Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  If this was when and why the author of The Travels returned to England, it is possible that he brought his book with him in a finished state. Or he may have been, all along, a Benedictine monk, a black friar, and his knight a literary invention not without precedent in that age of chivalrous romance. Yet the presence in some early manuscript copies of a number of alphabets, most of which, while garbled, correspond with known languages, suggests a documentary impulse. Whether The Travels is considered to be a persuasive forgery or a classic work of the imagination perhaps doesn’t matter; that its implied or stated criticism of the papacy is seen by some as a harbinger of the Reformation, while an interesting thought, probably strains credulity. Its broad-mindedness and willingness to seek and to find explanations for the most bizarre human customs does suggest a certain sweetness of nature in its author; although it may be easier to preach tolerance from the safety of a library than it is on the road among the pagan, the schismatic, the sacrilegious, the grotesque and the Mongol hordes. Notwithstanding, Mandeville’s sympathetic account of Islam was the fullest and most widely available … circulating in the later Middle Ages.

  Mandeville’s greatest legacy was his influence on the exploration and discovery of the nature and extent of the known world, if only because of that strange story he heard in his youth and could not forget: perhaps its ultimate origin was an Arab source, for at this time the Arabs certainly knew how to sail to China; while the Europeans had found only the arduous, dangerous and very long route overland. Or was the book a literate and extremely clever imitation of Polo and Rustichello’s Il Milione? Mandeville’s advice that the world was round and could be circumnavigated must have fallen on to the ears or eyes of his audience, not just as a prophecy but like the future itself speaking. It was as prospective and provocative as Dante’s intuition of another world at the back of the sun.

  THE LITERARY LEGACY WAS significant too: Shakespeare knew Mandeville and his plays are full of images taken from him; mostly pictures of exotic strangeness as in The Tempest or Othello: The Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow below their shoulders. But like Marco Polo’s, John Mandeville’s reputation as a witness to true wonders soon metamorphosed into that of an artful, or not so artful, liar. Richard Brome’s 1638 play The Antipodes, which took its inspiration from The Travels, is the first work in English to explore fully the implications of the antipodes as a topsy-turvy place, where familiar relationships are directly reversed.

  Many other examples of literature influenced by The Travels might be cited, including works by Rabelais, Defoe and Swift; indeed, a case can be made for it as the first genuine (if false) travel book. If so, the author invented a genre along with his book. This legacy is innovative and has proved immensely fertile: the creation of an authorial I which stands at the heart of a book and can, in the same breath, relate wonders and doubt that such wonders exist. Or, to put it another way, it is a voice that can elaborate genuine experiences in the same frame as spurious or imaginative constructions and do so in such a way that the beguiled reader no longer cares to decide whether s/he is reading fiction or non-fiction. The works of Bruce Chatwin fall naturally into this type. He called his first book, In Patagonia, a modern wonder voyage and acknowledged its debt to medieval models; later he would remark, perhaps mischievously, on the question of where the fiction/non-fiction divide fell in his work: I don’t think there is one. There definitely should be, but I don’t know where it is.

  THE CONNECTION BETWEEN travel, romance and fabrication is as old as Herodotus, whose tall tale of gold-eating ants, or pismires, is repeated by Mandeville, although transposed from the mountains of northern India to Taprobane or Ceylon. And after all it isn’t hard to understand how the exotic and the fanciful might become confused or conflated. The cycle of stories of Sinbad the Sailor, told in The One Thousand and One Nights, which has a literary relationship to Homer’s Odyssey, retains memories of real Arab voyages to the antipodes: to Madagascar, where the enormous eggs of the extinct elephant bird, mentioned by Marco Polo, gave rise to the legend of the roc (and incidentally to the name of the rook on the chessboard); to Timor, where Arab traders brought the small tough ponies that still survive there and on neighbouring islands like Sumba; and, most famously, to China.

  Dante’s poetic unpeopled world behind the sun becomes, in the prose excursions of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, peopled with wonders: men with dog heads, with their heads below their shoulders, with single feet so large they can sleep beneath their shade, with Cyclops, pygmies and hermaphrodites, with beings who live on the smell of apples, or those who go on four feet, or whose ears or testicles hang down below their knees. A constant and enticing theme is the almost unimaginable opulence of oriental courts, especially that of the Great Khan. The ragbag inclusions of prose writers, in stark contrast to the rarefied and unalterable beauties of the poets, soon decay into satire and burlesque; and yet they are the motive for explorers who, in the latter part of the fifteenth century, set out to find for themselves the truth of these prodigies. The Spanish did so by sailing, like Dante’s Ulysses, west into the green sea of darkness; while the Portuguese went south and east, their caravels following in the long-ago wake of the Phoenician galleys. This is not to say that a sober realism succeeded Classical and medieval romance: the Iberian explorers, even in the face of incontrovertible actuality, remained infected by the wonder that drew them hence.

  When Pedro Fernández de Quirós, a Portuguese in the service of the Spanish Crown, in 1606 landed on Espíritu Santo in what is now Vanuatu, he said he found the beaches strewn with precious stones: pearls, rubies, emeralds. Early Portuguese and Spanish expeditions seeking the Spice Islands were also hoping to find the Great South Land or the Land of Gold; both their intentions and their reports of what they found are shot full of aspects of the marvellous, to the degree that it is clear that they were never sure where fact ended and fantasy began. The myths of the biblical Tarshish and Ophir, which in part motivated Magellan’s voyage, and that of the Golden Chersonese, mentioned by English poet John Milton in his Paradise Lost – perhaps Sumatra, perhaps Malaya, perhaps even Australia – animated this quest well into modern times. Two texts, the Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (1515) and The Travels of Mendes Pinto, also known as The Peregrination (1614), contrast aspects of the colonial enterprise: the bureaucratic and the opportunistic.

  III

  JEWELLED SANDS

  IN THE OPENING PAGES OF RICHARD HALL’S EMPIRES of the Monsoon (1996) there is a compelling picture of the Indian Ocean before the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498. What had been to the Egyptian Greeks the Erythraean Sea was now an extension of the bilad al-Islam, the world of Islam, a mare nostrum such as the Mediterranean once was for the Romans, across which the cities of Iraq, Persia, Arabia, India, East Africa, South East Asia and China traded according to an unwritten rule: whatever their race or faith, merchants should have the freedom of the seas and be given fair and equal treatment at every port of call. To Hormuz (from the Persian Ohrmuzd for Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god), at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, a sea captain named Buzurg ibn Shahriyar wrote around 950 CE, they bring everything most rare and valuable. There are many people of all religions in this city, and nobody is allowed to insult their religions. That is why this city is called the citadel of security.

  Hormuz was taken by the Portuguese in 1515. Their admiral Albuquerque had by this time already captured Goa (1510) and Malacca (1511) and with these three key forts, and those built previously at Sofala (1505) and Mozambique (1507) on the East African coast, they had, in an astonishing decade, taken control of the entire ocean (apart from the Red Sea: they never conquered Aden) and most of its spice trade. Ships of other nationalities or persuasions were now supposed to purchase a licence, a cartez, and to pay customs duties at any Portuguese port. Unlicensed, especially Muslim, usually unarmed, ships were seized or sunk. The ruthless, brutal descent of these Iberian Christian soldiers, with thei
r red crosses on white flags, their arquebuses and their artillery, their swords and chains, from their viral caravels must have been a truly terrifying sight. They frequently left the sea incarnadined with the blood of their victims.

  When, for example, in 1502 Vasco da Gama on his second voyage to India took the merchant ship Merim, owned by a relative of the sultan of Egypt and one of the richest Arabs in Calicut, the cargo was transferred into the holds of the Portuguese ships. Then, despite appeals by her captain both to chivalry and cupidity, da Gama had the Merim primed with gunpowder so that she could be fired and sunk along with her 700 crew and passengers, many of whom were honourable Moors returning from pilgrimage to Mecca. Those who jumped into the sea, including women and children, were lanced in the water by Portuguese from boats lowered especially for this purpose; but twenty children were saved by the Franciscans to be turned into Christians. In da Gama’s mind this was retaliation for the treatment he had received at Calicut on his previous voyage into the east.

  The land route, the Silk Road that the Polos and others had travelled in the preceding centuries, was closed to Europe after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. And so the European kingdoms, and especially the Spanish and the Portuguese, who had long envied and intrigued against the Venetian eastern trade, began to look for a way to get to China by sailing into the western ocean. In 1494, by which time the Genoese navigator in the employ of the Spanish Crown had been to and returned from the Americas, and Portuguese ships had sailed as far as the Cape of Storms (the Cape of Good Hope) and perhaps even further, at the Treaty of Tordesillas the two empires divided the world between them. The division ran along a north-south meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands that were already, as Brazil soon would be, Portuguese.

  Where precisely the line lay on the other side of the globe was a matter of contention for another three and a half decades; until in 1529 the Treaty of Saragossa specified that it did indeed run along the anti-meridian of the line of demarcation specified at Tordesillas. That is, through Honshu in southern Japan, the Caroline Islands, western New Guinea and down Arnhem Land, more or less bisecting Australia and leaving Warnambool on the Victorian south coast, where some think a Portuguese caravel was wrecked and still lies, definitively in the Spanish zone. This meant the entirety of the Pacific east of western Micronesia and most of the Americas also belonged to Spain; but that the Moluccas, and indeed the whole of the East Indies, the fabled Spice Islands, were Portuguese.

  Wherever the line ran in the east, and despite the manifold strategies both empires used to subvert it according to their own interests, the fascinating thing about it now is that in the contested zone the glamorous mysteries of the antipodes persisted, with their wonders and terrors, their marvels and disappointments, delusively intact in the European imagination. And this remains the case even when you consider that the unholy combination of religious mania and a ruthless application of the commercial imperative powered both empires. It can seem that the emphasis on the Spanish side came down more often on the side of mania, while the Portuguese, no less devout, were somehow more practical. Or should that be piratical.

  PRACTICALITY IN ITSELF did not defeat a sense of the marvellous, aspects of which can be glimpsed both in the book and the fate of Tomé Pires, author of Suma Oriental, the earliest extensive account of the East written by a Portuguese. Here he is on the subject of who traded in Malacca and from what parts they came:

  Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Ormuz, Parsees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomans, Christian Armenians, Gujaratees, men of Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, of the kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from Orissa, Ceylon, Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Siamese, men of Kedah, Malays, men of Pahang, Patani, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, Lequeos, men of Brunei, Lucoes, men of Tamjompura, Laue, Banka, Linga (they have a thousand other islands), Moluccas, Banda, Bima, Timor, Madura, Java, Sunda, Palembang, Jambi, Tongkal, Indragiri, Kappatta, Menangkabau, Siak, Arqua, Aru, Bata, country of the Tomjano, Pase, Pedir, Maldives …

  The Portuguese would trade with anyone for anything, but the principal items of interest were spices, including cloves, nutmeg, mace, pepper, cinnamon, ginger and various drugs; gold, silver and gemstones of all descriptions; silks, pearls, musk and porcelain; and slaves. When Tomé Pires first arrived at Cochin in India a ship full of wormwood, previously purchased on order by a Lisbon merchant, was just departing for Europe.

  His lists of articles offered in exchange for these eastern treasures is as illuminating:

  Those from Cairo bring the merchandise brought by the galleasses of Venice, to wit, many arms, scarlet-in-grain, coloured woollen cloths, coral, copper, quicksilver, vermilion, nails, silver, glass and other beads, and golden glassware. Those from Mecca bring a great quantity of opium, rosewater, and such like merchandise, and much liquid storax. Those from Aden bring to Gujurat a great quantity of opium, raisins, madder, indigo, rosewater, silver, seed-pearls, and other dyes, which are of value in Cambay …

  Tomé Pires was born around 1468, the son of an apothecary to King John II (1455–95) of Portugal; he himself became apothecary to John’s son Prince Afonso (1475–91). The family may have lived in that part of Lisbon called the Porta da Madalena, near Black Horse Square and towards the end of Rua Nova dos Mercadores, the city’s main commercial street, in which in 1552 there were nine apothecary shops – quite close to the Rua dos Douradores where, four centuries later, Fernando Pessoa’s ghostly semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares would work as an assistant bookkeeper, dreaming of lost empires in drab commercial premises. Pires, who several times remarks that he was a man of the people – neither an aristocrat nor a privileged retainer – is thought to have been about forty and perhaps recently widowed when he went east; upon his arrival in Malacca he complained that the new factor there, the evocatively named Pero Pessoa (Peter Person), was so young that he, Pires, did not like to serve as scrivener under him. Three or four men with white beards, he wrote, could take care of all the King’s revenue.

  Pires went out to India in 1511, perhaps on the Belém – one of the most beautiful ships the seas have ever seen. The Belém left in April and was in India by September; nine months later, Pires was at Malacca. His original appointment was as feitor das drogarias (factor of drugs) at Cannanore and Cochin, India. He carried with him a botica (supply of medicines) worth a considerable amount of money. At Malacca he was controller of drugs, scrivener and accountant at the factory as well as being deputed to inquire into certain irregularities – the servants of Estada da Índia were notorious for lining their own pockets while ostensibly working for the state. During these various appointments Pires made several voyages on trading ships, going to Java for cloves and later to Sumatra for unspecified purposes; and, over five years in the east, gathered the vast amount of information contained in the Suma Oriental.

  It is not known if the book was compiled in Malacca or Cochin; probably mostly in Malacca and on board ship as well, but finished in India. A man as curious as Pires, with the encyclopaedic instinct, must have begun collecting facts as soon as he left Portugal. His book was dedicated to, and perhaps commissioned by, Manuel I of Portugal and sent to him from India in 1515. That same year, a wealthy man on his way home, Tomé Pires at Cochin was offered the chance to go to China in the service of the king. He accepted, returned to Malacca and went in 1517 as the first Portuguese ambassador, sailing, after some delays, with a cargo of pepper to Guangzhou. Here there were more delays before Pires was admitted, welcomed and taken ashore with his gifts for the emperor. It wasn’t until 1520 that the new ambassador went north to Nanjing; early in 1521 he was in Beijing, having travelled thence via the Grand Canal.

  Here the aggravations of delay turned to poisonous misadventure. Pires’ mission was obstructed by court officials and he left Beijing without meeting the emperor; back in Guangzhou he was thrown summarily into jail. The Chinese had decided he was not an ambassador but a spy; he and his comp
anions were fettered, flogged and tortured. Some died in the lice-infested squalor of a Guangzhou prison; the survivors were separately banished to internal exile. Pires himself was sent to ‘Sampitay’, a small town on the Grand Canal, probably near the northern limit of Jiangsu province. Nothing more was heard of him for many years and most contemporary accounts said that he died about 1524, the year in which his book on China, later lost, was secretly sent out to the viceroy of India.

  Then in 1543 the Portuguese traveller and adventurer Fernão Mendes Pinto arrived, a prisoner himself, by river boat in Sampitay. Here the wife of the chifu – mandarin – who had bound and flogged Mendes Pinto and his companions fell ill, delaying the party in the town. The Portuguese, still in their chains, were allowed ashore to beg alms from the people. While they were thus importuning in the streets a young woman, seemingly Chinese, came forward and, unbuttoning the sleeve of the purple satin coat she wore, showed a cross tattooed on her arm, like the brand of a Moorish slave. Mendes Pinto and his men fell to their knees, whereupon the woman uttered a cry, raised her arms heavenward and began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese.

  Mendes Pinto says he spent five days at the house of Inês de Leiria, as she called herself, who was a wealthy woman and had her own chapel with a wooden crucifix finished in gold leaf, silver candlesticks, a silver lamp; she was, she said, the daughter of Tomé Pires, who had met her mother while travelling up the Grand Canal during the period when the Chinese first entertained him as ambassador and later, when they decided he was a spy, contrived to be exiled near her. The two had married and lived a very Catholic life together for twenty-odd years, converting over 300 local people and meeting each Sunday to worship in the chapel. Their marriage ended with Tomé Pires’ death at the age of about seventy years. When Inês de Leiria heard Mendes Pinto’s own story of shipwreck and loss she remarked, sounding very Chinese: Men who seek their livelihood at sea find their graves at sea. That is why the best and surest thing is to value the earth highly, and labour on the earth, since it pleased God to create us out of earth.