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Updated: May 22, 2025
The Basques are, like the Greeks, children of the sun; while the Valencian drapes himself, bare and sad, in his russet woollen rug, with a hole to pass his head through, the natives of Galicia and Biscay have the delight of fine linen shirts, bleached in the dew.
The final decision rested in a great measure with the Archduke Charles, who at last decided to proceed with Lord Peterborough and land upon the coast of Spain and test the disposition of his Valencian and Catalan subjects. The reasons for Peterborough's falling in with the decision to move on Barcelona are explained in a dispatch which he dictated to Sir George Rooke on the 20th of July.
And, moved with childlike joy by the dawn of a new day, the Triton sent his bass voice booming across the maritime silence, several times intoning sentimental melodies that in his youth he had heard sung by a vaudeville prima donna dressed as a ship's boy, at other times caroling in Valencian the chanteys of the coast fishermen's songs invented as they drew in their nets, in which most shameless words were flung together on the chance of making them rhyme.
The Valencian potters of the eighteenth century had adorned these tiles with Berber and Christian galleys, birds from nearby Albufera, white-wigged hunters offering flowers to a peasant girl, fruits of all kinds, and spirited horsemen on steeds that were half the size of their bodies parading before houses and trees that scarcely reached to the knees of their prancing coursers.
It was not until the reign of Philip III. and his disgraceful favourite Lerma, himself the most bigoted of Valencian "Christians," that, by the advice of Ribera, the Archbishop of Valencia, these industrious, thrifty, and harmless people were ruthlessly driven out.
By the beginning of May, 1813, a great improvement was visible in the equipment and moral of the Spanish and Portuguese troops; a vigorous insurrection against the French occupation had broken out in the province of Biscay, endangering the great road into Spain; and an Anglo-Sicilian army of 16,000 men, under Sir John Murray, had repulsed Suchet, hitherto undefeated, at Castalla on the Valencian coast, without, however, completing their victory, or capturing any of the French guns in the narrow defile by which the enemy fled.
He could see the court of Valencia, with the romantic gardens of Ruzafa, where poets sang mournful strophes over the wane of the Valencian Moor, while beautiful maidens listened from behind the blossoming rose-bushes. And then the catastrophe came.
It was written in Castilian and for the better understanding of his listeners he would read it, without the slightest hesitation, in Valencian. What a man!...
At their left, beyond the blue mountains of Oropesa, which bound the Valencian gulf, he could see in imagination Barcelona, where he had numerous friends, Marseilles, that prolongation of the Orient fastened on the European coast, and Genoa with its terraced palaces on hills covered with gardens. Then his vision would lose itself on the horizon stretching out in front of him.
Years afterwards, when dislodged from Candia, the Valencian adventurers returned to their native shores and there established a town in a fertile valley, giving it the name of the distant island which was changed to Gandia.
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