The Witness./" and. the Other World ~ Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-I 6oo MARY B. CAMPBELL _;;~ .; .. ,; Cornell University Press Ithaca and London A "zone map" of the world as known to Europe for most of the Middle Ages. From a printed edition of Macrobius's De somnio Scipionis expositio. Paris, 1519. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to publication. Copyright© 1988 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1988 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number o-8014-2137-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 88-47720 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. The paper in this book is acid-free and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources . _;.., .:'··, Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction I PART ONE: THE EAST I The Scriptural East: Egeria, Arculf, and the Written Pilgrimage IS 2 The Fabulous East: "Wonder Books" and Grotesque Facts 47 3 The Utter East: Merchant and Missionary Travels during the "Mongol Peace" 87 4 "That othere half": Mandeville Naturalizes the East I22 PART TWO: THE WEST 5 "The end of the East": Columbus Discovers Paradise I65 6 "Inward Feeling": Ralegh and the Penetration of the Interior 2II Epilogue: A Brief History of the Future 255 References 267 Index 279 vii 5 "The end of the East" Columbus Discovers Paradise rom this point on our account of premodern travel writ­ Fing will concentrate on texts that belong at least as clearly to other kinds of literature and are directed to primary audiences whose role in relation to the places described was far more active than that of the curious armchair traveler (or armchair pilgrim). Travel writing is more than usually dependent for its form and posture on the ex:perience that motivates it. In turning to Columbus we will seem to be turning away from the prototypes of the genre; Columbus's travels were royal commissions, and his accounts were a mixture of official report and propaganda. From the point of view of history, his travel was not private and his experience not personal-was not, in short, what we now call "travel." But if exploration and conquest are not forms of travel, then neither are pilgrimage, crusade, nor the pointed wanderings of mer­ chant and missionary. Travel as we have come to understand the term-or as it is used in bookstores and the New York Times's "Travel" section-is a form of behavior that could come into its own only after the world had been mapped, for "travel" consists largely in the collision between inherited and experienced knowl­ edge. Frances Trollope traveled to America. Columbus discovered it, Cabeza de Vaca explored it, Ralegh tried to colonize it. The explicit pursuit of geographical experience itself is a self-referential goal, and all urgent devotional and practical motives must atrophy before it is possible. The travel accounts we have looked at so far resemble their modern offspring chiefly in that, whatever the trav- I65 The West eler-author's ulterior motives, the texts bespeak that conflict between mythic expectation and mundane fact which has become one of the generic foci of travel writing. The journals, letters, histories, and tracts we will be looking at next played a large part in the developments of ethnography, anthropology, and European colonialism, and they helped to estab­ lish the basis for a "justified" Christian imperialism. They are guilty texts, and sometimes difficult to speak of with the relative detachment of a literary critic. Nor do I want to detach the literary aspects of any text from its political and historical consequences: my hope is that in isolating and characterizing those features of rhetorical tradition and improvisation that constitute the "literary aspects" of such works, we may shed some light on the part they play, as literature, in history itself. My chief goal is not the exposure of the by now plentifully exposed underbellies of coloni­ alism and its servant anthropology, but an understanding of the rhetorical means by which their earliest texts communicated­ and helped to control-a suddenly larger world.! Travel literature was involved in the development of many new kinds of writing: if it is implicated in the origins of anthropology, it is also implicated in the origins of the modern novel, the renewal of heroic romance, and the foundations of scientific geography. That such various discourses are so mutually entangled in the corpus of Renaissance travel literature is a fact of real importance to the histories of all of them, but perhaps most of all to the history of literature. No text is an island, least of all the texts of a period and a culture that tried to annex all the islands in the world. Per­ haps even the novels of Jane Austen can be seen more clearly in a history of literature that has absorbed the relation of her genre to the prose of imperial conquest and empirical science. Renaissance travel literature did not spring into being with the· first letter of Columbus from the New World, although that letter heralded great changes. Other, quieter kinds of travel writing pre­ ceded and followed the voyage literature with which the rest of this book is concerned. After Mandeville had presented Europe I. For some recent critiques and rhetorical analyses of anthropology and eth­ nography per se, see James Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes (1982); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (1982); Johannes Fabius, Time and the Other (1983); and James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). r66 Columbus Discovers Paradise with a (fictional) model for the private, secular travel account, Petrarch, Aeneas Silvius, Montaigne, and others followed suit, in works that recorded their experience of Europe's more familiar topography. And with the long history of pilgrimage accounts behind them, such later pilgrims to the Levant as Piero Tafur, Felix Fabri, and Bertrandon de la Brocquiere could more nearly approach both the motives for travel and the rhetorical posture we find in modern accounts of the Near East.2 What the traveler-writer needs is a backlog of earlier writing: "Monsieur de Montaigne found three things lacking in his travels ... the third [was], that before making the trip he had not looked into the books that might have informed him about the rare and remarkable things in each place, or that he did not have a Munster or some other such book in his coffers" (Travel Journal, 28). For as it becomes a self-contained literary genre, travel writing becomes more and more impres­ sionistic. Its interest has come to lie largely in the sensibility of the particular writer, less and less in its capacity or obligation to inform. One could then turn aside here and finish with Montaigne and Coryate, whose records of travel to Italy and to the East rest on the requisite piles of earlier books, despite Montaigne's rueful desire to have read more of them than he had. These writers were conscious belles-lettrists. But the task of articulating the natural law of mod­ ern travel literature cannot properly begin until its many origins are accounted for. And by its nature, travel writing has as many origins as it has matters: each matter bespeaks a separate concern or fulfills a different requirement of the imagination, and the his­ torical conditions of their development vary widely. The matter of the New World was perhaps the last major topic to be absorbed by the West. As Edmundo O'Gorman so lucidly argues, once the idea of one new continent, entirely divided from the contiguous land masses of Europe, Africa, and Asia, had been digested by the West, Australia and Antarctica were slighter challenges to the imagina­ tion.3 If Columbus, Las Casas, and Ralegh were not travelers, they were nevertheless among the originators of New World description 2. English translations of travel accounts by all these-authors are easily acces­ sible, except for that of Bertrandon de la Brocquiere, which is only available now in English (slightly abridged) in Thomas Wright's recently reprinted anthology Early Travels in Palestine. This anthology also contains the texts of Arculf and (modern­ ized) of Mandeville. 3. See Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America, especially parts 2 and 4. The West and narration, and on their texts rests the pile of later literature. At the end of their lineage, Bruce Chatwin traveled to Patagonia to find a piece of dragon skin in the nuclear-free zone of the latter end of the world, where, as Joyce promised and Chatwin proved yet one more time, "there be terrible queer creatures." The particular focus of this chapter is on the formal contribution of narrativity made to the developing genre by the writings of Columbus. Its notable intrusion into a kind previously dominated by descriptio was given entrance by the novel presence of the Hero in the scene to be described. At one stroke, Columbus gives the tradition two elements crucial to the modern genre: character and plot. This development depended on historical circumstances and was certainly not accomplished by Columbus alone.