Generous swaths of the Prester John letter found their way into the two most popular travel books of the Middle Ages: The Travels of Marco Polo and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, lending credence to the travel accounts and to the Prester John legend.
Polo’s account, the earlier of the two, was written when he was a prisoner of war in Genoa in 1298 and 1299, with the help of a writer of romances known as Rustichello of Pisa. The son of a prominent Venetian merchant, Marco Polo had spent two decades in the East, traveling throughout the Mongol empire and China, and made it as far east as Burma. His father and uncle spent years in exile at the summer court of the Grand Khan, known as Shang-tu, whose kingdom served as the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu, and eventually they returned to Europe as the khan’s emissaries. Marco Polo had spent much of his youth in their company.
As might be expected of its co-authors, The Travels of Marco Polo is not strictly a travelog, and it is replete with inconsistencies. It has even been suggested that Marco Polo never made it to China, despite his apparently firsthand descriptions of that region. Why did he not mention the Great Wall, for instance, or tea? Although Travels included Polo’s experiences closer to home, enlivened with shrewd observations, the account was embellished with various wonders of the East, notably Prester John, which added to its readability and appeal, even as they compromised its claims to authenticity. To compound the problem, the manuscript was written in a FrenchItalian dialect that defied easy translation. Nor was there anything like a definitive text; over one hundred manuscripts, all of them different, were in circulation.
Polo, a tireless name-dropper, says he first encountered Prester John by reputation, as the lord of the Tatars, the inhabitants of northern China, who “paid him a tribute of one beast in every ten.” Polo and his collaborator merged the Prester John legend with another figure at least partly inspired by an actual person, his Tatar rival. In 1200, Polo says, Genghis Khan sent word to Prester John to announce that he wished to marry the priest’s daughter. “Is not Genghis Khan ashamed to seek my daughter in marriage?” Prester John exclaimed to the messengers. “Does he not know he is my vassal and my thrall? Go back to him and tell him that I would sooner commit my daughter to flames than give her to him as his wife.” Polo’s collaborator displayed a fanciful touch by explaining that Genghis Khan became so distressed that “his heart swelled within him to such a pitch that it came near to bursting within his breast.” When he recovered, predictably enough, he decided to go to war against Prester John.
The battle—an epic struggle, according to Marco Polo—pitted the largest armies ever assembled on a “wide and pleasant plain called Tenduc, which belonged to Prester John.” This is thought to be Mongolia, but as with so much else to do with Prester John, it is impossible to know for certain. Just before taking up arms, Ghengis Khan asked his astrologers to predict the outcome, and to his delight they announced that he would carry the day. Two days later, the battle began in earnest: “This was the greatest battle that was ever seen. Heavy losses were suffered on both sides; but in the end the fight was won by Ghengis Khan. In this battle Prester John was killed. And from that day he lost his land, which Ghengis Khan continued to subdue.”
Polo adds a curious postscript to the defeat of Prester John and Christianity in China. Tenduc, Polo says, became the home for descendants of both Genghis Khan and Prester John. “The province is ruled by a king of the lineage of Prester John, who is a Christian and a priest and also bears the title ‘Prester John.’> His personal name is George. He holds the land as a vassal of the Great Khan— not all the land that was held by Prester John, but a great part of it. I may tell you that the Great Khans have always given one of their daughters or kinswomen to reigning princes of the lineage of Prester John.” Polo populates Tenduc with all sorts of marvelous creatures; even the biblical Gog and Magog can be found there. Despite these imaginative excesses, The Travels of Marco Polo inspired Europe to conceive of trading with the kingdoms of Asia, and of exploring the world. Many of the sailors on Magellan’s voyage were familiar with it, and at least one brought a copy of Polo’s account along with him.
John Mandeville served as the other great traveler and storyteller of the era. With suave assurance, he deftly mixed accounts from ancient authors with what he claimed were his personal experiences, but Mandeville was actually a compiler rather than a traveler, and he drew much of his material directly from Speculum Mundi, a medieval encyclopedia, which contained extracts from Pliny and Marco Polo, among other authorities. As a finishing touch, he wove long passages from the Prester John letter into his account and passed it off as his own work.
Mandeville told jaw-dropping stories of his pilgrimages to the Holy Land, an unlikely event; he probably never got any farther than a noble’s well-stocked library. He claimed he traversed India, which he said was filled with yellow and green people; visited Prester John’s kingdom, without giving comprehensible directions; and even made it all the way to the borders of Paradise, but failed to enter because he considered himself unworthy. He naturally claimed to have found the Fountain of Youth in the course of his travels, and imbibed three draughts of its life-giving waters: “And evermore since that time I feel me the better and wholer.”
No account of the exotic East would be complete without a discussion of spices, and when it came to this subject, Mandeville skirted close enough to the truth to lure unsuspecting readers into taking his description seriously. He sounded entirely knowledgeable about a “forest” of pepper in a Neverland he called Combar, which might or might not have been based on the Spice Islands or some other actual place. “You must know that pepper grows in the manner of wild vines beside the trees of the forest, so that it can rely on them for support. Its fruit hangs in great clusters, like bunches of grapes; they hang so thick that unless they were supported by other trees, the vines could not carry their fruit. When the fruit is ripe, it is all green like the berries of ivy. They gather the fruit and dry it in the sun, then lay it on a drying floor until it is black and wrinkled.” This account was convincing enough to inspire European merchants and governments to attempt to find the mythical spice.
Sailors setting out to sea with Magellan paid special attention to Mandeville’s unnerving descriptions of powerful magnetic rocks capable of destroying unwary ships, warning of “great sea rocks of the stone that is called adamant . . . which draws . . . iron.” In consequence, “There should pass no ships that had nails of iron there away because of the foresaid stone, for he should draw them to him, therefore they dare not wend thither.” If they did, the magnetic rock would draw the nails from the hulls, and the ships would leak and even sink.
Among other far-fetched tales that Mandeville tried to pass off as fact were talking birds (perhaps he was thinking of parrots); trees that sprout at dawn, bear fruit by midday, and die before dusk; sixty-foot-high cannibals; and women who rejoice at the rebirth of their deceased infants. For good measure, he dusted off the legend of Amazons, but made his account more explicit than those of antiquity. “These women are noble and wise warriors,” he claimed, “and therefore kings of neighboring realms hire them to help them in their wars. This land of Amazons is an island, surrounded by water, except at two points where there are two ways in. Beyond the water live their lovers to whom they go when it pleases them to have bodily pleasure with them.”
This was, in short, a book of marvels. Despite all its improbabilities, Mandeville’s account was taken to be true. It was widely anthologized, and its most blatant inaccuracies excused on the basis that they must have been errors or corruptions of the original text committed by scribes and copyists over the years. His many borrowings from classical authors, rather than being seen as a form of plagiarism, added to his stature as a scholarly authority.
Mandeville argued that it was possible for people to circumnavigate the globe, but he warned, “There are so many routes, and countries, where a man can go wrong, except by special grace of God.” He
proposed one man who had accomplished the trick. “He passed India and so many isles beyond India, where there are more than 5,000 isles, and traveled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language being spoken,” Mandeville wrote. “He marveled greatly, for he did not understand how that could be. But I conjecture that he had traveled so far over land and sea, circumnavigating the earth, that he had come to his own border; if he had gone a bit further, he would have come to his own district. But after he heard that marvel, he could not get transport any further, so he turned back the way he had come; so he had a long journey!”
Accounts of the natural world circulating throughout Europe were so terrifying and fantastic that François Rabelais, the French friar and physician turned popular author, enthusiastically satirized them in his comic epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, which appeared as a series of books beginning in 1532. Rabelais mocked the unreliable accounts by the revered figures of antiquity with his own farcical version of exotic lands and the strange creatures to be found there. Among his authorities on the world was a blind old hunchback called Hearsay, who possessed seven tongues, each divided into seven parts, and maintained a school. In Rabelais’s hands, this figure becomes a vicious parody of a cosmologist and his entourage of flunkies. “Around him I saw innumerable men and women listening to him attentively, and among the group I recognized several with very important looks, among them one who held a chart of the world and was explaining it to them succinctly. Thus they became clerks and scholars in no time, and spoke in choice language—having good memories—about a host of tremendous matters, which a man’s whole lifetime would not be enough for him to know a hundredth part of. They spoke about the Pyramids, the Nile, Babylon, the Troglodites, the Himantopodes, the Blemmyae, the Pygmies, the Cannibals, the Hyperborean Mountains, the Aegipans, and all the devils—and all from Hearsay.” Rabelais had a serious point to make; he was directing his readers back to the classical Greek concept of autopsis, seeing for one’s self (and the origin of our word “autopsy”). Autopsis stressed the value of firsthand reporting; the next best thing was obtaining a reliable account from an eyewitness with firsthand knowledge.
This was a revolutionary concept in the Age of Discovery, to go see for one’s self, to study the world as it was, not as myths and sacred texts suggested that it should be. And that was exactly what Magellan proposed to do; he would see for himself if there was a water route to the Spice Islands, he would find the strait leading to them if it existed, and then he would report back to King Charles on his findings. So Magellan stood on the knife-edge dividing the ancient and medieval worlds from the modern. His voyage would be a completely practical and empirical approach to discovery. He would go and see for himself: the first-ever global autopsis. That ambition alone made it a daring and significant endeavor. The time was ripe for Magellan and his armada to sweep away a thousand years of accumulated cobwebs. The reign of Hearsay was coming to an end.
Fair weather favored the Armada de Molucca, and gusts carried the black ships southwest to the Canary Islands, off the coast of the western Sahara. “We left Sanlúcar on Tuesday, September twentieth of the said year, laying a course by the southwest wind,” Pigafetta noted. “And on the twenty-sixth of the said month, we arrived at an island of the Grand Canary named Tenerife . . . where we remained three and a half days to take in provisions and other things which we needed.”
For centuries this group of seven volcanic islands (Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, Tenerife, La Palma, Gomera, and Hierro) had served as a stopover for ships bound to and from the Iberian peninsula. They were known to Pliny, and classical historians may have been referring to the Canaries when they wrote of The Fortunate Islands. Later, a succession of Arab and European voyagers, carried by strong, favorable winds, frequently called on the Canaries to replenish their supplies, convert the islanders, or capture slaves; the islands began to appear on maps in 1341. At the time of Magellan’s arrival, in late September, the Canaries glistened in the waters of the Atlantic.
While there, Pigafetta confirmed an ancient story about the Canaries: “Know that among the other islands that belong to the said Grand Canary, there is one where no drop of water coming from spring or river is found, save that once a day at the hour of noon there descends from heaven a cloud which encompasses a great tree in the said island, then all its leaves fall from it, and from the leaves is distilled a great abundance of water that it seems a living fountain. And from this water the inhabitants of the said place are satisfied, and the animals both domestic and wild.” This observation marked the first time that Pigafetta tested his firsthand experiences against the claims of ancient writers, in this case Pliny, who wrote of a magical fountain in the Canaries with no source. It seemed to Pigafetta that there was a natural source of water, a rain cloud. Though hardly a revolutionary insight, the comment set Pigafetta apart from sages such as Pliny and Marco Polo, who relied on hearsay or the artful blending of hearsay with fact. If Pigafetta had any idea of emulating Polo, he gave up that notion now. Instead of embellishing timeworn legends about the world, he would present phenomena as he observed them with his own eyes. And he would test the legends against what he actually saw and experienced. With this entirely factual approach, Pigafetta broke with a tradition that reached back to antiquity.
During those brief days in the Canaries, Magellan busied himself the final provisioning of his fleet. He worked quickly—too quickly, as he would later discover to his horror, for the merchants and chandlers of the Canaries, practiced in deception, swindled Magellan by falsifying their bills of lading. They vastly overstated the amount of supplies they sold to the fleet, and what they did sell was in poor condition. This type of cheating was common, and very dangerous to the expeditions whose lives depended on the food acquired in the Canaries. Although Magellan was normally meticulous in preparing the ships, this time he was too trusting of his suppliers.
After three busy days in one of Tenerife’s harbors, Pigafetta wrote, “We departed thence and came to a port called Monterose, where we remained two days to furnish ourselves with pitch, which is a thing very necessary for ships.” While there, Magellan heard disturbing news: The king of Portugal had dispatched not one but two fleets of caravels to arrest him—a drastic measure, but not without precedent. A generation earlier, Manuel’s father had sent ships to intercept Columbus. Magellan also received a secret communiqué from his father-in-law, Diogo Barbosa, warning that the Castilian captains in the Armada de Molucca planned to mutiny at the very first chance. They might even kill Magellan to attain their goal. “Keep a good watch,” Barbosa admonished. The ringleader’s name came as no surprise to Magellan: Juan de Cartagena, the Castilian with blood ties to Bishop Fonseca.
In his reply to Barbosa, Magellan insisted he had accepted command of the fleet, come what may, but he promised that he would work closely with his captains for the good of the fleet and of Spain. Barbosa showed these conciliatory words to the Casa de Contratación, and Magellan won praise for gracious sentiments, at least in the short term. Despite this display of diplomacy, Magellan’s concern about the safety of his fleet, and his own life, could only have increased as he contemplated the Portuguese ships in hot pursuit. Unwilling to give his rebellious captains further cause for alarm, he kept both warnings to himself.
Under the circumstances, Magellan decided that the best course of action was to leave the Canaries immediately. If the Portuguese caravels caught up with Magellan, they would return him in shackles to the Portuguese court, where he would be convicted of treason, tortured, and perhaps executed. Poorly provisioned, but afraid for his life and the welfare of the fleet, Magellan gave the order to raise anchor and set sail at midnight, October 3.
We sailed on the course to the south,” Pigafetta wrote. “Engulfing ourselves in the Ocean Sea, we passed Cape Verde and sailed for many days along the coast of Guinea or Ethiopia, where there is a mountain called Sierra Leone, which is in eight degrees
of latitude.” Magellan ordered the fleet to sail both day and night, attempting to place as much distance as possible between his ships and the Portuguese caravels and to take evasive action by following an unexpected course. He led the fleet southwest, hugging the coast of Africa, rather than west across the Atlantic. From the deck of San Antonio, following closely behind the flagship, Cartagena immediately challenged Magellan’s orders. Why, he demanded, was Magellan following this unusual route?
Follow and do not ask questions, instructed the Captain General. Cartagena continued to protest, insisting that Magellan should have consulted his captains and his pilots. Was he trying to get them all killed by following this dangerous course? Magellan did not attempt to explain; he simply reminded the other captains to follow, and that they did. The mutiny that he expected to break out any moment failed to materialize, and order reigned aboard the ships, at least for the time being.
For the next fifteen days, the Armada de Molucca ran before the wind; the favorable conditions placated the irritable captains and gave Magellan time to strategize about the best way to avoid his Portuguese pursuers. Although he had seen no evidence of them, he continued to follow the coast of Africa rather than head west. But as they worked their way farther south, the weather turned foul, the winds confused and contrary day after day. They had no reliable nautical charts, no indications of rocks or other hazards that might have been lying in wait, and no idea when their miserable weather would change. Cooking fires were extinguished, the men went without sleep, and life on board the battered vessels became exceedingly precarious. One slip, and a sailor could plunge into the sea without hope of rescue.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 9