Barcelona the Great Enchantress by Robert Hughes

Author:Robert Hughes [Hughes, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Art, Spain & Portugal, Barcelona (Spain), Travel, Regional, Barcelona, General, Arts; Spanish, Architecture, Biography & Autobiography, European, Spain, History
ISBN: 9781426201318
Publisher: National Geographic
Published: 2004-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Desde hoy todos los hombres son hermanos

ni siervo se conoce, ni seño.

Marchemos, O marchemos Icarianos,

tendiendo el estandarte del Amor!

From today, all men are brothers,

there will be no slave or master

Let us march, O march onward, Icarians,

holding up the banner of Love!

“The Universal Era,” declared the group’s news sheet, “begins with the foundation of Icaria. January 20, 1848, is the moment fixed for the regeneration of the World.”

This was the date on which Étienne Cabet sailed for America to found an Icarian community on land purchased sight unseen from a real estate shark, northwest of New Orleans, near Shreveport, Louisiana. It was sand and swamp, and only mosquitoes and venomous snakes flourished there. Monturiol did not go with the first group, believing that twenty thousand people would join it. Only sixty-nine did. Some, guessing what lay before them, committed suicide. The remainder trekked north to Nauvoo, Illinois, and founded a new settlement there, which lasted a few more years. Monturiol never got to join them. Harried by his resentful disciples, Cabet died of heartbreak in Nauvoo in 1856.

That was the end of Icaria, which survived only as the name given to an industrial slum in Barcelona. Around 1900 the city fathers renamed it Poblenou (“New Town”). One broad street, which not inappropriately stops dead at the gates of the Old Cemetery, retained the name of Avinguda d’Icaria. Then in 1992 the Olympic Village, built for the games in Barcelona, was named Nova Icaria—an extraordinarily silly notion, since Olympic contests are about nothing but competition, which the original Icarians had sworn to eliminate from their future world.

So the image of invention and industrial newness floated over Catalunya like a liberating angel. Inventing the submarine belonged to such an order of things, whether the submarine really worked or not. Monturiol was not a bit discouraged by the evaporation of Icaria. It just put the emphasis back where his talents required it to be: in exploration through technology. “The poles of the Earth,” he declared, “the depths of the oceans, the upper regions of the air: these three conquests are undoubtedly reserved for the near future … such is the task I have taken on.”

Europeans had dreamed of probing the depths of the sea in controlled underwater voyages since antiquity. Early on, experiments bore some fruit: In 1801, for instance, the American inventor Robert Fulton made a five-hour descent to 160 feet off Brest in France, in a craft named the Nautilus (whose name Jules Verne appropriated), driven by a hand-cranked propeller.

But subs with engines for underwater running did not exist until Monturiol produced the second model of his Ictíneo, a name made up of the Greek words for “fish” and “ship.” The first version was only twenty-three feet long and displaced eight tonnes. She was driven by four crank-turning aquanauts, and one of Monturiol’s colleagues, perhaps his devoted wife who had been his constant companion in triumph and ill luck, made a flag: a gold star shedding light on a branch of red

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