(“I put forth on the deep open sea, in but a single ship, and with that little band that had not deserted me.”) But if Varthema is no scholar, is he not for ever revealing himself as a single-minded, enthusiastic traveller; an excellent actor, and quite able to live up to his part, a man of sound judgment, native wit, sly humour, and pronouncedly brave; direct and unflinching of purpose; a little vainglorious, yet discrete?
The comrades traversed the landlocked straits of Malacca and the Java and Banda seas, and after fifteen days found themselves on an ugly, gloomy, and flat island, where dwelt “a beastly kind of men, without king or even governor.... The administration of justice is not needed; for the natives are so stupid that they could not do evil if they would. They are pagans.” Such was this specimen of the Nutmeg Islands. Two day spent here was more than enough for our travellers; so they set sail for the Moluccas—the Clove Islands—and found “the people even viler than those of Banda, but whiter; and the air is a little cooler.” We have a full description of the clove tree and are told that cloves were sold by measure, “for they understood not weights. We were now wishful to change to another land, in order to learn new things and all about them.” So Borneo was steered for; and, on the voyage, the Chinamen took delight in questioning Varthema concerning Christians and their faith. “And when I told them of the impress of our Saviour’s face, which is in St. Peter’s, and of the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul and many other saints, they advised me in secret that if I would go with them, I should be a very great lord, because I had seen these things. But I doubted if, after I had been led thither I should ever come to my own land again; and therefore I kept me back from going.” Varthema does not think of his indebtedness to his generous Persian host; he has no use for the inconvenient fidelities of friendship or the costly coercion of gratitude; such altruistic weakness did not afflict the men of the Renaissance; “ma per sè foro”—“they were for themselves.”
The temptation to visit China must have been strong for a man of Varthema’s spirit. A few missionary friars had reached Mongolia in the thirteenth century, a very few bold spirits had penetrated Asia as far as China at the end of that and the beginning of the next century; and Tartars kept up some commercial intercourse between Europe and China a little later. But when the great Tartar Empire fell into decay, and the Moslem recovered his grip of Central Asia, intercourse between West and Farthest East became impossible. The few missionaries who set forth for the Celestial Empire never returned, and China became a shadow and a name to Christian Europe. But it would be no easy matter for Varthema to slip away from the Persian just here and now; the difficulty of ever returning from China, even should he reach it, would indeed prove a formidable problem; and we may suspect, too, that the hardships of the voyage and the heat and discomforts of the climate were beginning to tell on Varthema’s iron nerve.
He found the natives of Borneo to be “Pagans, and good folk.... Every year much camphor is shipped; which they say is the gum of a tree that grows there. I have not seen it; and therefore I do not affirm it to be so. Here my companion hired a ship.... We directed our course to the very beautiful island called Java; and came there, always sailing southward, in five days.” On the voyage, the skipper pointed out the Southern Cross; and “told us that, to the south, beyond the island aforesaid (Java) dwell sundry other sorts of men, who steer by these stars which are set over against ours; and, further, they made known to us that the daylight stays but four hours in those parts, and that it is colder there than elsewhere in the world. Whereat we were much solaced and gratified.”
Now, there is no inhabited land to the south of Java where the shortest day is of four hours only; but the assertion of the Malay captain reads as if he had visited Australia, or had gotten some true information concerning that continent; and bold navigators of Malaysia may have ventured or been driven much farther over the Southern Ocean to a very high latitude; or, the statement as to shortened hours of sunlight and cold may have been a mere inference from the progressive diminution of the day and of heat in sailing south. It is said that indications of the discovery of Australia a very little after Varthema’s time are to be found on manuscript maps of unknown authorship. It is interesting to find that the skipper steered by means of a compass, which was not of Chinese make, for the magnet pointed to the north; and that he was provided with a chart intersected by perpendicular and horizontal lines.
Java was under the rule of several kings: “some adore idols as at Calicut; some worship the sun; others, the moon; many, an ox; very many, the first thing they shall meet of a morning; yet others, the devil.” Nonetheless, “I believe the natives to be the most true dealers in the world.... Some use pipes, from which they blow poisoned arrows from the mouth; which bear death however little blood they may draw.... Some eat bread made of corn; and some eat flesh of sheep or deer or wild pigs; and some eat fish and fruits. Among the flesh-eaters, when their fathers become so old as to be past labour, their children or relatives put them up for sale in the market-place; and those that buy them kill and eat them cooked. Likewise if any young man shall fall into any dire sickness; and if those that have knowledge deem that he shall die thereof, the father or brother of the sick one shall slay him; and they do not wait for him to die. And, having killed him, they sell him to be eaten of others. We, marvelling at such a business, some traders of this land, to us: ‘O you dull Persians, why do you leave such toothsome flesh to the worms?’ Whereupon, my companion cried out ‘Quick, quick, to the ship; for never again shall these folk come near me on land.’” This is a strange statement; but there is abundant evidence as to the prevalence of cannibalism throughout Malaysia at this period to confirm it. Yet, says Varthema, “justice was well administered”; the natives clothed themselves in silk, camelot and cotton garments; and traded with the gold and copper which their island furnished abundantly, as well as the finest emeralds in the world. They were a maritime people and fought their battles at sea.
Varthema had lost count of time. It was now the month of June. He was south of the equator, and had crossed the ecliptic; and, directed by the Chinamen, he found the sun casting a shadow in a direction the reverse of that of northern latitudes. “And thereby we learned how far we had come from our country, and stood amazed.... Having seen the manners of the island, we saw no great reason for remaining there; for we had to keep watch all night, lest some scoundrel should steal up to us, and bear us away, and eat us. Wherefore, having called the Christians, we told them that, as soon as they were ready, we would return to our land. Before we set off, however, my comrade bought two emeralds ... and two little male children with their private parts wholly cut away; for in this island there is a sort of merchants who follow no other calling than that of buying little children, from whom they cut all away, so that they are left as if women.”
It is obvious that different communities, at varying stages of civilization, inhabited Java; from “the truest dealers in the world,” and those who administered justice well, down to bestial savages. Tales, and perhaps evidence, of the cruel brutality of the Aborigines, affected the imagination of Cazazionor and Varthema strongly; they were not sure that the cannibals, finding themselves in the close neighbourhood of “Persians,” and therefore quite unusual visitors to Java, might not be tempted to try the flavour of a novelty; their Chinese guides, moreover, had taken them to most of the parts of Malaysia with which they were acquainted; the softening effect of an equatorial climate relaxed their desire to push on into that cold and gloomy region to the south, of which the Malay skipper had told them; and it would seem that, out of commercial jealousy or from rude humour, “merchants of the country” took a pleasure or sought a profit in playing upon their fears. So they hired a junk, and sailed boldly over the more open water, along the south-east coast of Sumatra, rounded the northern extremity of that great island, and saw Malacca again on the fifteenth day of voyage.
Here they stayed three days, while Cazazionor made up a cargo of spice, perfumes and silk; and here “our Christian companions stayed on. It were not possible to make a short history of how they wailed and lamented; so that, verily, had I not had a wife and children, I had gone with them” (this is the first and last time that Varthema mentions the relatively unimportant fact of his being a yoke-mate and father off the chain). “And likewise, they said they would have come with us, had they known how to travel safely.... So they stayed behind, saying that they would return to Sarnau; and we went on in our ship to Ciromandel” (Negropotam). Probably the Chinese would take passage in some junk of the fleet which came to Malacca every year.