Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Not until he reached the Mediterranean by overland emigration did the white man wish to become a sailor. This sea that, compared with others, is a simple lake sown with archipelagoes, offered a good school. To whatever wind he might set his sails, he would be sure to reach some hospitable shore. The fresh and irregular breezes revolved with the sun at certain times of the year. The hurricane whirled across its bowl, but never stopped. There were no tides. Its harbors and water-ways were never dry. Its coasts and islands were often so close together that you could see from one to the other; its lands, beloved of heaven, were recipients of the sun's sweetest smiles.

Ferragut recalled the men who had plowed this sea in centuries so remote that history makes no mention of them. The only traces of their existence now extant were the nuraghs of Sardinia and the talayots of the Balearic Islands,—gigantic tables formed with blocks, barbaric altars of enormous rocks which recalled the Celtic obelisks and sepulchral monuments of the Breton coast. These obscure people had passed from isle to isle, from the extreme of the Mediterranean to the strait which is its door.

The captain could imagine their rude craft made from trunks of trees roughly planed, propelled by one oar, or rather by the stroke of a stick, with no other aid than a single rudimentary sail spread to the fresh breeze. The navy of the first Europeans had been like that of the savages of the oceanic islands whose flotillas of tree trunks are still actually going from archipelago to archipelago.

Thus they had dared to sally forth from the coast, to lose sight of land, to venture forth into the blue desert, advised of the existence of islands by the vaporous knobs of the mountains which were outlined on the horizon at sunset. Every advance of this hesitating marine over the Mediterranean had represented greater expenditure of audacity and energy than the discovery of America or the first voyage around the world…. These primitive sailors did not go forth alone to their adventures on the sea; they were nations en masse, they carried with them families and animals. Once installed on an island, the tribes sent forth fragments of their own life, going to colonize other nearby lands across the waves.

Ulysses and his mate thought much about the great catastrophes ignored by history—the tempest surprising the sailing exodus, entire fleets of rough rafts swallowed up by the abyss in a few moments, families dying clinging to their domestic animals,—whenever they attempted a new advance of their rudimentary civilization.

In order to form some idea of what these little embarkations were, Ferragut would recall the fleets of Homeric form, created many centuries afterwards. The winds used to impose a religious terror on those warriors of the sea, reunited in order to fall upon Troy. Their ships remained chained an entire year in the harbor of Aulis and, through fear of the hostility of the wind and in order to placate the divinity of the Mediterranean, they sacrificed the life of a virgin.

All was danger and mystery in the kingdom of the waves. The abysses roared, the rocks moaned; on the ledges were singing sirens who, with their music, attracted ships in order to dash them to pieces. There was not an island without its particular god, without its monster and cyclops, or its magician contriving artifices.

Before domesticating the elements, mankind had attributed to them their most superstitious fears.

A material factor had powerfully influenced the dangers of Mediterranean life. The sand, moved by the caprice of the current, was constantly ruining the villages or raising them to peaks of unexpected prosperity. Cities celebrated in history were to-day no more than streets of ruins at the foot of a hillock crowned with the remains of a Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine or Saracen castle, or with a fortress contemporary with the Crusades. In other centuries these had been famous ports; before their walls had taken place naval battles; now from their ruined acropolis one could scarcely see the Mediterranean except as a light blue belt at the end of a low and marshy plain. The accumulating sand had driven the sea back miles…. On the other hand, inland cities had come to be places of embarkation because of the continual perforation of the waves that were forcing their way in.

The wickedness of mankind had imitated the destructive work of nature. When a maritime republic conquered a rival republic, the first thing that it thought of was to obstruct its harbor with sand and stones in order to divert the course of its waters so as to convert it into an inland city, thereby ruining its fleets and its traffic. The Genoese, triumphant over Pisa, stopped up its harbor with the sands of the Arno; and the city of the first conquerors of Mallorca, of the navigators to the Holy Land, of the Knights of St. Stephen, guardians of the Mediterranean, came to be Pisa the Dead,—a settlement that knew the sea only by hearsay.