As soon as I had some into this sea, I took by force some Indians from the first island, in order that they might learn from us, and at the same time tell us what they knew about affairs in these regions. This succeeded admirably; for in a short time we understood them and they us both by gesture and signs and words; and they were of great service to us. They are coming now with me, and have always believed that I have come from Heaven, notwithstanding the long time they have been, and still remain, with us. They were the first who told this wherever we went, one calling to another, with a loud voice, Come, Come, you will see Men from Heaven. Whereupon both women and men, children and adults, young and old, laying aside the fear they had felt a little before, flocked eagerly to see us, a great crowd thronging about our steps, some bringing food, and others drink, with greatest love and incredible good will….
I saw no monsters, neither did I hear accounts of any such except in an island called Carib, the second as one crosses over from Spain to India, which is inhabited by a certain race regarded by their neighbors as very ferocious. They eat human flesh, and make use of several kinds of boats by which they cross over to all the Indian islands, and plunder and carry off whatever they can. But they differ in no respect from the others except in wearing their hair long after the fashion of women. They make use of bows and arrows made of reeds, having pointed shafts fastened to the thicker portion, as we have before described. For this reason they are considered to be ferocious, and the other Indians consequently are terribly afraid of them; but I consider them of no more account than the others. They have intercourse with certain women who dwell alone upon the island of Mateurin, the first as one crosses from Spain to India. These women follow none of the usual occupations of their sex; but they use bows and arrows like those of their husbands, which I have described, and protect themselves with plates of copper, which is found in the greatest abundance among them….
Although these matters are very wonderful and unheard of, they would have been much more so, if ships to a reasonable amount had been furnished me. But what has been accomplished is great and wonderful, and not at all proportionate to my deserts, but to the sacred Christian faith, and to the piety and religion of our Sovereigns. For what is the mind of man could not compass the spirit of God has granted to mortals….
Therefore let King and Queen and Princes, and their most fortunate realms, and all other Christian provinces, let us all return thanks to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who has bestowed so great a victory and reward upon us…and let us be glad not only for the exaltation of our faith, but also for the increase of temporal prosperity, in which not only Spain but all Christendom is about to share.
As these things have been accomplished so have they been briefly narrated.
Farewell.
Tourism
Anton Chekhov to Anatoly Koni, 16 January 1891
In 1890 Anton Chekhov, a medical doctor as well as a celebrated writer, set off to the penal colony of Sakhalin in the Russian Far East, to conduct a census of its prisoners. His letters from there record the suffering and degeneracy of these godforsaken unfortunates and his own adventures, observing humanity with a world-weary and humorous sensitivity and a forensic precision.
To reach the “Hell of Sakhalin,” Chekhov travels by ship, river steamer, train, and carriage. On the way he records the one-horse towns of the Far East. In one letter to his publisher Alexander Suvorin, he describes a visit to the brothel in Blagoveshchensk: “a nice clean room sentimental in an Asiatic way furnished with bric-a-brac….The Japanese girl has her own concept of modesty. She doesn’t put out the light and when you ask what the Japanese is for one thing or another she gives a straight answer as she does so because she doesn’t understand much Russian, points her fingers, and even puts her hand on it. What’s more she doesn’t put on airs or go all coy like Russian women. And all the time she is laughing….She is amazingly skilled at her job so that you feel you are not having intercourse but taking part in a top level equitation class. When you come, the Japanese girl pulls with her teeth a sheet of cotton wool from her sleeve, catches you by the ‘boy,’ gives you a massage….All this is done with coquetry, laughing, singing and saying tsu.”
Born in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, Chekhov had endured a hard childhood, but after qualifying as a doctor he started to write stories for Suvorin’s newspaper. He became even more famous for plays like The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya, describing the key to the art of drama: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” After a raffish love life, forswearing marriage, he married late—but was only forty-four when he died of tuberculosis. He liked to claim “medicine is my wife, literature is my mistress,” but this letter to his friend and lawyer Koni combines the two—it is one of his best.
DEAR SIR, ANATOLY FYODOROVITCH [KONI]
I did not hasten to answer your letter because I am not leaving Petersburg before next Saturday. I am sorry I have not been to see Madame Naryshkin, but I think I had better defer my visit till my book has come out, when I shall be able to turn more freely to the material I have. My brief Sakhalin past looms so immense in my imagination that when I want to speak about it I don’t know where to begin, and it always seems to me that I have not said what was wanted.
I will try and describe minutely the position of the children and young people in Sakhalin. It is exceptional. I saw starving children, I saw girls of thirteen prostitutes, girls of fifteen with child. Girls begin to live by prostitution from twelve years old, sometimes before menstruation has begun. Church and school exist only on paper, the children are educated by their environment and the convict surroundings. Among other things I have noted down a conversation with a boy of ten years old. I was making the census of the settlement of Upper Armudano; all the inhabitants are poverty-stricken, every one of them, and have the reputation of being desperate gamblers at the game of shtoss. I go into a hut; the people are not at home; on a bench sits a white-haired, round-shouldered, barefooted boy; he seems lost in thought. We begin to talk.
* * *
I. “What is your father’s second name?”
He. “I don’t know.”
I. “How is that? You live with your father and don’t know what his name is? Shame!”
He. “He is not my real father.”
I. “How is that?”
He. “He is living with mother.”
I. “Is your mother married or a widow?”
He. “A widow. She followed her husband here.”
I. “What has become of her husband, then?”
He. “She killed him.”
I. “Do you remember your father?”
He. “No, I don’t, I am illegitimate. I was born when mother was at Kara.”
* * *
On the Amur steamer going to Sakhalin, there was a convict with fetters on his legs who had murdered his wife. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together. I remember I was at a funeral in Sakhalin. Beside the newly dug grave stood four convict bearers ex officio; the treasury clerk and I, in the capacity of Hamlet and Horatio, wandering about the cemetery; the dead woman’s lodger, a Circassian, who had come because he had nothing better to do; and a convict woman who had come out of pity and had brought the dead woman’s two children, one a baby, and the other, Alyoshka, a boy of four, wearing a woman’s jacket and blue breeches with bright colored patches on the knees. It was cold and damp, there was water in the grave, the convicts were laughing. The sea was in sight. Alyoshka looked into the grave with curiosity; he tried to wipe his chilly nose, but t
he long sleeve of his jacket got into his way. When they began to fill in the grave I asked him: “Alyoshka, where is your mother?” He waved his hand with the air of a gentleman who has lost at cards, laughed, and said: “They have buried her!”
The convicts laughed, the Circassian turned and asked what he was to do with the children, saying it was not his duty to feed them.
Infectious diseases I did not meet with in Sakhalin. There is very little congenital syphilis, but I saw blind children, filthy, covered with eruptions—all diseases that are evidence of neglect. Of course I am not going to settle the problem of the children. I don’t know what ought to be done.
Gustave Flaubert to Louis Bouilhet, 15 January 1850
This letter of sexual adventure is by Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist, to his school friend and fellow writer Louis Bouilhet. In 1849–50, aged around thirty, Flaubert travels through the Middle East, from Greece to Istanbul and Beirut, sightseeing and experiencing as much as he could in the backstreets and bathhouses. His letters describe encounters with girls and boys, joking that he travels for “educational purposes.” His risky adventures cost him dear—he was tormented for the rest of his life by the infections he contracted there and this contributed to his decision not to marry or have children.
On his return, he started work on his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, the story of a disastrous, adulterous affair. He prided himself on his search for the precise word in his writing—“le mot juste”—exhausting himself with this exacting perfectionism that meant he published many fewer works than his equals, Balzac and Zola. But even in this letter, set in a Cairo bathhouse, the wit is as acute as the style is meticulous.
…Speaking of bardashes, this is what I know about them. Here it is quite accepted. One admits one’s sodomy, and it is spoken of at table in the hotel. Sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody teases you and you end up confessing. Traveling as we are for educational purposes, and charged with a mission by the government, we have considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejaculation. So far the occasion has not presented itself. We continue to seek it, however. It’s at the baths that such things take place. You reserve the bath for yourself (five francs including masseurs, pipe, coffee, sheet and towel) and you skewer your lad in one of the rooms. Be informed, furthermore, that all the bath-boys are bardashes. The final masseurs, the ones who come to rub you when all the rest is done, are usually quite nice young boys. We had our eye on one in an establishment very near our hotel. I reserved the bath exclusively for myself. I went, and the rascal was away that day! I was alone in the hot room, watching the daylight fade through the great circles of glass in the dome. Hot water was flowing everywhere; stretched out indolently I thought of a quantity of things as my pores tranquilly dilated. It is very voluptuous and sweetly melancholy to take a bath like that quite alone, lost in those dim rooms where the slightest noise reverberates like cannon shot, while the naked kellaks call out to one another as they massage you, turning you over like embalmers preparing you for the tomb. That day (the day before yesterday, Monday), my kellak was rubbing me gently, and when he came to the noble parts he lifted up my boules d’amour to clean them, then continuing to rub my chest with his left hand, he began to pull with his right on my prick, and as he drew it up and down, he leaned over my shoulder and said “baksheesh, baksheesh.” He was a man in his fifties, ignoble, disgusting—imagine the effect, and the word “baksheesh, baksheesh.” I pushed him away a little, saying “làh, làh” (“no, no”)—he thought I was angry and took on a craven look—then I gave him a few pats on the shoulder, saying “làh, làh” again but more gently—he smiled a smile that meant “You’re not fooling me—you like it as much as anybody, but today you’ve decided against it for some reason.” As for me, I laughed aloud like a dirty old man and the shadowy vault of the bath echoed with the sound….
War
Peter the Great to Catherine I, 27 June 1709
This letter marks the moment that Russia becomes a world power—the triumph every Russian leader from Stalin to Putin aspires to emulate. Peter the Great was the six-foot-seven tsar who, in 1707, faced an invasion from the best army of the day, Sweden. But he fought back, founded a new capital—St. Petersburg—and created a new navy and army. Finally, on this day in 1709 at Poltava, he defeats the Swedes and wants to share the moment with his wife.
She too is an extraordinary individual. She had been a laundress, mistress of many generals, and was not even a Russian; but Peter fell in love with her, changed her name to Catherine, and ultimately would make her empress of Russia in her own right. In their saucy letters he calls her “Katerinushka, my heart’s friend,” often adding “I am bored without you.” They would tease each other about other girls—especially laundresses. “I got your letter full of jokes. You’ll say I’ll be looking for a new lady but I am too old,” he writes to her when visiting Versailles on 28 April 1717.
“I think Your Worship is distracted by a multitude of fountains and forgets us,” she jokes back on 25 May, with much phallic imagery. “Though I think you have found new laundresses, your old laundress hasn’t forgotten you.”
Joshing about sex and his frequent affliction, venereal disease, he remarks, “The doctors ban domestic fun. I’ve sent my mistress away for I won’t be able to resist the temptation if I kept her here.” To which Catherine replies, “I hope the mistress’s admirer [Peter] will arrive in the same state of health as she did!” adding, “But if my old man was here we’d make us another kid.” They had around twelve children together but all the boys died. On 2 January 1717 he celebrates a new son: “I received your delightful letter in which you say the Lord God has blessed us by giving us another recruit.” The very next day, hearing the baby has died, he tries to console his wife: “I received your letter about what I knew before, the unexpected occurrence which has changed joy to grief. What answer can I give except that of the long-suffering Job? The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord. I beg you to reflect on it in this way; I do as far as I can.”
So this partner is the person with whom he wishes to share his world-changing victory at Poltava, writing to her:
Matushka, good day. I declare to you that the all-merciful God has this day granted us an unprecedented victory over the enemy. In a word, the whole of the enemy’s army is knocked on the head, about which you will hear from us.
Peter
PS Come here and congratulate us!
Napoleon to Josephine, 3 December 1805
This is the letter of a man who has just defeated the emperors of Russia and Austria and is now the master of Europe. On the battlefield of Austerlitz, Napoleon scribbles the following note to his wife, Josephine.
To the Empress, at Strasbourg,
I have sent Lebrun to you from the battlefield. I defeated the Russian and Austrian army commanded by the two emperors. I am slightly [!] tired, as I spent eight days in a bivouac out in the open and the nights were rather cold. Tonight, I am staying at the palace of Prince Kaunitz, where I shall sleep two or three hours. The Russian army is not only defeated, it is destroyed.
I kiss you,
Napoleon.
Dwight D. Eisenhower to all Allied troops, 5 June 1944
On 5 June 1944 General “Ike” Eisenhower, supreme allied commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and later president of the United States, gives the order to launch the long-awaited Operation Overlord, the invasion of Nazi-occupied France. It is risky: an assault across the Channel with overwhelming force but against the well-defended coast of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—and at the mercy of weather and sea and Nazi airpower. On that day Eisenhower writes one letter to be issued to all the troops before the assault. But he also writes a second one, to be issued in the event of a disaster, wrongly dated 5 July. Fortunately, this letter was never sent. D-Day was successful. Here is the first:
&nbs
p; You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you….We will accept nothing less than full victory! Good Luck!
And this is the letter never sent:
5 JULY
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
Catherine, Duchess of Oldenburg, to her brother Alexander I, 3 September 1812
In the summer of 1812, the French emperor Napoleon invaded Russia. By September he had taken the ancient capital of Moscow, which was then burned to the ground, a shocking humiliation for Tsar Alexander I and the Russian people. At this moment of disaster, Alexander trusts no one and knows his reputation, if not his actual life, is in peril. He is encouraged in his determination to resist at all costs—even if he has to retreat all the way back to the city of Kazan—by the person he loves most of all: his strong and fearless sister Catiche. This letter is as powerful as it is short.
Written in History Page 10