When the travel stories of mankind were first set down in writing the
list was already nearly complete. Little was added afterward until the
modern age began the systematic collection of a mass of folklore which,
with all its significance, had scant literary backgrounds and less than
the old geographical quality. This is a strange thing. From generation
to generation men increased their stores of knowledge, but from century
to century they neither greatly increased nor greatly reduced their
stock of fables. There were periods when men forgot the wisdom of the
ancient world, but they remembered and repeated its pleasant marvels.
These have had a long journey down the ages. The Greek had them from
the Persian, Indian, and Egyptian; the Roman had them from the Greek;
the Arab merchant and Christian pilgrim had them from the Roman;
the Celtic monk and the viking had them alike from Roman, Arab, and
Christian; and the Spanish explorer had them from every mediæval
source. In the Spanish Americas of the sixteenth century the Age of
Fable blazed forth again and then grew dark.
The things added in this journey to the original stock of travel
tales were mainly local legends and variations on older themes. The
grasshoppers in one province chirped or were silent in obedience to
provincial ordinance, the fountains of another had curative properties,
there was an enchanted forest in a third. Celtic glamour passed a wand
over familiar material and it yielded the veiled or sunken islands of
the western ocean. The quest of El Dorado came out of a Spanish dream.
Nearly all other travel tales are found in the earliest literature. It
must be that men told them to one another ages before writing was known.
Various of the older books record them. They are interwoven with myths
of the supernatural in epic poetry. They are included in accounts of
countries and peoples in histories, encyclopædias, and guide-books.
They decorate the narratives of ancient and mediæval travelers. They
are compiled in volumes of mirabilia. Instances of these several
records are the Odyssey of Homer, the _History_ of Herodotus, the
_Travels_ of Marco Polo, and the _Collecteanea_ of Solinus.
The special type of letters which travel tales have developed is
the collections of mirabilia. Most, perhaps all, of these have been
library pilferings and borrowings. Photios culled from the _Indika_
of Ctesias everything that was difficult to believe, and the rest of
this survey of ancient India is lost. Solinus won the name of Pliny’s
Ape by extracting the curious things from the writings of the Roman
encyclopædist and combining them in a work which was standard for a
thousand years.
The very skepticism of other writers evidences the industry of the
historians of marvel. In his _Attic Nights_, Gellius, a Roman of
the second century A.D., tells of a bundle of musty books which he
bought for a few coppers in Brundusium. “They were all in Greek,”
he says, “and full of wonders and fables, containing relations of
things unheard of and incredible, but written by authors of no small
authority--Aristeas of Proconnesos and Isogonos of Nicæa, and Ctesias
and Onesikritos and Polystephanos and Hegesias.” Swiftly he lists their
races of dog-headed, one-legged, headless, and feathered mortals.
“As we perused them,” says the practical but too-scornful Roman, “we
felt how wearisome a task it is to read worthless books which conduce
neither to adorn nor to improve life.”
When Huc was ascending a Chinese river in the middle of the last
century his native servant used to go ashore at every stopping place
and bring aboard a stock of pamphlets to read. These products of the
ready pens of the literary class included fantastic stories of various
kinds, some of them very coarsely written. Says Huc: “The Greeks fixed
the abode of their monsters and ephemeral creatures in the east, and
the Chinese have returned the compliment by placing theirs in the west,
beyond the great seas. There dwell their dog-men, their ears long
enough to trail on the ground as they walk; there is the Kingdom of
Women, and of the people with a hole right through them at the breast.”
Best of all skeptical discussions of prodigy is the _Enquiries into
Vulgar and Common Errors_ (1646), which bears the high name of Sir
Thomas Browne. Its author challenges the entire array of travel
tales, closes his eyes to the truth hidden in many of them, recites
the means by which impostors fabricate imaginary animals, denounces
“saltimbancoes, quacksalvers, charlatans, astrologers, fortune tellers,
jugglers, geomancers and the like incantatory impostors,” and sounds
a warning against Herodotus, Ctesias, Maundeville, Pliny, Ælian,
Solinus, Athenæus, Philes, Tzetzes, and “even holy writers such as
Basil and Ambrose and Isidore, Bishop of Seville, and Albertus, Bishop
of Ratisbone.” Preachers and moralists, he says, have made occasion for
error by using for illustration the fables of the phœnix, salamander,
pelican and basilisk. The root of the matter, he concludes, is the
“deceptible condition” of men, of which Satan took advantage in the
beginning.
In whatever books one finds these pictures of strange lands and races
they have the effect of cameos, in that they are miniatures, and the
outlines are not subject to change. The description is always brief,
and next to nothing is added to it from age to age. The griffin has
no new habits, the dog-faced men lived under the old law, the pygmies
of the Middle Ages have not yet won the battles with the cranes which
they were waging in the time of Homer. If a traveler sees these strange
creatures he has nothing fresh to say of them. The main thing that
happens is that they shift their places on the map, retiring always
before the advance of knowledge. Æthicus of Istria contributes almost
the only really novel touch in a thousand years. He saw, so he says,
the Amazons in the region north of the Caspian suckling the centaurs
and minotaurs.
That these fables came down through the centuries unchanged is a
tribute to the hold of tradition, to men’s reverence for the written
word. It is also a revelation of the way natural histories and
encyclopædias were compiled until about the time of Buffon and Cuvier.
When a thing got itself said, it had a good chance of surviving,
provided it was interesting. Other men copied it out of a book without
demanding proofs, authority taking the place of research. The ancient
geographers cited the very poets as authorities.
Because they passed through endless compilations the fables remained
brief, or became so. Despite its vigor and penetrating quality, even
the _Geography_ of Strabo rests for its main facts on a multitude of
travel books whose statements it abridged. What the Greek writers could
not wholly avoid was too much for the Roman encyclopædists. They were
note-takers, compilers, abridgers, and they tried to make all learning
their province. The encyclopædias of Varro, Verrius, Flaccus, Pliny,
Suetonius, Pompeius Festus, and Nonius Marcellus were the product
not of a staff of experts, but in each case of a single mind. The
editors epitomized everything. They made extracts from books, extracts
from extracts, abridgments of abridgments. The original works they
consulted were lost, and only fragments of the mental inheritance of
the Roman world were transmitted from age to age. Under the modern
system of specialized inquiry the frontiers of knowledge press ever
outward. Under the old encyclopædists they drew inward and the body of
known facts shrank continually. This tendency culminated in Isidore,
Bishop of Seville in the seventh century, last of the Roman, first of
the Christian, encyclopædists. He devotes two sentences to the small
island of Thanet, now a part of Kent. He gives three sentences to Great
Britain; “jet is very common there, and pearls,” he says.
From works prepared under such conditions one must be content with a
treatise as brief as this in Isidore’s _Etymologies_: “The Cynocephali
are so called because they have dogs’ heads and their very barking
betrays them as beasts rather than men. They are born in India.”
The ideal lands, the prodigious races, and the fabulous animals were
first made known to the world by the Greeks. Few of the classic travel
tales, however, originated with them. Most of them trace back to Egypt
and India; if their sources are still more remote, the track has been
lost. The mythical peoples and animals dwelt in the deserts of Africa
and the deserts and mountains of Asia. India, even more than Egypt, was
their home. The mighty mountains that bordered it, the multitude of
peoples that inhabited it, the strong touch of the grotesque in their
art and ritual, and their curious sense of kinship with the elephant,
the tiger, the snake, and the jackal made theirs the native soil of
marvel. Many of the singular creatures that peopled the hinterlands of
Africa seem to be emigrants from India and beyond.
The earliest travel tales in Greek literature are found in Homer’s
Odyssey commingled with accounts of places and peoples that are not
of the earth. These stories of the tenth century before Christ look
westward from Greece. In the poems of Pindar the strange outlines of
eastern marvel appear on the Mediterranean scene and a new aspect
of reality animates them. With the history of Herodotus, written in
the fifth century before Christ, the invasion is well-nigh complete.
Imbedded in the greatest of all histories, passages about the griffin,
the phœnix and kindred creatures are scattered through volumes that
contain the high story of the Persian attempt upon Greece, and the best
accounts which the Mediterranean world had of the back lands of the
earth. Herodotus had heard of so many wonderful things which were true
that he made it a rule to report what he heard even where he doubted
its truth; and to this rule the world owes much. The Halicarnassian
doubted the existence of a sea north of Europe, or of the Tin Islands,
but he gave them a place in his pages. He could not believe that
the Phœnicians had circumnavigated Africa, but his record of their
incredible assertion that as they sailed they “had the sun on their
right” is evidence that the thing was done.
Herodotus was attacked as untruthful by Ctesias and the
Pseudo-Plutarch, and his monument at Thurium in Italy recites that
he removed thither to escape ridicule; but in the main this was the
ridicule of men who accepted his pleasant stories and doubted his
history, and who were offended because with too candid a pen he
sketched faction and faint-heartedness in the Greek states when Xerxes
led his host across the Hellespont.
After Herodotus the chief sponsor for antique marvel is Ctesias the
Cnidian, whose work falls in the following generation. If the one
history was the product of travel, the other was the product of
prolonged residence abroad, Ctesias having been stationed as physician
for seventeen years at the Persian court. He gave the Greeks their
first special treatise on India, introduced the Deformed Folk to the
west, and pictured the peninsula as a preserve of curious peoples
and animals. So he made a notable book of his _Indika_, but among
the learned it had small credit. “A writer not to be depended on,”
Aristotle calls the author, and where Herodotus was accused of
credulity, Ctesias was assailed for mendacity. Modern criticism,
however, has identified several of his monstrous races with tribes
still inhabiting Hindostan and partly excused other fables on the
ground that he never saw India and put in his book only what the
Persians told him of their neighbors to the east. When one people tells
another the ways of a third, the theme is marvel.
What was denied to Ctesias was vouchsafed to Alexander in the next
generation. With his own eyes he saw India. The European race before
which the east unveiled was the most gifted, curious, and imaginative
of all peoples, and the east beheld it personified in the captivating
figure of Alexander. The expedition brought legends back with it, and
left other legends behind. Indian and Afghan and Turkoman and Arab
never forgot the great Macedonian, while the whole literature of the
west was colored by this eastern contact.
A few other Greek names are linked with the travel tale. Scylax of
Caryanda taxed credulity with his fabric of wonder. Aristotle examined
reports of fabulous creatures, and fables as to actual species, and
rejected most, but not all, of them. The study of anthropology,
developed at Alexandria, found its harvest in the geography of Strabo
and in the survey of the Erythræan Sea by Agatharcides. Both works
contain curious accounts of curious tribes of men.
Pausanias the Lydian, who lived in the second century of the Christian
era, is better remembered than men with better title to remembrance,
because his work happened to survive. His _Description of Greece_ has
been compared to an old shoe flung high on the beach of time. An old
man wrote it, interested in old things. Pausanias has much to say
of the wonders of sacred grottos, trees, and springs. His method of
taking a road and describing everything along it was copied by pilgrim
writers, who clogged the paths of Palestine with their marvels. Modern
criticism has discovered that he repeats as interviews with natives
statements he had read in local handbooks, and that, betrayed thereby,
he tells of seeing cities as flourishing places which had been in
ruins for centuries. Yet Pausanias was a real traveler, although at
times a luckless compiler.
Lucian the Samosatan was his contemporary, but his contribution to
marvel is a satire on the credulity of all travelers, among whom he
arraigns Homer, Herodotus, and Ctesias. His _True History_ relates an
imaginary voyage to the moon, and thence to the Fortunate Isles, where
Ulysses entrusts him with a letter to Calypso. In the belly of a whale
nearly two hundred miles long, which had swallowed his ship, he finds
lakes, woods, and strange races of living men. It was the singular
fortune of this travesty to provide material for epics which the Celts
accepted as history and for adventures which were foisted on the
narrative of Baron Munchausen.
The Latin mind was inferior to the Greek chiefly in that it was
deficient in curiosity. The Romans were content to rule the world
rather than to understand it. It was enough that amber and silk and
incense and spice should come to them from the four corners of the
earth without their following the trade routes back to find what manner
of people sent these things. Yet legend was active among the mariners
and camel-drivers and porters of the races that served the Roman on the
fringes of his empire. The fables of these porter-nations were passed
on to the Arab and are preserved in the _Thousand and One Nights_.
Rome, however, performed a service to the traditional world by
producing the elder Pliny and his amazing _Natural History_. Pliny has
not the charm, narrative gifts, or historical genius of Herodotus,
but he comes half a millennium afterward and has more to report. He
lacks the comprehensive and penetrating intelligence of Aristotle, but
he knows more--of things that are so, and of things that are not so.
His great work is perhaps the most impressive monument to industry
raised by a single mind. The entire body of learning of the ancient
world passed through his mind and came out again in the volumes which
he calls a natural history but which are in fact an encyclopædia.
These thirty-seven books record twenty thousand matters of importance
collected from about two thousand volumes, only a few of which have
survived. As his nephew, the younger Pliny, recites, it was his maxim
that “there is no book so bad but some good may be got out of it.”
To get it Pliny made notes, even in the bath. When he traveled, his
secretary was by his side with a book and tablets, and if it was winter
the scribe took dictation with his gloves on. In Rome Pliny never moved
about except in a litter, reading while he was being carried through
the streets. Once he rebuked his nephew for walking and “losing all
those hours.”
While tracing the courses of the stars, the description of countries,
plants and animals, the anatomy of man, the properties of drugs, the
nature of gems, the uses of metals, the science of farming and the
fine arts, Pliny contrives also to sketch the geography of marvel. “It
is really wonderful,” he declares, “to what a length the credulity of
the Greeks will go.” Yet he draws most of his material from them, and
whatever his own attitude toward the things he recites, the result of
the recital was to give credulity its own text-book for a thousand
years. Cynical as was his point of view, Pliny was yet a lover of
marvel and searched it out and set it forth in his pages whether he
believed it or not. It was enough that it was interesting.
His was the journalistic angle. The _Natural History_ is in effect
a vast newspaper report of the world of about A.D. 77. The columns
of curious miscellany which newspapers print sometimes under such
headings as “Oddities in the Day’s News” are legacies of his spirit.
The monument to his immense industry and reportorial instinct is a
work which fabulists of all succeeding ages used as a quarry for their
own building materials. Had his been the questing mind of the Greek,
instead of the drag-net intelligence of the journalist of an incurious
but marvel-loving world, the view of the central countries of culture
and of the horizon lands presented in the _Natural History_ would have
less the aspect of a main circus tent surrounded by side shows.
Solinus, surnamed Polyhistor or the Varied Narrator, distilled the
marvels from Pliny, making some seven hundred extracts, adding to them
from other sources, and producing a work which supplanted the older
writer in the affections of the multitude throughout the Middle Ages.
His _Collecteanea_ appeared in the third or fourth century of the
Christian Era, and although he seems to have been a pagan grammarian,
he had mainly Christian readers. St. Augustine quotes him four times
in his _City of God_, and Isidore uses no less than two hundred
extracts in his _Etymologies_. The pagan’s work was both a symptom and
a cause of the intellectual decline in the Middle Ages. Other men did
as he did, or accepted the results of his labors as sparing them its
pains. What he did, and what Europe did after the breakdown of the old
order of things, was to forget ancient wisdom and hold fast to ancient
wonder. Solinus was spiritual father of the Christian fabulists, mentor
of the Christian pilgrims.
What Pliny wrote, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, Solinus copies
with mouth agape. The world is become a playhouse, a curio hall, a
province of faerie. One learns that, like man, the quail suffers from
the falling sickness and that the cranes of Thrace travel southward
in ballast, stuffing their craws with sand and pebbles. In the
Mediterranean islands there is a “sardonic” plant, on eating which
one grins horribly and dies of lockjaw. In Germany are the Hercynian
birds whose feathers give light in the dark. Here also is a mule-like
pastoral beast with so long an upper lip that he “cannot feed except
walking backward.” In Africa are jovial apes which rejoice in the new
of the moon and lament in its wane, and sphinxes and satyrs “easily
taught to forget their wildness, very sweet faced, and full of toying
continually.” There are no snakes in Ireland--and no sense of right and
wrong.
The _Physiologus_, an Alexandrian compilation, companions the
_Collecteanea_, but introduces a moralizing note and thereby
ushers a rabble of real and fabulous animals into the symbolism of
ecclesiastical architecture. Isidore of Seville is a desiccated
Solinus, dried out by theology and the specialized pursuits of the
grammarian. He wrote at the opening of the seventh century. His
_Etymologies_ has already been cited as that irreducible minimum of
knowledge to which the epitomizing habit of Roman encyclopædists tended
always. It shows also the Roman dependence on authority as a substitute
for research, and the Roman worship of words. Easy it was for early
Christian writers to take up the tradition of the encyclopædists, for
it needed only that the authority of the pagan be replaced by that of a
purer faith. The pagan marvels were accepted almost in a body and many
of them are briefly recited by Isidore.
How words breed legend is disclosed in the very title of the
_Etymologies_. Carrying a little further the tradition of the Romans,
with whom philology was almost as old as poetry and more important than
natural science, Isidore seemed to think that when he had given the
derivation of a term he had accomplished a complete description of the
thing that bore its name. Words themselves were things transcendental.
Thus he defines Barbarism as “the uttering of a word with an error
in a letter or in a quantity.” _Nox_, the Latin word for night, “is
derived from _nocere_ (to injure) because it injures the eyes.” “_Homo_
is so named because he is made of _humus_ (earth), as it is told in
_Genesis_.” “_Corpus_ (the body) is so called because being corrupted
it perishes.”
Isidore writes the texts for the chapter in the history of marvel that
deals with Christian fabulism, pilgriming, and cosmography. It is
Christian only in the sense that Christians of the earlier centuries
tell the tales, make the journeys, and construct the world theories.
Its subject matter is Jewish and pagan, with the two elements sometimes
in an artless, sometimes in a forced, combination; it presents one
side of that contact and conflict between Aryan and Semitic cultures
which is the history of the last nineteen centuries. For the first part
of the period the result of the conflict in the field of geography,
travel, and tradition was what might be expected where simple-witted
peoples, lately emerged from barbarism and not yet nationally minded,
meet a race of ancient culture and intense national spirit. Jewish
conceptions prevailed. It was thought that children, if taught no other
tongue, would naturally speak Hebrew. Europe accepted as a literal
recital of fact the Sumerian legend preserved in Hebrew Scriptures
that the human race began with Adam--“the mean, toolless and frivolous
Adam,” as Andrew Lang calls him--and his consort in the Garden of Eden;
and from Hebrew chronology it figured that the earth must be about
four thousand years old. It made over its geography to conform to Old
Testament texts, and, discarding the world-knowledge of the classic
civilizations, it made over its maps to show Jerusalem in the center of
a flat earth.
When pilgrims to Palestine had visited the scenes of the birth and
passion of Christ they proceeded to explore the Jewish background for
memorials of Old Testament history, with side trips into the realm of
pagan marvel. All of them looked for the pillar of salt by the Dead
Sea in which Lot’s wife was entombed; for centuries this column comes
and goes in their narratives. Silvia of Aquitaine, whose journey falls
in the fourth century, says there was no pillar there--the sea had
engulfed it--but others saw it later. Theodosius says it waxed and
waned with the phases of the moon. Antoninus denies the report that
pasturing sheep had diminished its size by licking it. A fragment of
this marvel is in the Library of Congress at Washington, together with
the report of an American traveler who measured the pillar and found it
sixty feet high and forty feet around, larger than he believed Lot’s
wife could have been.
Other of the earlier pilgrims are said to have gone into Arabia to see
the dunghill where Job contended with his comforters. The pyramids,
some thought, were the barns of Joseph. The Apples of Adam still showed
the marks of his teeth. The Jordan halted its waters at the time of
the Epiphany. Devils were seen on Mount Gilboa. The torments of hell
lay under the Sea of Sodom and Abbott Daniel had a whiff of them from
its surface. In Samaria, Paula, friend of Saint Jerome, saw “devils
writhing and yelling in different kinds of torture, and men before the
tombs of the saints, howling like wolves, barking like dogs, roaring
like lions, hissing like serpents, bellowing like bulls.” One pilgrim
writer copied another, few took any note of the natural features of
Palestine, most of them were of primitive culture, and the women had a
wider outlook than the men.
The Jew, Rabbi Moses Petachia, made a pilgrimage, reporting among other
things that the wind which blew from the shallow parts of the Sea of
Azov, the Stagnant Sea of old geography, was fatal to passers-by; he
saw on the Euphrates a flying camel which could go a mile in a second.
Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela undertook a remarkable journey in the twelfth
century to learn the condition of the Jewish communities of the east.
He brought back valuable information, but said he could not approach
the vast ruins of Babylon because of the scorpions and serpents that
haunted them, located mythical Jewish states in the deserts of Arabia,
and repeated numerous fables on hearsay. If he ever took this journey,
says the elder Disraeli, it must have been with his nightcap on.
How the new peoples of the west lost the sense of historical
perspective under the Jewish impact is shown in the long speculation
over the whereabouts of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Classic learning
was dismissed as “windy babble.” The fate of the peoples of the
great monarchies of antiquity aroused no curiosity. But everywhere
were sought the footsteps of the vanished Israelites. They were
imprisoned in the Caucasus, they had become Afghan mountaineers, they
were privileged subjects of Prester John, they were settled in the
Canaries, they had reached China, they had colonized Peru, they were
the progenitors of the British and American peoples, they were the
ancestors of the North American Indian, and the first Mormons.
While Europe was curious about the shrines, landmarks, and legends of
Asia, and held it to be the continent of wonder, Asia did not return
the interest. It had few travel tales to tell of the peoples of the
west, few reports of any kind. The Chinese saw little of note in
the Roman Empire, “Great China,” save that it had good jugglers and
asbestos cloth and that the eastern gate of Constantinople was covered
with shining gold leaf and was two hundred feet high. India ignored the
sea, and was self-contained in its life and legends; the fabulous and
felicitous peoples of the Puranas dwell in trans-Himalayan valleys.
Arab sailors were carriers of Indian fables and may have taught them to
the Chinese; a large part of Chinese marvel has a quality suggesting
importation. Yet the superior historical sense of the Chinese,
preserving almost intact marvel tales that were brought to them, made
the rest of the world their debtor. Their encyclopædias and classics
are quite in the style of Pliny, as, for example, the _Shan Hai King_,
or _Wonders by Land and Sea_, to which the dates of B.C. 2700, 2205,
and 222 have been severally ascribed, and which is also alleged to be a
Taoist forgery of the fourth century A.D. Monster peoples and animals
are in this work, and one of its early prefaces relates the journey of
a king to the Halls of the Giants in the east, to the mansions of the
Fairy Queen in the west, across a bridge of tortoises in the south and
over streets made of feathers in the north. It is also recited that by
imperial decree nine urns were set up in various parts of China on
which, to the fear of the people, the common and the strange animals of
each region were pictured.
Religious fervor at length set the feet of Chinese upon paths along
which wonder grew. Buddhist priests and scholars went east to teach and
west to learn. If the annals of the Middle Kingdom are to be credited,
a fair interpretation of the record is that the Chinese reached the
coast of North America in A.D. 499 and again in 502 and 556. They
found countries which they described as the Land of Marked Bodies and
the Great Han country. The natives of the former had horses and draft
deer with great horns (reindeer) and esteemed copper more than gold. A
thousand furlongs east was the Kingdom of Women--erect, white-skinned,
hairy, timorous, subsisting on a salt plant like wormwood. The
residents of the Land of Marked Bodies, supposed to be the Aleutian
Islands, were tattooed, joyous, rich in gold and silver. Eastward was
Great Han, possibly British Columbia, the wild beasts of which devoured
guilty criminals, but spared persons falsely accused. There was also a
country of dog-headed men.
These lands have been identified with regions of northeastern Asia,
and because of their climate and products with American regions as far
south as California and Mexico.
The westward journeys of Buddhist scholars are historical and
important. They went to India at various periods from the beginning of
the fifth to the latter part of the seventh century of our era to study
the Law of Buddha, to visit the sites associated with Sakya Muni and
to collect sacred books and relics. One Chinese work has a record of
fifty-six of these worthies. The Buddhist pilgrims were men of higher
intelligence and still greater credulity than those who at about the
same time were journeying out of Europe to the shrines of Palestine.
Their largest figure, and one of the world’s greatest travelers, is
Hiouen Thsang, who left China in A.D. 629 and returned seventeen years
later.
In the desert of Gobi, Hiouen saw spectral armies charging down upon
him and at night the flare of spectral torches, but at a word of
scripture the glamour faded. In the T’sung-ling mountains Fa-hien found
poison dragons that spat the storm and avalanche; here, says Hiouen,
one should not wear red garments nor carry loud-sounding calabashes.
The pass of Varasena was so high that birds could not fly over it,
but crossed the summit afoot. Report had it that in the deserts of
Turkestan a sandstorm covered in a single day as many cities as there
were days in the year.
The India that Hiouen traversed was a land of ruins and marvels.
He tells of demon women and miracle gold and wonder-working Buddha
teeth; of a shepherd that became a dragon; of a roe that brought forth
a beautiful girl with deer feet; of a risha that could fly until a
princess touched him, and thereafter he merely walked; of a holy man
whose sanctity made light in a dark wood. There are elephants in his
pages that tend shrines with flowers and perfumes, and wild asses
that protect an altar, and desert ants as large as hedgehogs. There
are dragon domains and serpent palaces underground, and aboveground a
Buddhist tower made of cows’ dung. There is a City of Hump-backed Women
and on a distant island the Kingdom of Western Women who traffic in
gems with Byzantium and accept lovers from there.
Most of these things of Chinese report the west knows also from
Herodotus and Pliny and Polo. Out of India, marvel.
The Nestorian chapter in the joint history of religion and wonder bears
a twelfth-century date, but deals with the inheritance of classic
fable. Although the mediæval legend of a powerful Christian monarch
named Prester John, who reigned amid pagan enemies somewhere in the
heart of Asia, was based on rumors of the eastward spread of the
Nestorian faith, the Christian element in it is weighted with all the
pagan wonders of an earlier time. The realm of Presbyter John is the
range of strange animals and stranger men. Thus the apocryphal letter
bearing his signature which reached the west declares: “Our land is the
home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum,
cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears,
white merles, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses,
wild oxen, and wild men, men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes
before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high
giants, cyclopes, and similar women; it is the home, too, of the
phœnix, and of nearly all living animals.”
Here, continues the royal letter writer, are the accursed Gog and
Magog, and the Lost Israelites, and the worm Salamander, and Amazons
and Brahmans, and paradise and pearls and pepper. And when John goes
to war a million and a half soldiers follow him. The epistle is pagan
marvel’s broadest gesture over lands unknown.
With differences of Oriental temperament and cast of thought, Arab
geography and travel parallel every phase of the west except the Age of
Ignorance. The Arabs escaped a Lactantius and a Cosmas, but they had
their Plinies and Ptolemies, their own sea epic, and in Ibn Batuta a
traveler second only to Marco Polo. Until the Middle Ages were ending
the centers of world culture were at Bagdad and Cordoba. If Christendom
accepted the ancient fables and rejected the ancient learning, Islam
embraced both.
The great Arab geographers blended in their works the methods of
Ptolemy and Pliny, together with a story-telling strain from the
coffee-houses of the east. The very titles of their works suggest
this--Aljahedh’s _Book of the Cities and Marvels of Countries_,
Massoudy’s _Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones_, Al
Istakhri’s _Book of Climates_, Ibn Haukal’s _Book of Roads and
Kingdoms_, Ibn Khordadbeh’s _Principal Trade Routes_, Abulfeda’s
_Encyclopædia_, and Idrisi’s _The Delight of Those Who Seek to Wander
Through the Regions of the World_. These are treatises such as would
be expected from a race which had found its destinies in trade routes,
which had pitched its tents in the seats of the ancient culture, and
which took its ease in coffee-houses. They show Ptolemy’s sense of
distances and measurements, Pliny’s note-taking habits and appetite for
marvel, the bazar instinct for entertaining stories, and the Arab’s
poetic fancy. Massoudy’s is the typical product of his race. It is a
vast and glittering collection of history, science, travel, and legend,
thrown together by an imagination to which the varied and shifting
shows of life and nature were perpetual delight. What mainly it and
its companion works lack is the Greek sense of form and capacity for
precise thinking.
Arab geography and marvel are best to be studied in the seven voyages
of Sindbad the Sailor. These are true travels, tricked out with
legendary travel tales, taken by a number of men, notably the Two
Mussulman Travelers of the ninth century, and all ascribed to one man
in order to give them the epic quality. Sindbad is the Arab Ulysses and
this the Arab Odyssey. The theater of the eastern epic is the Indian
Sea, rather than the Mediterranean, it is well-nigh free from myths of
the supernatural, and its geographical notes, although disguised, are
definite. One can trace, and Beazley has done so, the itineraries of
the much-buffeted merchant-wanderer, and identify the material of many
of his adventures.
Wak-wak, the destination of the first voyage, is perhaps Japan; the
island of mysterious nightly music is an echo of Solinus; the adventure
of the whale’s back is repeated by St. Brendan’s companions, and the
owl-headed fish are borrowed from Khordadbeh. The accounts of the roc
of Zanzibar and the Indian valley of diamonds in the second voyage are
to be found also in the _Travels_ of Marco Polo. The third voyage is
lifted from Homer; the hairy, ugly little dwarfs are the pygmies of the
Iliad, and the one-eyed giant who ate Sindbad’s companions is a negro
Polyphemus out of the Odyssey. The fourth voyage, with its incidents
of cannibal ghouls and their reason-destroying herbs, the burial of
Sindbad alive with his deceased native wife, and his encounter with
pepper-gatherers, is a distorted narrative of Indian races, customs,
and products. The Old Man of the Sea, or Sheikh of the Seaboard, in the
fifth voyage is the orang-utan of Sumatra. The sixth voyage is mainly a
description of Ceylon. In the seventh voyage the account of elephants
that transported Sindbad to their cemetery, where without killing them
he could have all the ivory he required, is about as Pliny would have
written it.
Into this east of glowing sorceries came two men of the west in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the one to traverse Asia from end
to end, and see more of wonder than any man had seen before, the other
to roam still farther, for his journeys were in his imagination and
had only its limits. The _Book of Diversities_ of Marco Polo is the
greatest of all narratives of wanderings. The _Marvellous Adventures
of Sir John Maundeville_ is the wildest of all romances that purport
to be fact. The two works may be considered together if for no other
reason than the ironic comment they afford on popular judgments before
time redresses them. The facts of Polo were long treated as fables.
The fables of Maundeville were accepted as facts. Sir John’s book was
translated into every European tongue and passed through hundreds of
editions. Because of his reports on the wealth of Kublai Khan, Marco
was nicknamed Il Milioni; he was asked on his deathbed if he would
not recant some of the things he had said, and after his death there
figured in Venetian masques a comic character who told unbelievable
tales to guffawing street crowds and was called Marco Milioni.
The Venetian spent twenty-four years in Asia, most of the time in the
service of the philosopher-monarch, Kublai Khan, and returned to his
native city in 1295. There are fables in his book, hearsay statements
usually reported as such; but their effect of illusion is slight
compared with the staggering and splendid realities which the narrative
unfolded before eyes unprepared for them. Marco drew aside the curtain
of Asia. It was as if the spectators in some provincial theater,
used only to the antics of vagrant mountebanks and the crudities of
folk-drama, saw for the first time one of those extravaganzas of
music, movement, and color, built around a tale of the Orient, which
tax even the dramatic resources of world capitals to produce. Sitting
in their own darkness, the simpler peoples of the west saw on a stage
hung with costly draperies and dim with clouds of incense, a stage of
vast spaces and long perspectives, the civilizations of the venerable
east--India, dreaming in the sun with its jeweled rajahs and naked
fakirs; China, with its teeming populations, its immense inland fleets,
its wisdom and its riches; Burma, serene amid the clang of its temple
bells; the golden roofs of Japan rising out of cherry blossoms; Tibet,
wrapped in a vision; the Indian Archipelago, with its spices, pearls,
and cannibals. Other figures less clearly defined appeared in the
background--nomads of the steppes, fur-hunting Samoyeds of the tundras,
mountain tribes that pressed their women upon stranger guests; glimpses
even of farthest Africa, of a Christian Ethiopia, of the Zanzibar of
negroes, ivory, and ambergris, and of Madagascar, past which the sea
bore relentlessly southward.
Of many of these things Europe heard for the first time from Marco,
of all of them his was the first illuminating report, and most of them
his own eyes had seen. Here Truth is the stuff of Illusion. Though
Marco speaks of dog-faced Andamanese, and islands of Amazons, and Lop
with its evil spirits, and the storm-raising witches of Socotra, and
the roc, it is not on these, but on his verities, that wonder waits.
The center of the wonder is Kublai Khan, who built the pleasure-dome
in Xanadu. Greatly is he beholden to the traveler, who came to him
one morning out of the unknown. But for Marco, as Masefield finely
says, this lord of lords, ruler of so many cities, so many gardens, so
many fish pools, would be only a name, an image covered by the sands.
Remembrance is with those who see, and write.
Though he did not see, Maundeville wrote. The author of the volume
that bears this name may have seen Syria, but he claims to have been
everywhere. He served the Sultan of Egypt against the Bedouins and
declined his daughter’s hand in marriage. He drank of the Well of
Youth. He served the emperor of China in his war against Mancy. He took
astronomical observations in the Indian Ocean. He traversed Russia,
Livonia, Asia Minor, Amazonia, Persia, India, Tartary, China, Arabia,
Libya, Ethiopia. One great thing his humility forbade him to essay, and
that was the Terrestrial Paradise. “I was not worthy,” he says.
The fabricator of the Maundeville narrative seems to have been Jean de
Bourgogne, a physician of Liège, who died there in 1373, long enough
after his book appeared for it already to have won reputation; on his
deathbed he was proud to avow his authorship, though not his imposture.
It is to be inferred that he appropriated his pen name of Maundeville,
knight of St. Albans in England, from the title of a romantic satire
by Jean du Pin published a few years before, in which the writer is
conducted in a dream through a world of allegory by a knight named
Mandevie whose home was on a white mountain--Mons Albus or St. Albans,
as has been suggested. Where the adventures of Maundeville came from is
not in doubt. Friar Odoric, a great but credulous traveler, had spent
fourteen years in Asia, largely in India and Cathay, and had written
out his story on his return to Italy in 1330. Maundeville, whose book
is perhaps of twenty years later, looted his predecessor so thoroughly
that the friar was deemed the copyist of the knight; Samuel Purchas
thought that “some later fabler,” like Odoric, had stuffed the knight’s
tale. Maundeville raided also the fables of Solinus, the forged letter
of Prester John, the travels of King Hayton of Armenia, and the varied
lore and legend of all lands and times collected in the preceding
century by the great encyclopædist of the Middle Ages, Vincent of
Beauvais. Apparently he never heard of Polo.
The bogus knight won a wide and fascinated audience by throwing his
marvels into a tale of which he is the hero. His own adventures, his
travels from land to land, his comments on countries and peoples, give
his book unity, movement, and the narrative interest which is lacking
in the works of Ctesias, Pliny, Solinus, and their school. Ctesias
writes of India, but never professes to have been there, and Pliny and
Solinus sit afar and look over the world. Maundeville comes out of
the library and crosses the earth, staff in hand, in an earlier, and
unhallowed, _Pilgrim’s Progress_. His is the method, and his almost was
the vogue, of the Odyssey and of the Sindbad saga. The classic brevity
and sterility in recounting mirabilia, he escapes in some measure,
robbing several fables to enrich one. It happened that an early
rendering of his work into English was done when the island tongue was
in a fluid state, and done with such sense of idiom that he has been
called, although falsely, the father of English prose.
Maundeville is most interesting when he is most audacious, or when
he stumbles most. At Joppa he transposes the figures of a classic
myth, and reports seeing a rib forty feet long of “Andromeda a great
giant,” chained there before Noah’s flood. The chameleon (chamois?) is
“a little Beast, as a Goat.” In Pathen the giant tortoise of Odoric
becomes “a kind of Snails that be so great that many Persons may lodge
them in their Shells.” The rats in the Isle of Charia are “as great as
Hounds here.” There are wool-bearing hens in Mancy. The manna in the
Land of Job “cleanseth the Blood and putteth out Melancholy.” Chaldea
is a country of fair men and evil women. In the Pepper Country “the
Women shave their Beards and the Men not.”
The author scatters his mythical islands even over the mainland of
Asia. Yet his sense of the shape and rotundity of the earth was far
in advance of his time. In the midst of romancings, one finds this,
the clearest word of his century, and in the field of exploration the
most constructive: “I say to you certainly that Men may environ all the
Earth of all the World, as well underneath as above, and return again
to their Country, if that they had Company and Shipping and Conduct;
and always they should find Men, Lands and Isles, as well as in this
Country.” For this declaration, for the vision of the Valley of the
Shadow of Death which Bunyan took from him and he from Odoric, for
the delight that his fictitious narrative still conveys, and for the
English prose which is its vehicle, one may half forgive the physician
of Liege his pose of a gouty English knight, dictating the true story
of adventurous years to ease hours of broken rest, and ending it with a
benediction, followed, anthem-wise, by a chorus of amens.
The remainder of the story of marvel, so far as it is a literary
phenomenon, is a sea tale told by men of the west, for Prince Henry
the Navigator was born a few years after Jean de Bourgogne died, and
with his manhood there opens the era of maritime discovery. Meanwhile
the northwest of Europe had entered the record with Norse and Irish
chapters. Though maps of the early Middle Ages placed the griffins and
the cynocephali in the north of Europe, the north knew them not. Giants
and trolls it knew, and the Iceland sagas tell of vampires that hid in
heaps of stockfish, and monster men, dragons, and bulls that guarded a
haunted shore. The inevitable compilations came later. The history of
Norway written by Pontoppidan in the eighteenth century is a brief for
Scandinavian waters as the habitat of prodigious things.
The Celts neither robbed nor traded on the sea, and the very ports of
Ireland were opened by Northmen; yet one of the three great epics of
the deep, the _Voyage of St. Brendan_, is Irish, and monks are its
heroes. The five Irish _Imrama_ or sea tales, of which this is the
chief, weave a spell beyond any other woven upon the deep, because they
look westward toward hidden continents that presently were to loom
through the mists, and track with spectral craft the very seas that
foamed erelong around the prows of Spain. Working with bits of old
beliefs, as a craftsman with bits of broken glass, the Celt fashioned
an oriel window through which he glimpsed the lands of dream. It was
magic like that of Gwyn ab Nudd, King of Faerie, who spread before St.
Collen the semblance of a feast in a great court. “I will not eat the
leaves of trees,” said the saint, and flung holy water about him, and
“there was neither castle, nor troops, nor maidens, nor music, nor the
appearance of any thing whatever, but the green hillocks.”
Fables of old time which had smoldered through the later Middle Ages,
and which were rekindled by fresh contacts with classic marvel in the
revival of letters, blazed into fierce life in the age of discovery.
When new continents swam into ken, and hidden empires showed themselves
for a moment on distant mountain sides, only to crash down at the onset
of a handful of adventurous men, nothing seemed incredible. A world
which had denied its own shape awoke to the fact of antipodal lands and
peoples and was prepared to believe anything. The extravagant things
it credited--and herein is palliation for its credulity--were yet
small beside the wonders with which reality smote it in the face. The
prodigious races of antiquity that had retreated before the traveler
seemed at last to have been run to cover in those parts of the New
World whither Spanish explorers penetrated. South America presented
itself as a fulfillment of classic wonder and a proof of the unity of
the human story.
Mythical America was in part a projection of the dreaming mind of
Spain upon the sensitive consciousness of savages. There are stories
that have a way of taking root as soon as they are transplanted, and
by the incorporation of native elements of accommodating themselves
so completely to new surroundings as to deceive the very men who had
loosed them. Hence the mingling of Old and New World elements in
the tales of giants, pygmies, Amazons, satyrs, and acephalites. The
conquistadors put leading questions, and had the answers they wanted.
If they were deceived, yet there was more of the scientific spirit in
the men who set out in search of Paradise or El Dorado, than in all the
generations of encyclopædists who copied down incredible things and
never went forth to find them.
One may trace the outlines of Mythical America in the journals of
Columbus; in the writings of Peter Martyr and Garcilaso de la Vega;
in the monographs of conquistadors like Coronado; in the _History of
the Indies_ by Oviedo, which Las Casas unjustly declares is “as full
of lies almost as pages,” and in Hakluyt’s _Principal Voyages_, justly
called the English prose epic. For the most fabulous and fascinating
picture one turns to Raleigh’s account of his expedition to Guiana in
1595. It is at once a collection of mirabilia, a story of adventure, a
courtly address to the “Lady of Ladies” (Queen Elizabeth), a commercial
prospectus, and the brief of a man on the defensive. In its pages the
southern coasts of the Caribbean are as rich in marvel as the southern
coasts of the Mediterranean in the pages of Pliny.
Earlier travelers had found it well to secure specimens of ores,
plants, and savages as vouchers for their credit among skeptical
stay-at-homes, and the Spaniards took the precaution of carrying
notaries in their ships to attest their statements. In the eighteenth
century a more effective check was developed for travel tales.
The science of criticism superseded the habit of compilation. The
reports of travelers were examined, sifted, and compared by closet
philosophers. French savants like Buache, Delisle, and Fleurieu
challenged the realms of prodigy and had no answer from them.
Humboldt’s great journey into Spanish America at the end of the century
is the recessional. Through the lands of legend he wends his way, a
patient, sometimes a pensive, observer, and puts Atlantis, El Dorado,
the Amazons and the wild men of the woods to the question. His report
is the most tolerant, suggestive, and illuminating document in the
literature of marvel. Soon afterward began the scientific study of
European folklore with the brothers Grimm as pioneers.
The remarkable things which the North American Indian had to tell,
most of them, were not assayed until after Humboldt’s time. Save where
the Spaniard had been, they have the undiluted aboriginal quality;
yet a bookish note, which has been imputed to Viking influence before
Columbus, is in eastern Algonquin and Eskimo sea lore and giant lore.
These tales of the northern continent did not launch expeditions, nor
enter the great narratives of travel, and they have yet to win their
indicated place in literature. There is wonder in them, and poetry, and
the deep reflection of untutored minds; though crude the backgrounds
and the figures that animate them, they parallel almost the entire
array of legendary lands and peoples which the classic world assembled.
Skillful old story-tellers--“delight-makers” they were called--told
them at night about a dim fire in the ceremonial roundhouses. Winter
was the time, for then, says Schoolcraft, the strange beings that might
be underground or in the lakes and streams could not hear through the
frozen surfaces the merry tales that the Indian dared tell about them,
and the laughter of the roundhouse.
Rude are these records of a people whose trickster-hero might be the
obscene and ofttimes ridiculous coyote instead of Ulysses; who spoke
of caribou back-fat and not of the lotus, and who had “the sacred
groaning stick” rather than the lyre of Hermes. Their myth-figures, no
demigods of marble perfection, are the coyote, the buzzard, the hare,
the loon, the lizard--in reality the Indian in his nakedness; and their
evil beings are flint people and awesome rolling skulls. Yet they could
see in the stars the light of lodge fires, speak of the rainbow as the
road of the dead, picture the whirlwind as the dance of a ghost, find
a relation between a gust and the flutter of a moth’s wings, trace the
drift of spirits down the wind, and catch on the throat of the humming
bird a gleam of the fire it stole in a Promethean adventure. No weary
Titan upholds the Indian sky, but in Tlingit story an old woman stands
under the earth with a mighty post and supports it.
Shape-shifting is at the basis of North American myth, and the
substantial identity of men and animals is proclaimed by it. “Baalam’s
ass,” says Leland, “spoke once for every Christian; every animal spoke
once for the Indian.”
If one marvels how the fabric of fable held together so long alike
in classic and savage lands, one has only to make some change in a
familiar bedtime story told to children. Their protest is instant; they
want the tale as they have heard it. So do men.