I’ve tended to think of traffic across English Channel historically as being basically a one-way, northward affair involving Romans, Huguenots, Joseph of Arimathea and their like. However Blasco Ibáñez, who combined radical republicanism with racial stereotyping but had the good sense to die before 1933, says that the anglocabrones have always longed for the costas and the islands, for his and the Romans’ Mare nostrum:

The entire history of European man–forty centuries of war, migration and racial clashes–the doctor explained by the desire to possess this sea of harmonious framework, to enjoy the transparency of its atmosphere and the vivacity of its light. Men of the North, who need a glowing log and alcoholic beverages to preserve their life from the jaws of the cold, think at all hours of the Mediterranean rim. All their movements–warlike or peaceful–have had as their object to descend from icy ocean shores to warm sea beaches. They craved possession of the fields where the sacred olive tree alternates its severe antiquity with the happy vineyard, where the pine spreads its dome and its cypress erects its minaret. They wanted to dream below the perfumed snow of the endless orange groves; to be masters of the sheltered valleys where the myrtle and jasmine scent the salt air; of the silent volcanos which let aloe and cactus grow between their rocks; of the mountains of marble which sink their white arris down to the bottom of the sea and refract the African heat emitted by the opposite shore.

[Toda la historia del hombre europeo—cuarenta siglos de guerras, emigraciones y choques de razas—la explicaba el médico por el deseo de poseer este mar de marco armonioso, de gozar la transparencia de su atmósfera y la vivacidad de su luz. Los hombres del Norte, que necesitan el tronco ardiente y la bebida alcohólica para defender su vida de las mandíbulas del frío, pensaban á todas horas en las riberas mediterráneas. Todos sus movimientos belicosos ó pacíficos eran para descender de las orillas de los mares glaciales á las playas del mar tibio. Ansiaban la posesión de los campos donde el sagrado olivo alterna su ancianidad severa con la alegre viña, donde el pino extiende su cúpula y el ciprés yergue su minarete. Querían soñar bajo la nieve perfumada de los interminables bosques de naranjos; ser dueños de los valles abrigados donde el mirto y el jazmín embalsaman el aire salitroso; de los volcanes mudos que dejan crecer entre sus rocas el áloe y el cacto; de las montañas de mármol que descienden sus blancas aristas hasta el fondo del mar y refractan el calor africano emitido por la costa de enfrente.]

Is he talking about the barbarian invasions 1500 years before Ronnie Knight? Or was the Mayflower actually just a minor, confused player in a Great Forgotten Essex Armada which aimed to settle Almería but perished in debauched chaos in a Tangier whorehouse?

Tags: anglocabrón, Barbara Windsor, beaches, Blasco, Blasco Ibáñez, Costa del Crime, Costa del Sol, Essex, Gran Armada, mediterranean, migration, oranges, Pilgrim Fathers, racism, Ronnie Knight, Tangier, valencia, walking
Categories: Empires, rulers and warfare, Les bourgeois, Liberals & locals, Poets, The ocean, The sea

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1. Aidan Kehoe
   October 3rd 2009 00:23

   Hahah, that’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. Lyrically beautiful, though.

2. Trevor
   October 3rd 2009 10:38

   Mare Nostrum is a tremendous exercise in cliché, but he’s not always quite that bad, and he wrote a rather good doctoral thesis on the magical little church of San Juan del Hospital in Valencia, which turns up at the beginning of Mare Nostrum.