“The lower orders seem well employed, contented, and happy; the higher classes lead a life of perfect inactivity”
In the winter of 1840, the Marchioness of Westminster washed up in Palma and wrote one of the earliest English accounts of the island.
In 1842, Elizabeth Mary Leveson-Gower, Marchioness of Westminster, published her “Narrative of a Yacht Voyage in the Mediterranean” — a meticulous and often unintentionally hilarious account of genteel adventure. The previous New Year, en route from Barcelona to Italy, she had been driven off course by a violent storm and forced to take shelter in Palma. Among the earliest English visitors to the island, she described it with a mixture of awe, alarm, and aristocratic condescension.
The tempest
The usually unflappable Marchioness of Westminster did not glide into Mallorca on a beam of sunlight. She lurched toward it after six miserable days at sea, in a yacht that rolled, pitched, and prayed its way through howling winds across the Balearic Sea from Barcelona. Planks creaked, sails were shredded, the waves struck like a “sledge-hammer,” and Rap, her faithful spaniel, shivered and shook.
“The noises both in and out of the ship were dreadful,” she wrote. “The wind, and, above all, the dreadful rushing of the sea… rendered these hours of horror far beyond any description.”
Undaunted, she does her best, anyway, describing the ordeal in prose drenched in a sublime, primeval terror of the deep. Even Christmas Day was spent at sea, at prayer, fearful and sleepless, until at last, through “masses of black clouds… we were glad to see the mountains of Majorca very near us.”
By Boxing Day afternoon they sighted Palma’s vast, looming cathedral, and anchored in the bay with other storm-battered ships, including the steamer from Marseilles and the Spanish troopship Manzanares, nearly lost to the waves. Once repairs were arranged and provisions secured, the Marchioness and her party resolved to explore. On December 29, after her first sound sleep in a week, she stepped ashore — composed, curious, and ready to assess civilisation.
Landfall — Palma at last
Morning brings reconnaissance. The landing, she concedes, “is very good.” The town?
“Completely and strongly fortified all round, with broad walks on the ramparts. A strong gate leads into the town, which is extremely picturesque. The view is very pretty over the plain below, where there were kitchen gardens… olive woods, ending in very fine mountains… and groves of orange-trees.”
It is a postcard in paragraphs: terraces are “like a dream,” palm-trees sprout improbably from courtyards, the sea flashing beyond the walls. The Consul from the Kingdom of Sardinia (naturally) appears. He’s called Constant, and this useful gentleman escorts them about town, as all right-thinking consuls called Constant should. “He is very civil and obliging,” she remarks.
People, shops, stories
The Marchioness is quick to take the local temperature — social, not meteorological. Palma’s hygiene and inhabitants get a five-star review:
“The town is very clean and quiet, looks comfortable, and not poor. The people generally have an agreeable appearance, are neatly dressed, and seem good-natured. They are more fresh-coloured, and less sallow and fierce-looking than the Spaniards we had lately seen, and are said to be obliging to foreigners, and particularly to the English, whom they treat with civility and hospitality.”
Then, with the curious specificity of a travel diarist, she detours into the market, where she documents an “abundance of provisions… oranges, lemons, apples, pomegranates, walnuts, tomatoes, capsicums, varieties of grain, beans of all sizes and colours, rice, vermicelli, maize, and innumerable other things…”
There’s also a melancholy aside — one of those little historical thunderclaps tucked into her writing — on shopkeepers: “principally people of Jewish descent,” segregated since the Inquisition “to a distinct part of the town, “not allowed to intermarry with the original Christians.” It’s a reminder that Mediterranean sunlight falls on complicated histories — and an opportunity for an Anglican lady to shudder at the dark shadow of foreign Popery.
Architecture soon lifts her mood again. She loves the grand entryways — “handsome and curious archways, with fine staircases” — and the city’s odd geometry: “The town is filled with the strangest houses imaginable, high towers, numbers of small open arcades and terraces, with gardens, as it were, in midair… many palm-trees, and, in all the most miserable holes and alleys, orange and lemon trees covered with fruit, and trellises of vines.”
The Gothic masterpiece, the Lonja, she says, is a “handsome old building” that’s “now completely neglected, and consequently falling to ruin”. And she notes that the fine convents have been confiscated and closed by the authorities, their inhabitants left homeless and destitute.
“The conduct of the government to the monks and nuns has been cruel in the extreme. Those recluses, who from age are unable to support themselves, are either starving, or obliged to subsist on the charity of their relations.”
The Cathedral and other consolations
No English visitor could resist the cathedral, and the Marchioness is no exception. She is tart about unfinished business (it is “far from completion”) but then lets out a delighted gasp over the windows:
“Those which are filled with stained glass are the richest in colour I ever saw, consisting entirely of the deepest and most gorgeous reds, dark blues, greens, and browns, like a cluster of carbuncles.”
She inventories monuments with military precision — a tomb here, a sarcophagus there — and she regards, with ethnographic interest if not enthusiasm, the local custom of suspending “an infinity of little white things, like paper butterflies, actually sacred wafers, from Christmas till the Epiphany.”
On New Year’s Eve, the Marchioness learns just how close to disaster she had come. The steamer Mallorquín limps into Palma port with grim news from Barcelona:
“Sixteen vessels were lost in the harbour, and some were driven out and wrecked on the bar. An English brig was lost on the coast near Rosas; the captain, two ladies, and four of the crew were drowned. A Dutch galliot and a Swedish brig ran ashore near Monjuich, and the crews were drowned.”
A night at the opera
New Year’s Day, and Palma’s theatre is “about the size of the Haymarket” — which will do very nicely. However, it “wants painting and renovating.” The production is Bellini’s Il Pirata — an apt title after the week she’s had. The review is restrained:
“The performers in general were very indifferent, but the tenor sang with taste, and the prima donna had a strong, rich voice. The performance was over by half-past nine.”
A model of concision — and one senses relief at the early curtain.
A walk above the bay
With their vessel repaired and “a good supply of provisions” aboard, the party was ready for Italy — but the wind is not cooperative. So the Marchioness indulged another walk ashore, to the castle of Bellver.
The fort is “round, with handsome towers,” the view is a sweep of water and “undulating country around, covered with trees and cultivated ground.” The sight of some peasants, “in full costume”, with enormous black hats, waistcoats, and very full white trousers, “like Greek dress,” delights her: “These men sit at an immense height on their mules, on a kind of platform saddle… they have fine, good-natured countenances, and evince no surprise at the sight of strangers…”
She is particularly taken with a peasant in a calf-skin pelisse — tail and all — worn with such “perfect gravity” that the scene becomes, in her words, “irresistible.”
Final judgment: the idle rich, the happy poor
And so to the passage that deserves to be engraved on a tile and sold in gift shops. After days of looking, walking, ranking, and thanking, the Marchioness delivers her verdict on Mallorcan society with the breezy authority of a woman who keeps both a yacht and a prayer book:
“The island is certainly very beautiful, and well worth a visit when time and opportunity serve. The lower orders seem well employed, contented, and happy; the higher classes lead a life of perfect inactivity — doing little, but eating occasionally, sleeping regularly, and strolling up and down the alameda. It is difficult to imagine a less agitated or more objectless existence, — nothing to do, to care about, or to wish for, — the climate and soil supplying all that is wanted, with no anxiety and little trouble.”
On January 2, the Marchioness, Rap the spaniel, and her yacht set sail, firing two guns “as a salute to Palma,”. She leaves the island “with very agreeable impressions, after a most acceptable repose.” She has had her adventure, her oranges, her opera, her opinions. She liked the bread, “it was particularly good”. She has survived the sea and, in her way, discovered an island — one that would, a century later, discover tourism.
It would be easy to mock the Marchioness — our brave worrier, quick to catalogue, quicker to judge. She can be prim and pious, and yet expansive when beauty breaks through (those windows like “a cluster of carbuncles”). And she actually looks. She sees orange-trees in the “most miserable holes and alleys”; lavender that turns the ground “blue.” She’s alert to the plight of the dispossessed. Importantly, she doesn’t pretend to be what she is not. She’s an aristocratic Englishwoman abroad, measuring the world by her own ruler, and telling you exactly what that ruler finds. The result is a portrait of 1840s Mallorca through the Victorian gaze that is both revealing and, at times, weirdly affectionate. She is not a pamphleteer or a publicist; she is a person in a place, startled into attention, and trying to write it all down before the wind shifts.
