VENTA EATING.
All the operations of cookery and eating, of killing, sousing in boiling water, plucking, et cætera, all preparatory as well as final, go on in this open kitchen. They are carried out by theventera and her daughters or maids, or by some crabbed, smoke-dried, shrivelled old she-cat, that is, or at least is called, the “tia,” “my aunt,” and who is the subject of the good-humoured remarks of the courteous and hungry traveller before dinner, and of his full stomach jests afterwards. The assembled parties crowd round the fire, watching and assisting each at their own savoury messes, “Un ojo á la sarten, y otro á la gata”—“One eye to the pan, the other to the real cat,” whose very existence in aventa, and among the pots, is a miracle; by the way, the naturalist will observe that their ears and tails are almost always cropped closely to the stumps. All and each of the travellers, when their respective stews are ready, form clusters and groups round the frying-pan, which is moved from the fire hot and smoking, and placed on a low table or block of wood before them, or the unctuous contents are emptied into a huge earthen reddish dish, which in form and colour is the preciseparopsis, the food platter, described by Martial and by other ancient authors. Chairs are a luxury; the lower classes sit on the ground as in the East, or on low stools, and fall to in a most Oriental manner, with an un-European ignorance of forks;[8]for which they substitute a short wooden or horn spoon, or dip their bread into the dish, or fish up morsels with their long pointed knives. They eat copiously, but with gravity—with appetite, but without greediness; for none of any nation, as a mass, are better bred or mannered than the lower classes of Spaniards.
VENTA EATING.
They are very pressing in their invitations whenever any eating is going on. No Spaniard or Spaniards, however humble their class or fare, ever allow any one to come near or pass them when eating, without inviting him to partake. “Guste usted comer?” “Will your grace be pleased to dine?” No traveller should ever omit to go through this courtesy whenever any Spaniards, high or low, approach him when at any meal, especially if taking it out of doors, which often happens in thesejourneyings; nor is it altogether an empty form; all classes consider it a compliment if a stranger, and especially an Englishman, will condescend to share their dinner. In the smaller towns, those invited by English will often partake, even the better classes, and who have already dined; they think it civil to accept, and rude to refuse the invitation, and have no objection to eating any givengoodthing, which is the exception to their ordinary frugal habits: all this is quite Arabian. The Spaniards seldom accept the invitation at once; they expect to be urged by an obsequious host, in order to appear to do a gentle violence to their stomachs by eating to obligehim. The angels declined Lot’s offered hospitalities until they were “pressedgreatly.” Travellers in Spain must not forget this still existing Oriental trait; for if they do not greatly press their offer, they are understood as meaning it to be a mere empty compliment. We have known Spaniards who have called with an intention of staying dinner, go away, because this ceremony was not gone through according to their punctilious notions, to which our off-hand manners are diametrically opposed. Hospitality in a hungry inn-less land becomes, as in the East, a sacred duty; if a man eats all the provender by himself, he cannot expect to have many friends. Generally speaking, the offer is not accepted; it is always declined with the same courtesy which prompts the invitation. “Muchas gracias, buen provecho le haga á usted,” “Many thanks—much good may it do your grace,” an answer which is analogous to theprositof Italian peasants after eating or sneezing. These customs, both of inviting and declining, tally exactly, and even to the expressions used among the Arabs to this day. Every passer-by is invited by Orientals—“Bismillah ya seedee,” which means both a grace and invitation—“In the name of God, sir, (i.e.) will you dine with us?” or “Tafud’-dal,” “Do me the favour to partake of this repast.” Those who decline reply, “Heneê an,” “May it benefit.”
AN EVENING AT A VENTA.
HONESTY AND ANTIQUITY IN A VENTA.
Supper, which, as with the ancients, is their principal meal, is seasoned with copious draughts of the wine of the country, drunk out of a jug orbotawhich we have already described, for glasses do not abound; after it is done, cigars are lighted, the rude seats are drawn closer to the fire, stories are told, principally on robber or love events, the latter of which are by far the truest. Jokesare given and taken; laughter, inextinguishable as that of Homer’s gods, forms the chorus of conversation, especially after good eating or drinking, to which it is the best dessert. In due time songs are sung, a guitar is strummed, for some black-whiskered Figaro is sure to have heard of the “arrival,” and steals down from the pure love of harmony and charms of a cigar; then flock in peasants of both sexes, dancing is set on foot, the fatigues of the day are forgotten, and the catching sympathy of mirth extending to all, is prolonged until far into the night; during which, as they take a long siesta in the day, all are as wakeful as owls, and worse caterwaulers than cats; to describe the scene baffles the art of pen or pencil. The roars, the dust, the want of everything in these low-classed ventas, are emblems of the nothingness of Spanish life—a jest. One by one the company drops off; the better classes go up stairs, the humbler and vast majority make up their bed on the ground, near their animals, and like them, full of food and free from care, fall instantly asleep in spite of the noise and discomfort by which they are surrounded. This counterfeit of death is more equalizing, as Don Quixote says, than death itself, for an honest Spanish muleteer stretched on his hard pallet sleeps sounder than many an uneasy trickster head that wears another’s crown. “Sleep,” says Sancho, “covers one over like a cloak,” and a cloak or its cognate mantle forms the best part of their wardrobe by day, and their bed furniture by night. The earth is now, as it was to the Iberians, the national bed; nay, the Spanish word which expresses that commodity,cama, is derived from the Greekκαμαι. Thus they are lodged on the ground floor, and thereby escape the three classes of little animals which, like the inseparable Graces, are always to be found in fine climates in the wholesale, and in Spanishventasin the retail. Their pillow is composed either of their pack-saddles or saddle-bags; their sleep is short, but profound. Long before daylight all are in motion; “theytake uptheir bed,” the animals are fed, harnessed, and laden, and the heaviest sleepers awakened: there is little morning toilette, no time or soap is lost by biped or quadruped in the processes of grooming or lavation: both carry their wardrobes on their back, and trust to the shower and the sun to cleanse and bleach; their moderate accounts are paid, salutations or execrations (generally thelatter), according to the length of the bills, pass between them and their landlords, and another day of toil begins. Our faithful and trustworthy squire seldom failed for a couple of hours after leaving theventato pour forth an eloquent stream of oaths, invectives, and lamentations at the dearness of inns, the rascality of their keepers in general, and of the host of the preceding night in particular, although probably a couple of dollars had cleared the account for a couple of men and animals, and he himself had divided the extra-extortion with the honestventero.
These Spanish venta scenes vary every day and night, as a new set of actors make their first and last appearance before the traveller: of one thing there can be no mistake, he has got out of England, and the present year of our Lord. Their undeniable smack of antiquity gives them a relish, aborracha, which is unknown in Great Britain, where all is fused and modernized down to last Saturday night; here alone can you see and study those manners and events which must have occurred on the same sites when Hannibal and Scipio were last there, as it would be very easy to work out from the classical authors. We would just suggest a comparison between the arrangement of the Spanish countryventawith that of the Roman inn now uncovered at the entrance of Pompeii, and its exact counterpart, the modern “osteria,” in the same district of Naples. In the Museo Borbonico will be found types of most of the utensils now used in Spain, while the Oriental and most ancient style of cuisine is equally easy to be identified with the notices left us in the cookery books of antiquity. The same may be said of the tambourines, castanets, songs, and dances,—in a word, of everything; and, indeed, when all are hushed in sleep, and stretched like corpses amid their beasts, the Valencians especially, in their sandals and kilts, in their mantas, and in and on their rush-baskets and mattings, we feel that Strabo must have beheld the old Iberians exactly in the same costume and position, when he told us what we see now to be true,το πλεον εν σαγοις, εν ὁις περ και στιβαδοκοιτουσι.
THE VENTORILLO.
The “ventorrillo” is a lower class ofventa—for there is a deeper bathos; it is the Germankneipeor hedge ale-house, and is often nothing more than a mere hut, run up with reeds or branches of trees by the road-side, at which water, bad wine, and brandy, “aguardiente,” tooth-water, are to be sold. The latter is alwaysdetestable, raw, and disflavoured with aniseed, and turns white in water like Eau de Cologne, not that the natives ever expose it to such a trial. These “ventorillos” are at best suspicious places, and the haunts of the spies of regular robbers, or of skulking footpads when there are any, who lurk inside with the proprietress; she herself generally might sit as a model for Hecate, or for one of the witches in Shakspere over their cauldron; her attendant imps are, however, sufficiently interesting personages to form a chapter by themselves.
SPANISH ROBBERS.
Spanish Robbers—A Robber Adventure—Guardias Civiles—Exaggerated Accounts—Cross of the Murdered—Idle Robber Tales—French Bandittiphobia—Robber History—Guerrilleros—Smugglers—Jose Maria—Robbers of the First Class—The Ratero—Miguelites—Escorts and Escopeteros—Passes, Protections, and Talismans—Execution of a Robber.
Spanish Robbers—A Robber Adventure—Guardias Civiles—Exaggerated Accounts—Cross of the Murdered—Idle Robber Tales—French Bandittiphobia—Robber History—Guerrilleros—Smugglers—Jose Maria—Robbers of the First Class—The Ratero—Miguelites—Escorts and Escopeteros—Passes, Protections, and Talismans—Execution of a Robber.
ANollawithout bacon would scarcely be less insipid than a volume on Spain without banditti; the stimulant is not less necessary for the established taste of the home-market, than brandy is for pale sherries neat as imported. In the mean time, while the timid hesitate to put their heads into this supposed den of thieves as much as into a house that is haunted, those who are not scared by shadows, and do not share in the fears of cockney critics and delicate writers in satin-paper albums, but adventure boldly into the hornet’s nest, come back in a firm belief of the non-existence of the robber genus. In Spain, thatpays de l’imprévu, this unexpected absence of personages who render roads uncomfortable, is one of the many and not disagreeable surprises, which await those who prefer to judge of a country by going there themselves, rather than to put implicit faith in the foregone conclusions and stereotyped prejudices of those who have not, although they do sit in judgment on those who have, and decide “without a view.” This very summer, some dozen and more friends of ours have made tours in various parts of the Peninsula, driving and riding unarmed and unescorted through localities of former suspicion, without having the good luck of meeting even with the ghost of a departed robber; in truth and fact, we cannot but remember that such things as monks and banditti were, although they must be spoken of rather in the past than in the present tense.
A ROBBER ADVENTURE.
The actual security of the Spanish highways is due to theModerados, as the French party and imitators of thejuste milieuare called, and at the head of whom may be placedSeñor Martinez de la Rosa. He, indeed, is a moderate in poetry as well as politics, and a rare specimen of that sublime of mediocrity which, according to Horace, neither men, gods, nor booksellers can tolerate; his reputation as an author and statesman—alas! poor Cervantes and Cisneros—proves too truly the present effeteness of Spain. Her pen and her sword are blunted, her laurels are sear, and her womb is barren; but, among the blind, he who has one eye is king.
This dramatist, in the May of 1833, was summoned from his exile at Granada to Madrid by the suspicious Calomarde. The mail in which he travelled was stopped by robbers about ten o’clock of a wet night near Almuradiel;—theguard, at the first notice, throwing himself on his belly, with his face in the mud, in imitation of the postilions, who pay great respect to the gentlemen of the road. The passengers consisted of himself, a German artist, and an English friend of ours now in London, and who, having given up his well-garnished purse at once with great good-humour, was most courteously treated by the well-satisfied recipients: not so the Deutscher, on whom they were about to do personal violence in revenge for a scanty scrip, had not his profession been explained by our friend, by whose interference he was let off. Meanwhile, theDonwas hiding his watch in the carriage lining, which he cut open, and was concealing his few dollars, the existence of which when questioned he stoutly denied. They, however, re-appeared under threats of the bastinado, which were all but inflicted. The passengers were then permitted to depart in peace, the leader of their spoilers having first shaken hands with our informant, and wished him a pleasant journey: “May your grace go with God and without novelty;” adding, “You are acaballero, a gentleman, as all the English are; the German is apobrecito, a poor devil; the Spaniard is anembustero, a regular swindler.” This latter gentleman, thus hardly delineated by his Lavater countryman, has since more than gotten back his cash, having risen to be prime minister to Christina, and humble and devoted servant of Louis-Philippe,cosas de España.
GUARDIAS CIVILES.
Possibly this little incident may have facilitated the introduction of the mounted guards, who are now stationed in towns, and by whom the roads are regularly patrolled; they are calledguardias civiles, and have replaced the ancient “brotherhood” of Ferdinand and Isabella. As they have been dressed and modelled after the fashion of the transpyrenean gendarmerie, the Spaniards, who never lose a chance of a happy nickname, or of a fling at the things of their neighbour, whom they do not love, term them, eitherPolizontesorPolizones, words with which they have enriched their phraseology, and that represent the Frenchpolissons, scoundrels, or they call themHijos de Luis-Philipe, “sons of Louis-Philippe;” for they are ill-bred enough, in spite of the Montpensier marriage, and the Nelsonic achievements of Monsieur de Joinville, to consider the words as synonymes.
The number of these rogues, French king’s sons, civil guards, call them as you will, exceeds five thousand. During the recent Machiavelianisms of their putative father, they have been quite as much employed in the towns as on the highway, and for political purposes rather than those of pure police, having been used to keep down the expression of indignant public opinion, and, instead of catching thieves, in upholding those first-rate criminals, foreign and domestic, who are now robbing poor Spain of her gold and liberties; but so it has always been. Indeed, when we first arrived in the Peninsula, and naturally made enquiries about banditti, according to all sensible Spaniards, it was not on the road that they were most likely to be found, but in the confessional boxes, the lawyers’ offices, and still more in thebureauxof government; and even in England some think that purses are exposed to more danger in Chancery Lane and Stone Buildings, than in the worst cross-road, or the most rocky mountain pass in the Peninsula.
THE MURDERED MAN’S CROSS.
It will be long, however, before this “great fact” is believed within the sound of Bow-bells, where many of those who provide the reading public with correct information, dislike having to eat their own words, and to have their settled opinions shaken or contradicted. Nor is it pleasant at a certain time of life to go again to school, as one does when studying Niebuhr’s Roman History, and then to find that the alphabet must be re-begun, since all that was thought to be right is in fact wrong. Distant Spain is ever looked at through a telescope which either magnifies richness and goodness, from which half at least must be deductedaccording to the proverb,de los dineros y bondad, se ha de quitar la mitad, or darkens its dangers and difficulties through a discoloured medium. A bad name given to a dog or country is very adhesive; and the many will repeat each other in cuckoo-note. “Il y a des choses,” says Montesquieu, “que tout le monde dit, parcequ’elles ont été dites une fois;” thus one silly sheep makes many, who will follow their leader;ovejas y bobas, donde va una, van todas. So in the end error becomes stamped with current authority, and is received, until the false, imaginary picture is alone esteemed, and the true, original portrait scouted as a cheat.
EXAGGERATED ROBBER NOTIONS.
It has so long and annually been considered permissible, when writing about romantic Spain, to take leave of common sense, to ascend on stilts, and converse in the Cambyses vein, that those who descend to humble prose, and confine themselves to commonplace matter-of-fact, are considered not only to be inæsthetic, unpoetical, and unimaginative, but deficient in truth and power of observation. The genius of the land, when speaking of itself and its things, is prone to say the thing which is not; and it must be admitted that the locality lends itself often and readily to misconceptions. The leagues and leagues of lonely hills and wastes, over which beasts of prey roam, and above which vultures sulkily rising part the light air with heavy wing, are easily peopled, by those who are in a prepared train of mind, with equally rapacious bipeds of Plato’s unfeathered species. Rocky passes, contrived as it were on purpose for ambuscades, tangled glens overrun with underwood, in spite of the prodigality of beauty which arrests the artist, suggest the lair of snakes and robbers. Nor is the feeling diminished by meeting the frequent crosses set up on classically piled heaps, which mark the grave of some murdered man, whose simple, touching epitaph tells the name of the departed, the date of the treacherous stab, and entreats the passenger, who is as he was, and may be in an instant as he is, to pray for his unannealed soul. A shadow of death hovers over such spots, and throws the stranger on his own thoughts, which, from early associations, are somewhat in unison with the scene. Nor is the welcome of the outstretched arms of these crosses over-hearty, albeit they are sometimes hung with flowers, which mock the dead. Nor are all sermons moreeloquent than these silent stones, on which such brief emblems are fixed. The Spaniards, from long habit, are less affected by them than foreigners, being all accustomed to behold crosses and bleeding crucifixes in churches and out; they moreover well know that by far the greater proportion of these memorials have been raised to record murders, which have not been perpetrated by robbers, but are the results of sudden quarrel or of long brooded-over revenge, and that wine and women, nine times out of ten, are at the bottom of the calamity. Nevertheless, it makes a stout English heart uncomfortable, although it is of little use to be afraid when one is in for it, and on the spot. Then there is no better chance of escape, than to brave the peril and to ride on. Turn, therefore, dear reader, a deaf ear to the tales of local terror which will be told in every out-of-the-way village by the credulous, timid inhabitants. You, as we have often been, will be congratulated on having passed such and such a wood, and will be assured that you will infallibly be robbed at such and such a spot a few leagues onward. We have always found that this ignis fatuus, like the horizon, has receded as we advanced; the dangerous spot is either a little behind or a little before the actual place—it vanishes, as most difficulties do, when boldly approached and grappled with.
BANDITTIPHOBIA OF FRENCH TOURISTS.
At the same time these sorts of places and events admit of much fine writing when people get safely back again, to say nothing of the dignity and heroic elevation which may be thus obtained by such an exhibition of valour during the long vacation. Peaked hats, hair-breadth escapes from long knives and mustachios, lying down for an hour on your stomach with your mouth in the mud, are little interludes so diametrically opposed to civilization, and the humdrum, unpicturesque routine of free Britons who pay way and police rates, that they form almost irresistible topics to the pen of a ready writer. And such exciting incidents are sure to take, and to affect the public at home, who, moreover, are much pleased by the perusal ofauthenticaccounts from Spain itself, and the best and latest intelligence, which tally with their own preconceived ideas of the land. Hence those authors are the most popular who put the self-love of their reader in best humour with his own stock of knowledge. And this accounts for the frequency, in Peninsular sketches, personalnarratives, and so forth, of robberies which are certainly oftener to be met with in their pages than on the plains of the Peninsula. The writers know that a bandit adventure is as much expected in the journals of such travels as in one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s romances; such fleeting books are chiefly made by “striking events;” accordingly, the authors string together all the floating traditional horrors which they can scrape together on Spanish roads, and thus feed and keep up the notion entertained in many counties of England, that the whole Peninsula is peopled with banditti. If such were the case society could not exist, and the very fact, of almost all of the reporters having themselves escaped by a miracle, might lead to the inference that most other persons escape likewise: a blot is not a blot till it is hit.
PSEUDO-BANDIT LOOKS.
Our ingenious neighbours, strange to say in so gallant a people, have a still more decided bandittiphobia. According to what the badauds of Paris are told in print, every rash individual, before he takes his place in the dilly for Spain, ought by all means to make his will, as was done four hundred years ago at starting on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; possibly this may be predicated in the spirit of French diplomacy, which always has a concealed arrière pensée, and it may be bruited abroad, on the principle with which illicit distillers and coin-forgers give out that certain localities are haunted, in order to scare away others, and thus preserve for themselves a quiet possession. Perhaps the superabundance of l’esprit Français may give colour and substance to forms insignificant in themselves, as a painter lost in a brown study over a coal fire converts cinders into castles, monsters, and other creatures of his lively imagination; or it may be, as conscience makes cowards of all, that these gentlemen really see a bandit in every bush of Spain, and expect from behind every rock an avenging minister of retaliation, in whose pocket is a list of the church plate, Murillos, &c. which were found missing after their countrymen’s invasion. Be that as it may, even so clever a man as Monsieur Quinet, a real Dr. Syntax, fills pages of his recentVacanceswith his continual trepidations, although, from having arrived at his journey’s end without any sort of accident, albeit not without every kind of fear, it might have crossed him, that the bugbears existed only in his own head, and he might have concealed, in his pleasant pages, a frame ofmind the exhibition of which, in England at least, inspires neither interest nor respect; an over-care of self is not over-heroic.
IDLE ROBBER TALES.
It must be also admitted that the respectability and character of many a Spaniard is liable to be misunderstood, when he sets forth on any of his travels, except in a public wheel conveyance; as we said in our ninth chapter, he assumes the national costume of the road, and leaves his wife and long-tailed coat behind him. Now as most Spaniards are muffled up and clad after the approved melodrame fashion of robbers, they may be mistaken for them in reality; indeed they are generally sallow, have fierce black eyes, uncombed hair, and on these occasions neglect the daily use of towels and razors; a long beard gives, and not in Spain alone, a ferocious ruffian-like look, which is not diminished when gun and knife are added to match faces à la Brutus. Again, these worthies thus equipped, have sometimes a trick of staring rather fixedly from under their slouched hat at the passing stranger, whose, to them, outlandish costume excites curiosity and suspicion; naturally therefore some difficulty does exist in distinguishing the merino from the wolf, when both are disguised in the same clothing—azamarrasheepskin to wit. A private Spanish gentleman, who, in his native town, would be the model of a peaceable and inoffensive burgess, or a respectable haberdasher, has, when on his commercial tour, altogether the appearance of the Bravo of Venice, and such-like heroes, by whom children are frightened at a minor theatre. In consequence of the difficulty of outliving what has been learnt in the nursery, many of our countrymen have, with the best intentions, set down the bulk of the population of the Peninsula as one gang of robbers—they have exaggerated their numbers like Falstaff’s men of buckram; the said imagined Rinaldo Rinaldinis being probably in a still greater state of alarm from having on their part taken our said countrymen for robbers, and this mutual misunderstanding continues, until both explain their slight mistake of each other’s character and intention. Although we never fell into the error of thus mistaking Spanish peaceable traders for privateers and men-of-war, yet that injustice has been done by them to us; possibly this compliment may have been paid to our careful observation of the bearing and garb of their great Rob Roy himself and in his own country, which, to one about toundertake, in those days, long and solitary rides over the Peninsula, was an unspeakable advantage.
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 costnothing, 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 themladronesor 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, andaunque 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 asense of loyalty, with indignation at their outraged religion, and with a deep-rooted national loathing of thegabacho, 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, theprima materiaof 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 fullmajodress. 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.
Theprestigeof 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.
FIRST-CLASS BANDITS.
Many circumstances combined to make this freebooting career popular among the lower classes. The delight of power, the exhibition of daring and valour, the temptation of sudden wealth, always so attractive to half-civilized nations, who prefer the rich spoil won by the bravery of an hour, to that of the drudgery of years; the gorgeous apparel, the lavish expenditure, the song, the wassail, the smiles of the fair, and all the joyous life of liberty, freemasonry, and good fellowship, operated with irresistible force on a warlike, energetic, and imaginative population.
This smuggling was the origin of Jose Maria’s career, who rose to the highest rank and honours of his profession, as didNapoleon le Grandand “Jonathan Wild the Great,” and principally, as Fielding says of his hero, by a power of doing mischief, and a principle of considering honesty to be a corruption ofhonosty, the qualities of an ass (ονος). But it is a great mistake to suppose that there always are men fitted to be captains of formidable gangs; nature is chary in the production of such specimens of dangerous grandeur, and as ages may elapse before the world is cursed with another Alaric, Buonaparte, or Wild, so years may pass before Spain witnesses again another Jose Maria.
FIRST-CLASS BANDITS.
TheLadron-en-grande, the robber on a great scale, is the grandee of the first class in his order; he is the captain of a regularly-organized band of followers, from eight to fourteen in number, well armed and mounted, and entirely under command and discipline. These are very formidable; and as they seldom attack any travellers except with overwhelming forces, and under circumstances of ambuscade and surprise, where every thing is in their favour, resistance is generally useless, and can only lead to fatal accidents. Never, for the sake of a sac de nuit, risk being sent to Erebus; submit, therefore, at once and with good grace to the summons, which will take no denial, of “abajo,” down, “boca á tierra,” mouth to the earth. Those who have a score or so of dollars, four or five pounds, the loss of which will ruin no man, are very rarely ill-used; a frank, confident, and good-humoured surrender not only prevents any bad treatment, but secures even civility during the disagreeable operation: pistols and sabres are, after all, a poor defence compared to civil words, as Mr. Cribb used to say. The Spaniard, by nature high-bredand a “caballero,” responds to any appeal to qualities of which he thinks his nation has reason to be proud; he respects coolness of manner, in which bold men, although robbers, sympathise. Why should a man, because he loses a few dollars, lose also his presence of mind or temper, or perhaps life? Nor are these grandees of the system without a certain magnanimity, as Cervantes knew right well. Witness his graphic account of Roque Guinart, whose conduct to his victims and behaviour to his comrades tallied, to our certain knowledge, with that observed by Jose Maria, and was perfectly analogous to the similar traits of character exhibited by the Italian bandit Ghino de Tacco, the immortalized by Dante; as well as by our Robin Hood and Diana’s foresters. Being strong, they could afford to be generous and merciful.
Notwithstanding these moral securities, if only by way of making assurance doubly sure, an Englishman will do well when travelling in exposed districts to be provided with a decent bag of dollars, which makes a handsome purse, feels heavy in the hand, and is that sort of amount which the Spanish brigand thinks a native of our proverbially rich country ought to have with him on his travels. He has a remarkable tact in estimating from the look of an individual, his equipage, &c., how much ready money it is befitting his condition for him to have about him; if the sum should not be enough, he resents severely his being robbed of the regular perquisite to which he considers himself entitled by the long-established usage of the high-road. The person unprovided altogether with cash is generally made a severe example of, pour encourager les autres, either by being well beaten or stripped to the skin, after the fashion of the thieves of old, near Jericho. The traveller should have a watch of some kind—one with a gaudy gilt chain and seals is the best suited; not to have one exposes him to more indignities than a scantily-filled purse. The money may have been spent, but the absence of a watch can only be accounted for by a premeditated intention of not being robbed of it, which the “ladron” considers as a most unjustifiable attempt to defraud him of his right.
THE RATERO.
The Spanish “ladrones” are generally armed with a blunderbuss, that hangs at their high-peaked saddles, which are covered with a white or blue fleece, emblematical enough of shearing propensities; therefore, perhaps, the order of the goldenfleece has been given to certain foreigners, in reward for having eased Spain of her independence and Murillos. Their dress is for the most part very rich, and in the highest style of the fancy; hence they are the envy and models of the lower classes, being arrayed after the fashion of the smuggler, or the bull-fighter, or in a word, the “majo” or dandy of Andalucia, which is the home and head-quarters of all those who aspire to the elegant accomplishments and professions just alluded to. The next class of robbers—omitting some minor distinctions, such as the “salteadores,” or two or three persons who lie in ambuscade andjump outon the unprepared traveller—is the “ratero,” “the rat.” He is not brought regularly up to the profession and organized, but takes to it on a sudden, and for the special occasion which, according to the proverb, makes a thief,La ocasion hace al ladron; and having committed his petty larceny, returns to his pristine occupation or avocation.
MIGUELITES.
The “raterillo,” or small rat, is a skulking footpad, who seldom attacks any but single and unprotected passengers, who, if they get robbed, have no one to blame but themselves; for no man is justified in exposing Spaniards to the temptation of doing a little something in that line. The shepherd with his sheep, the ploughman at his plough, the vine-dresser amid his grapes, all have their gun, ostensibly for their individual protection, which furnishes means of assault and battery against those who have no other defence but their legs and virtue. These self-same extemporaneous thieves are, however, remarkably civil to armed and prepared travellers; to them they touch their hats, and exclaim, “Good day to you, my lord knight,” and “May your grace go with God,” with all that innocent simplicity which is observable in pastorals, opera-ballets, and other equally correct representations of rural life. These rats are held in as profound contempt by the higher classes of the profession, as political ones used to be, before parties were betrayed by turncoats, who, with tails and without, deserted to the enemies’ camp. Theladron en grandelooks down on this sneaking competitor as a regular M.D. and member of the College of Physicians does on a quack, who presumes to take fees and kill without a licence. However despicable, these rats are very dangerous; lacking the generous feeling which the possession of power andunited force bestows, they have the cowardice and cruelty of weakness: hence they frequently murder their victim, because dead men tell no tales.
The distinction between these higher and lower classes of rogues will be better understood by comparing the Napoleon of war, with the Napoleon of peace. The Corsican was theladron en grande; he warred against mankind, he led his armed followers to pillage and plunder, he made his den the receiving house of the stolen goods of the Continent: but he did it openly and manfully by his own right hand and good sword; and valour and audacity are qualities too high and rare not to command admiration—qualified, indeed, when so misapplied. Louis-Philippe is aratero, who, skulking under disguise of amity and good faith, works out in the dark, and by cunning, his ends of avarice and ambition; who, acting on the artful dodger (no) principle, while kissing the Queen, picks her pocket of a crown.
MIGUELITES.
It must be stated for the purposes of history that at the time when Spain was, or was said to be, overrun with rats and robbers, there was, as Spaniards have it, a remedy for everything except death; and as the evils were notorious, it was natural that means of prevention should likewise exist. If the state of things had been so bad as exaggerated report would infer, it would have been impossible that any travelling or traffic could have been managed in the Peninsula. The mails and diligences, being protected by government, were seldom attacked, and those who travelled by other methods, and had proper recommendations, seldom failed in being provided by the authorities with a sufficient escort. A regular body of men was organized for that purpose; they were called “Miguelites,” from, it is said, one Miguel de Prats, an armed satellite of the famous or infamous Cæsar Borgia. In Catalonia they are called “Mozos de la Escuadra,” “Lads of the squadron, land marines;” they are the modern “Hermandad,” the brotherhood which formed the old Spanish rural armed police. Composed of picked and most active young men, they served on foot, under the orders of the military powers; they were dressed in a sort of half uniform and halfmajocostume. Their gaiters were black instead of yellow, and their jackets of blue trimmed with red. They were well armed with a short gun and a belt round the waist in whichthe ammunition was placed, a much more convenient contrivance than our cartouche-box; they had a sword, a cord for securing prisoners, and a single pistol, which was stuck in their sashes, at their backs. This corps was on a perfect par with the robbers, from whom some of them were chosen; indeed, the common condition of the “indulto,” or pardon to robbers, is to enlist, and extirpate their former associates—set a thief to catch a thief; both the honest and renegadeMigueliteshunted “la mala gente,” as gamekeepers do poachers. The robbers feared and respected them; an escort of ten or twelveMiguelitesmight brave any number of banditti, who never or rarely attack where resistance is to be anticipated; and in travelling through suspected spots these escorts showed singular skill in taking every precaution, by throwing out skirmishers in front and at the sides. They covered in their progress a large space of ground, taking care never to keep above two together, nor more distant from each other than gun-shot; rules which all travellers will do well to remember, and to enforce on all occasions of suspicion. The rare instances in which Englishmen, especially officers of the garrison of Gibraltar, have been robbed, have arisen from a neglect of this precaution; when the whole party ride together they may be all caught at once, as in a casting-net.