We could make no sail, but were impelled along by the oars
of five or six stout mariners, who sang all the while Gallegan
ditties.
Suddenly the sea appeared to have become quite smooth,
and my sickness at once deserted me. I rose upon my feet and
looked around. We were in one of the strangest places imaginable.
A long and narrow passage overhung on either side by a stupendous
barrier of black and threatening rocks. The line of the coast was
here divided by a natural cleft, yet so straight and regular that
it seemed not the work of chance but design. The water was dark
and sullen, and of immense depth. This passage, which is about a
mile in length, is the entrance to a broad basin, at whose farther
extremity stands the town of Ferrol.
Sadness came upon me as soon as I entered this place. Grass was
growing in the streets, and misery and distress stared me in the
face on every side. Ferrol is the grand naval arsenal of Spain,
and has shared in the ruin of the once splendid Spanish navy: it
is no longer thronged with those thousand shipwrights who prepared
for sea the tremendous three-deckers and long frigates, the greater
part of which were destroyed at Trafalgar. Only a few ill-paid and
half-starved workmen still linger about, scarcely sufficient to
repair any guarda costa which may put in dismantled by the fire of
some English smuggling schooner from Gibraltar. Half the
inhabitants of Ferrol beg their bread; and amongst these, as it is
said, are not unfrequently found retired naval officers, many of
them maimed or otherwise wounded, who are left to pine in
indigence; their pensions or salaries having been allowed to run
three or four years in arrear, owing to the exigencies of the
times. A crowd of importunate beggars followed me to the posada,
and even attempted to penetrate to the apartment to which I was
conducted. "Who are you?" said I to a woman who flung herself at
my feet, and who bore in her countenance evident marks of former
gentility. "A widow, sir," she replied, in very good French; "a
widow of a brave officer, once admiral of this port." The misery
and degradation of modern Spain are nowhere so strikingly
manifested as at Ferrol.
Yet even here there is still much to admire. Notwithstanding its
present state of desolation, it contains some good streets, and
abounds with handsome houses. The alameda is planted with nearly a
thousand elms, of which almost all are magnificent trees, and the
poor Ferrolese, with the genuine spirit of localism so prevalent in
Spain, boast that their town contains a better public walk than
Madrid, of whose prado, when they compare the two, they speak in
terms of unmitigated contempt. At one end of this alameda stands
the church, the only one in Ferrol. To this church I repaired the
day after my arrival, which was Sunday.
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