The barbary macaques of Gibraltar are the sole free-ranging population of monkeys in Europe.
We ascended the top of the rock and came across many of these monkeys including this fellow, sitting on the Charles V wall, built under Charles I of Spain during 1540-1552.
The river was known to the Romans as Baetis, a name that may have a celtic or phoenician origin. When the Arabs invaded in 711, they called it "the river of Cordoba," after one of the cities on its shores. But when other Moors of North Africa known as the Almoravids invaded in 1090, they renamed it "the big river," or Wad al-Kabir; when the Spanish took the river back, in the years 1236 to 1248, they kept this name of Berber origin, latinised as Guadalquibir.
Seville is 60 nautical miles away from the sea, but the river is navigable and the city features a very active cargo and cruiseship harbour. Peregrinus has been docked at Odyssey Marina for the last three weeks.
We have often used the Guadalquivir as transport, commuting to the city center by Zodiac. The Sevillanos use the river to practice sailing, rowing and paddling; and in fact a number of them have made it to the Olympic games.
Paddlers and rowers on the Guadalquivir from the Puente de Triana on a Saturday morning. 10:21 AM, 12 December 2015. Leica Typ 114.
We found a chart of "all the civilian and navy flags of the world" in the Maritime Museum of Seville. It includes a section on treacherous American insurrectionists: América Disidente.
The subversives: Alto Perú, Bajo Perú, Colombia, Buenos-Ayres, Chile, Mejico, and Estado Central de America.
The rebel Estado Central de America, founded 1821, eventually dissolved into Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 1840. Recusant Colombia, founded 1819, later split into Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia (including Panama) in 1831. Insurgent Alto Perú is of course Bolivia, founded 1825.
A chart like this had a more-than-academic interest for a European power. Out at sea, it was critical to be able to identify friends and foes, yay!, even those disloyal American rebels. In the Museum of the Navy in Lisbon, for example, we saw a painting of a Portuguese frigate sunk, with substantial loss of hands, by a Buenos-Ayres naval vessel during the time the newly-minted Argentineans and the Kingdom of Portugal were in conflict for possession of what would later become Uruguay.
The chart is undated, but it must be from after 1825, because the Alto Perú flag did not previously exist. Conceivably the chart could be from before 1831, and it evidently cannot be from after 1840.
Click image to enlarge. Prospecto General De todas las Banderas que se izan a bordo de los Buques de guerra y mercantes de todas las naciones. Museo Marítimo de Sevilla, Torre del Oro. 12 December 2015. Leica Typ 114.
[...]
Ah! The remote beaches, the docks glimpsed from far away
Then the beaches looming up, the docks seen from close up.
The mystery of every departure and every arrival,
The sad instability, the incomprehensibility
Of this impossible universe
Felt in the skin more intensely at every seafaring moment!
The absurd gulping sobs our souls pour out
Over the expanses of various seas with isles in the distance,
Over far-off islands, coasts left behind as we pass,
Over ports grown clearer with their houses and their people
As the ship approaches.
[...]
——— Alvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), Poesia
Peregrinus at anchor in the Odiel river, in front of Mazagón Marina, mancomunidad of Moguer and Palos de la Frontera. Photo courtesy of Javier Delgado. Sony DSC-HX60V, 10:14 AM, 17 November 2015
