or dale; in a word, he is admirably educated for the high-road—for what Froissart, speaking of the celebrated Amerigot Tetenoire, calls “a fayre and godlie life.” And the transition from plundering the king’s revenue, to taking one of his subjects’ purse on the highway, is easy.