The anonymous author of The Golden Coast, or a Description of Guinney (London, 1665) has little reliable information on this or any other subject. The people, he tells us, are Nigritæ “from their colour, which they are so much in love with that they use to paint the Devil white”; and of the elephant, “which some call Oliphant,” that “they have continual war against dragons which desire their blood because it is very cold.” The book abounds in such old tales out of Pliny and Bartholomew Anglicus, and has all the appearance of a literary puff of the Company of Royal Adventures of England trading to Africa (est. 1662); for what honest man could have waxed so enthusiastic over that death-trap of a country, where (says he) “a man may gain an estate by a handfull of beads, and his pocket full of gold for an old hat; where a cat is a tenement and a few fox tails a Mannor; where gold is sold for iron, and silver given for brasse and pewter?” The Company failed shortly afterwards and was replaced by the Royal African Company (1672), and this may well have been to over-spending in the Advertising Department.
Doctor Thomas Browne, in his “Enquiries into very many received tenents, and commonly presumed truths” (London, 1686) (commonly called Browne’s Vulgar Errors) is more modern, but, he, like a sensible man takes a middle path between scepticism and faith—thinks we cannot safely deny that there is such an animal as the basilisk; but we are not to confuse it with the cockatrice, a mere hieroglyphical fancy, though even the cockatrice he will not declare to be impossible (he does not see how such an oddity can be hatched from “a cock’s egg” (sic: the phenomenon occurs only in a cock’s eighth year, and causes it acute discomfort put under a toad or serpent)); but many inventions, he says, are really “the courteous revelations of spirits,” and we must not be too cocksure of our merely human faculties.
Scheuchzer, the learned Botanist who toured the Alps in the first ten years of the eighteenth century, frankly adopted the compromise implicit in Aldrovandus—always to believe half of what he was told; but he thought the dragon-stone in the museum at Lucerne entirely convincing; for (says he) a dishonest man would not have invented so simple a story as its falling from the sky—but rather some fabulous tale about its coming from the farthest Indies; and the stone not only cures simple hæmorrhages, which ordinary jasper or marble might well do, but dysentery and fevers and all those ills of which, to judge from the advertisements in the local press, Glastonians may now rid themselves so much more simply. Item, a respectable citizen returned home one evening lately “with a swimming in the head and a marked uncertainty about the motions of his legs, and how can we doubt his word when he attributes these unprecedented phenomena to the influence of the dragon who encountered him in the forest?” Scheuchzer’s scientific journals were published at the expense of the Royal Society of London. Credible witnesses of to-day maintain that “not the vestige of a dragon is to be found, even in those wildest regions of the Alps which ... were especially adapted for their generation.” Thus do beauty and romance fade before the advance of Winter Sports and Grand Babylon Hôtels.
References: Aldrovandus, op. cit.
Thomas Browne, op. cit.
Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (London, 1871).
E. Ray Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair (London, 1910).
F. W. Hasluck, The Dragon of Rhodes (British School at Athens, 1914).