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.