Aldo Leopold sitting on rimrock along the Rio Gavilan in Mexico. (Starker Leopold/Aldo Leopold Foundation)

A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, just after Leopold had died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor fight a wildfire on his farm in Wisconsin. The book was a seminal work of nature writing that, with his capstone section, “The Land Ethic,” helped implant the notion of environmental ethics in the American, and ultimately global, consciousness.

Nevertheless, Leopold, a pioneering forester and land manager who, through his position in the U.S.D.A. Forest Service, helped establish the world’s first official wilderness area—the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico—in 1924 and subsequently co-founded the Wilderness Society in 1935 with Bob Marshall, Robert Sterling Yard, Harvey Broome, Harold Anderson, Ernest Oberholtzer, Bernard Frank and Benton MacKaye.

A Sand County Almanac had a tremendous effect on my thinking about my relationship with the environment once I finally read it—one of my former undergraduate professors, Steve Lynch, strongly encouraged me to read it, but I failed to act on his suggestion for nearly two decades. I will discuss the book on this blog eventually, but today it is time to talk about “Some Fundamentals,” which predated A Sand County Almanac by more than 20 years.

Leopold wrote “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” in the early 20s. The manuscript, dated 1923, was discovered among his unpublished papers by the scholar Eugene Hargrove, who was looking for material for a new journal, Environmental Ethics, which was inaugurated in 1979.

“Some Fundamentals” is not quite finished. The reprinted version contains blanks for statistics Leopold intended to fill in later. Statistics aside, however, the paper represents Leopold’s rather advanced—and still relevant—thinking about the relationships we have with the non-human world around us.

The paper begins with an assessment of the resources of the Southwest as well as of the major environmental issues affecting the region. Some of the assessment is dated—for example, he devotes a good bit of time discussing the 11-year drought cycle that appeared to be common in the region. He refers to the then-current work of pioneering dendrochronologists Andrew Ellicott Douglass (misspelled Douglas) and Ellsworth Huntington, who were seeking a relationship between the 11-year sunspot cycle and periodic drought. I do not believe the evidence Douglass and Huntington found for that relationship is as equivocal as they thought back then. (To be fair to Douglass, the statistical methods available to him at the time were somewhat inadequate to the task at hand.)

Nevertheless, “Some Fundamentals,” is a remarkably forward-thinking document in which Leopold challenges some of the practices of the time—which we unfortunately continue today:

The point is that, if every eleven years we may expect a drouth, why not manage our ranges accordingly? This means either stocking them to only their drouth capacity, or arranging to move the stock or feed it when the drouth appears. But instead, we stock them to their normal capacity, and, when drouth comes, the stock eat up the range, ruin the watershed, ruin the stockman, wreck the banks, get credits from the treasury of the United States, and then die. And the silt of their dying moves on down into our reservoirs to someday dry up the irrigated valleys—the only live thing left! (Leopold 1923, 306)

While Leopold refers primarily to overgrazing in this paragraph, the question he raises applies to many other environmental issues, such as climate change—basically, will we live within our biosphere’s means, or will we trash it (as usual) and hope for some miraculous rescue that may, in fact, never come.

As with A Sand County Almanac, the final section of the essay, “Conservation as a Moral Issue,” addresses the ethics of our relationship with the world around us. In it he finds inspiration in the Old Testament, specifically Ezekiel, who challenged the Israelites over their wasteful uses of their land, “Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have fed upon the good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pasture? and to have drunk of the clear waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet?” (Ezekiel 34:18).

Nature has its place, Leopold said, that even worshipers of the Judeo-Christian god should recognized:

It just occurs to me that … God started his show a good many million years before he had any men for audience—a sad waste of both actors and music—and in answer to both [people of faith and of science], that it is just barely possible that God himself likes to hear birds sing and see flowers grow. (Leopold 1923, 310)

Leopold also finds inspiration in the work of the Russian philosopher Peter D. Ouspensky, who—anticipating James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis by several decades—suggested that the Earth itself is living being, but that is, according to Leopold, not recognized as such because its scale is too large and its life processes too slow for us to notice.

Leopold goes on to point out the transience of human culture, noting that at least five separate groups have dominated the region in the past millennium, each yielding to a newer, more technologically advanced, set of invaders before leaving little but a handful of ruins in their wake. But none of those predecessors—including the Cliff Dwellers, Pueblos, and Spanish—left nearly so much ruin in their wake as our current culture has.

Leopold ends “Some Fundamentals” with a question whose answer is very much in doubt in the year 2015:

… And if there be, indeed, a special nobility inherent in the human race—a special cosmic value, distinct from and superior to all other life—by what token shall it be manifest?

By a society decently respectful of its own and all other life, capable of inhabiting the earth without defiling it? Or by a society like that of John Burrough’s potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself? As one or the other we shall be judged in “the derisive silence of eternity.” (Leopold 1923, 311)

REFERENCES

Leopold, Aldo. 1923. “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest.” Environmental Ethics 1: 131-141. (Reprinted, with corrections and annotations by J. Baird Callicott, in J. Baird Callicott. 2013. Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic. New York, Oxford University Press, 303-311.)

Inspiracion de Cristobal Colon by Jose Maria Obregon, 1856. (Wikimedia Commons)

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—Enthusiastic over his “discovery” of the region Columbus identified as the Indies, Spain’s rulers backed him with a much larger expedition set to leave the fall following his return from his first voyage. On September 25, 1493, that expedition—with a complement of 17 ships—departed Cadiz for the westward voyage across the Atlantic.

Columbus was better equipped for a voyage of discovery this time around. Among the personnel onboard his ships were a number of individuals with some formal training in science. One of the key members of Columbus’s scientific contingent was a physician, Diego Álvarez Chanca, who described his experiences in a letter to the cabildo (town council) of Seville, his home town.

Chanca’s résumé was impressive: He had served as physician-in-ordinary to Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Castile and Aragon—and, after the final conquest of the emirate of Granada in 1492, Spain (de Ybarra 1906). The monarchs appointed Chanca to accompany Columbus on his second voyage, in part because of the importance of the voyage, but also because of the many aristocratic men participating in the voyage (de Ybarra 1906).

The second voyage was undertake on a much grander scale than Columbus’s original voyage. Rather than departing Europe in three barely seaworthy ships like the first expedition, the second expedition was comprised of 17 ships—including galleons—about 1,200 men, and a vast amount of supplies (Chanca 1906). It was not a mere voyage of exploration. The goal this time was to establish a permanent colony in the New World.

The fleet left the port of Cadiz, Spain, on September 25, 1493. After a brief stop in the Canary Islands, the fleet set across the Atlantic and reached Dominica in the Lesser Antilles on November 3. The voyage was a productive one for Columbus. he sailed through much of the Lesser Antilles, giving many of the islands he cited the names by which we know them now. He spotted, though never landed on, the islands we now call the Virgin Islands. He landed on Puerto Rico, visited Española (Hispaniola)—including the ruins of the settlement he established on the first voyage, La Navidad, which was destroyed in an attack by the local Taino people, and explored the coastal parts of Cuba. He then returned to Española, from which he departed on his return trip to Spain.

The doctor proved his worth when he cured Columbus of a near-fatal attack of typhus  in one instance and of malaria in another. He successfully treated many other members of the expedition for various diseases that might otherwise have killed them (de Ybarra 1906). After his return to Europe, he wrote a treatise on the treatment of pleurisy in 1506 and a critical commentary on the work of another physician in 1514 (de Ybarra 1906).

The approximate routes of the four voyages of Columbus, 1492-1503.

The great value of Chanca’s work to us is the scientifically trained-lens he trains onto the life of the New World. de Ybarra claims, not without reason, that Chanca’s letter on Columbus’s second voyage is the “the first written document about the flora, the fauna, the ethnology and the anthropology of America.”

Here is an example of Chanca’s  powers of description—in a passage describing Española (Chanca 1906, 295-297):

The island being large, is divided into provinces; the part which we first touched at, is caused Hayti; the other province adjoining it they call Xamaná; and the next province is named Bohio, where we now are. These provinces are again subdivided, for they are of great extent. Those who have seen the length of its coast, state that it is two hundred leagues long, and I myself should judge it not to be less than a hundred and fifty leagues: as to its breadth, nothing is hitherto known; it is now forty days since a caravel left us with the view of circumnavigating it, and it is not yet returned. The country is very remarkable, and contains a vast number of huge rivers, and extensive chains of mountains, with broad open valleys, and the mountains are very high; it does not appear that the grass is ever cut throughout the year. I do not think they have any winter in this part, for at Christmas were found many bird-nests, some containing the young birds, and others containing eggs. No four-footed animal has ever been seen in this or any of the other islands, except some dogs of various colors, as in our own country, but in shape like large house-dogs; and also some little animals, in color and fur like a rabbit, and the size of a young rabbit, with long tails, and feet like those of a rat; these animals climb up the trees, and many who have tasted them, say they are very good to eat; there are not any wild beasts.

There are great numbers of small snakes, and some lizards, but not many;  for the Indians consider them as great a luxury as we do pheasants; they are of the same size as ours, but different in shape. In a small adjacent island (close by a harbor called Monte Cristo, where we stayed several days), our men saw an enormous kind of lizard [DML: probably the American crocodile, Crocodylus acutus], which they said was as large round as a calf, with a tail as long as a lance, which they often went out to kill: but bulky as it was it got into the sea so that they could not catch it. There are, both in this and the other islands, and infinite number of birds like those in our own country and many others such as we had never seen. No kind of domestic fowl has been seen here, with the exception of some ducks in Zuruquia; these ducks were larger than those of Spain, though smaller than geese,—very pretty, with flat crests on their heads, most of them as white as snow, but some black.

Here, Chanca describes some of the vegetation of the islands (Chanca 1906, 310-311):

… The little time that we have spent on land, has been so much occupied in seeking for a fitting spot for the settlement, and in providing necessaries, that we have had little opportunity of becoming acquainted with the products of the soil, yet although the time has been so short, many marvellous things have been seen. We have met with trees bearing wool, of a sufficiently find quality (according to the opinion of those who are acquainted with the art) to be woven into good cloth; there are so many of these trees that we might load the caravels with wod, although it is troublesome to collect, for the trees are very thorny, but some means may be easily found of overcoming this difficulty. There are also cotton trees, perennials, as large as peach trees, which produce cotton in the greatest abundance. We found trees producing wax as good both in color and smell as bees-wax and equally useful for burning; indeed there is no great difference between them. There are vast numbers of trees which yield surprisingly fine turpentine; and there is also a great abundance of tragacanth, also very good. We found other trees which I think bear nutmegs, because the bark tastes and smells like that spice, but at present there is no fruit on them; I saw one root of ginger, which an Indian wore around his neck. There are also aloes; not like those which we have hitherto seen in Spain, but no doubt they are one of the species used by us doctors. A sort of cinnamon has also been found; but, to tell the truth, it is not so fine as that with which we are already acquainted in Spain. … We have also seen some lemon-colored myrobolans; at this season they are all lying under the trees, and have a bitter flavor arising from the rottenness occasioned by the moisture of the ground; but the taste of such parts as have remained sound, is that of the genuine myrobolan. there is also very good mastic. …

While his descriptions are scientifically vague in that there is little formal identification of species found, readers should remember that this was a letter to a friend, not a formal report. Furthermore, Chanca likely had not formal zoological or botanical training beyond that necessary for a physician, so one should not expect detailed lists of species. Nevertheless, the detail present gives me, at least, some idea of the landscape and its non-human residents.

Chanca also described the indigenous peoples he encountered, though not without some of the European bias (at the time) toward regarding non-Christians as savages. Here is an example (Chanca 1906,  288-289):

We remained eight days in this port … and went many times on shore, passing amongst the dwellings and villages which were on the coast; we found a vast number of human bones and skulls hung up about the houses, like vessels intended for holding various things. There were very few men to be seen here, and the women informed us that this was in consequence of ten canoes having gone to make an attack upon other islands. These islanders appeared to us to be more civilized than those we had hitherto seen; for although all the Indians had houses of straw, yet the houses of these people are constructed in a much superior fashion, are better stocked with provisions, and exhibit more evidence of industry, both on the part of the men and the women. They had a considerable amount of cotton, both spun and prepared for spinning, and many cotton sheets, so well woven as to be no way inferior to those of our country. We inquired of the women, who were prisoners on the island, what people these islanders were; they replied that they were Caribbees. As soon as they learned that we abhorred such people, on account of their evil practice of eating human flesh, they were much delighted; and after that, if they brought forward any woman or man of the Caribbees, they informed us (but secretly) that they were such, still evincing by their dread of their conquerors, that they belonged to a vanquished nation, though they knew them all to be in our power.

Chanca goes on to describe a lethal skirmish with the Caribbees after some of Columbus’s men tried to take them captive (Chanca 1906, 293):

When the Caribbees saw that all attempt at flight was useless, they most courageously took to their bows, both women and men; I say most courageously, because there were only four men and two women, and our people were twenty-five in number. Two of our men were wounded by the Indians, one with two arrow-shots in his breast, and another with one in his side, and if it had not happened that they carried shields and wooden bucklers, and that they soon got near them with the barge and upset their canoe, most of them might have been killed with their arrows. After their canoe was upset, they remained in the water swimming and occasionally wading (for there were more shadows in that spot), still using their bows as much as they could, so that our men had enough to do to take them; and after all there was one of them who they were unable to secure till he had received a mortal would with a lance, and whom thus wounded they took to the ships. The difference between these Caribbees and the other Indians, with respect to dress, consists in their wearing their hair very long, while the latter have it clipt and paint their heads with crosses and a hundred thousand different devices, each according to his fancy; which they do with sharpened reeds. All of them, both the Caribbees and the others, are beardless, so that it is a rare thing to find a man with a beard: the Caribbees and whom we took had their eyes and eyebrows stained, which I imagine they do from ostentation and to give them a more frightful appearance. …

While Columbus had moments of skilled observation, in comparing the two narratives, I find Chanca much more reliable and insightful—a better witness to the cultural and physical geography of the Caribbean at the dawn of the European conquest. Given his business was medicine, his observations were less skewed toward the quick acquisition of wealth than those of Columbus were. (Chanca was not immune from referring to rumors of gold to be found in the islands, but his references to it were much more matter of fact; there was little of the desperation evident in Columbus’s writing that the gold needed to be relocated from its Caribbean home to more hospitable environs in the hoards of Europe.)

If only Columbus had had someone with both the observational and literary skills of Chanca on his first voyage, we would know so much more about that time of first contact.

CORRECTION: The opening paragraph of the initial version of this post gave September 24, 1493, as the initial departure date of Columbus’s second voyage from Cadiz. The correct date was September 25, as was given later in the text (Chanca 1906, 283).

REFERENCES

Chanca, Diego Alvarez. 1906. “Letter of Dr. Chanca on the Second Voyage of Columbus.” Translated by R.H. Major. In The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503: The Voyages of the Northmen. Edited by Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne. Original Narratives of Early American History, 279-313. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

de Ybarra, A. M. Fernandez. 1906. “A Forgotten Medical Worthy, Dr. Diego Alvarez Chanca, of Seville, Spain, and His Letter Describing the Second Voyage of Christopher Columbus to America.” Medical Library and Historical Journal 4(3):246–263.

Christopher Columbus, a 1519 painting by Sebastiano del Piombo

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—For all our breast-beating about our history, Americans know surprisingly little about Christopher Columbus beyond a couple of lines from Ramon Montaigne’s poem about sailing the ocean blue and that (in the United States, at least) the second Monday in October is a holiday (for some) that carries his name. They also “know” he discovered America, which, of course, he didn’t—nor was he the first (modern) European to set foot on its shores.

That is not to say his legacy is insignificant. Far from it.

Columbus, by his rediscovery of the “new” world later called the Americas, ignited the biggest mass-migration in history, the biggest land grab in history, and the biggest genocide in history. His discovery sired the growth of European colonial empires, fueled the Age of Discovery, and force us to significantly redraw our maps of the world.

And most of that time, Columbus thought he was somewhere off the coast of Asia.

Christopher Columbus (in Italian, Cristoforo Colombo; in Spanish, Cristóbal Colón) was an opportunist, like many Europeans of his day. He sought to use his seafaring skills to acquire wealth, and spent much of his life seeking a patron to grubstake his ambitions.

Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa sometime in October 1451. While the Crusades had long ended in Muslim victory in the Holy Land, they were still being waged elsewhere. In the east, the Byzantine Empire was on the verge of annihilation at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, who had already seized territory in the Balkans and were poised to expand further into southeastern Europe. In the west, the Reconquista—an effort launched in 722 to oust the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula—was just a few decades away from ending in a complete Christian victory.

Europeans such as Columbus often looked to the East as a way to gain wealth. But the traditional land route between Europe and East Asia—the Silk Road—was getting too expensive and dangerous. And it was all beyond European control. Likewise, the traditional sea route through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean was troublesome. Europeans sought an easier path.

The Portuguese, taking advantage of the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator; a revolutionary ship design, the caravel; and building upon the results of their exploration of the coast and adjacent interior of West Africa, eventually found a potential pathway. In 1588, Bartholomeu Dias pioneered a route south along Africa’s Atlantic coast, around Cape Agulhas (the true southernmost point of the African continent) and northeast into the Indian Ocean.

While the Portuguese looked east, Columbus persuaded the Spanish Court to look west.

What was he thinking?

In some of the fairy tales I heard when I was growing up, Columbus was a navigational genius that many—including the Portuguese court—failed to recognize. They all believed the Earth was flat and if you went far enough west, you would sail off the edge of the planet.

Of course, usually what sounds great in fairy tales does not sound so great in real life. (Imagine being Rapunzel and having to take care of all that hair?) Most educated people knew that the Earth was roughly spherical in shape. They had known that since the time of Ptolemy more than 1,000 years before Columbus was born.

Those who doubted Columbus and his ideas did so for good reason.

First, Columbus underestimated the size of the Earth. Columbus was in a minority of folks who failed to accept Eratosthenes’s calculation of the circumference of the Earth. Eratosthenes, a third-century scholar of Greek descent who lived in what is now Libya, used geometry to derive a reasonably close estimate of the Earth’s circumference. Depending on the version of the “stade” Eratosthenes used as a measurement unit, his 250,000 stades could range from 40,000 kilometers to 52,000 kilometers, but most likely falls near the center of that range (46,000 kilometers). The actual circumference of the Earth at the Equator is 40,000 kilometers.

Columbus thought the circumference of the Earth was closer to 30,000 kilometers—far smaller than the lower-bound estimate of Eratosthenes’s figure as well as of the actual value.  Columbus was clearly dead wrong. If it weren’t for the unknown (to the residents of the Old World) continents blocking his path to Asia, dead is how he and his crew would have ended up before actually getting to Asia. Some of those he approached for backing of his initial expedition, such as the Portuguese, figured just that—all they ultimately would be paying for was three hulks manned by skeletons and drifting the oceans for an eternity.

Here’s where the Spanish come in. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, fresh off their victory over the Moors, learned something that many of our twenty-first century “patriots” have a  hard time grasping—that wars are expensive. They needed to rebuild coffers depleted as a result of their success in pushing the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula. Columbus persuaded the king and queen—Isabella in particular—that his expedition would foster an era of trade that would make them all rich.

Columbus, in particular, sought wealth that would enrich his family for generations:

… I should go to the said parts of India, and for this [King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella] made great concessions to me, and ennobled me, so that henceforward I should be called Don, and should be Chief Admiral of the Ocean Sea, perpetual Viceroy and Governor of all the islands and continents that I should discover and gain, and that I might hereafter discover and gain in the Ocean Sea, and that my eldest son should succeed, and so on from generation to generation forever (Columbus 1906, 90).

The voyage

The approximate routes of the four voyages of Columbus, 1492-1503.

Columbus set out from the port of Saltes on Friday, August 3, 1492, with three ships—the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María—bound for the Canary Islands to take on provisions and water for the main ocean crossing. Along the way he had to contend with a damaged rudder and leaky hull on the Pinta and Portuguese caravels apparently looking to prevent his escape to the open Atlantic Ocean. Despite the headaches, he got away from the port of Gomera on September 6.

For more than a month, the three ships of Columbus’ flotilla crossed the North Atlantic Ocean, much of the time working around the Sargasso Sea. The long crossing for sailors not used to going so long without the sight of land caused dissension among some of Columbus’s officers and crew. (Personally, I know that stretch of water, and I understand how people unprepared for it can get to feeling restive.) Columbus placated his potentially mutinous company long enough to keep moving west until Rodrigo de Triana, a lookout on the Pinta, sighted land about 2 a.m. on Friday, October 12. Arguably the most consequential encounter in human history took place after sunrise.

The vessels were hove to, waiting for daylight; and on Friday they arrived at a small island of the Lucayos, called, in the language of the Indians, Guanahani. Presently they saw naked people. The Admiral went on shore in the armed boat, and Martin Alonso Pinzon, and Vicente Yañez, his brother, who was captain of the Niña. The Admiral took the royal standard, and the captains went with two banners of the green cross, which the Admiral took in all the ships as a sign, with an F and a Y and a crown over each letter, one on one side of the cross and the other on the other. Having landed, they saw trees very green, and much water, and fruits of diverse kinds. The Admiral called to the two captains, and to the others who leaped on shore, and to Rodrigo Escovedo, secretary of the whole fleet, and to Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, and said that they should bear faithful testimony that he, in presence of all, had taken, as he now took, possession of the said island for the King and for the Queen his Lords, making the declarations that are required, as is now largely set forth in the testimonies which were then made in writing.

Presently many inhabitants of the island assembled. What follows is the actual words of the Admiral in his book of the first navigation and discovery of the Indies. “I,” he says, “that we might form great friendship, for I knew that  they were a people who could be more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force, gave to some of them red caps, and glass beads to put round their necks, and many other things of little value, which gave them great pleasure, and made them so much our friends that it was a marvel to see. … They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion. I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak (112-113).

With what was arguably a silly ceremony, Columbus claimed two continents for a people that had no idea the continents existed, nor that had any concern for any prior claim the actual residents of those continents might have had for the land. Instead, Columbus was more concerned with how cheaply he could swindle the residents out of their property with “things of little value.”

Columbus did not seem oblivious to the natural wonders that he saw in this New World. Here he describes what is now known as Long Island in the Bahamas:

During that time I walked among the trees, which was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, beholding  as much verdure as in the month of May in Andalusia. The trees are as unlike ours as night from day, as are the fruits, the herbs, the stones, and everything. It is true that some of the trees bear some resemblance to those in Castile, but most of them are very different, and some were so unlike  that no one could compare them to anything in Castile (121).

Here, he describes some of the wonders of Cuba:

He says that he found trees and fruits of very marvellous taste; and adds that they must have cows or other cattle, for he saw skulls which were like those of cows. The songs of the birds and the chirping of crickets throughout the night lulled everyone to rest, while the air was soft and healthy, and the nights neither hot nor cold (132-133).

Nevertheless, appreciation of his “discoveries” did not seem to be high on Columbus’s priority list. There was a religion to promote, or, more accurately, to exploit in the name of baser concerns:

… your Highnesses should resolve to make them Christians, for I believe that, if the work was begun, in a little time a multitude of nations would be converted to our faith, with the acquisition of great lordships, peoples, and riches for Spain. Without doubt, there is in these lands a vast quantity of gold, and the Indians I have on board do not speak without reason when they say that in these islands there are places where they dig out gold, and wear it on their necks, ears, arms, and legs, the rings being very large. There are also precious stones, pearls, and an infinity of spices (144).

Columbus departed what is now known as the Bay of Samana in the Dominican Republic on January 16, 1493, to begin his return voyage to Europe. They reached the vicinity of the Azores on February 5, but because of navigational challenges and storms, did not make landfall until February 18 at the island of Santa Maria. After some misadventures—particularly at the hands of the Portuguese governor as well as from more storms—Columbus and his company arrived off Lisbon, Portugal, on Sunday, March 3. This time, he was received more hospitably.

His voyage ended when he crossed the bar at Saltes on March 15.

The Journal

Portions of the Journal are what one might expect as a pure record of the voyage. For example, this entry from September 8, 1492:

At the third hour of Saturday night, it began to blow from the N.E., and the Admiral shaped a course to the west. He took in much sea over the bows, which retarded progress, ad 9 leagues were made in that day and night (94).

Many passages are like that. The large stretches of the Atlantic Ocean between the Old World and New receive little detailed narrative except when Columbus’s ships encountered storms or interesting oceanographic or biological phenomena, such as what they encountered when they sailed through what is now called the Sargasso Sea, such as is described in the entry on September 17:

They proceeded on their west course, and made over 50 leagues in the day and night, but the Admiral only counted 47. They were aided by the current. They saw much very fine grass and herbs from rocks, which came from the west. They, therefore, considered that they were near land. … At dawn, on that Monday, they saw much more weed appearing, like  herbs from rivers, in which they found a live crab, which the Admiral kept (97).

The weed encountered was the Sargassum weed (Sargassum natans or S. fluitans), for which the Sargasso Sea is named. The crab was most likely the Sargassum crab (Planes minutus), which inhabits the floating patches of weeds. Unfortunately, there were few if any actual naturalists on Columbus’s first voyage, so that the descriptions of the life, landscapes, and seascapes encountered are often quite vague.

The Journal is better when describing items relevant to navigators. Here is his description of the bay of Nuestra Señora, near the eastern tip of Cuba:

Finally he reached the sea of Nuestra Señora, where there are many islands, and entered a port near the mouth of the opening to the islands. … On nearing the land he sent in the boat to sound, finding a good sandy bottom in 6 to 20 fathoms. He entered the haven, pointing the ship’s head S.W. and then west, the flat island bearing north. This, with another island near it, forms a harbor which would hold all the ships of Spain safe from all winds. This entrance to the S.W. side is passed by steering S.S.W., the outlet being to the est very deep and wide. Thus a vessel can pass amidst these islands, and he who approaches from the north, with a knowledge of them, can pass along the coast. These islands are at the foot of a great mountain-chain running east and west, which is longer and higher than any others on the coast, where there are many. A reef of rocks outside runs parallel with the said mountains, like a bench, extending to the entrance. On the side of the flat island, and also to the S.E., there is another small reef, but between them there is great width and depth. Within the port, near the S.E. side of the entrance, they saw a large and very fine river, with more volume than any they had yet met with, and fresh water could be taken from it as far as the sea. At the entrance there is a bar, but within it is very deep, 19 fathoms. The bangs are lined with palms and many other trees (153-154).

The Journal can be descriptive of the appearance and culture of the native residents of the islands Columbus encountered, but the descriptions were rarely of anything more than a superficial nature:

As soon as dawn broke many of these people came to the beach, all youths, as I have said, ad all of good stature, a very handsome people. Their hair is not curly but loose and coarse, like horse hair. In all the forehead is broad, more so than in any other people I have hitherto seen. Their eyes are very beautiful and not small, and themselves far from black, but the color of the Canarians. … Their legs are very straight, all in one line, and no belly, but very well formed. They came to the ship in small canoes, made out of the trunk of a tree like a long boat, and all of one piece, and wonderfully worked, considering the country. They are large, some of them holding 40 to 45 men, others smaller, and some only large enough to hold one man. They are propelled with a paddle like a baker’s shovel, and go at a marvellous rate. If the canoe capsizes, they all promptly begin to swim, and to bale it out with the calabashes that they take with them (112).

Columbus was inclined to not take the natives seriously in terms of their ability to resist Spanish occupation, such as in his discussion of the desirability of a garrison on the island of what he called Española (Hispaniola):

I believe that with the force I have with me I could subjugate the whole island, which I believe to be larger than Portugal, and the population double. But they are naked and without arms, and hopelessly timid. Still, it is advisable to build this tower, being so far from your Highnesses. The people may thus know the skill of the subjects of your Highnesses, and what they can do; and will obey them with love and fear (204).

Columbus tarried long enough to learn the natives were far from “hopelessly timid,” as when some attacked his men on January 13, 1493.:

As soon as they came to the boat the crew landed, and began to buy the bows and arrows and other arms, in accordance with an order of the Admiral. Having sold two bows, they did not want to give more, but began to attack the Spaniards, and to take hold of them. They were running back to pick up their bow and arrows where they had laid them aside, and took cords in their hands to bind the boat’s crew. Seeing them rushing down and being prepared—for the Admiral always warned them to be on their guard—the Spaniards attacked the Indians, and gave one a slash with a knife in the buttocks and another in the breast with an arrow. Seeing that they could gain little, although the Christians were only seven and they numbered over fifty, they fled, so that none were left, throwing bows and arrows away. The Christians would have killed many, if the pilot, who was in command, had not prevented them. The Spaniards presently returned to the caravel with the boat. The Admiral regretted the affair for one reason, and was pleased for another. They would have fear of the Christians, and they were in no doubt an ill-conditioned people, probably Caribs, who eat men. But the Admiral felt alarm lest they do some harm to the 39 men left in the fortress and town of Navidad, in the event of their coming here in their boat. Even if they are not Caribs, they are a neighboring people, with similar habits, and fearless, unlike the other inhabitants of the island, who are timid, and without arms (224).

A consistent thread throughout the Journal is an appalling self-righteousness and total disregard for anyone other than Columbus himself. Columbus seems an inconsistent leader: a man who can lead three ships and their company toward a destination largely unknown, yet who inspires mutinous acts against him; a man capable of great feats of seamanship, yet a somewhat questionable navigator who frequently misreckoned his position; and a man who expresses concern about at least the spiritual welfare of the natives he encounters in the “New” World, yet one ready to exploit—sometimes to the death—those same natives to satisfy his and compatriots’ base greed for worldly goods and comfort.

As a historical document, the Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus is important and worthy of study. But it is hardly a work for explorers and scholars to emulate in the twenty-first century, rife as it is with unchecked and unexamined prejudice on the part of the writer towards the peoples and lands he examines in his wanderings.

REFERENCES

Columbus, Christopher. 1906. “Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus.” Translated by Clements Markham. In The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503: The Voyages of the Northmen. Edited by Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne. Original Narratives of Early American History, 87-258. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Henry Way Kendall was the primary author of the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.” (Photo by Donna Coveney)

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—This post is a change of pace from the commentaries on exploration narratives posted previously. Instead, this post discusses a work that touches upon environmental ethics, which is another component of my dissertation project.

In 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists published the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. The statement, written primarily by physicist Henry Way Kendall, a founding member of the UCS and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics—with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor—for research leading to the development of our understanding of quarks.

The document began with the at-the-time bold statement (for scientists, at least): “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.”

It described a number of environmental problems with global consequences. Parts of the list are somewhat dated now, for example, with mentions of the depletion of the ozone layer and acid precipitation (both of which are less of a problem because of concrete steps taken to address them.

Other problems cited are as much of a threat, or even a greater threat, to the residents (including humans) of the planet as they were in 1992, among them: overfishing, soil loss and degradation, shrinking freshwater supplies, habitat and biodiversity loss, climate change and overpopulation.

The statement was signed by most of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences alive at the time. Nearly 1,700 more of the world’s leading scientists added their names in support of the statement.

The statement made five specific recommendations for action (numbers added for clarity):

1. We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth’s systems we depend on. We must, for example, move away from fossil fuels to more benign, inexhaustible energy sources to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of our air and water. Priority must be given to the development of energy sources matched to Third World needs—small-scale and relatively easy to implement. We must halt deforestation, injury to and loss of agricultural land, and the loss of terrestrial and marine plant and animal species.
2. We must manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively. We must give high priority to efficient use of energy, water, and other materials, including expansion of conservation and recycling.
3. We must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.
4. We must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty.
5. We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions. (Union of Concerned Scientists 1992)

The statement added a deeper call to action:

A new ethic is required — a new attitude towards discharging our responsibility for caring for ourselves and for the earth. We must recognize the earth’s limited capacity to provide for us. We must recognize its fragility. We must no longer allow it to be ravaged. This ethic must motivate a great movement, convincing reluctant leaders and reluctant governments and reluctant peoples themselves to effect the needed changes. (Union of Concerned Scientists 1992)

Given the two decades of growing apathy (or worse, hostility) toward the environment that followed the publication of the warning, the call for a new ethic is more urgent than ever.

REFERENCES

Union of Concerned Scientists. 1992. World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. Accessed July 16, 2014. http://www.ucsusa.org/about/1992-world-scientists.html.

This is a painted wooden sculpture of the Chinese Admiral Zheng Ho.

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—For much of its history, China had been an insular, rather xenophobic nation. There had been attempts, often successful, to subdue neighboring nations, but much of that aggressive spirit the past two millennia had been driven by outside invaders such as the Mongols who conquered, then were assimilated into, the Chinese people and who eventually redirected their attentions inward.

An exception to the outsider-driven outward gaze of the Chinese people came early in the Ming Dynasty—ironically, the last dynasty ruled by ethnic Han Chinese. The third Ming ruler, the Yongle Emperor (1402-1424), who seized the throne after deposing his nephew, the Jianwen Emperor (1398-1402), turned to a cadre of palace Eunuchs to help administer his government after a purge of Confucian scholars potentially loyal to his nephew.

One of those eunuchs was Zheng He (also romanized as Cheng Ho), a Muslim with considerable diplomatic, maritime, and military skills. The Yongle Emperor appointed him as admiral of a vast fleet of nearly 4,000 warships, transports, and treasure ships (Mills 1970a) and dispatched Zheng He on six expeditions (1405-1407, 1407-1409, 1409-1411, 1413-1415, 1417-1419, and 1421-1422) throughout the Indian Ocean and the seas immediately east and south of China.

The Yongle Emperor ordered the end of the expeditions late in his reign, but his successor, the Hongxi Emperor (1424-1425) dispatched Zheng He on a seventh and final expedition (1431-1433), but subsequently ended the expeditions for good and ordered that the ships be burned. (The emporer also ordered that a lot of land-based frontier trade be halted, too.) Zheng He himself may have died during the seventh voyage.

Map of the routes taken by several Middle Age explorers of the Old World. Tracks in blue are those of the twelfth century Jewish explorer Benjamin of Tudela; tracks in red are of the thirteenth century Christian explorer Marco Polo; tracks in green are of the fourteenth century Muslim explorer ibn Battuta; and yellow circles are some of the places written about by Ma Huan, himself a Muslim, in his account of the expeditions led by the Chinese admiral Zheng He in the 15th century. The religions of the explorers are important, as each man viewed the the lands and seas he traveled through with a different cultural lens. Redrawn from other sources. Mercator Projection with a nominal scale of 1:67,500,000.

Zheng He, while in command of the expeditions, did not go everywhere his ships did.  He often dispatched smaller groups from the main fleet to visit additional locations. As far as is known, he left no personal account of his voyages. It is possible that he left reports that were subsequently purged from the Imperial record.

Some of Zheng He’s subordinates did leave accounts of the voyages, however. One of these was Ma Huan. Ma Huan referred to himself as a “mountain woodcutter,” but it is clear he was more than that. Like Zheng He, Ma Huan was a Muslim, and educated in reading and writing Arabic as well as Chinese script. He was employed as a translator on three of Zheng He’s voyages (1413-1415, 1421-1422, and 1431-1433).

Like Marco Polo or Ibn Battutah, Ma Huan’s narrative is somewhat uneven.  Some places that stood out in his memory were described in great detail while others received just the briefest of abstracts. Here is an example of the latter, Ma Huan’s description of Li-tai—what is now Meureudu in Aceh Province, Sumatra, Indonesia:

The land of Li-tai is a also a small country. It lies on the west of the boundary with the land of Na-ku-erh [now Peudada]; south of this place there are large mountains; on the north it abuts the great sea [the Indian Ocean]; and on the west it joins the boundary of the country of Nan-p’o-li [now Aceh].

The people of the country [comprise] three thousand families. They themselves elect a man to be king, so that he may administer their affairs. [The country] is subject to the jurisdiction of the country of Su-men-ta-la [now Semudera].

The land has no products.

The speech and usages are the same as Su-men-ta-la.

In the mountains they have very many wild rhinoceros; and the king sends men to capture them.

[Their envoys] accompany [those from] the country of Su-men-ta-la to bring tribute to the Central Country [China] (Ma Huan 1970, 122).

Compare his meager description of Meureudu to the detail he gives of the Ka’aba in Mecca:

All around it on the outside is a wall; this wall has four hundred and sixty-six openings; on both sides of the openings are pillars all made of white jade-stone; of these pillars there are altogether four hundred and sixty-seven—along the front ninety-nine, along the back one hundred and one, along the left-hand side one hundred and thirty-two, [and] on the right-hand side one hundred and thirty-five.

The Hall is built with layers of five-coloured stones; in shape it is square and flat-topped. Inside, there are pillars formed of five great beams of sinking incense wood, and a shelf made of yellow gold. Throughout the interior of the Hall the walls are all formed of clay mixed with rosewater and ambergris, exhaling a perpetual fragrance. Over [the Hall] is a covering of black hemp-silk. They keep two black lions to guard the door.

Every year on the tenth day of the twelfth moon all the foreign Muslims—in extreme cases making a long journey of one or two years—come to worship inside the Hall. Everyone cuts off a piece of the hemp-silk covering as a memento before he goes away. When it has been completely cut away, the king covers over [the Hall] again with another covering woven in advance; this happens again and again, year after year, without intermission (174-175).

I added Ma Huan’s account of the Zheng He expeditions to my reading list in the hopes of getting a different—Asian—perspective on lands also visited by Benjamin of Tudela, Marco Polo and ibn Battutah. I did not feel that I got all that different a perspective, however. Given Ma Huan’s Muslim faith, he might not have been the ideal candidate for what I sought.

While Ma Huan had broader interests than Benjamin of Tudela—who seemed primarily interested in cataloging the Jewish communities encountered in his travels—Ma Huan was still not the storyteller that either Marco Polo or ibn Battutah were. The narratives by the latter two men conveyed a sense of adventure that that carries through nearly a millennium to infect and inspire twenty-first century readers. Ma Huan’s Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores strikes me as largely a mercantile account of the resources available and the political and economic systems encountered in the places they visited.

Nevertheless this was an interesting treatise from a brief period in history when China was not content focusing its national energy within its own borders. Modern readers should draw their own conclusions as to whether Overall Survey bears any relevance comparisons to the China of today.

REFERENCES

Ma Huan. 1970. Ying-yai Sheng-Lan (The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores [1433]). Translated by J.V.G. Mills. London: Hakluyt Society. Reprinted Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press, 1997.

Mills, J.V.G. 1970a. “Introduction: Cheng Ho and His Expeditions.” In Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-Lan (The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores [1433]), 1-34. London: Hakluyt Society. Reprinted Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press, 1997.

Ibn Battuta in Egypt, a painting by Hippolyte Leon Benett.

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—Marco Polo is much more better known in the west, if only for the kids’ game I had never heard of prior to a television commercial a few years ago.

Abū ʿAbd al-Lāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Lāh l-Lawātī ṭ-Ṭanǧī ibn Baṭūṭah, a.k.a. Ibn Battutah, is not. I cannot remember any cultural references, any discussions of his travels or of his writings until I began graduate studies in geography at the University of Oklahoma in 1983.

I deduced from the whispered, jazz-like references to him that he was considered cool in geographic circles—someone who contributed greatly to our knowledge of the cultural and physical geography of the medieval world; one of the greatest, if arguably unintentional, geographers in history.

That observation was confirmed when I began teaching undergraduate geography in the current century and frequently noticed his name in the introductory discussions of the history of geography that usually whooshed by in the first chapter of the textbooks I used in my cultural, physical, and world regional geography classes.

Just as it took me some time to read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, embrace jazz, or learn to scuba dive, it took me some time to see what all the whispering among my fellow geographers was about.

I am glad I finally followed up.

Ibn Battutah is every bit the adventurer and storyteller that Marco Polo was, and it frankly is a damned shame that he is not as widely known in Western popular culture as is the legendary Venetian. (Although, one can legitimately argue that the Venetian’s writing had a greater impact on Western culture than Ibn Battutah’s work has had.)

Caravan of pilgrims in Ramleh (31st Maqamat), a painting by Yahyâ ibn Mahmûd al-Wâsitî from the 13th century book, Maqâmât of al-Harîrî.

Ibn Battutah was born in 1304 into a family of Muslim clerics. He studied to become one himself. While that status proved handy on his travels, he was not content to carry on the family tradition in his native Tangier. The young man was itching to travel, and once he set out on his first Hajj—pilgrimage to Mecca—he kept going, not returning home for nearly a quarter of a century.

If I may use filmmaking terminology here, the inciting incident in Ibn Battutah’s life was not his initial departure for Mecca—as one of the pillars of Islam, such a journey is expected of all Muslims with the ability to attempt it at least once in their lives.

The inciting incident came on the way to Mecca, when he went to visit a legendary shaikh who lived in Egypt near Alexandria. The shaikh, Abu Abdallah al-Murshidi, was a recluse, but allowed Ibn Battutah a brief stay. The event that changed Ibn Battutah’s life began with a dream:

That night, as I was sleeping on the roof of the cell, I dreamed that I was on the wing of a huge bird which flew with me in the direction of the qiblah, then to Yaman, then eastwards, then went toward the south, and then making a long flight towards the east, alighted  in some dark and greenish country, and left me there. I was astonished at this dream and said to myself “If the shaikh shows me that he knows of my dream, he is all that they say he is.” Later on, when I had prayed the forenoon prayer, he called me and revealed to me his knowledge of my dream. So I related it to him and he said: “You will make the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit the tomb of the Prophet at al-Madinah, and you will travel through the lands of al-Yaman and al-Iraq, the land of the Turks, and the land of India. You will stay there for a long time and meet there my brother Dilshad the Indian, who will rescue you from a danger into which you will fall.” He then gave me a travelling provision of some small cakes and silver coins, and I bade him farewell and departed. Never since parting from him have I met on my journeys aught but good fortune, and his blessed powers have stood me in good stead (Ibn Battutah 2002, 12-13).

Map of the routes taken by several Middle Age explorers of the Old World. Tracks in blue are those of the twelfth century Jewish explorer Benjamin of Tudela; tracks in red are of the thirteenth century Christian explorer Marco Polo; and tracks in green are of the fourteenth century Muslim explorer ibn Battuta. The religions of the explorers are important, as each man viewed the the lands and seas he traveled through with a different cultural lens. Redrawn from other sources. Mercator Projection with a nominal scale of 1:67,500,000.

Ibn Battutah did make it to Mecca. He traveled through Arabia, Yaman (Yemen), Iraq, then headed through the land of the Turks to India, where did stay for some time and where he was rescued by Dilshad from a band of Hindu raiders in southern India. Ibn Battutah traveled through parts of the Indian Ocean, such as on a brief stay in the Maldives and visits to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and eventually went on a diplomatic mission to China to deliver to the Chinese emperor a gift on behalf of Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq, ruler of much of India at the time.

Whereas The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela sometimes reads like more of a Works Progress Administation-style guide to medieval Jewish communities in the Southern Europe, the Levant and Arabia, both Ibn Battutah and Marco Polo are telling a story. The Travels of Ibn Battutah has the strengths of The Travels of Marco Polo: An exquisite eye for detail and a strong narrative sense. Both qualities are exhibited in this passage:

The Chinese vessels are of three kinds: large ships called junks, middle-sized ones called zaws, and small ones called kakams. The large ships have anything from twelve down to three sails, which are made of bamboo rods plaited like mats. They are never lowered, but they turn them according to the direction of the wind; at anchor they are left floating in the wind. A ship carries a complement of a thousand men, six hundred of whom are sailors and four hundred men-at-arms, including archers, men with shields and arbalists, that is, men who throw naphtha. Each large vessel is accompanied by three smaller ones, the ‘half’, the ‘third’, and the ‘quarter’. These vessels are built only in the town of Zaitun in China [Quangzhou], or in Sin-Kalan, which is in Sin al-Sin [Canton]. …

Now, it is usual for this sea to become stormy every day in the late afternoon, and no one can embark then. The junks had already set sail, and none of them were left bu the one which contained the present, another junk whose owners had decided to pass the winter up the coast at Fandaraina, and the kakam [onboard which Ibn Battuta arranged passage for him and his “slave girls”]. We spent the Friday night on the seashore, we unable to embark on the kakam, and those on board unable to disembark and join us. I had nothing left but a carpet to spread out. On the Saturday morning the junk was kakam was at a distance from the port, but the junk whose owners were making for Fandarayna [sic]was driven ashore and broken in pieces. …
The night the sea struck the junk which carried the sultan’s present, and all on board died. In the morning, we went to the scene of their disaster; I saw Zahir al-Din with his head smashed and his brains scattered, and the Malik Sumbul had a nail drive through one of his temples and coming out at the other, and having prayed over them we buried them. I saw the infidel, the Sultan of Qaliquṭ, wearing a large white cloth round his waist, folded over from his navel down to his knee, and with it a small turban on his head, bare-footed, with the parasol carried by a slave over his head and a fire lit in front of him on the beach; his police officers were beating the people to prevent them from plundering what the sea cast up. In all the lands of Mulaibar, except in this one land alone, it is the custom that whenever a ship is wrecked all that is taken from it belongs to the treasury. At Qaliquṭ, however, it is retained by its owners, and for that reason Qaliquṭ has become a flourishing and much frequented city. When those on the kakam saw what had happened to the junk they spread their sails and went off, with all my goods and slave boys and slave girls on board, leaving me on the beach with but one slave whom I had enfranchised. When he saw what had befallen me he deserted me, and I had nothing left with me at all except the ten dinars that the jugi had given me and the carpet I had used to spread out (223-226).

Their stories may be embellished a bit as they both sometimes uncritically recount legends, such as that of Prester John (Marco Polo) and of vampires, in India (Ibn Battutah). Both had unsought editorial help in the form of transcribers who added personal notes—some clearly labeled, some not. Polo and Ibn Battutah may or may not embellish their roles in the societies that they visited on their journey, though my impression is that both men are largely telling the truth.

Both are judgmental toward “infidels,” with Ibn Battutah the harshest of the lot. While his eagerness to straighten out anyone who strays from what he considers a proper Muslim path is understandable given his training and position—a cleric and jurist—he strikes me as quite snippy, the busybody to end all busybodies. I can see myself sipping coffee and dangling my legs off the edge of a dock with Marco Polo as he regaled me with tales tall and otherwise. With Ibn Battutah, I see myself as more likely telling him to go stuff himself when I got tired of him telling me how he set yet another person on the straight and narrow.

Ibn Battutah could finesse his retelling of incidents in which his judgment wasn’t always inspired. For example:

Sultan Jamal al-Din had fitted out fifty-two vessels for an expedition to attack Sandabur [Goa]. A quarrel had broken out there between the sultan and his son, and the latter had written to Jamal al-Din inviting him to seize the town and promising to accept Islam and marry his sister. When the ships were ready it occurred to me to set out with them to the Holy War, so I opened then Qur’an to make an augury, and found at the top of the page: ‘In them is the name of God frequently mentioned, and verily god will aid those who aid Him.‘ I took this as a good omen, and when the sultan came for the afternoon prayer I said to him, ‘I wish to join the expedition.’ ‘In that case,’ he replied, ‘you shall be their commander.’ I related to him the incident of my augury from the Qur’an, which so delighted him that he resolved to join the expedition himself, though previously he had not intended to do so (227-228).

They did capture the town, but the infidel forces regrouped.

The infidel sultan of Sandabur, from whom we had captured the town, now advanced to recapture it. All the infidels fled to join him, and the sultan’s troops, who were dispersed in the outlying villages, abandoned us. We were besieged by the infidels and reduced to great straits. When the situation became serious, I left the town during the siege and returned to Qaliqut, where I decided to travel to Dhibat al-Mahal, of which I had heard (229).

Despite Ibn Battutah’s flaws, his ability to relate the character of the fourteenth century world—and to do it so well that a twenty-first century person like me can see it in his or her mind—is phenomenal. But a twenty-first century explorer—or journalist—would do well to learn from Ibn Battutah’s negative example, too.

In other words, we should be careful to check our biases at the door.

REFERENCES

Ibn Battutah. 2002. The Travels of Ibn Battutah. Edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Translated by Hamilton A.R. Gibb and Charles Beckingham. London: Picador.

Marco Polo in Tartar costume (n.d.: Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marco_Polo_-_costume_tartare.jpg).

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—I think it’s safe to say that Marco Polo was the most famous European explorer prior to Columbus.

He has to have been, in any event, as his Travels of Marco Polo was one of the biggest motivations for the great Age of Discovery. For better or worse, Polo’s Travels inspired legions of would-be explorers—including Columbus—to go off in search of tremendous wealth in China and the other eastern empires that Polo described.

Polo was a Venetian merchant whose father, Niccolò, and uncle Maffeo departed on a trade trip to Constantinople before Marco was born in 1254. By the time Niccolò and Maffeo returned to Venice in 1269 on a mission from Kublai Khan—a.k.a. The Great Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson and founder of China’s Yuan Dynasty—Niccolò’s wife had died and Marco was being raised by another uncle and aunt.

In 1271, Niccolò and Maffeo departed on their return trip to China, taking Marco with them. This journey, which lasted 24 years, is the one recounted in the Travels.

Map of the routes taken by several Middle Age explorers of the Old World. Tracks in blue are those of the twelfth century Jewish explorer Benjamin of Tudela; tracks in red are of the thirteenth century Christian explorer Marco Polo; and tracks in green are of the fourteenth century Muslim explorer ibn Battuta. The religions of the explorers are important, as each man viewed the the lands and seas he traveled through with a different cultural lens. Redrawn from other sources. Mercator Projection with a nominal scale of 1:67,500,000.

In short, the Polos sailed to Acre to pick up a couple of priests, Nicholas of Vicenza and William of Tripoli, who were to accompany them and represent Pope Gregory X on their mission to Kublai Khan’s court (but who found excuses to double-back at the earliest opportunity). They then sailed north to the port of Laiassus—near the modern-day city of İskenderun on Turkey’s eastern Mediterranean coast—then proceeded by land across Armedia and Persia, where they joined the Silk Road and followed it east to eventually reach The Great Khan’s capital at Cambaluc (modern-day Beijing).

Over the next two decades the Polos assisted The Great Khan with administration of the Yuan state, going on diplomatic missions—including one to the Kingdom of Pagan in what is now Burma—and educating Kublai Khan on European ways and the Christian religion.

In time, though, they had a reasonable fear of political instability within the Yuan Dynasty. Fearing what might happen should Kublai fall from power, they sought an excuse to return home, and eventually found it in an opportunity to escort the Mongol princess Kököchin to Persia, where she was to marry the Ilkhanate Khan Argun. By the time they arrived, Argun was dead. Kököchin instead married his son Ghazan.

The Polos then returned to Venice. Shortly afterward, Marco Polo joined the Venetian Navy in a war with Genoa. He was captured, and dictated the story of his travels to his cellmate, Rustigielo of Pisa, while the two were held as prisoners of war.

The Travels of Marco Polo is organized into a four books. The first details the Polos’ journey to the court of Kublai Khan. The second book describes the Khan’s capital, court, and government, as well as describes the provinces Marco visited while serving at the Khan’s court. The third book discusses Japan, southern India, and the islands of the Indian Ocean. And the fourth book recounts wars among the various Mongol Princes, including The Great Khan, the Ilkhanate Khan, the Chagatai Khan, and the leader of the Golden Horde. It also includes a discussion of the “northern” lands in what would now be called Russia, Mongolia, and Central Asia.

The Travels has its flaws. For example, Marco was dictating this tale nearly three decades after his adventures began. He also may have added material he had gleaned from other sources to supplement his own observations. Rustigielo likely introduced some of his own “insights” into the manuscript.

Polo all-too-frequently gives short shrift to his descriptions of other cultures, frequently describing smaller ethnic groups he encountered as “idolaters,” for example. (I suspect his observations are snap judgments resulting from having little time to spend in some of these areas.) He is also sometimes given to unavoidable fantasy, such as in his frequent references to Prester John, the mythical Christian king of Central Asia. Marco never claims to have visited the court, even the realm, of Prester John, but he clearly believes, like many Christians of that time, that Prester John existed.

But The Travels of Marco Polo is rich in detail. Polo describes the organization of the Kublai Khan’s government and army, how it collects revenues—especially from industries such as the salt trade—and how the Yuan court efficiently communicates with far-flung parts of the empire. Marco offers exquisite descriptions on the Yuan Dynasty urban and rural geography, such as in this description of the city of Kin-sai (modern Hangzhou):

… According to common estimation, this city is an hundred miles in circuit. Its streets and canals are extensive, and there are squares, or market-places, which, being necessarily proportioned in size to the prodigious concourse of people by whom they are frequented, are exceedingly spacious. It is situated between a lake of fresh and very clear water on the one side, and a river of great magnitude on the other, the waters of which, by a number of canals, large and small, are made to run through every quarter of the city, carrying with them all the filth into the lake, and ultimately to the sea. This, whilst it contributes much to the purity of the air, furnishes a communication by water, in addition to that by land, to all parts of the town. …

It is commonly said that the number of bridges, of all sizes, amounts to twelve thousand. Those which are thrown over the principal canals and are connected with the main streets, have arches so high, and built with so much skill, that vessels with their masts can pass under them. At the same time, carts and horses are passing over, so well is the slope from the street graded to the height of the arch. If they were not so numerous, there would be no way of crossing from one place to another. …

There are within the city ten principal squares or market-places, besides innumerable shops along the streets. Each side of these squares is half a mile in length, and in front of them is the main street, forty paces in width, and running in a direct line from one extremity of the city to the other. It is crossed by many low and convenient bridges. These market-squares are at the distance of four miles from each other. In a direction parallel to that of the main street, but on the opposite side of the squares, runs a very large canal, on the nearer bank of which capacious warehouses are built of stone, for the accommodation of the merchants who arrive from India and other parts with their goods and effects. They are thus conveniently situated with respect to the market-places. In each of these, upon three days in every week, there is an assemblage of from forty to fifty thousand persons, who attend the markets and supply them with every article of provision that can be desired. …

Each of the ten market-squares is surrounded with high dwelling-houses, in the lower part of which are shops, where every kind of manufacture is carried on, and every article of trade is sold; such, amongst others, as spices, drugs, trinkets, and pearls. In certain shops nothing is vended but the wine of the country, which they are continually brewing, and serve out fresh to their customers at a moderate price. The streets connected with the market-squares are numerous, and in some of them are many cold baths, attended by servants of both sexes. The men and women who frequent them, have from their childhood been accustomed at all times to wash in cold water, which they reckon highly conducive to health. At these bathing places, however, they have apartments provided with warm water, for the use of strangers, who cannot bear the shock of the cold. All are in the daily practice of washing their persons, and especially before their meals (Polo 1926, 232-235).

Marco is equally detailed in the description of Chinese cultural practices, such as in the minting and circulation of paper money in China:

In the city of Kanbalu is the mint of the Great Khan, who may truly be said to possess the secret of the alchemists, as he has the art of producing money by the following process.

He causes the bark to be stripped from those mulberry-trees the leaves of which are used for feeding silk-worms, and takes from it that thin inner rind which lies between the coarser bark and the wood of the tree. This being steeped, and afterwards pounded in a mortar, until reduced to a pulp, is made into paper, resembling, in substance, that which is manufactured from cotton, but quite black. When ready for use, he has it cut into pieces of money of different sizes, nearly square, but somewhat longer than they are wide. Of these, the smallest pass for a half tournois; the next size for a Venetian silver groat; others for two, five, and ten groats; others for one, two, three, and as far as ten bezants of gold. The coinage of this paper money is authenticated  with as much form and ceremony as if i were actually of pure gold or silver; for to each note a number of officers, specially appointed, not only subscribe their names, but affix their seals also. When this has been regularly done by the whole of them, the principal officer, appointed by the Majesty; having dipped into vermilion the royal seal committed to his custody, stamps with it the piece of paper, so that the form of the seal tinged with the vermilion remains impressed upon it. In this way it receives full authenticity as current money, and the act counterfeiting it is punished as a capital offence.

When thus coined in large quantities, this paper currency is circulated in ever part of the Great Khan’s dominion; nor does any person, at the peril of his life, refuse to accept it as payment. All his subjects receive it without hesitation, because, wherever their business may call them, they can dispose of it again in the purchase of merchandise they may require; such as pearls, jewels, gold, or silver. With it, in short, every article may be procured (159-160).

I find it hard to overly praise the value of The Travels of Marco Polo as a way for a westerner to gain insight into Chinese history and geography during what we call the Medieval period. The Travels is essential reading for anyone interested in travel writing—even for academics interested in writing modern accounts of the geography of specific readings. Sure, some of Marco’s cultural biases may have crept in, but I find his eye for geographical detail—both physical and cultural detail—and his storytelling skill to be impeccable.

Likewise, I find it hard to overly praise the sense of adventure that runs throughout the Travels—it makes me want to drop everything and travel the Silk Road, no matter how dangerous parts of the route may now be.

REFERENCES

Polo, Marco. 1926. The Travels of Marco Polo. Edited by Martin Komroff. Translated by William Marsden. New York: Boni & Liveright Publishing Co.

Benjamin of Tudela in the Sahara, a woodcut by Dumouza

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—Benjamin was a twelfth century Jewish scholar from the town of Tudela in Navarre, in what is now Spain.

In 1165, Benjamin set off on a journey across the Iberian Peninsula across southern Europe in to Asia Minor, the Levant, Persia, Arabia, and Egypt.

No one is completely sure why Benjamin undertook the journey. It may have been out of a desire to make trade connections with other communities along the way. He may have been wanting to reach out to Jewish communities increasingly fragmented by the strife of the Crusades. Or he may have wanted to identify places where other traveling Jews could find sanctuary on their journey.

Whatever the motive, the Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela is an amazing catalog of twelfth century Jewish communities, giving numbers of Jews in each as well as naming the leaders within those groups. For example, he says of the Greek city of Thebes:

“From Thebes it is a day’s journey to Egripo [39], which is a large city upon the sea-coast, where merchants come from every quarter. About 200 Jews live there, at their head being R. Elijah Psalteri, r. Emanuel, and R. Caleb. (Benjamin of Tudela 1840, 8).”

Unless you have a strong interest in a census of medieval Jewish communities, this is not terribly interesting. But Benjamin relayed a lot of other detail about the places he saw.

“A three days’ voyage brings one to Abydos, which is upon an arm of the sea which flows between the mountains, and after a five days’ journey the great town of Constantinople is reached. It is the capital of the whole land of Javan, which is called Greece. Here is the residence of the King Emanuel the Emperor. … The circumference of the city of Constantinople is eighteen miles; half of it is surrounded by the sea, and half by land, and it is situated upon two arms of the sea, one coming from the sea of Russia, and one from the sea of Sepharad.

All sorts of merchants come here from the land of Babylon, from the land of Shinar, from Persia, Media, and all the sovereignty of the land of Egypt, from the land of Canaan, and the empire of Russia[42], from Hungaria, Patzinakia[43], Khazaria[44], and the land of Lombardy and Sepharad. It is a busy city, and merchants come to it from every country by sea or land, and there is none like it in the world except Bagdad, the great city of Islam. In Constantinople is the church of Santa Sophia, and the seat of the Pope of the Greeks, since the Greeks do not obey the Pope of Rome. … Close to the walls of the palace is also a place of amusement belonging to the king, which is called the Hippodrome, and every year on the anniversary of the birth of Jesus the king gives a great entertainment there. And in that place men from all the races of the world come before the king and queen with jugglery and without jugglery, and they introduce lions, leopards, bears, and wild asses, and they engage them in combat with one another; and the same thing is done with birds. No entertainment like this is to be found in any other land (9).”

Map of the routes taken by several Middle Age explorers of the Old World. Tracks in blue are those of the twelfth century Jewish explorer Benjamin of Tudela; tracks in red are of the thirteenth century Christian explorer Marco Polo; and tracks in green are of the fourteenth century Muslim explorer ibn Battuta. The religions of the explorers are important, as each man viewed the the lands and seas he traveled through with a different cultural lens. Redrawn from other sources. Mercator Projection with a nominal scale of 1:67,500,000.

While the Itinerary is dense in terms of information content, and while passages such as the above-cited segment about Constantinople are fascinating, the structure of the Itinerary is repetitive and reading it at times is a chore—as exciting as reading sheets from a nineteenth century U.S. Census.

But, on balance, the price of enduring the repetition is worth the peek the Itinerary offers of the Medieval world.

REFERENCES

Benjamin of Tudela. 1907. The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. Critical Text, Translation and Commentary by Marcus Nathan Asher. New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1907. Reprinted Gloucester, United Kingdom: Dodo Press.

Leiv Eiriksson Discovers North America, an 1893 painting by Christian Krohg.

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—The Flat Island Book is a medieval manuscript containing a number of Icelandic tales, including the “Saga of Erik the Red” as well as the “Greenland Saga,” from which this “Vinland History” has been taken.

The stories contained in Erik’s saga and the “Vinland History” overlap to a large extent. I assigned Erik’s saga to the tenth century because a bit more of its length is devoted to events that occurred prior to the turn of the century, while I assigned the “Vinland History” to the eleventh century because, in turn, a bit more of its length is devoted to events that occurred afterward.

My assignment has a significant streak of arbitrary built into it.

Despite the overlap in terms of subject and chronology, there are differences. There is a lot less genealogical and magical content in the “Vinland History.” I found the narrative in the “Vinland History” to be a lot straighter, i.e., much more easily followed and digested.

Likewise, I found the “Vinland History” offered a more clear description of the geography of the places the Norse visited beyond Greenland in the provinces they called Helluland (probably Baffin Island), Markland (probably Labrador), and Vinland (Newfoundland, but possibly including portions of the Lower Saint Lawrence Estuary).

As with Erik’s saga, the “Vinland History” narrative begins with Erik the Red’s history, beginning with his father’s banishment from Norway, Erik’s banishment from Iceland and his subsequent settlement of Greenland.

The next segment begins with his son Leif’s early years, including his conversion to Christianity.

Map of the routes taken by several Norse explorers (intentional or otherwise) to North America in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Redrawn from other sources. Projection is Lambert Conformal Conic with standard parallels of 50 and 70 degrees North latitude. Nominal scale is 1:32,500,000.

The “Vinland History” tells more of Biarni’s story. Biarni is important as the one who, blown off course from a voyage to Greenland, sights the land beyond. Biarni eventually makes it to Greenland and tells Greenlanders what he saw — which in turn inspires Leif, now living in Greenland with his father to set off with the intention of establishing a colony in the land Biarni had found.

Leif establishes his colony, Vinland. He is son followed by his brother, Thorvald, who is killed in a fight with skraelings there. Leif’s other brother, Thorstein Eriksson, plans to go to Vinland  to retrieve Thorvald’s body, but before he can go, he and his wife, Gudrid get sick and Thorstein dies. Gudrid eventually remarries. Her new husband is Thorfinn Karlsefni.

One new story in the “Vinland History” is that of Freydis, the sister of Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein Eriksson, who is of a rather malevolent mind and who engineers the slaughters of members of her and her husband’s colony in Vinland. While a broken-hearted Leif cannot bring his sister to justice once he learns of what she did, he predicts that her descendants will not fare well.

Gudrid establishes another short-lived colony in Vinland with Thorfinn Karlsefni, but their lasting legacy is Snorri — the first modern European child to be born in this so-called New World. While Gudrid and Thorfinn abandon Vinland after about three years, Snorri leave behind a long line of bishops and other prominent folks in Iceland.

The main take-home lesson of the “Vinland History” for me, especially when compared with Erik’s Saga, is the importance of a coherent narrative. Since I had an easier time making sense of the “Vinland History,” I got much more out of the story.

REFERENCE

“The Vinland History of the Flat Island Book.” 1906. Translated by Arthur Middleton Reeves. In The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503: The Voyages of the Northmen. Edited by Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne. Original Narratives of Early American History, 45-66. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

This woodcut of Erik the Red was taken from the frontispiece of Arngrímur Jónsson’s Gronlandia (1688).

MECHANICSVILLE, Va.—The Saga of Erik the Red documents the first sustained European contacts with North America from the latter part of the tenth century to the beginning of the eleventh.

Lest anyone counters that the Norse left no permanent settlement in North America, I should point out that Greenland—the Earth’s largest island—is technically a part of the North American continent. The Norse may not have realized it at the time, and many U.S. geography students as well as FFVs (First Families of Virginia) may not want to acknowledge the truth, but it is.

Tectonically, Greenland is a part of the North American plate. Culturally, the indigenous Inuit had longstanding trade ties with their fellow Inuit as well as other native peoples in North America. It was an accident of history that Greenland, now governed by Denmark, was colonized by Europeans.

This accident brings us to The Saga of Erik the Red. Erik’s story (not the saga itself) begins with the expulsion of Erik’s father from Norway to Iceland on account of a manslaughter rap. Erik was similarly expelled from Iceland—the inciting incident that led to Erik’s relocation to Greenland. He finds it worthy of a colony and sends word back to Iceland to encourage others to settle there.

Erik engages in what twenty-first century scholars might call a disinformation campaign to promote the colony, much of which is capped by glaciers, with waters are full of icebergs and a very short growing season. But Erik called it Greenland because, “… men would be the more readily persuaded thither if the land had a good name (Saga of Erik the Red 1906, 17).”

The next phase of the story concerns Erik’s son, Leif, who was a member of Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason’s court. While with King Olaf, Leif converted to Christianity and was dispatched by the king to Christianize the Norse living in the Greenland settlements. While on that voyage, Leif, off-course like his father, finds land to the west of Greenland. He briefly visits, where he finds “… self-sown wheat fields and vines … (25),” and a few marooned Norsemen. Leif rescued the marooned men and leaves for Greenland, where he begins his proselytizing efforts, but also plans a return to the land to the west.

The final phase of the story recounts the Vineland colonization efforts conducted by Leif, his brother Thorvald, and subsequently by Thorfinn Karlsefni.

Map of the routes taken by several Norse explorers (intentional or otherwise) to North America in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Redrawn from other sources. Projection is Lambert Conformal Conic with standard parallels of 50 and 70 degrees North latitude. Nominal scale is 1:32,500,000.

On one hand the saga is fascinating, although the prose translation probably loses much of the drama and poetry that a story meant to be transmitted orally should carry.

But what is more troublesome—for me, at least—is the mishmash of genealogy, history, and magic that runs through the saga.

The genealogical aspect is the biggest hurdle to following the story. There are a profusion of names, many of which are similar, which—despite several readings—makes it hard for me to keep track of the key players and the related narrative threads.

Another problem is, being that the saga was not meant to serve as a geographical guide, essential detail about locations of Vinland and related sites visited or settled by the Norse is omitted. The lack of detail has inspired centuries of searches for the sites of the Norse settlements in the so-called “New World.” While diligent archaeological research has identified some settlement sites, such as L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland (Wallace 2009), most purported sites remain highly controversial.

The saga strikes me as at its best when it focuses on the drama of the human endeavor called exploration. The storms, conflict, illness, and death—even its conjurings of oracles and ghosts—that run through the narrative should make The Saga of Eric the Red a tale that will be remembered long after drier, more academic histories have been pulled from library shelves and pulped.

REFERENCES

“The Saga of Eric the Red.” 1906. Translated by Arthur Middleton Reeves. In The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503: The Voyages of the Northmen, edited by Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne, 14-44. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Wallace, Birgitta. 2009. “L’Anse Aux Meadows, Leif Eriksson’s Home in Vinland.” Journal of the North Atlantic no. 2 (sp2):114-125. doi: 10.3721/037.002.s212.