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the Centaur and the
North American Indian.
They can ride you, or walk you to death, whichever you please; and so
Freemantle said to me, ‘Now,
Captain, we will just take a little gallop out past the “neutral ground,” and then I think I will have shown you all the curiosities.’
The ‘neutral ground’ was about three miles distant, and ‘a gallop’ out and back, would be six miles! Imagine a sailor who had not been on horseback before, for six months; who had been riding for half a day one of those accursed English horses, with their long stride, and swinging trot, throwing a man up, and catching him again, as if he were a trap-ball; who was galled, and sore, and jaded, having such a proposition made to him It was worse than taking me out on that narrow ledge of rock fifteen hundred feet above the sea, to look at the
Queen of
Spain's Chair.
But I could not retreat.
How could an American, who had been talking of his big country, its long rivers, the immense distances traversed by its railroads and steamboats, and the capacity for endurance of its people in the present war, knock under to an Englishman, and a Coldstream Guardsman at that, on this very question of endurance?
And so we rode to the ‘neutral ground.’
This is a narrow strip of territory, accurately set off by metes and bounds, on the isthmus that separates the Rock from the Spanish territory.
As its name implies, neither party claims jurisdiction over it. On one side are posted the English sentinels, and on the other, the Spanish; and the all'swell! of the one mingles strangely, at night, with the alerta of the other.
We frequently heard them both on board the Sumter, when the night was still.
I got back to my ship just in time for a six o'clock dinner, astonished John by drinking an extra glass of sherry, and could hardly walk for a week afterward.
A day or two after my visit to the Rock, I received a visit from a Spanish naval lieutenant, sent over, as he stated, by the Admiral from Algeziras, to remonstrate with me against the burning of the ship Neapolitan within Spanish jurisdiction.
The reader who has read the description of the burning of that ship, will be as much astonished as I was at this visit.
The Spanish Government owns the fortress of Ceuta, on the
