Even the traveler, looking closely, often gets things wrong. Richard Henry Dana's Hawaiians in Two Years Before the Mast (1840), after months of sailing, mistook the island of Nantucket for the whole of the United States, because it was all they saw: the mainland is not visible from the island.
Here is another instance of travelers' ignorance, from Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa (1897). She writes, "Watch again a gang of natives trying to get a log of timber down into the river from the bank… No idea of a lever, or anything of that sort — and remember that, unless under white supervision, the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate piece of cloth or pottery, or a machine, tool, picture, sculpture, and that he has never even risen to the level of picture-writing."
Never mind the masterpieces of Benin bronzes, the magnificent carvings of the Chokwe people, whom she would have known from her travels in Angola. A little research would have revealed the Amharic script of Abyssinia, two thousand years of Nok sculpture, the immense variety of African pottery, or ancient examples of terracotta statuary. Yet she seems not to have taken any notice even in the places she claimed to know welclass="underline" Gabon with its Punu and Fang masks and carvings, or the masterpieces of carving — Bamileke and others, and indeed elaborate pots — from Cameroon.
Yet I am fascinated by imaginary landscapes, what Dr. Johnson called "romantick absurdities and incredible fictions," that are retailed as the real thing, especially landscapes I have seen. I do not recognize the fictional Africas, and Kafka's America is one of the weirdest countries of all. As for the outrageous George Psalmanazar — he fooled almost every reader (except Jonathan Swift) in early-eighteenth-century England with his book about Formosa.
George Psalmanazar's Travels in Formosa
THE AMAZING THING about this impostor of travel was the completeness and credibility of his book. Drawing on Dutch accounts, and fantasizing, he created a whole Formosan landscape and culture and made up an entire language of gobbledygook that even years later was taken by some scholars to be an actual Asiatic tongue. The book, published in London in 1704, was a huge success.
George Psalmanazar (or Psalmanaazaar) also managed to conceal his real identity under this outlandish name (perhaps a version of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser in 2 Kings): his birth name and birthplace are unknown. He was probably French, and he may have been born around 1689. For a while he claimed to be an Irish pilgrim. He also at various times said he was Japanese or Formosan. He claimed to worship the sun and the moon, and he slept sitting upright in a chair ("Formosan-style" he said), but he was more than the lovable eccentric who was later befriended by Dr. Johnson. "A great lover of penitents," Jeffrey Meyers writes in his biography Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, "Johnson reverenced Psalmanazar, who'd confessed his sins, reformed his character and become pious, endured prolonged hardship and — though an opium addict — died an exemplary Christian." But in his travel book, Psalmanazar played upon the anti-Jesuit animus current in the early eighteenth century; disparagements of Catholic missionaries are frequent in his book, something that would have found favor with the predominantly Catholic-hating English.
"The prevailing Reason for this my Undertaking was," he writes, "because the Jesuits I had found had imposed so many Stories, and such Gross Fallacies upon the Public, that they might the better excuse themselves from those base Actions, which brought upon them that fierce Persecution in Japan." The Japanese persecution of Catholics in the 1630s was a historical fact that was given a fictional retelling in Shusako Endo's 1966 masterpiece, Silence.
Psalmanazar's book is in two parts, the first, "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, Giving an account of the Religion, Customs, & of the Inhabitants, Together with a Relation of what happen'd to the Author in his Travels; particularly his Conferences with the Jesuits, and others, in several Parts of Europe. Also the History and Reasons of his Conversion to Christianity, with his Objections against it (in defence of Paganism) and their Answers." The second part relates his travels: "An Account of the Travels of Mr. George Psalmanaazaar, a Native of the Isle Formosa, thro' several parts of Europe; with the reasons of his Conversion to the Christian Religion."
Discourses on religion aside, the book is highly readable, both for its narrative of abduction and its delineation of a colorful culture. George is taken, under protest, by Jesuits from his native land. He travels to the Philippines, then to Goa, then Gibraltar, where "very much indisposed by the change of Climates, Air and Diet," he needs to recuperate. Then on to Toulon, Marseille, and into Catholic Avignon and Lutheran Bonn and Calvinist Holland, where he becomes embroiled in theological arguments. He is ultimately converted to Christianity, becoming "a most faithful Member of the Church of England."
Having established his loyalty to his adopted country and rulers (William III, who ruled until 1702, when Queen Anne succeeded him), ingratiating himself with readers, he goes on to describe the island of Formosa, with occasional allusions to Japan. This country is "one of the most Pleasant and Excellent of the Asiatic Isles, whether we consider the convenient Situation, the healthful Air, the fruitful Soil, or the curious Springs and useful Rivers, and rich Mines of Gold and Silver wherewith it abounds."
He chronicles the history, the monarchy, how the island was invaded by the emperor of Tartary and subdued, the arrival of the Dutch and the English traders, mayhem, mutinies, government, the more colorful of the laws. "Every man may have as many Wives, as his estate is able to maintain," he says, because children are highly valued. Adultery is severely punished; a man may lawfully kill his wife if she is unfaithful. "But this Law does not extend to Foreigners, to whom the Natives are wont to offer Virgins or Whores, to be made use of at their Pleasure, with Impunity."
No mention is made of Buddhism, which flourished in Formosa except for the forty years when the Dutch tried to sideline it. Psalmanazar explains Formosan religion as sun and moon worship, and "idolatry" that requires the sacrifice of oxen, rams, and goats. If "their God is not appeased by other Sacrifices," infants are killed — their hearts cut out and burned in the thousands. Meticulous illustrations are included in the book, showing where these human sacrifices are performed, where priests cut babies' throats "and pluck out their Hearts."
Because nothing seems to be excluded, the book has a convincing verisimilitude: superstitions, diseases, weapons, musical instruments, and the food of the islanders — roots that they make into bread, fruit, pigs, and "they eat serpents also." Formosans are not allowed to eat pigeons or turtles. They breed "Elephants, Rhinocerots [sic], Camels" to use as beasts of burden; and for their amusement, "Sea-Horses." In the countryside there are "Lyons, Boars, Wolves, Leopards, Apes, Tygers, Crocodiles."
Not everyone was taken in by George Psalmanazar's hoax. He was mocked even in his own time (he died in 1763), but the book remained popular, perhaps for the reason that travel books have always been popular, because the traveler (like Psalmanazar) claims to be an eyewitness to amazing sights. And the very barbarities in the book's details seemed to prove that it was a truthful account of a distant land.
Poe's Believable Landscapes
EDGAR ALLAN POE'S life was short, and not a traveling one, yet his fiction is full of foreign landscapes, among them believable Paris, Switzerland, Holland, and Norway, as well as nameless gothic moorlands, and even unearthly ones, such as the cold regions at the end of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. I read Poe as a teenager and was transported from my humdrum existence to his world of horror and mystery and freakishness.