Paul Theroux - The Tao of Travel - Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

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.

Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to parents who were actors. His father had disappeared and his mother was dead by the time he was two years old. Adopted by the Allan family, from whom he got his middle name, he was taken abroad, and before he turned eleven he had seen Scotland and England. But after 1820 he merely shuttled from one American city to another — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond; and he was dead at forty. High-strung, quarrelsome, competitive, and alcoholic, Poe had an intensity and a belief in his own genius, which compelled his creation of real and imaginary worlds.

The gothic attracted him, as it attracts many, for its brooding landscape of crags and castles, haunted palaces, its "sense of insufferable gloom" and "shadowy fancies" ("The Fall of the House of Usher"), of moorland and howling wolves, plagues such as "the Red Death," crypts and catacombs ("A Cask of Amontillado"), and "gloomy gray hereditary halls" ("Berenice").

The gothic memory in "William Wilson" is emblematic: "My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient."

Or the lugubrious opening of "The Fall of the House of Usher": "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

In his detective fiction, macabre stories, and even his early science fiction, Poe shows himself to be a reader of travel, history, and the arcane — the Red Death, the Spanish Inquisition ("the horrors at Toledo"), the devil in the belfry in the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss; "The Assignation" takes place in a believable Venice.

Now and then there's a serious geographical lapse, as in "Silence — A Fable," which takes place in a "dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire… yellow ghastly river… hippopotami." Elsewhere, his work is distinguished by its exactitude. Poe had never been to France, yet the French loved Poe in Baudelaire's translations. Detective Auguste Dupin appeared in "The Purloined Letter," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and also in "Murders in the Rue Morgue," where he is here, walking with the narrator in Paris, part of a paragraph that is convincing in its precision:

You kept your eyes upon the ground — glancing, with a petulant expression, at the holes and ruts in the pavement (so that I saw you were still thinking of the stones), until we reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks. Here your countenance brightened up, and, perceiving your lips move, I could not doubt that you murmured the word "stereotomy," a term very affectedly applied to this species of pavement.

Some corpses are found to be horribly mutilated, and this leads to the Rue Morgue, "one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch." It turns out that the murderer is an enraged orangutan with a razor, but Poe knows (as some other authors do not) that orangutans come from Borneo.

The opening of his terrifying story "The Descent into the Maelstrom" is Poe's most impressive fictional representation of an actual landscape:

"We are now," [the old man] continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him—"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast — iwn the sixty-eighth degree of latitude — in the great province of Nordland — and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher — hold on to the grass if you feel giddy — so — and look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea."

I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it, its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.