Desert Divers Read Free

with which to defend themselves. In 1443, Eannes de Azurara relates:
    Some were drowned in the sea, others hid in their cabins, yet others tried to bury their children in the sand in order to return later to fetch them. But Our Lord God, who rewards everything well done, decided as compensation for the hard work our men had donein His service that day to allow them to conquer their enemies and take 165 prisoners, men, women and children, not counting those killed or who killed themselves.
    At the end of the 1400s, when Portugal and Spain divided up the world between them, the Spaniards were given the Saharan coast, as it lay close to the Spanish Canary Isles. But by the time four hundred Spaniards stepped ashore to take possession of the area, the Saharans had had time to organize resistance. Only a hundred Spaniards escaped with their lives. The hunt for slaves continued all through the 1500s, but for almost four hundred years the Saharans managed to prevent Europeans from gaining a foothold on the coast.
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    At the tip of the Cap Juby headland there is no archipelago, only one small island.
    A Scot called Donald MacKenzie opened a store there in 1875. He called it the North West Africa Company and successfully traded cloth, tea and sugar for wool, leather and ostrich feathers.
    The Sultan of Morocco disliked the competition. In 1895, he bought the store for £50,000 and closed it.
    MacKenzie was also a thorn in the flesh of the Spanish traders on the Canary Isles, where he had a base. They wanted to take over his profitable caravan trade and exploit the rich coastal fishing grounds. In 1884, they sent men to the Saharaand built a fort on the next headland, the Dakla Peninsula, and called it Villa Cisneros.
    Cap Juby from the air. (
Musée d’Air France
)
    The Saharans attacked the fort constantly, the caravans never turned up, profits were non-existent and the Spanish state had to take over.
    By 1914, the French had subjugated the interior of the Sahara. In the north, they had occupied Morocco. In Europe, the First World War was being fought. Only in the Spanish Sahara was nothing happening. The commanding officer in Villa Cisneros, Fransisco Bens, had been rotting away there for ten years. Now he put his soldiers onto a ship and sailed north to capture Cap Juby.
    The Admiralty found out and ordered the ship to return to Villa Cisneros immediately.
    But Bens didn’t give up. On foot, he marched his men north along the coast.
    As they approached Cap Juby, they were overtaken by a Spanish cruiser, ordered to board and were once again conveyed ignominiously back to Villa Cisneros.
    Not until 1916 was Bens finally able to occupy Cap Juby, this time at the request of the Saharans, who preferred Bens to the aggressive French, and also of the French, who preferred Bens to the aggressive Saharans.
    Of course, by then trade had long gone elsewhere and MacKenzie’s island became the Spanish equivalent of Devil’s Island, a prison as loathed by the gaolers as it was feared by the prisoners.
    Its little fort was surrounded by two kilometres of barbed wire, says Joseph Ressel, the French writer, there on a visit. At night, nowhere was safe outside the walls. It was difficult to tell the difference between soldiers and convicts: all were unshaven, unwashed and in the same ragged uniforms. The officers sat silently in the mess, playing dice, their faces expressionless.
    But in the early 1920s, this godforsaken place gained a sudden importance when the French airline Compagnie Latécoère needed it as a stopover on the first Toulouse-Dakar air route.
    And in the mid-1920s, when the Germans and the French were competing for the air routes to South America and German agents supplied the Saharans with arms and ammunition to shoot down French planes – then Cap Juby became a focal point.
    In the spring of 1927, a new airport chief was appointed to Cap Juby with the task of rescuing shot-down French pilots and creating better relations with