Travel Writing, Form, and Empire

The Poetics and Politics of Mobility

Julia Kuehn, Paul Smethurst, Julia Kuehn, Paul Smethurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415542500
• eBook ISBN: 9781135894542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays is an important contribution to travel writing studies -- looking beyond the explicitly political questions of postcolonial and gender discourses, it considers the form, poetics, institutions and reception of travel writing in the history of empire and its aftermath.

Starting from the premise that travel writing studies has received much of its impetus and theoretical input from the sometimes overgeneralized precepts of postcolonial studies and gender studies, this collection aims to explore more widely and more locally the expression of imperialist discourse in travel writing, and also to locate within contemporary travel writing attempts to evade or re-engage with the power politics of such discourse. There is a double focus then to explore further postcolonial theory in European travel writing (Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanic), and to trace the emergence of postcolonial forms of travel writing. The thread that draws the two halves of the collection together is an interest in form and relations between form and travel.

Part One
The Discursive Terrains of Empire

1
Asia, Africa, Abyssinia

Writing the Land of Prester John

Mary Baine Campbell

The steps up which the Emperor goes to his throne where he sits at meals are, in turn, onyx, crystal, jasper, amethyst, sardonyx and coral; and the highest step, which he rests his feet on when at meat, is chrysolite … The pillars in his chamber are of gold set with precious stones, many of which are carbuncles to give light at night. Nevertheless every night he has burning in his chamber twelve vessels of crystal full of balm, to give a good sweet smell and drive away noxious airs.

—Mandeville’s Travels (c. 1356)

They told me that their houses and dwellings were made of reeds plastered with mud within and without. And in the said country there is no house of dressed stone, nor any other buildings, except that each king on reaching the throne builds a church in which he should be buried.

—Francesco Suriano, Iter (c. 1482)

The land of spices, something understood….

—George Herbert, “Prayer (I)” (1633)

I

Ethiopia, as it has mostly been called by its own people, occupied a peculiarly mobile and shadowy place on pre-modern European maps of the world. Homer does not quite seem to know where it is, when he speaks in the Odyssey of “the far Aethiopians, … most distant of men, who live divided, some at the setting of the sun, some at his rising …”. The biblical book of Esther does not really clear things up, though it echoes the pairing of extremities, when it tells us Esther’s new husband “Ahasuerus … reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces”.¹ Even the spices that reached Europe from the Malabar Coast of India were believed to be from East Africa, where Europeans had bought them from African middlemen since Roman times.

The confusion of place between the Indian subcontinent and the East African highland country now chiefly constituted as Ethiopia Eritrea, Djibouti, and parts of Somalia goes back a long time and belongs to more than one culture of western Eurasia. Political reasons for the fusion and confusion of two such disparate regions have shifted dramatically, but the persistence of the Ethiopian-Indian link is fascinating, and the confusion of regions since before the onset of European colonial expansion and domination has had consequences as real as their shared identity was imaginary. It is a persistence belonging first and foremost though to literary history, for during much of the time of mythologizing there was scarcely any direct or unmediated contact between Europe and either place, and knowledge was text-based. The legendary priest-king Prester John appears on the fourteenth-century Hereford Map in India and on Frau Mauro’s fifteenth-century map in Africa: literary history eventually shifted him from an India conceived as a utopian and compensatory other world to an Ethiopia known to lie below Egypt and next to Sudan in the real economic world of Venetian and eventually Portuguese trade. But that Ethiopia was never until recently seen outside the shadow of its “Indian” promise, though it was finally felt as a promise broken

Although the yoking of India and Ethiopia is earliest attested for European and Mediterranean culture in the biblical book of Esther, India’s earliest presence by name in the literature and lore of specifically Christian Europe is as the missionary destination of that most interesting of apostles, Doubting Thomas, in the late third-century apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas, which were translated into many languages, including the Ethiopian scriptural language of Ge’ez. Geographical plurality of location follows immediately, with Thomas’s Christian colony located in the northwest of India, the southwest Malabar Coast, the town of Malyapur (Mylapore) on the southeast coast, and with his relics buried in Malyapur and in Edessa in present-day Turkey, to which his holy remains seem to have, mostly, been ‘translated’. Later European visitors such as Friar Jordanus and Marco Polo found his cult established in Malyapur, where a Christian community held and still holds their church to be his burial place.

A little later than the Acts of St. Thomas, we have the fourth-century account of Rufinus recounting the origins of Christianity in Aethiopia:

when [Frumentius] arrived in India [i.e., Ethiopia] as bishop, such grace is said to have been given to him by God that apostolic miracles were wrought by him and a countless number of barbarians were converted by him to the faith. From which time Christian peoples and churches have been created in the parts of India, and the priesthood has begun. These facts I know … from … Aedesius himself [Frumentius’ companion]….²

The literary, or at any rate textual, plot thickens quite a bit in the twelfth century when—in 1121, to be precise—a successful Mongol-Buddhist warlord in Central Asia, Yeh-lui Tashih, decisively defeated the Persian army of the Seljuk king Sanjar and made his presence felt through a tale told by a Syrian bishop, the Frenchman Hugh of Jabala.³ During preparations for the Second Crusade, Hugh made his way in 1145 from his see in the Latin kingdom of Edessa to Rome and then Viterbo to present to Pope Eugenius III an account which has come down to us in the text that first seeded the immortal legend of Prester John, Christian king of India—or maybe of someplace east of India, or north of India, or of Aethiopia. It was Aethiopia where the potentate was tracked down by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, and disappeared beneath an accumulating burden of fact. Bishop Hugh’s account of Prester John’s victory over the Selkuk Sanjar was transmitted by the historian Otto of Friesing. Otto had happened to be at the Pope’s court when Hugh visited, and later included an account of what he heard there in his Scriptores rerum Germanicum with regard to “[a] certain John, king and priest of the people living beyond the Persians and Armenians, in the extreme Orient, professing Christianity …”.⁴ Along with the famous hoax called The Letter of Prester John that followed about twenty years later, it coloured all subsequent accounts of an Asia understood as stretching from East Africa to Cathay but often anchored in mythical and eventually historical accounts of Abyssinia, a province the late thirteenth-century traveller Marco Polo places in “Middle India” (while at the same time debunking it as the Land of Prester John).

The year 1121 had also seen a visit to Pope Calixtus by a certain prelate “John” of India, which news comes down to us in two independent accounts prior to Otto’s historia that laid some of the groundwork for the coalescence of the legend of the Christian conqueror, in their relations of the miracle of the shrine of St. Thomas; the miracle (or anyway its local fame, in one of various “Indias”) is substantiated by an account of it in an Ethiopian collection of saints’ lives. The legend of the re-animated hand of Doubting Thomas (perhaps the relic left behind when the rest of the body was taken to Edessa?) is itself wonderfully self-dividing. In the earlier of the two accounts it receives gifts from the local people, but closes at the approach of an infidel. In the later account it distributes the gift of the Eucharist to the faithful, though it closes similarly to the reach of infidels who die as a result. This gift-giving ceremony occurs on the October feast day of the saint, during the dry season—or contrariwise the July feast day of the saint, during the rainy season: pick your expert. It divides in location as well: in the De adventu, one of the two twelfth-century texts from which we get the legend, the account of “India” may have been assigned by its scribe to India on the strength of Patriarch John’s account of this miracle as occurring at the ambiguously located shrine of Thomas, even if the traveller was really, as scholars now think, referring to the saint’s relics at Edessa.⁵

In 1320, Friar Jordanus of Séverac (sometime bishop of the east coast Indian city of Columbum) will describe Aethiopia but call it “India Tertia”, adding another and very similar account of Ethiopia under that name as a province of “Greater Arabia”:

Of India Tertia I will say this, that I have not indeed seen its many marvels, not having been there, but have heard them from trustworthy persons. For example, there be dragons in greatest abundance, which carry on their heads the lustrous stones which be called carbuncles. These animals come together at the destined time, develop wings, and begin to raise themselves in the air, and then, by the judgement of God, being too heavy, they drop into a certain river which issues from Paradise, and perish there. 2. But all the regions round about watch for the time of the dragons, and when they see that one has fallen, they wait for lxx days, and then go down and find the bare bones of the dragon and take the carbuncle which is rooted in the top of his head, and carry it to the emperor of the Ethiopians, whom you call Prestre John … Of Aethiopia, I say that it is a very great land, and very hot. There are many monsters there, such as gryphons that guard the golden mountains which be there. Here, too, be serpents and other venemous beasts, of vast size and venemous exceedingly. 3. There, too, are very many pretious stones. The lord of that land I believe to be more potent than any man in the world, and richer in gold and silver and in pretious stones.⁶

The complex history of persons and events contributing to this legendary Christian king and his mobile realm would take a book to unwind properly, but in the process we could learn a 500-year history of European contacts with and imagination of Asia, at least the Asia which was in some sense conjured by the words “India” and “Abyssinia” both, in the world Marco Polo lived in and wrote for.⁷ The “Indies” have been plural for a long time—and the French word for turkey is “d‘inde”—“of India”. Both of the latter terms refer to an edible bird indigenous to the east coast of what we now call the United States: the sacrificial lamb of the secular Thanksgiving holiday, modelled on the Jewish harvest feast of Sukkhot and celebrated first in Massachusetts by a worn-out group of Protestant Christian “pilgrims” from Amsterdam.

II

The high and late Middle Ages distinguish between three Indias in the geographical works, among others, of the friar, Odoric of Pordenone, who went as far as Cathay, Friar Jordanus, and the more famous books of the Venetian Marco Polo and the imaginary Englishman, Sir John Mandeville. These three Indias are India Major, India Minor, and India Tertia or Middle India, which Marco Polo calls Abascia (Abyssinia), though it is not yet definitively located in...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Travel Writing
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One The Discursive Terrains of Empire
• Part Two Unravelling Forms of Travel
• Contributors
• Index