The Argonauts

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1914 · Authors: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (Valencia, 1867-Menton, France, 1928) was a journalist, politician, and above all a great writer of widely renowned novels. Author of successes such as La barraca , Cañas y barro , Sangre y arena , among other widely disseminated works of his time, he was a man of action characterised by his constant desire for mobility and to see the world. This impulse led him to travel to South America at the beginning of the 20th century. As a result of his contact with the New World, a new literary project arose, from which his work The Argonauts would emerge, published in 1914. In this novel, the author narrates the two weeks during which, confined on a transatlantic ship, different lives intersect on a journey full of will and hope, both for European millionaires and new American rich, as well as for sad Italian and Spanish emigrants seeking a new life. The transatlantic ship will make a stop in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with Blasco describing the city and especially the activity of its port as follows:

«The island rose in the background with its stepped volcanic mountains, with quadrilaterals of cultivated land dotted with white houses. At the lower part, next to the blue mass of the sea, the Spanish fortifications extended their old bastions, topped at the corners by projecting stone sentry boxes. The city was pink in colour, and above it rose the bell towers of several churches with tiled domes. Four radio towers marked in space the lines of its almost immaterial body, letting the sky be seen through the iron framework.

Higher up from the city, on a wrinkle of the mountain, waved the flag of a modern castle: an elegant hotel regularly visited by northern consumptives to breathe.

Between the dock and the transatlantic, Ojeda saw a wide bay area with flat barges for coal transport abandoned on their moorings and bobbing in solitude; steamships of various flags, around whose flanks the movement of cargo was stirred with crane screeches and the bustle of smaller boats; green-hulled sailing ships, which seemed dead, with no man on deck, stretching the skeletal arms of their masts into space. Roars of sirens announced an imminent departure and other roars warned from the horizon of immediate arrivals. He saw Belgian flags atop a mast heading to the mouths of the Congo; English bows coming from the Cape or turning course towards the Antilles and the Gulf of Mexico; ships of all nationalities heading straight south, seeking the coasts of Brazil and the Río de la Plata republics; five-masted hulls resting awaiting orders, returning from China, Hindustan or Australia; tricolour-flagged steamers en route to the African ports of colonial France; Spanish schooners dedicated to coastal shipping in the Canary archipelago and stops in Morocco.»

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