Little they'll care, as they shout aloud,
If the Southern shirt prove a Southern shroud.
Hurrah for the needles sharp and thin!
Cotton is saved by hemming it in.'
One Of My Predecessors.
No books have quite the same fascination for me as the narratives of old travelers. Give me a rainy day, a state of affairs which renders the performance of a more serious task impossible, and a volume of Hakluyt or Purchas, or even of Pinkerton's agreeable collection, and I experience a condition of felicity which leaves Gray and his new novel far in the background. For I thus not only behold again the familiar scenery of the earth,—never forgetting a landscape that I have once seen,—but I am also a living participant in the adventures of those who have wandered the same paths, hundreds of years before. I visit Constantinople while the Porphyrogenite emperors still sit upon the throne of the East; I look upon the barbaric court of Muscovy before the name of Russia is known in the world; I make acquaintance with Genghis Khan at Karakorum, and with Aurungzebe at Delhi; I invade Japan with Kampfer, penetrate the Arctic Seas with Barentz, or view the gardens of Ispahan in the company of the gallant Sir John Chardin.
This taste was not the cause, but is the result, of my own experience. My far-off, unknown Arab progenitor says, in one of his poems: 'Fly thy home, and journey, if thou strivest for great deeds. Five advantages thou wilt at least procure by traveling. Thou wilt have pleasure and profit; thou wilt enlarge thy prospects, cultivate thyself, and acquire friends. It is better to be dead, than, like an insect, to remain always chained to the same spot of earth.' In the Middle Ages, and especially among the members of the enlightened Saracenic race, the instinct of travel was mainly an instinctive desire for education. There was no other school of knowledge so complete and practical, in the dearth of books and the absence of other than commercial intercourse between the ends of the earth, I fancy that this instinct, skipping over some centuries, reappeared, in my case, in its original form; for it was not until after I had seen a large portion of the earth, that I became acquainted with the narratives of my predecessors, and recognized my kinship with them. With the ghost of the mercantile Marco Polo, or those of the sharp fellows, Bernier and Tavernier, I do not anticipate much satisfaction, in the next world; but—if they are not too far off—I shall shake hands at once with the old monk Rubruquis, and the Knight Arnold von der Harff, and the far traveled son of the Atlas, Ibn Batuta.
These old narratives have a charm for me, which I do not find in the works of modern tourists. There is an honest homeliness and unreserve about them, which I would not exchange for any graces of style. The writers need no apologetic or explanatory preface; they sit down with the pressure of a solemn duty upon them. When much of the world was but dimly known, the man who had reached India, China, or the Islands of the Sea, and returned to describe his adventures, made his narrative a matter of conscience, and justly considered that he had added something to the stock of human knowledge. The world of fable had not then contracted into as narrow limits as at present; foreign countries were full of marvels, and science had not made clear the phenomena of nature. The old travelers had all the wonder and the credulity of children. All was fish that came to their nets, and their works are singular compounds of personal adventure, historical episodes, statistics of trade, and reflections on the laws, manners and religions of races, interwoven with many astonishing stories, and with the most amusing conjectures and speculations. Their sincerity is apparent on every page. How delightful is that remark of honest old Bernal Diaz, when, in describing the battle of Tlascala, he states that many of the Spanish soldiers believed that St. James and St. Thomas fought in person against the pagans, and adds, in the simplicity of his heart, 'Sinner that I am, it was not given to my eyes to behold either the one or the other of those holy persons.' Montanus, in his travels through Muscovy, speaks of a wonderful plant on the borders of Tartary, which resembled a pumpkin-vine in appearance, only that instead of pumpkins it produced lambs covered with wool. He calls this 'a mighty pleasant story,' but takes care to say that he had never seen with his own eyes the lambs growing upon the vines, but only the wool thereof, which the natives manufactured into garments.