Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard H. Davis

Dropped into Gibraltar, Davis writes like a man whose senses can barely keep up with the empire. The sentence is comically overstuffed on purpose: “a large place” and yet “no room in this letter” is the first sly move, turning geography into a joke about the inadequacy of language when confronted with spectacle. He’s doing travel writing as velocity, a dispatch that wants to feel breathless and immediate rather than reflective.

The chosen details telegraph the late-imperial gaze. “Moors in bare legs” isn’t neutral description; it’s an exotifying snapshot, the kind that reassures a Western reader they’ve arrived somewhere “foreign” and visually legible. Then come “six thousand Red-coats,” the counter-image of order, number, and uniform. Gibraltar becomes a stage where difference is costumed and British power is counted. Davis’s eye flicks between the sensual and the statistical, between the colonial postcard and the military ledger.

The most revealing clause is the last: “to hear Englishmen speak again.” Beneath the travelogue sparkle sits homesickness, or at least cultural re-centering. After the Moor-and-Redcoat panorama, the comfort he confesses isn’t the rock itself but the sound of English voices, a sonic return to belonging. It’s a line that exposes the psychological machinery of empire: the world is thrilling precisely because it’s arranged to keep “home” within earshot. Gibraltar, strategically and emotionally, is presented as a hinge - a foreign edge that still feels safely, audibly British.