THE FLAT WORLD: The Chinese, Hindus, Arabs, and Greeks long knew it was nothing of the kind. So did many people in western Europe. The story of belief in a flat world has been endlessly repeated by those who would magnify the voyage of Columbus out of all proportion. As a matter of fact, if one studies maritime navigation before and after it will be seen that Columbus had rather an easy time of it. His ships were small by our standards, but oceans have been crossed by many much smaller craft both before and after his time.
Traveling the routes he followed in his earlier years, visiting or residing in Genoa, Lisbon, etc., Columbus would have had to be both deaf and blind not to have heard of Atlantic voyages. Columbus and his brother made their livings, for a time, copying charts.
Ancient sea voyaging was much more extensive than has been suspected, and there was probably no land on earth that had not been visited before recorded history. Evidences of man have been found on even the most remote islands.
The secret of making a discovery then, as now, was to make it at the right time with proper attention to publicity.
GEESE: The discovery of land by following the flight of birds is as old as mankind. The annual migration of geese from Ireland to their nesting places in Iceland, Greenland, or Labrador would have indicated land in those directions. It is roughly but 600 miles from the west coast of Ireland to Iceland, less than 200 miles to the nearest point on Greenland, and only about 600 or a bit less to Labrador.
The distances were nowhere so great as those sailed by small craft in the South Pacific or Indian oceans. Many South Pacific islands were discovered by following the flight of birds.
GUNPOWDER INVENTION: Despite arguments for Roger Bacon, Black Berthold, and others, gunpowder had been used in China before A.D. 1000 (Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham). Grenades and explosive bombs hurled by catapults had been used, and it is probable that gunpowder had been used in fireworks as early as the T’ang dynasty.
HIND: India
HUELGOAT, YEUN ELEZ, etc.: Very much as described. A wild, beautiful setting, strangely eerie, especially on a moonlit or stormy night.
IRISH IN ICELAND: Recorded in the Norse sagas. When the first Norsemen arrived in Iceland, they found Irish priests waiting on the beach. The Irish had made many voyages into the western seas before the Vikings.
MANUEL I (Comnenus): Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople, was in the last few months of his reign at the time of this story, and died in the same year. A man of enormous physical strength, a fine soldier, and a competent ruler, he waged some wars that were wasted effort and failed to strengthen his overall position.
MEN MARZ: The Miracle Stone, probably erected in Neolithic times. About twenty-five feet high. An object of veneration for several thousand years.
MOORISH SPAIN: Arabs from North Africa, called Moors, had intermarried somewhat with the Berbers, a white people who occupied most of North Africa, and conquered Spain 710–712. They held all of Spain and a part of France for a time, and more than half of Spain for the best part of 750 years, leaving an indelible stamp upon the land. Cultural diffusion from there and from Sicily, also held for a time by the Arabs, had much to do with the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe.
MOSLEM LIBRARIES: Literally thousands of manuscripts lie untranslated and unknown in mosque libraries. Many are of religious character, but undoubtedly others could add important chapters to the histories of science and exploration.
It is possible that archives in private libraries, mosques, and monasteries in China, India, Japan, Tibet, and the Arab countries contain as many books awaiting discovery as ever have been translated into any European tongue.
PETCHENEGS: Pre-Mongol invaders from the steppes of Asia, who lived, fought, and looked much like the Mongols who were to conquer much of Asia and Russia in the century following this story.
PRE-COLUMBIAN VOYAGES: Breton, Norman, and Basque fishermen, as well as others from Bristol and Iceland, had apparently been fishing off the banks of Newfoundland for many years before Columbus.
Settlers from Greenland came regularly to the coast of Canada to cut timber for building houses or ships, and there is some evidence of temporary settlements at various points along the coast as well as on the rivers. The Maine islands were visited and temporarily occupied at a very early time.
Alexandre Aufredi, for example, sent ten ships on a voyage into the west from La Rochelle. The ships were gone for several years, but at last when hope had been given up, they returned. The details of the voyage are lost.
There was never any need to “discover” America. The Chukchi Indians of Siberia had been crossing the Bering Strait for centuries.
Vitus Bering had a chart showing the west coast of Alaska and Canada as far down as Vancouver Island before any known explorer visited the area. Magellan had a chart of the Strait before beginning his voyage. Seafaring and exploration are far older than any recorded history.
PROVINS: A walled town with a maze of catacombs, cellars, and tunnels beneath it. The tunnel from Champeaux to Melun and Provins was reported to have been built in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries.
RUE DU FOUARRE: Site of one of the first schools of Paris, this lies behind the Church of St. Julien le Pauvre on the Left Bank, not far from Notre Dame itself. It was named for the bundles of straw on which students sat for lectures. Dante visited there in 1304.
SAÔNE: This Crusader castle stands in remote, rocky, and brush-covered hills not far south of the ancient city of Antioch, the modern Antakya. It is approximately opposite (but some distance inland) from the isle of Cyprus. It is still an impressive ruin, but off the beaten track and rarely visited.
TOLENTE: One does not think of lost cities when thinking of Brittany, yet there were several. Tolente was destroyed by the Norsemen in 875, and was reportedly the site of a school of necromancers. The supposed site is now occupied by the village of Plouguerneau.
TOURNEMINE: A lawless family of unknown, perhaps British, origin, known for the Castle of Hunaudaye in the forest by that name, situated a bit south of the road from Plancoet to Lamballe. It is a massive and picturesque ruin, said to have been built in 1378 by Pierre de Tournemine, possibly on the site of an earlier castle built in 1220. The last of the Tournemines is reported to have killed his father, wife, and brother, and according to legend was carried off by their ghosts. There is some suggestion that a still earlier timbered fortress occupied the site before 1220.
VENETI: The first seafaring people of western Europe, of whom we know, from whom the Irish may have received their impetus. Brittany was their home. The best description of their oak-hulled ships with leathern sails is found in Caesar’s Commentaries. The ships of the Veneti were of heavier construction than necessary for coastwise voyages, and they had many such ships. Nobody knows where or with whom they traded aside from voyages for tin to the Scilly Isles or Cornwall.
WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.
Currently included in the project are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1, which published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, which will be published in the fall of 2019. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.
In 2018 we released No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.
Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within
the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.
An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes.
All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.
POSTSCRIPT
By Beau L’Amour
If there is an overarching story to the entire Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series, it is how my father struggled to establish a career for himself by writing Westerns, and then had to try and fail, and try again, to free himself from the clutches of the Western genre while still retaining his hard-won success. At the center of every great story is a Dilemma, a personal crisis that causes the protagonist to ask, “Who am I?” It is a rock on which the hero can stumble or which he can use as a fulcrum to shift his world. In my father’s life, The Walking Drum was that rock and that fulcrum—but for the longest time, it was unclear just what its fate would ultimately be.
That old, and likely apocryphal, Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” may have an equally ironic corollary: “May you receive everything you ever wanted.” In his mid-seventies Dad finally did get almost everything he ever wanted. He achieved success and recognition across a number of literary genres, but the victory was hard-won. It certainly wouldn’t have been possible without great patience and careful planning.
In the early 1950s Dad used the production of the movie Hondo, which was adapted from his short story “Gift of Cochise,” to convince a number of paperback publishers to give him an opportunity to prove himself. Over the next five years he pumped out more than a dozen solidly successful Westerns and was able to persuade Bantam to both publish his books as paperback originals, something the company didn’t do at the time, and to fundamentally alter its “one book a year per author” business model in order to become his exclusive publisher. The future seemed bright, especially since he had spent the first few years of the decade in dire financial straits.
The only downside was that his fortunes were now firmly wedded to the Western genre. Louis had written a great many Westerns in the previous dozen or so years, but, up until the demise of the pulp magazines, doing so had always been a choice he made on a story-by-story basis. He didn’t see himself as a specialist.
I’m not sure he realized what he was getting into when he sold his talents to paperback publishers Gold Medal, Ace, and, eventually, Bantam. At first Dad was happy to give them what they wanted. For the first time in his life, he felt like he might be settling into a solid career. It was about time—he was nearly fifty years old.
It’s also likely he thought that he could shift seamlessly from genre to genre as he had when writing for the pulps, and for the first few years that might have been true. The business, however, was becoming ever more committed to the concept of category, or genre, fiction and, because of some modest success, his category ended up being “Western.” As the late 1950s became the early 1960s Dad became more rebellious about being stuck in just one genre. He was still young enough to want to push the envelope and he was old enough to feel like he could do anything he set his mind to. He also wanted legitimacy, but legitimacy as an author was not easily won in the arena of 1950s Western paperback originals.
One attempt to gain greater respect was a nonfiction project on the subject of trade, travel, and cultural diffusion in the ancient world, a subject Dad believed was not appropriately appreciated at the time. Another was a plan to produce a series of volumes on the lives of the great scholar travelers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In an attempt to collect some advance money, my father carefully laid out a proposal for the first of this series, a volume that covered the fourteenth-century adventures of Abu ‘Abd al-Lah Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Lah l-Lawati t-tangi ibn Batutah…or, much more simply, Ibn Battuta. He sent this to the respected hardcover publisher Henry Holt & Company in early 1960.
A draft of the entire proposal is included in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2; however, I’ll quote the introductory paragraph so you can get a feeling for it:
THE WORLD OF IBN BATTUTA
A Proposal for a Non-Fiction Book
A proposed non-fiction book based on the journeys of the great Moorish traveller of the 14th century. His world is the world of the Arabian Nights, of mystery, adventure, romance, caravans, the diamonds of Golconda; the Vale of Kashmir, of betel and hashish, of myrrh and frankincense, of harems and beautiful slave girls, of strange empires, singing sands, of the Golden Horde, the Mongol khans, of Samarkand, Tashkent, Delhi, Bokhara, Bagdad and Damascus; of scimitar and Greek fire, of pirate galleys and the sciences of the East.
Through the stories of his amazing travels, which covered Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Africa, Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan, Russia, India, and China, one definitely gets the sense that Ibn Battuta might well be the inspiration for the wily and picaresque hero of The Walking Drum. And if Ibn Battuta, as some suspect, padded his itinerary a bit…well, that too is somewhat in character.
Henry Holt ultimately turned down the “ancient explorers” series, but it is very likely that the proposal, combined with the trade, travel, and cultural diffusion idea, had already served a new and different purpose; in September of 1960 Dad wrote the following in his journal:
…am hard at work on my historical, tentatively called KERBOUCHARD. It is going very well. A story of the 12th Century in Europe and Asia, that will become a trilogy.
The late 1950s saw the first moment of modest prosperity and stability in the life of Louis L’Amour. He had a regular income from his Westerns. He was recently married. And he had a quiet and elegant place to live in the bohemian enclave of West Hollywood: the Andalusia Apartments, a classic of Southern California Spanish-style architecture. The low and rambling building surrounded a courtyard filled with flowers and sporting a trickling tiled fountain. Possibly for the first time in his life, Dad was able to relax and be the man he had always aspired to be.
Most important, he had the money and time to haunt the many wonderful bookstores that Los Angeles had to offer: Hunter’s, Caravan, Dawson’s, and most particularly the nearby Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, also known as “The Red Barn,” which was owned by his friend Jacob Zeitlin. Louis lived to write, but his first love was reading, studying, and doing research. Copies of books that he had coveted in libraries around the country, and others he’d more recently discovered, began to pile up in his apartment. Many of these became his window into the past, into the world of Mathurin Kerbouchard.
There were also aspects of personal experience in The Walking Drum. Besides all the little pieces of day-to-day life that sneak into any work of fiction, Dad drew from the year or so he spent in France during World War Two. Just the fact that he was an officer in a Transportation Corps company allowed him to see a great deal of the country, but in between the convoys, which supplied tanks and aircraft with fuel, there was time for serious exploration. A particularly interesting find was the underground road that Kerbouchard and the Comtesse de Malcrais use to escape to Provins.
As Louis tells it, he and some of the men of the 3622 Quartermaster Truck Company discovered part of that tunnel system in the fall of 1944, while they were stationed at Château d’Aunoy, near Champeaux, France. In a letter to his parents he wrote:
“It is an interesting thing that in this area where I am now there are a great many long
secret passages. Long ago the monks were at war with the nobles, back in 900, and then they built these passages for protection. Some of them go across country for forty or fifty miles…Most of them are unknown, a few are, and we have found one of them, a great stone slab in the lawn lifts, and one looks down into the deep passage. It is at least eight feet to the bottom of the passageway. But that isn’t one of the oldest, which the people about here are very shy about revealing.”
Theoretically, these passages connected the church in Champeaux with Melun and Provins.
The stories that I heard (and that I only vaguely remember) started with tales of a room in the château that had a number of mirrored or paneled walls, one of which concealed a stairway that went down into a tunnel. I also heard of the divided pond, much as it appears in this novel, and a grotto that contained some strange plumbing which may have been a more modern way to drain the water covering the entrance to the underground stable. Dad and a soldier named Arden or Ardner did some exploring of the tunnel but discovered it had collapsed before it got too far along. I’m not sure where they learned the local legend about the origin of the passages, but Dad was, at the time, engaged to Countess Marguerite de Felcourt, who owned a château and a good deal of land nearby. It is very likely that she knew the stories or was aware of whom to ask when my father mentioned his underground adventure.
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