Sailing the Gannetsway: On Crossing Biscay

48deg24’N, 8deg4W is where I am beginning to write this post. Finisterre is 333 nautical miles astern (bearing SxW), Baltimore 192 nm ahead, the Ile de Sein 119 nm somewhat south of East, the nearest land being the Scilly Isles, 112 nm to the North-east. This day has been extremely peachy, with the sea calming down, the Anna M pottering along beautifully at 4 or 5 knots, with a gentle easterly breeze and kindly, warm sunshine. For once we have left the bad weather off the Iberian coast.

Yesterday, in nearly calm conditions with a very light SE wind and an unpleasant swell, our progress was not so good at all. Sailing at one or two knots, we had also been forced to sail to the north-east in order to catch what breeze there was, filling the sails and minimising their exasperating slatting. Apart from needing to conserve diesel, I didn’t use the engine because it would have simply killed what wind there was for us. Besides, while we had a better angle on the waves heading NE, we were not wishing to find ourselves in Brittany this time!

The day before there had been more wind but also an even worse sea-state. Looking to the East, we could see the swells coming down Biscay, while looking South-west, there were even bigger ones coming in from the Atlantic. We were like children sat on a blanket which some malevolent sea-gods were violently shaking up and down as they fought. So that was what AEMET had meant by forecasting a mar gruesa (rough sea), though with a maximum wind of only force 5 or 6 for a short while!

It always intrigued me that La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología* present their charts for mar total before those for viento y mar del viento. In most cases the sea-state is a more vital consideration than the wind, in these days of engines and especially off that North-West coast of Spain. In a sailing boat one can shake sails and rig to pieces, and I was lucky to get away with only popping the odd slide off the mainsail. We literally had to head NE to survive, with the over- reefed mainsail pinned forward with a preventer as well as downwards….

Bow-riders

As we clawed our way up towards Brittany, the sea gradually settled, and after a very calm day a sweet easterly breeze sprang up. I was able to write this far, as we settled into a couple of days of perfect sailing, that took us to within 40 miles of Baltimore before the wind died out. Still we had a pleasant motor-sail in against a very light NE air, through the night and early morning, accompanied by many dolphins and also spying four basking sharks.We came to Baltimore in the midst of its Wooden Boat Festival, and then to Sherkin to find it settling into a most magnificent spell of weather.

Wooden Boat Festival with Sherkin Island +

It is hard to adapt to life ashore again, with its diverse preoccupations; an overgrown garden, even that strange EU referendum coming up in Blighty. In the long watches at sea, I found myself considering the long and frequently difficult relationship between England, Spain and Ireland. Where did it all go wrong? I suppose one starts with Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, which horrified right-thinking English people like Sir Thomas Moore. The Spaniards must have been horrified at every level, in sentiment, honour and religion.

No doubt simple resentment of the old established Spanish Empire by the young upstart British one was going to cause trouble, but surely it was not really necessary for things to come to the pass they did. The British Empire kicked off in Ireland, sending an army of 18,000 soldiers in the massive effort to subjugate this country, replete with appalling policies of scorched earth and destruction, that led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Irish civilians, mostly by famine. When I think of that Bay of Biscay, compared to the Irish Sea, I cannot really think that fear of Spaniards being established here could have warranted that kind of response. After all they only managed to send 3,000 troops to the Battle of Kinsale.

Much propaganda was made about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and their cruelty in America. Happily there is a much more general willingness to admit these days that the treatment of native populations in the British Empire, including the Irish and North American Indians, was as bad if not worse than what happened in South America, and what with the butchering of Catholic priests that went on in the market squares of England, the Elizabethans were certainly not to be outdone in the line of sadistic torture. I also used to hear talk in England about ‘dirty, lazy Spaniards’, and pretty much had to find out for myself how untrue that line of talk is. Besides being hard workers, they generally seem obsessed with cleanliness.

Such narrow-minded nationalism, and worse, has thankfully been in retreat in Europe for a good while - since the Second World War in fact, when the European Community project commenced. I am profoundly grateful for being spared the horrors of war in my lifetime. Of course one cannot put all this simply down to the EU, but much work has gone into it and it has at least been a massive help. Now Mr Boris Johnson and his friends are apparently willing to bring it to an end; for indeed, it would not be the same without Britain.

In a speech likening the EU to the efforts of Napoleon and Hitler, he said that ‘fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void.’ I find this a strange statement. Does he not realise that this is precisely the essential problem of any democracy, which his Napoleons and Hitlers were trying to remedy by providing a ‘single authority’? Does he really think that this great exercise in democracy, the referendum, is going to bring people together? Even his Tory Party?

But things are not so very hopeless. Mr Johnson might not like to recognise it, but the ultimate answer to his ‘eternal problem’ is religious in nature rather than political; and fundamentally Europe is not quite so badly off as he makes out. Many of the founding fathers of the EU, such as Adenauer, Monnet and Schuman, one might include de Gaulle, were indeed practising Catholics, but I am not expecting the likes of Johnson to suddenly become one. What I would argue is that Catholicism remains the bedrock of European culture, yes, in England and Ireland too, and if Mr Johnson really wants a single authority to fill the democratic void, that is where he may easily find it!

It is a big thesis, too big to tease out here, but quite apart from the many explicitly Catholic writers of England as well as the rest of Europe, let us just consider William Shakespeare a little. Take King Lear. The old king eschewed the responsibility of governing, divided the kingdom, and went mad. Are we to suppose that Shakespeare did not have his own times in mind when he wrote it, around 1605? Queen Elizabeth I had died, and the terrible war in Ireland dragged to a conclusion of sorts, two years previously. The ‘truth party’, Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, suffered and were largely defeated, like the Irish Earls. The values upheld are thoroughly catholic, and bear no traces of xenophobia…. Says Kent:

‘To plainness honour's bound,

When majesty stoops to folly.

Fare thee well, king: sith thus thou wilt appear,

Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here.’

One more literary illusion, from the twentieth century, and I shall have to rest my case, that the Catholic tradition of Europe transcends in a sense the Roman Catholic Church, although the latter is indeed essential to it. This quotation from The Dry Salvages by T.S.Eliot does have the advantage, from my point of view, of chiming with my other great source of universal values, the sea and seafaring; but if it does not refer to the Catholic Church, then I don’t understand it aright:-

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,

Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,

In navigable weather it is always a seamark

To lay a course by: but in the sombre season

Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

Islas Cies

The sooner Mr Boris Johnson, not to mention the great British electorate, realise this, the better! I pray that they may not be pitching themselves and us all into another sombre season or sudden fury! But I do admit it, I am getting a little spoilt in my old age. I will close with a few photos both of the fabulous Galicia we left behind, and the equally fabulous island we have come back to.....

What a wonderful place Europe is!