The Fantastic Voyages of Sir John Mandeville

REFLE CTIONS Robert Silverberg THE FANTASTIC VOYAGES OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE L. Sprague de Camp, who wrote so many readers of the New York Sun in 1835 great novels of fantasy and science fic - that Sir John Herschel’s powerful new tion in the middle years of the twentieth telescope had revealed the existence of century, liked to refer to fiction writers forests, oceans, and all sorts of strange as “professional liars.” I’ve also heard the animals on the Moon. term applied to lawyers, politicians, pub - And then there was the fourteenth-cen - lic-relations people, and various other tury author of The Travels and Voyages of practitioners of the verbal arts. Sir John Mandeville , who, at a time when I don’t like it. There are a lot of lawyers Europeans had very little knowledge of and politicians whose statements I mis - the world beyond their immediate vicini - trust, and I rarely accept PR statements ty, produced a lively and readable tale of at face value, but it seems too cavalier to his travels through far-off and fantastic dismiss all practitioners of those profes - regions full of the most amazing marvels sions as liars. (Honest Abe Lincoln was and wonders. In a later era, he would both a lawyer and a politician.) And I ab - have been a successful fantasy writer; in solutely reject the glib labeling of the his own, he was regarded as an authority writing of fiction as a kind of lying. Fic - on our planet’s geography, and as late as tion writers—and trust me on this; I the seventeenth century Samuel Purchas, have been one for almost sixty years—do who compiled a vast compendium of ex - indeed make up stories, and hope that plorers’ journals, called him “the greatest their readers will believe them at least Asian traveler that ever the world had,” while engaged in the act of reading. But which certainly he was not, though he no one past the age of seven thinks that does rank high in the roster of charlatans. Dante actually took a tour of the nine cir - The prologue to Mandeville’s Travels cles of Hell, or that Hamlet really en - says that he was born in the English countered his murdered father’s ghost on town of St. Albans and set out to explore the battlements of the castle, or—to come the world in 1332 (or 1322, according to closer to our own genre—that Cthulhu some manuscripts), “and since hither - slumbers in his undersea palace, dream - ward [I] have been a long time over the ing of the moment when he and the other sea, and have seen and gone through Elder Gods will emerge and reconquer many kingdoms, lands and provinces our world. Those stories have a certain and isles, and have passed through kind of fictional truth, but their writers Turkey, Armenia the less and the more, did not expect readers to regard them as Tartary, Persia, Syria. .” and on and on literal reports about the real world. to India and “Amazonia,” where he be - The phrase “professional liar,” I think, held “many diverse manners of folk of di - ought to be reserved for swindlers, finan - verse laws and shapes,” and many a land cial manipulators, and the creators of even stranger and more distant. hoaxes. That last category includes such The part about having come from St. diabolically ingenious people as John Albans may even have been true. A cer - Keely, who bilked nineteenth-century in - tain Jean de Bourgogne of the Belgian vestors out of hundreds of thousands of city of Liege seems to have confessed on dollars by claiming to have invented a his deathbed in 1372 that he was actual - perpetual motion machine, and Richard ly “Master Jean de Mandeville, Knight, Adams Locke, who convinced credulous count of Montfort in England. Having 6 Asimov’s had the misfortune to kill, in his country, that time I feel me much the better and a count whom he did not name, he oblig - the wholer.” The land of the Amazons, ed himself to traverse the three parts of which he places in what is now Iraq: “in the world. Although he was a man of that realm is all women and no man, be - distinguished nobility he preferred to cause that the women will not suffer no keep himself hidden,” practicing medi - men among them.” To the south he finds cine and writing an account of his trav - Ethiopia, where the sun is so strong that els. We have no way of telling if this is “in the sea of Libya is no fish, for the wa - true. The oldest surviving manuscript of ter is evermore boiling for the great heat.” the book is in French heavily flavored In that land “are young children white- with Anglicisms. Malcolm Letts, the fore - haired, and when they are old, their hair most modern Mandeville scholar, has waxes black.” In the city of Saba dia - concluded that the book was almost cer - monds abound, which “grow together tainly written by an Englishman, and male and female, and they are nourished “the more the problem is studied the with dew of heaven. And they engender clearer it becomes, at least to my mind, and conceive, and bring forth small chil - that Mandeville was a man of flesh and dren, and multiply and grow all the year.” blood, born, as he says, at St. Albans, that Deeper yet into Africa “be folk that have he practiced medicine, . that he fled the but one foot and they go so blue that it is country, and that de Bourgogne was a marvelous. And the foot is so large that it name invented or borrowed by Mandev - shadoweth all the body against the sun ille to conceal his identity.” when they would lie and rest them.” More than that we will probably never Onward: “In a certain isle towards the know. But his book is a wild and wonder - south dwell folk of foul stature and of ful thing, very much worth reading by cursed kind that have no heads, and their the connoisseur of good fantasy or good eyes be in their shoulders. And their hoaxes. mouth crooked as an horse shoe, and that Mandeville seems to have based his ac - is in the midst of their breast. And in an - count of his purported travels on the nar - other isle be folk that have the face all ratives of such earlier medieval travelers flat, all plain without nose and without as Friar Odoric of Pordenone, John de mouth, but they have two small holes all Plano Carpini, and William of Rubruck, round instead of their eyes, and their who made valiant journeys to India, Chi - mouth is flat also without lips. And in an - na, and Indonesia in the thirteenth and other isle be folk that have the lip above fourteenth centuries with the intent of the mouth so great that when they sleep spreading Christianity. But whatever he in the sun, they cover all the face with lifted he embellished with magnificent that lip to shade themselves.” He contin - fantasies of his own invention. ues his parade of human monsters with Thus he inserts into a discussion of the people with ears hanging down to their tomb of St. John at Ephesus the tale of a knees; people with horses’ feet, who run princess who was transformed into a so swiftly they overtake wild beasts; her - dragon; in Jaffa he sees the “bones of a gi - maphrodites, who alternately sire and ant that hight Andromedes, and one of bear children; eight-toed people who his ribs is forty feet long”; he informs us crawl wondrous fast on their knees, and a that the Pyramids were “the barns of race that had heads like those of dogs, Joseph that were made for to keep corn in “yet they are full reasonable and subtle of for the seven barren years . as the first wit,” and many another remarkable tribe. book of Bible tells.” But much better is In India are eels thirty feet long, “and folk coming as he presses on to the Near East that dwell near that water are ill colored, and then Africa. Such as the Fountain of yellow and green.” In Cathay—China— Youth, which flows out of Paradise. He he enrolls in the Great Khan’s army and took three sips of it, “and evermore since spends fifteen months doing battle in the Reflections: The Fantastic Voyages of Sir John Mandeville 7 July 2011 Mongol conquest of southern China, a big that three or four men could live with - campaign that had taken place twenty or in their shells, and he visits the isle of Py - thirty years before he was born, though tan, “where the folk neither till nor sow probably he assumed his readers knew no land, and are nourished by the scent of nothing about that. As for the Khan, he wild apples.” Beyond, past a wilderness of says, “he passeth all earthly princes in dragons and unicorns and lions and ele - might, noblesse, royalty, and riches.” phants both white and blue, lies “Tapro- When he leaves China he visits the bane”—Ceylon —where ants the size of court of a monarch nearly as great, the hounds dig gold from the ground, and be - fabled Christian king Prester John, yond that is Thule, “the furthest isle of about whom a whole cluster of remark - the world inhabited with men,” beyond able tales accreted. (I wrote a long book which is nothing but a wilderness filled about Prester John years ago; there is no with “dragons and other wild beasts, cru - room to tell that story here.) Prester el and fell.” Here he ended his journey.

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