being unshipped by yawning faquins. We find a large and handsome five-storied building with an imposing façade, and balconied windows that look out upon the small central square of the town. The interior conveys a truly southern impression of silence and space, due to the great expanses of marble pavement and to the cool stone walls and passages which prevent the conveyance of sound. The dining hall is immense; so are the lobbies that run round the central well of the house, and off which the bedrooms open. We go upstairs, and within an hour of our arrival have become pensionnaires of the hotel at 10s. a head a day, and are installed in two excellent rooms on the third floor, comfortably furnished, fitted with electric bells and light, heated by hot water, and reached by a lift, while our wants are being ministered to by a cheerful white-capped chambermaid answering to the name of Dolores.
With brains still jumbled by travel it is almost impossible to realise, in the midst of such up-to-date comfort, that we are really and actually in Majorca—an island that might, for all we knew to the contrary a few weeks ago, have proved an inhospitable rock. Memories recur of nights spent en route at Paris and Toulouse, and we go to the window half-expecting to see a vista of wide boulevards and to hear the familiar clanging of electric trams as they glide up and down some arcaded street of cafés and shopfronts.
We are sharply recalled from such visions: a sea of pale yellow-ochre tiles, unbroken, though intersected by narrow crevasse-like streets, stretches down to a strip of brilliant blue water in the harbour below. On flat house tops lines of wet linen flap wildly in sun and wind. Jutting up above the mass of irregular roofs are fantastic turrets and aviaries, painted blue and red, the homes of innumerable pigeons now wheeling in flocks over the town, their wings singing as they cleave the air above our heads. From scattered belfrys and towers unmelodious bells clash out wildly for a few moments and then relapse into silence; and like a running accompaniment to the murmur of the streets is heard the gobble, gobble of many turkeys, and the bright eye of one of these birds is seen watching us fixedly through the Venetian shutters of a small upper room across the way. No, truly! this is all very unlike a northern city.
Majorca is in fact a stepping-stone between Europe and Africa, where the East and West—rather than the north and south of her geographical position—may be said to meet.
She has had many masters in her day: the earliest colonists of whom we have any record were the sea-faring Rhodians, who were said to build “as though for eternity.” But not the faintest trace of their occupation survives. Their successors were the Carthaginians, who left footprints in Minorca by founding Mahon, the capital, the reputed birthplace of Hannibal. Then came the Romans, who in 123 B.C. founded Palma and Pollensa; Balearic slingers fought under Julius Cæsar in Gaul as they had done under Hannibal at Cannæ. Five hundred years later the islands were captured by the Vandals—were retaken by the Byzantine general Belisarius, and fell subsequently with the greater part of Spain into the hands of the Visigoths.
In the eighth century came the resistless tide of the Saracens, who held the island for an uninterrupted period of nearly five hundred years, and might have kept it longer had they not strained the patience of their Christian neighbours to breaking point by their piratical habits. They had become such a menace to the marine commerce of Europe that the then Pope preached a crusade against the Balearic bandits, and an allied fleet sailed from Pisa and Catalonia in the twelfth century. The pirates’ nest was smoked out, Palma succumbing after a long and stubborn siege. The allies, however, proved unable to retain their prize, and the island relapsed to the Moors, who so far took their lesson to heart as to somewhat amend their ways.
But the great assault was yet to come. On Sept. 6, 1229, Don Jaime I—King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona—destined to live in history by the title of El Conquistador, set sail for Palma with 150 galleys and 18,000 soldiers, besides a great company of Spanish knights aflame with religious zeal, the lust of conquest, and the hope of glory. We are told that the Christian host encountered a great storm on the way, and that they were grievously sick before they landed near Porto Pi to the west of the town.
Here the infidels attacked them, but were beaten back and besieged within the city, which fell some three months later after a desperate resistance, and was entered by the victorious Spanish army on December 31, 1229.
From that memorable day may be said to date modern Palma. Everything around one testifies to the break that separates the history of the town since the conquest from the old period of Arab domination. The names of the streets immortalise the Conqueror and succeeding sovereigns or notables of the invading race. The scutcheons that ornament the public buildings display the arms granted to Palma by Don Jaime—a castle in the sea, with a palm-tree issuant, quartered with the arms of Aragon and surmounted by the Bat, cognisance of the Counts of Barcelona.
The town houses of the aristocracy are the old palaces of the nine noble families whose ancestors accompanied the Conqueror and settled in the island. The Governor’s residence stands where did the Moorish sheikh’s palace; the Cathedral occupies the site of the principal mosque. So thorough were the invaders in destroying or converting to other uses the Moorish buildings, so fierce was their Christian zeal—“which spared not even stones”—that hardly a trace remains of the oriental Palma, that city crowned with minarets and peopled with 80,000 souls, which attained under the Moors a glory and magnificence that have never since been equalled.
The Palma of the present day is a prosperous town of some 60,000 inhabitants. She has burst her ancient limits, and her eastern outskirts are thick with factories and windmills extending to the plain, while outside her western fortifications has sprung up a large residential suburb, and the wooded slopes above the bay are thronged for miles with villas and summer residences. Only the town that lies inside the walls is the old Palma, and this—in its main features—has probably altered little since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
“The gateway by which Don Jaime is said to have made his triumphal entry into Palma in the year 1229.”
(page 10)
“The Riéra is seen flowing beneath the bridge that leads from the gate of Santa Catalina to the suburb of the same name.”
(page 9)
A wide thoroughfare divides the town into the upper and lower Villas, and starting from the harbour, takes a right angle near the Grand Hotel and makes its exit through the Porte Jésus in the north-west walls. This is the principal artery of the town, and was originally—like the Rambla of many another Spanish city—the bed by which the river found its way to the sea; but in the year 1403 a disastrous flood, causing the loss of hundreds of houses and lives, so alarmed the inhabitants that the river was turned from its course and conducted into the moat that surrounds the town. Spanish rivers are proverbial for their lack of water, and it is difficult to credit the Riéra—which in its normal state suggests nothing more dangerous than a gravel pit after rain—with such powers of destruction in bygone days.
The gigantic scale of Palma’s encircling fortifications may perhaps best be realised by a glance at the accompanying picture, where the Riéra is seen flowing beneath the bridge that leads from the gate of Santa Catalina to the suburb of the same name.
The fortifications date from very different periods. The completed design of moat and rampart as it now stands was originated in the sixteenth century and only finished a hundred years ago; but remains of the old Moorish defences still exist, though they suffered severely in the great siege of 1229, and were strengthened and largely rebuilt by the Spanish conquerors.
A picturesque gateway on the north of the town, now called Santa Margarita, but dubbed by the Moors the Gate of the Christians, is pointed out as having been the one by which Don Jaime made his triumphant entry into Palma. This gateway, like the other survivals of the ancient fortifications, stands some way