The Lives of Celebrated Travellers, Vol. II.
Harper’s Stereotype Edition.
THE
LIVES
OF
CELEBRATED TRAVELLERS.
BY
JAMES AUGUSTUS St. JOHN.
Wand’ring from clime to clime, observant stray’d,
Their manners noted and their states survey’d.
Pope’s Homer.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
══════════════
NEW-YORK:
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY J. & J. HARPER,
NO. 82 CLIFF-STREET,
AND SOLD BY THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS THROUGHOUT
THE UNITED STATES.
1832.
CONTENTS.
JOSEPH PITTON DE TOURNEFORT.
Born 1656.—Died 1708.
| Born at Aix—Education—Early passion for botany—Philosophy of Descartes—Aversion for the study of theology—Travels in France—Spain—The Pyrenees—Taken for a robber—Publishes his first work—Commanded to travel in the East—Candia—Mount Ida—Constantinople—Black Sea—Erzeroom—Georgia—Returns to Smyrna—France—Death | [7] |
DR. THOMAS SHAW.
Born 1692.—Died 1751.
| Born at Kendal—Educated at Oxford—Appointed chaplain of Algiers—Arrives in Africa—Environs of Algiers—Departs for Egypt—Alexandria—Cairo—Site of Memphis—Origin and destination of the Pyramids—Animals of Egypt—Dancing Serpents—Cannibals—Visit to Mount Sinai—Hospitality of the Arabs—Route of the Israelites—Is plundered by the Arabs—Curiosities of the desert—Waters of Marah—Returns to Egypt—Descends the Nile—Sails for Syria—Is taken prisoner and ransomed—Extraordinary ignis fatuus—Prodigious flights of storks—Waterspouts—Returns to Algiers—Arabs of Africa—Marries—Earthquakes—Visits the kingdom of Tunis—Ruins of Carthage—Lake of Tunis—City of Tunis—Roman ruins—Virgil’s Nympharum Domus—The Lesser Syrtis—Lake of Marks—Yellow-haired Kabyli—Natural history of Barbary—Locust clouds—Music—Eating of lions—Complexion of the Moors—Superstition—Returns to England—Dies | [19] |
FREDERIC HASSELQUIST.
Born 1722.—Died 1752.
| Born in Eastern Gothland—Studies at Upsal—Acquires the friendship of Linnæus—Conceives the design of travelling in the East—Mode of raising travelling funds—Studies the oriental languages—Embarks at Stockholm—Arrives in the Grecian Archipelago—Harbour of Milo—Strange costume of the women—Island of Scio—State of medical science in the East—Smyrna—The Frank carnival—Dances—Beginning of Spring—Beautiful flowers and plants—Turkish cemetery—Excursion to Magnesia—Impregnation of figs—Sails for Egypt—Gardens of Alexandria—Asses of Egypt—Rosetta—Women hatching eggs—Politeness of the Turks—Circumcision feast—Voluptuousness—Serpent-charmers—The Pyramids—Vegetation of the desert—The lion ant—Impregnation of palm-trees—Soils of Palestine—Jerusalem—The Dead Sea—Apples of Sodom—The dudaim, or mandrakes—Silkworm—Cyprus—Dies at Smyrna | [52] |
LADY WORTLEY MONTAGUE.
Born 1690.—Died 1762.
| Born in Northamptonshire—Masculine education—Early life—Friendship with Mrs. Wortley—Marriage—Violent love of fame—Accompanies her husband abroad—Holland—Germany—Ratisbon—Absurd quarrels of ambassadors—Descends the Danube—Vienna—Letters of Pope—Coarseness of language—Extravagant costume of the women—Beauty of the empress—Bohemia—Mountain scenery—Dangerous pass—Dresden—New mode of making love—Dwarfs—Taste of royalty for the deformed—Prince Eugene—Hungary—Field of battle—Belgrade—Becomes acquainted with a handsome bey—Servia—Visit to the baths of Sophia—Exquisite female beauty—Ruins of Justinian’s Church—Teeth-money—Adrianople—Pretended intrigues of Lady Mary with the sultan—Beautiful costume of the women—Intrigues—Homeric antiquities—History of inoculation—Enthusiastic admiration of beauty—lovely wife of the kihaya—Dancing girls—Enters a mosque—Singular dwelling—Constantinople—Village of Belgrade—Elysium—Greek slaves—Cosmetics—Balm of Mecca—The Dardanelles—Hero and Leander—Site of Troy—Coast of Africa—Carthage—Arrival in England—Pope—Love—Quarrels—Grows weary of pleasures—Removes to Italy—Remains abroad twenty-two years—Returns to England—Dies | [72] |
RICHARD POCOCKE.
Born 1704.—Died 1765.
| Born at Southampton—Education—Visits France—Italy—Returns—Departs for the East—Original travellers—Ruins of Egypt—Alexandria—Egyptian landscape—Mohammedan saints—Cairo—District of Faioum—Lake Mœri—Origin of the fable of the Elysian Fields—The Labyrinth—Ascends the Nile—The Cataracts—Returns—Embarks for the Holy Land—Arab harem—Jerusalem—The Dead Sea—Northern Syria—Mesopotamia—Lebanon—Tripoli—Cyprus—Worship of Venus—Paphos—Amathusia—Crete—White Mountains—Mount Ida—Islands of the Archipelago—Asia Minor—Constantinople—Mount Athos—Vale of Tempé—Field of Pharsalia—Zeitoun—Tremendous earthquake—Thermopylæ—The Euripus—Bœotia—Attica—Returns to England—Dies | [101] |
JOHN BELL.
Born 1690.—Died 1780.
| Born at Antermony—Embarks for Petersburg—Sets out for Persia—Descends the Volga—The Caspian—Falcons—Extraordinary incident— Shamakia—Tabriz—Koom—Kashan—Scorpions—Ispahan—Returns to Petersburg—Departs for China—Arrives at Kazan—Beehives—Fogs and frosts of Siberia—Asbestos—Tobolsk—Swedish prisoners—Game—Singular manuscripts—Ancient tombs or barrows—Curious antiquities—White hares—Sable hunters—The Baikal Lake—Mongolia—Great wall of China—Pekin—Character of the Chinese—Fine arts—Population—Imperial hunt—Departs from China—Returns to Petersburg—Journey to Derbend—And to Constantinople—Returns to Scotland—Dies | [125] |
JOHN LEDYARD.
Born 1751.—Died 1788.
| Born at Groton in North America—Early studies—Intends becoming a missionary—Escapes from college to the woods—Returns—Again leaves college—Sails down the Connecticut alone in a canoe—Studies theology—Becomes a common sailor—Sails for Gibraltar—Enlists as a soldier—Is released—Returns to America—Sails for England—Arrives at Plymouth—Begs his way to London—Enters into the marine corps, and accompanies Captain Cook on his last voyage—The Cape—New-Holland—New-Zealand—Love adventure—Watteeoo—Tongataboo—Simple manners—Quarrels with the natives—Tahiti—Discovery of the Sandwich Islands—Nootka Sound—Behring’s Straits—Adventure on Onalaska—Return to the Sandwich Islands—Death of Cook—Returns to England—Sails for America—Leaves the English service—Sails for France—Stay at Paris—Proceeds to London—Disappointments—Undertakes a journey across Siberia—Sweden—Travels round the Gulf of Finland—Petersburg—Sets out for Siberia—Tobolsk—Irkutsk—Yakutsk—Is arrested—Returns to Europe—Engages to travel for the African Association—Sails to Egypt—Dies | [163] |
GEORGE FORSTER.
Born 1750.—Died 1791.
| Birth and parentage not exactly known—Enters the civil service of the East India Company—Madras—Calcutta—Benares—Mythology of the Hindoos—Assumes the Mohammedan character—Sails up the Ganges—Crosses the southern ridge of the Himalaya—Arrives in Kashmere—Richness and beauty of the landscape—Lake—Gardens of the Shalimar Rose of Kashmere—Shawl manufacture—Imitations—Wool—Number manufactured—Departs from Kashmere—Crosses the Indus—Sleeps in a mosque, where the moollah endeavours to rob him—Afghan cavalry—Arrives at Pashawer—Intense heat—Joins a kafilah—Travels by night—Mountain torrent—Drowning of a lady—Kabul—Is seized by a fever—Recovers—Reassumes his character of Christian—Quickly repents this step—Insults and difficulties—Ghizni—Mahmood—Kandahar—Proceeds to Herat—Once more assumes the Mohammedan character—Joins a caravan—Enters Khorasan—Tremendous cold—Poetry supplies the place of food—A conjurer—Host of pilgrims—Descendant of Mohammed—Anecdote—Mazenderan—Caspian Sea—Baku—Astrakhan—Petersburg—Arrives in England—Returns to India—Dies | [198] |
JAMES BRUCE.
Born 1730.—Died 1794.
| Born at Kinnaird—Educated at Harrow—Wishes to become a clergyman—Returns to Scotland—Becomes a sportsman—Studies the law—Marries—Loses his wife—Visits Spain and Portugal—Returns through Germany and Holland—Projects an expedition against Spain—Is appointed consul of Algiers—Travels in Italy—Arrives in Algiers—Disputes with the dey—Leaves Algiers—Visits Tunis and Tripoli—Is shipwrecked, and plundered by the Bedouins—Embarks at Bengazi for Caramania—Sails for Syria—Visits Palmyra—Embarks for Egypt—Cairo—Transactions with the bey—Anecdote—Ascends the Nile—The Ababde Arabs—The Tigrè chief—Assuan—Descends the Nile—Proceeds to Kosseir—Adventure among the Arabs—Visits the mountains of emeralds—Crosses the Red Sea to Jidda—Anecdote—Surveys the Red Sea—Arrives at Masuah—Is in extreme danger—Escapes, and enters Abyssinia—Crosses Mount Taranta—Arrives at Dixan—Slave trade—Rich scenery—Fair in the forest Adowa—Palace of Ras Michael—Ruins of Axum—Beautiful scenery—Live cow eating—Monks of Waldubba—Crosses Mount Lamalmon—Arrives at Gondar—The book of the prophet Enoch—Visits the queen-mother—Becomes a physician, and excites the jealousy of the monks—Has an interview with Ras Michael—Triumphal entry of the Ras into Gondar—Beautiful wife of the Ras—Is promoted to a high office at court—Shoots through a shield and a table with a piece of candle—Profligate manners of the Abyssinians—Is appointed governor of a district—Visits the great cataract of the Nile—Sets out to discover the source of the Nile—Is entertained by a rebel chief—Placed under the protection of the Gallas—Reaches the sources of the Nile—Returns to Gondar—Leaves Abyssinia—Traverses the deserts of Nubia—Reaches Assuan—Descends the Nile—Embarks for Marseilles—Arrives in England—Publishes his Travels—Dies | [233] |
JONAS HANWAY.
Born 1712.—Died 1786.
| Born at Portsmouth—Educated in London—Apprenticed to a merchant at Lisbon—Conceives an unsuccessful passion—Renounces all ideas of marriage—Returns to England—Visits St. Petersburg—Appointed agent of the Russian company in Persia—Arrives at Lanjaron—Proceeds to Astrabad—Burning forest—Persian compliments—City of Astrabad taken and plundered—Loses all his merchandise—Sets out in company with a hajji and an escort—Deserted by his guides, and left at a fisherman’s hut—Embarks in a canoe—Arrives at Teschidezar—Presented with a horse by the shah’s officers—Arrives at Balfroosh—Sets out alone for the camp of Nadir Shah—Extraordinary privation—Dangers and difficulties—Reaches Lanjaron—Hospitably entertained by Captain Elton—Desolating effects of the shah’s tyranny—Arrives at the royal camp—His tent near the royal standard—Narrowly escapes being burnt to death—Petitions for restitution of his merchandise—Nadir detested by his followers—Magnificence of the imperial camp—Splendid equipments of his numerous army—Hanway obtains an order for restitution of his property—Sets out on his return to Astrabad—Beautiful scenery—Orange groves, &c.—Curse of despotism—Loses himself in a forest—Attacked by an enormous wolf—Deserted by his escort—Instances of ferocious cruelty—Receives an offer of payment in female slaves—Refuses the offer—Regains his property—Invests it in silks—Arrives at Moscow—Succeeds to considerable property in England—Settles at St. Petersburg—Establishes himself as a merchant there—Desire of visiting home awakened—Peter I.—Dry dock of Cronstadt—Returns to England—Resides in London—Compiles his travels—Visits the Continent—Opposes the naturalization of the Jews—Promotes the paving of the streets of London—Absurdity of the French invasion—Founds the Marine Society—Discourages tea-drinking—Founds the Magdalen Hospital—Ridicules the custom of vails giving—Ludicrous anecdotes of this subject—Prince Eugene—Scheme for bettering the condition of chimney-sweeps—Laughable story—Devil taking a holyday—Ridiculous anecdote connected with Hanway’s frontispieces—Death—Amiable character | [301] |
ANTONIO DE ULLOA.
Born 1716.—Died 1795.
| Born at Seville—Enters into the Spanish navy—Intrusted with the conduct of an expedition for measuring a degree of the meridian near the equator—Sails from Cadiz—Arrives at Porto Bello—Rapid river Chagre—Magnificent landscape—Curious trees, fruits, birds, insects, &c.—Monkeys crossing a river—Arrives at Panama—Employs himself in making astronomical observations—Sails for Guayaquil—Received with distinguished politeness—Extraordinary sufferings from mosquitoes—Arrives at the foot of the Andes—Mamarumi, or “mother of stone”—Beautiful cascade—Dexterity of mules in descending the mountain slopes—Chimborazo—Arrives at Quito—Pillars of sand—Their fatal effects—Enormous caves—Singular effects of the moon on the waters within them—Ascends Pichincha—Interesting description of his encampment there—Extraordinary manner of living—Intense cold—Delightful serenity of those lofty regions—Storms and tempests beneath—Difficulty of respiration—Danger of being blown down the precipices—Fall of enormous fragments of rock—Violence of the wind—Snow-storms—Effects of the climate on the limbs—Conversation painful from the state of their lips—Curious effect of intense cold on ardent spirits—Deserted by his attendants—Becomes reconciled to the hardships of his situation—Proceeds with his astronomical observations—Recalled to Lima—War between England and Spain—Commissioned to put the city in a state of defence—Lord Anson the English admiral—Returns to Quito—Resumes his scientific pursuits—Recalled to the coast—Sack of Payta by the English fleet—Honoured with the command of a frigate—Arrival of reinforcements—Returns to Quito—Comet of 1744—Impatient to revisit Europe—Embarks at Callao—Attacked by two English privateers—Escapes—Sails for North America—Arrives at Louisburg—Compelled to surrender to the English—Humanity and politeness of Commodore Warren—Sails for England as a prisoner of war—Arrives at Portsmouth—Courtesy and generosity of Captain Brett—Pretender—Is received with distinguished hospitality and politeness by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Harrington, and the Commissioners for French and Spanish prisoners—Obtains his papers—Martin Folkes—Is elected a member of the Royal Society—Embarks for Lisbon—Arrives at Madrid—Flattering reception—Travels through Europe—Receives the command of the Indian fleet—Appointed Governor of Louisiana—Returns to Europe—Dies in the Island of Leon | [320] |
THE LIVES
OF
CELEBRATED TRAVELLERS.
JOSEPH PITTON DE TOURNEFORT.
Born 1656.—Died 1708.
Tournefort was born at Aix, in Provence, on the 5th of June, 1656. He received the first rudiments of his education at the Jesuits’ College of that city; where manifestations of his passion for botany, to the gratification of which he devoted the whole of his life, appeared at a very early age. As soon as he beheld plants, says Fontenelle, he felt himself a botanist. He desired to learn their names; he carefully observed their differences, and sometimes absented himself from his class in order to botanize in the country, preferring nature to the language of the ancient Romans, which at that time was regarded as the principal object of education. Like the majority of those who have distinguished themselves in any department of science or art, he was his own master, and in a very short time had made himself acquainted with the plants found in the environs of his native city.
For the philosophy then taught in the schools he had but little predilection. Being in search of nature, which was almost wholly banished from the prevailing systems, he considered himself fortunate in discovering accidentally among his father’s books, the works of Descartes, which appeared to contain the philosophy which he sought. He was not, however, permitted to enjoy this gratification openly; but his ardour and enthusiasm were apparently exactly proportioned to the mystery by which it was attended.
Tournefort, being designed by his father for the church, of course included theology in his studies, and even went so far as to enter into a seminary. But his natural inclinations prevailed. The fathers and the doctors of the Sorbonne were less attractive than the plants of the field; and when he should have been engaged with
Councils, classics, fathers, wits,
he stole away to the garden of an apothecary of Aix, who delighted in the same studies, and there pursued in secret the course he had chosen for himself. But the treasures of the apothecary’s garden were soon exhausted. It therefore soon became necessary to discover a wider field; and as botanists, like most other mortals, consider stolen joys the sweetest, he occasionally penetrated into forbidden grounds, and exposed himself to the suspicion of having less exalted views than those by which he was really actuated. In fact, being one day discovered in a garden by some peasants, he was taken for a robber, and narrowly escaped the fate of St. Stephen.
There is something in the circumstances under which the science of botany is studied, which has a tendency to confer upon it a kind of poetical charm. It is not a sedentary pursuit. It leads the student abroad among the most magnificent and beautiful scenery of the earth, in all seasons, but more particularly during those in which external nature is loveliest. That botany should be pursued with passion is, therefore, not at all surprising; but it is difficult to understand how the imagination should become enamoured of anatomy, which, instead of generating cheerful and enlivening images, dwells wholly upon decay and dissolution. Tournefort, however, associated this gloomy science with botany, and is said to have equally delighted in both.
The death of his father, which took place in 1677, delivered him from theology and the church. He was now entire master of his time; and, in order the more completely to gratify his inclinations, made a tour through the mountains of Dauphiny and Savoy, where he collected a great number of fine plants, which formed the nucleus of his herbarium. This journey increasing instead of gratifying his curiosity, and probably adding fresh vigour to his naturally robust frame, while it at the same time enhanced his gayety, was merely the prelude to others more adventurous and extensive. In 1769 he set out from Aix for Montpellier, where, besides improving himself in his anatomical and medical studies, he enjoyed all the advantages which the rich botanical garden created by Henry IV. could afford an enlightened botanist.
At Montpellier Tournefort remained nearly two years. He then undertook an excursion into Spain, where he made large accessions to his herbary; and after wandering for some time among the mountains of Catalonia, accompanied by several physicians and young medical students, he directed his footsteps towards the Pyrenees. Fontenelle, in speaking of this excursion of Tournefort, seems to be principally astonished at the intrepidity with which our traveller encountered, not the dangers, but the cookery of the Pyrenees, which, to the Rouen epicurean, appeared more terrible than precipices or robbers. He was quite aware, says he, that in these vast solitudes he should find no subsistence, except such as the most austere anchorets might have partaken, and that the wretched inhabitants from whom even this was to be obtained were not more numerous than the robbers who might deprive him of it. In fact, he was more than once attacked and plundered by Spanish outlaws; and the contrivance by which he succeeded on such occasions in concealing a small quantity of money is sufficiently ingenious. He thrust a number of reals into the coarse black bread which he carried about with him as his only food, and this the robbers considered so utterly worthless that, although by no means fastidious, they invariably relinquished it to the traveller with extreme contempt.
Tournefort, having thus overreached the dull-headed banditti of Spain, roamed about at leisure through the wild regions of the Pyrenees, climbing the most abrupt and apparently inaccessible pinnacles. New plants, however, were found at almost every step, and the pleasure derived from this circumstance, which none but a discoverer can conceive, amply compensated him for the fatigues and dangers he underwent. One day during this tour he narrowly escaped with his life: a miserable house, in which he had taken shelter, fell down upon him, and for two hours he lay buried under the ruins, but was at length dug out by the peasantry.
Towards the end of the year 1681 he returned through Montpellier to Aix, where he classed and arranged all the plants which he had collected in Provence, Languedoc, Dauphiny, Catalonia, the Alps, and the Pyrenees; and the pleasure afforded him by the sight of his collection was an ample reward for all the fatigue and danger which he experienced in procuring it.
Tournefort’s reputation now began to diffuse itself. M. Fagon, principal physician to the queen, a man who ardently desired to advance the interests of botany, learning his extraordinary merit, invited him to Paris in 1683; and on his arrival obtained for him the place of botanical professor in the Jardin des Plantes. This appointment, however, by no means restrained his passion for travelling; for, although botany was perhaps his principal object, the delight arising from visiting new scenes was strongly associated with the weaker and more tranquil gratification afforded by science. He therefore once more undertook a journey into Spain, and while in Andalusia, where the palm-tree abounds, endeavoured to penetrate the mysterious loves of the male and female of this celebrated tree, but his researches were unsuccessful. He proceeded next into Portugal, from whence, when the object of his journey had been accomplished, he returned to France.
Shortly after this he visited England and Holland, in the latter of which countries he was invited, and even tempted by the offer of a more liberal salary than he enjoyed at home, to take up his residence as botanical professor. The offer was flattering, but Tournefort, persuaded that no worldly advantages are an equivalent for a permanent exile from home, wisely declined it. His own country was not ungrateful. In 1691 he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences; and his reputation, which was now rapidly gaining ground, paved the way to other more solid advantages.
Tournefort, notwithstanding his enthusiasm for science and thirst of reputation, was not in haste to appear before the public as an author. However, in 1694, having meditated profoundly and long upon the subject, he ventured to put forth his “Elemens de Botanique, ou Méthode pour connoître les Plantes,” which, though attacked by Ray and others, was highly esteemed by the greater number of naturalists. He now took his degree of M.D., and, shortly afterward, in 1698, published his history of the plants growing in the environs of Paris, with an account of their uses in medicine.
Such were his employments until the year 1700, when, to adopt the language of the times, he was commanded by the king to undertake a journey into Greece, Asia, and Africa, not merely for the purpose of making scientific researches, but in order to study upon the spot the manners, customs, and opinions of the inhabitants. This long and somewhat hazardous journey he hesitated to commence alone; for, as he justly observes, there is nothing so melancholy as to be ill in a foreign country, surrounded by entire strangers, ignorant of medicine yet daring to practise. However, he very quickly found two companions—the one a physician, the other a painter—and having made every necessary preparation, embarked at Marseilles on the 23d of April, 1700.
On the 3d of May they arrived at Canea, the principal port of Candia; and Tournefort, to whom the passage had appeared exceedingly tedious, experienced peculiar pleasure in commencing his eastern travels with the ancient kingdom of Minos. He found the environs of the city admirable, plains covered with forests of olive, fields richly cultivated, gardens, vineyards, and streams fringed with myrtle and rose laurel. One small inconvenience was felt, however, in traversing these lovely scenes. The Turks, as usual, had laid out their cemeteries along the highway, and not having sunk the graves to a sufficient depth, the bodies, powerfully acted on by the sun, exhaled an extremely fetid odour, which the wind wafted over the country, engendering noisome diseases. To add to the chagrin occasioned by this circumstance, they found, notwithstanding the assertions of Galen and Pliny, which had in fact tempted them into the island, that the plants of Crete were difficult to be met with even in Crete itself, though in the sequel the plants of the “White Mountains” amply made up for their first disappointments.
Tournefort, though a scholar, was by no means a classical enthusiast, and therefore his descriptions of celebrated places may generally be depended upon. If any thing, he was too much disposed, from a not uncommon species of affectation, to disparage the places on which the ancients have thrown the noblest rays of glory. From this disposition he caricatures the Cretan Ida, which he denominates “a great ugly ass’s back,” where you find neither landscape, nor fountain, nor stream, nor agreeable solitude; but, instead of all these, prodigious piles of barren rocks, surrounded by all the circumstances of desolation. From the summit he enjoyed, indeed, an extensive prospect, but he thought it much too dearly purchased by the fatigue of climbing so difficult a mountain; and, in order to put himself in good-humour with the scene, set down in the lee of a rock and made a good bowl of sherbet.
After visiting Retimo, Candia, and the other principal cities of the island, they made an excursion to the famous labyrinth which is hewn in the bowels of a hill near the ancient Gortyna. This singular excavation is entered by a rustic cavern, and conducts you by numerous windings entirely through the mountain. Tournefort regards it as a natural cavern enlarged by human industry. Wherever he met with any Greeks during his journeys in this island, their manners were distinguished by the most remarkable simplicity, men, women, and children crowding round the strangers, admiring their dresses, or demanding medicines.
Having satisfied his scientific curiosity respecting Candia, he proceeded to visit the various islands of the Archipelago, which he examined with attention. On almost every rock on which he landed some additions were made to his botanical or antiquarian treasures, and with this mass of materials continually accumulating, he pushed on to Constantinople. Being desirous of comprehending the barbarous but complex machine of the Ottoman polity, he made a considerable stay in this city, from whence, when he conceived his object to have been accomplished, he continued his travels towards the east, and following the footsteps of the Argonauts, whom the ancients, he tells us, regarded as their most famous travellers, proceeded along the southern shores of the Black Sea towards Colchos. Our traveller performed this part of his route in the suite of the Pasha of Erzeroom. The whole party embarked in feluccas, the pasha with his harem in one vessel, and the remainder of his people, together with Tournefort and his attendants, distributed in seven others. During the voyage they frequently landed on the coast, for the purpose of passing the night more agreeably than could have been done on board. Tents were pitched, and those of the ladies surrounded by ditches, and guarded by black eunuchs, whose ugly visages and fearfully rolling eyes struck a panic into the soul of our traveller, who seems to have regarded them as so many devils commissioned to keep watch over the houries of paradise.
Indeed, Tournefort, if we may take him upon his word, was exceedingly well calculated by nature for travelling securely in the suite of a pasha accompanied by his harem; for when he was cautioned by the great man’s lieutenant against approaching the female quarters too nearly, or even ascending any eminence in the vicinity, from whence their tents might be viewed, he remarked, with apparent sincerity, that he was too much in love with plants to think of the ladies! This was a fortunate circumstance. Plants are everywhere to be procured, for even in the East it has never been thought necessary to place a guard of black eunuchs over hellebore or nightshade; but had the smile of female lips, or the sunshine of female eyes, been necessary to his happiness, he must have languished in hopelessness, at least while in the train of a pasha.
Notwithstanding the nature of the government and the state of manners in the country through which he passed, he encountered but few difficulties, and no real dangers. He settled the geographical position of cities, he admired the landscapes, he described the plants; but being fully persuaded that the better part of valour is discretion, he engaged in no adventures, and therefore the current of his life ran on as smoothly on the shores of the Black Sea as it could have done on the banks of the Seine or Rhone.
On arriving at Trebizond our traveller continued his route by land; and here he began to experience something of danger. There was no proceeding singly through the country. Every road was beset with robbers; and, in order to protect their persons and property, men congregated together into caravans, small moving polities, the members of which were temporarily bound to each other by a sense of common danger. Every man went armed, as in an enemy’s country. On this occasion Tournefort remarks, that there would be less danger in traversing the wild parts of America than such countries as Turkey: for that the savages, or those independent tribes whom we persist in regarding as such, never fell upon any but their enemies; while in civilized and semi-barbarous countries, robbers make no distinctions of this kind, being the declared enemies of every person possessing property. And as for the cannibal propensities of the former, he does not imagine that they greatly alter the case; for when a poor wretch has been murdered, he does not perceive how it can make any great difference to him whether he be eaten by men, or left naked in the fields to be devoured by birds or wild beasts.
However, the caravan in which Tournefort travelled being commanded by the pasha in person, the robbers fled from it with as much celerity as they followed others, for every one who was caught had his head instantly struck off without the least delay or ceremony. This salutary rigour, which those who tasted of the tranquillity it produced were very far from blaming, enabled the whole party to move on perfectly at their ease; and as great men accompanied by their harems seldom move with any great celerity, our Franks enjoyed ample leisure for observing the face of the country, and collecting all such curious plants as nature had sown in the vicinity of their route. Tournefort greatly admired the spectacle presented by the caravan when in motion. Horses, camels, mules, some laden with merchandise, others bestrode by the rude warriors or merchants of the East, others bearing a species of cages said to contain women, but which, says our traveller, with evident chagrin, might as well have contained monkeys as reasonable creatures.
In this style they proceeded to Erzeroom, where they arrived on the 15th of June. Winter had not yet relinquished his dominion over the land, for, notwithstanding that the sun was exceedingly hot during the greater part of the day, the hills in the neighbourhood were covered with snow, large showers of which had recently fallen. The cold, as might be expected, is very rigorous here during the winter months, so that several persons have been known to have lost their hands and feet from the effects of it; and although coal might probably be easily obtained, the inhabitants suffer the more severely, inasmuch as wood, the only fuel used, is extremely scarce and dear. These inconveniences are equally felt by natives and foreigners; but our traveller encountered another misfortune, which, in all probability, was confined to himself and his companions. This affliction, which he laments like a hero, was caused by the absence of good wines and brandies, a deprivation which appears to have weighed far more heavily on his heart than the absence of houries.
From this city he made several excursions into the mountains of Armenia, which generally continue to be covered with snow until August; and having discovered a monastery, the monks of which possessed some excellent wine, his spirits revived, and he began to view the country with a less gloomy eye. Near this city are the sources of the Euphrates, springs remarkable for their extreme coldness, and, to be rendered fit for drinking, requiring perhaps a mixture of that nectar which our traveller obtained from the monks of Erzeroom. To add to this enjoyment, some very fine trouts were caught in the stream of the Euphrates, and being cooked immediately upon the spot, and eaten with a good appetite, were found to be particularly excellent. However, all these pleasures were not purchased without some expense of fear, for they were now in the country of the Koords and Yezeedis, who, roaming about the plains in dauntless independence, regardless of pashas and eager for plunder, would have been but too happy to have lightened the burdens of the Frank adventurers.
From Erzeroom, the environs of which afford a rich treasure to the botanist, they proceeded with a caravan for Teflis, the capital of Georgia. The country upon which they now entered was flat and well cultivated, artificial irrigation being required, however, to maintain fertility, without which the corn would be roasted upon the stock. In the islands of the Archipelago, on the other hand, where the heats, he observes, are sufficient to calcine the earth, and where it rains only in winter, the corn is the finest in the world. This renders it clear that all kinds of soil do not possess the same nourishing juice. The soil of the Archipelago, like the camel, imbibes sufficient water during the winter to serve it for a long time to come; but that of Armenia requires to be constantly refreshed by showers or by irrigation.
On his arrival in Georgia, we find our worthy traveller, who, during his sojourning in the camp of the Turkish pasha, preferred plants to pretty women, suddenly adopting a different creed, and, in order to enjoy the sight of a fair face, spreading out a quantity of toys upon the grass, the reputation of which it was hoped would quickly attract the ladies to the spot. In this expectation he was not disappointed. The young women from all the neighbourhood gathered round the merchandise; but, although they were in possession of robust health and good forms, their beauty fell far short of his anticipations. This is not surprising. The imagination invariably out-runs reality; and, moreover, the travellers who confer or take away a reputation for beauty, besides being naturally perhaps incorrect judges, are frequently influenced by considerations which are far from appearing on the face of their narrative.
Having made some short stay at Teflis, he proceeded on an excursion to Mount Ararat, famous throughout all the East as the spot on which the ark rested after the flood; after which he once more directed his footsteps towards the west, returned to Erzeroom, and thence proceeded by way of Tocat and Angora to Smyrna. From this city, after visiting Ephesus, Scalanouva, and Samos, he sailed for Marseilles, where he arrived on the 3d of June, 1702.
It was originally intended that our traveller should have included a large portion of Africa within the limits of his tour, but the plague raging at that period in Egypt deterred him from proceeding into that country. However, he was already, if we may believe M. Fontenelle, loaded with the spoils of the East, and could afford to relinquish Egypt to some future adventurer, for whom the plague might have fewer terrors. The number of plants which he discovered was certainly very considerable, amounting to not less than 1356 species, of which the far greater number naturally arranged themselves under the 673 genera which he had previously established, while for the remainder he created 25 new genera, but no new class. The rest of Tournefort’s life was spent in preparing the account of his travels for the press, but he did not live to see their publication. A blow in the breast, which he accidentally received, reduced him to a languishing and weak condition, and hastened his death, which took place on the 28th of December, 1708. His travels, printed at the Louvre, appeared shortly afterward in two volumes quarto, and have always maintained a considerable reputation.
DR. THOMAS SHAW.
Born 1692—Died 1751.
This curious and learned traveller was the son of Mr. Gabriel Shaw, of Kendal, in Westmoreland, where he was born in the year 1692. The first rudiments of his education, which appears to have been carefully conducted, he received at the grammar-school of his native town, from whence, in 1711, he removed to Queen’s College, Oxford. Here he took the degree of B.A. in 1716, and that of M.A. three years after. In the course of the same year he went into orders, and was appointed chaplain to the English factory at Algiers. As he has left no account of the mode in which he reached the point of destination, it is uncertain whether he proceeded to Africa wholly by sea, or performed a portion of the journey by land; but as it is certain that he was in Italy, where, among other places, he visited Rome, it is probable that it was upon this occasion that he traversed the continent of Europe, taking ship at some port of Italy for Algiers, where he arrived about the end of 1719, or early in the beginning of the year following. This city, which has long been an object of considerable curiosity to Europeans, I have already described, at least as it existed in the sixteenth century, in the life of Leo Africanus; and therefore shall merely observe upon the present occasion, that at the period of Shaw’s residence it was a small though populous city, not exceeding a mile and a half in circumference, but computed to contain little less than one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. Of antiquities, the peculiar objects of our traveller’s researches, it could boast but few specimens, though his practised eye discerned upon the tower of the great mosque several broken inscriptions, the letters of which, however, were either so inverted or filled up with lime and whitewash, that nothing could be made of them.
The environs are remarkable for their beauty, consisting of a rapid succession of hills and valleys, sprinkled with gardens and villas, to which the more wealthy among the citizens retire during the heats of summer. From these little white houses, perched in picturesque situations among evergreen woods and groves of fruit-trees, the inhabitants enjoy a gay and delightful prospect of the sea; while to those who sail along the shore these woods, villas, and gardens present a no less cheerful and animated scene. The springs which rise in these hills, and confer beauty and fertility upon the whole landscape, likewise furnish the city with an abundance of excellent water, which is conveyed to the public fountains through a long course of pipes and conduits.
Having remained about a year at Algiers, in the exercise of his professional duties, he was enabled, I know not how, to quit his post for a time, in order to satisfy the desire he felt of visiting Egypt and Syria. His voyage to Egypt, however, was ill-timed, for he arrived in the midst of summer, when, for the most part, the heat is excessive, the sands heated like the ashes of an oven, and the whole vegetation of the country exceedingly parched and withered. In approaching the low and level coast, no part of which could be seen from any considerable distance at sea, the mariners, he observes, conjectured how far they were from land by the depth of the water, the number of fathoms usually answering to the same number of leagues. The portion of the shore lying between Tineh, the ancient Pelusium, and Damietta, was so exceedingly low and full of lakes and morasses, that, in his opinion, it answered exactly to the etymology of its names; Tineh, from tin (Heb. טִין), clay or mud, and Pelusium (Gr. πηλούσιον), from pelus πηλός [TN]), a word of the same signification! With etymological conjectures such as these our curious traveller amused himself on drawing near the shores of Egypt. At length, however, he arrived at Alexandria, where, regarding every thing modern as so many vain dreams unworthy the attention of a learned traveller, he discovered nothing striking or curious but the shattered walls, the cisterns, and other splendid vestiges of antiquity.
From Alexandria he sailed up the Nile to Cairo, and found travelling upon this “moving road,” as Pascal beautifully terms a navigable river, an extremely agreeable diversion. At every winding of the stream, says he, such a variety of villages, gardens, and plantations present themselves to our view, that from Rosetta to Cairo, and from thence all the way down by the other branch, to Damietta, we see nothing but crowds of people, or continued scenes of plenty and abundance. The many turnings of the river make the distance from Cairo to each of those cities near two hundred miles, though in a direct road it will scarce amount to half that number.
Grand Cairo, notwithstanding the magnificence of its name, he found much inferior in extent to several European capitals, though as the inhabitants lived in a close and crowded manner, it was exceedingly populous. Its principal curiosities, in his estimation, were contained within the castle situated on Mount Mocattem, and consisted of a spacious hall, adorned with a double row of vast Thebaic columns, and a wall about two hundred and sixty feet in depth, with a winding staircase descending to the bottom, hewn out in the solid rock; both of which works are attributed by the Mohammedans to the patriarch Joseph. At the village of Ghizah, directly opposite Cairo, on the Libyan or western bank of the Nile, he supposed himself to have discovered the site of ancient Memphis, which Dr. Pococke, Bruce, and others place at Metraheny, several miles farther southward. From the discussion of this point, in which, whether right or wrong, our author displays a profusion of learning and very considerable ingenuity, he proceeds, through a series of equally learned dissertations, to the origin and destination of the pyramids. The magnitude, structure, and aspect of these prodigious edifices, which have withstood the united attacks of barbarism and the elements through a period of unknown duration, have frequently been described with picturesque and nervous eloquence, though it is probable that the impression which the actual contemplation of them produces upon the imagination is not susceptible of being represented by language. Satirical or calculating writers have stood at the foot of these ancient temples, for such, I think, they should be considered, and laughed at the ambition or folly, as they term it, which prompted their founders to rear them, because their names and purposes are now become an enigma. Yet it is probable, that from the day on which they were erected until the present, few persons have beheld them towering above the plain of the desert, reflecting back the burning sun of noon, or throwing their morning or evening shadows over the sand, without being smitten with a sense of the sublime, and experiencing in their hearts a secret pride at the boldness and elevation of their founders’ conception. And this feeling will be heightened into something of a religious character, if, rejecting, the vulgar notion of their being nothing but royal tombs, we suppose, what might, I think, be all but demonstrated, that they were originally temples dedicated to the passive generative power of nature, the Bhavani of the Hindoos, the Athor-Isis of the Egyptians, and the Aphrodite and Venus of the Greeks and Romans. To Dr. Shaw, however, this theory did not present itself. He was contented with the old idea, suggested by the etymology of the word, that they might, perhaps, have been fire-temples; but he observes that the mouth of the pyramids, as well as the end of the mystic chest in the interior, points to the north, the original Kiblah, or “praying-point,” of the whole human race. Other sacred edifices of Egypt, as Herodotus observes, had their doors on the northern side; the table of shew-bread was placed in the same situation in the tabernacle; and in Hindostan the piety or the superstition of the people points in the same direction.
Of the animals of Egypt which, from the frequent mention made of them in classical literature, are regarded as curiosities, the most remarkable, as the hippopotamus, the crocodile, and the ibis, are now exceedingly rare. Indeed, though the crocodile is sometimes found above the cataracts, it is totally unknown to those who live lower down the river, and the hippopotamus and the ibis, the latter of which was once so plentiful, may be regarded as extinct in Egypt. To make some amends for these losses, there is a great abundance of storks, which, as they are every winter supposed to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, are, according to Lady Montague, regarded as so many hajjîs by the Turks. When about to migrate from the country, it is observed that they constantly assemble together from the circumjacent regions in a vast plain, where, in the opinion of the inhabitants, they daily hold a divan, or council, for about a fortnight before their departure; after which they rise at once upon the wing, marshal themselves into close compact bodies of prodigious dimensions, and then, putting themselves in motion, float away like dusky clouds of many miles in length upon the wind. The aspic, one of which opened the voluptuous Cleopatra a way to the court of Proserpine, is still very numerous in the sandy and mountainous districts on both sides of the Nile. This reptile, now called the cerastes, is capable of existing for an incredible length of time without food; at least if we can rely upon the veracity of Gabrieli, an Italian gentleman, who showed our traveller a couple of these vipers, which he had kept, he said, five years in a large crystal vessel, without any visible sustenance. “They were usually coiled up,” says the doctor, “in some fine sand, which was placed in the bottom of the vessel; and when I saw them they had just cast their skins, and were as brisk and lively as if newly taken. The horns of this viper are white and shining, in shape like to half a grain of barley, though scarce of that bigness.” The warral, a gentle and docile species of lizard, which appeared to be inspired with violent emotions of delight by the sounds of music, he beheld keeping exact time and motion with the dervishes in their rotatory dances, running over their heads and arms, turning when they turned, and stopping when they stopped. These timid practitioners, however, who thus charm or tame this small and apparently innoxious creature, are mere children compared with those daring adepts of Hindostan who, by the force of spells or skill, compel the cobra di capello, the most deadly and terrible of reptiles, to rear himself in spiry volumes, and dance, or rather wriggle, like a Nautch girl, for the amusement of the crowd. But the Egyptian charmers did something better with serpents and other reptiles than teaching them to dance; they converted them into articles of food; and Dr. Shaw was assured that in Cairo and its neighbourhood there were not less than forty thousand persons who subsisted entirely upon serpents and lizards. Locusts are a delicacy in Barbary; crickets, fried in sesamum oil, in Siam; and a dish of human brains is an Apician morsel in New-Zealand. Nay, we are told that certain Roman epicures, who were very far from regarding themselves as cannibals, were in the habit of drowning slaves in their fish-ponds, that by feeding upon their bodies the fish might acquire a superior flavour and richness. The Abyssinians, who cut beefsteaks from a living cow, belong to this family of gourmands; and those rebel janizaries of Tunis who cut their bey into kabobs, and ate him for a relish, as Dr. Shaw relates, may be said to have pushed this strange, irregular appetite nearly as far as it can be carried. However, the serpent-eaters of Cairo, besides the gratification of their preposterous fancy, have a religious motive, as the being addicted to this curious diet entitles them, among other religious privileges, to the honour of attending more immediately upon the hanging of black silk which is annually sent to the temple of Mecca.
In reiterated endeavours to discern through the mists of three thousand years the ancient condition of Egypt, physical and moral, our traveller consumed the time between July and September, in which month he departed from Cairo on his visit to Mount Sinai and the Red Sea. All travellers who have journeyed through this wilderness speak with terror of the dreary desolation and barrenness of the scene. Vegetation is here dead. Even the dews and showers of heaven fall in vain. They drench the sands without fertilizing them, and, sinking down into the earth, disappear, leaving no trace behind. On the skirts of the desert, and upon a few widely-scattered points, two or three hardy plants, stunted by the drought, scorched during the day by the intense heat of the sun, and shrivelled up with piercing cold by night, look like a few miserable stragglers found in a country depopulated by war and famine. Upon quitting the valley of the Nile, which is nowhere very broad, the caravan with which Shaw travelled proceeded directly east through the desert towards Suez, the atmosphere being perfectly clear and serene; a fortunate circumstance, as the heavens were every night their only covering, a carpet spread on the sand their bed, and a bundle of clothes their pillow. In this situation they were nightly wet to the skin by the copious dew, though, such is the salubrity of the climate, their health was not in the least impaired by it. When they had arrived at their halting-place, and were about to lie down to sleep, the camels were caused to kneel down in a circle about their resting-place, with their faces pointing outwards, and their load and saddle piled up behind them, and being naturally so wakeful as to be roused from sleep by the least noise, they served their masters instead of a guard.
As in so wild and steril a country the purchasing of provisions as they might be wanted on the way was of course out of the question, they were obliged to furnish themselves in Egypt with a stock sufficient for their consumption during the whole journey. In most countries nature supplies man wherewith to quench his thirst, without his experiencing the necessity of exercising his foresight or taxing his ingenuity, by lavishly scattering about her refreshing springs over the earth, or by suspending, as in the forests of Brazil, diminutive vegetable reservoirs in the thicket, where he may always calculate upon finding the requisite quantity of cool pure water. But in Arabia this rule does not hold. Our traveller, therefore, upon commencing his journey, took care to provide himself with a sufficient number of goat-skins, which were replenished every four or five days, or oftener, if wells were met with. Wine, likewise, and brandy, together with wheatflour, rice, biscuit, honey, oil, vinegar, olives, lentils, potted flesh, and such other articles of food as would keep sweet and wholesome during two months, were laid in; as well as barley, with a few beans intermixed, which, with balls made of the flour of the one or both of them, and a little water, constituted the whole sustenance of the camels. Their kitchen furniture consisted of a copper pot and wooden bowl, in the former of which they cooked, and from the latter ate their food, or kneaded therein their unleavened cakes. When the caravan halted for the purpose of cooking their breakfast or dinner, the dung left by the camels of preceding travellers was carefully gathered up, there being no wood; and this, when it had been a few days exposed to the sun, took fire quickly, and burned like charcoal. Their food being prepared, whether it was potted flesh boiled with rice, a lentil-soup, or unleavened cakes, served up with oil or honey, one of the Arabs belonging to the party, not, as the Scripture says, “to eat his morsel alone,” placing himself upon the highest spot of ground in the neighbourhood, called out thrice, with a loud voice to all his brethren, “the Sons of the Faithful,” to come and partake of it; though none of them, says the traveller, were in view or perhaps within a hundred miles of them. The custom, however, is maintained as a mark of benevolence, and, when an opportunity occurs, of their hospitality.
Upon arriving at the fountain of Elim, two leagues to the west of Suez, they found it brackish, and though there were several large troughs for the convenience of watering cattle, it was not considered wholesome, and the people of the neighbourhood preferred the waters of the Ain el Mousa, or “Fountain of Moses,” two leagues east of the city, which are lukewarm and sulphureous, and spout up like an artificial fountain from the earth,—a circumstance which Dr. Shaw thinks is no other way to be accounted for than by deducing their origin from the “great abyss!” The distance between Cairo and Suez is about ninety Roman miles, which the Israelites, according to Josephus, though the Scriptures are silent on the subject, traversed in three days, which, considering that they were encumbered with aged persons and children, Dr. Shaw thinks exceedingly improbable. The time employed in his own traject he does not mention; but observes that upon every little eminence on the road, as well as in the mountains of Libya near Egypt, great quantities of echini, as well as of bivalve and turbinated shells, were to be found, most of which corresponded exactly with their respective families still preserved in the Red Sea. The old walls of Suez, as well as the ruins of the village of Ain el Mousa, are full of fossil shells, which, as Xenophon remarks in the Anabasis, was the case with the walls of certain castles on the confines of Curdistan.
Having turned the point of the Red Sea at Suez, they proceeded towards the south, having the sea on their right, and the broken plain of the desert on the left. In the tongue of land improperly called the “Peninsula of Mount Sinai,” lying between the Sea of Suez and the Gulf of Akaba, over which they were now moving, the danger, while the whole caravan kept together, was not great, as opportunities of plunder being unfrequent, robbers had not sufficient motives for establishing themselves there. The chances of danger being thus diminished, our traveller became imboldened to overstep the limits of prudence, and yielding to his passion for collecting plants and other curiosities, lagged behind, or wandered from the caravan. Scarcely, however, had he tasted the sweets of feeling himself alone in the boundless wilderness, a pleasure more poignant and tumultuous than can be conceived by those who have never experienced it, than he beheld three robbers start up, as it were, from the sand, and rush upon him. Resistance was out of the question. The ruffians immediately seized him, and tearing off his clothes, mean and ragged as they were, two of them began to fight for the possession of them. Meanwhile he stood by, naked, a spectator of the fray, apprehensive that their natural ferocity being aggravated by strife and contention, they might terminate their quarrel by plunging their daggers in his heart. Providence, however, had otherwise determined. The third robber, taking compassion upon his forlorn and helpless condition, allowed him to escape; and after wandering about among the naked rocks and burning sands for some time, he fortunately overtook the caravan.
For several days the sky, as I have already observed, was serene, and the weather beautiful; but on their arriving at Wady Gharendel, a small stream which flows into the Red Sea, a few leagues south of Suez, they observed that the tops of the mountains, which now flanked their road on both sides, were at intervals capped with clouds, which sometimes remained stationary during the whole day. This disposition of the atmosphere was soon after succeeded by a violent tempest. A canopy of dark clouds extended itself over the earth—the lightning flashed incessantly—the thunder rolled along the sky—and the rain descended throughout the night with all the weight and fury of a tropical storm. Such tempests, however, are exceedingly rare in that part of Arabia, though they are not, as Burckhardt observes, at all uncommon in the Hejaz; nor, according to Niebuhr, is Yemen much less liable to them. But in the neighbourhood of Mount Sinai there is usually one uniform course of weather throughout the year, the winds blowing briskly during the day, and decreasing with the decrease of light. In the level parts of the desert, where the plain was as unbroken as a calm sea, our traveller observed that curious phenomenon called the mirage, or mimic lake, every object within the circumference of which appeared to be magnified in an extraordinary manner, so that a shrub might be taken for a tree, and a flock of birds for a caravan of camels. This seeming collection of waters always advanced about a quarter of a mile before the observers, while the intermediate space was one continued glow, occasioned by the quivering undulating motion of that quick succession of vapours and exhalations which were extracted from the earth by the powerful influence of the sun. The few real springs of water which occurred on the road were all of them either brackish or sulphureous; yet the water they afford is so extremely wholesome, and so provocative of appetite, that few persons are ever afflicted with sickness in traversing these wild inhospitable scenes.
Among the curiosities which are scattered by the liberal hand of nature even over these deserts may be enumerated certain beautiful flints and pebbles, which are superior to Florentine marble, and, in many instances, equal to the Mokha stone, in the variety of their figures and representations. Locusts, hornets, and vipers were numerous; and the lizards seem to have considerably amused the loitering members of the caravan by their active movements and spotted skins. Of birds the only ones seen by Shaw were the percnopterus and the dove, as the graceful and beautiful antelope was the only animal; but the ostrich, which he seems to consider neither a bird nor a beast, is the grand ranger, says he, and ubiquitarian of the deserts, from the Atlantic Ocean to the very utmost skirts of Arabia, and perhaps far beyond it to the east. Of the white hares, like those found in the Alps and other cold regions, which some travellers have observed in this peninsula, Dr. Shaw saw no specimen; neither did he meet with any badgers, though, from the frequent mention made of their skins in Exodus, this animal must formerly have abounded here. Nothing, however, seems to have kindled up a poetical fervour in the mind of our traveller like the ostrich, and the magnificent description of its nature and peculiarities which occurs in the book of Job. “When these birds,” he observes, “are surprised by coming suddenly upon them, while they are feeding in some valley, or behind some rocky or sandy eminence in the desert, they will not stay to be curiously viewed and examined. They afford an opportunity only of admiring at a distance the extraordinary agility and the stateliness likewise of their motions, the richness of their plumage, and the great propriety there was of ascribing to them ‘an expanded, quivering wing.’ Nothing certainly can be more beautiful and entertaining than such a sight! the wings, by their repeated though unwearied vibrations, equally serving them for sails and oars; while their feet, no less assisting in conveying them out of sight, are no less insensible of fatigue.”
It was at Gharendel that he supposed the Israelites to have met with those “bitter waters,” or “waters of Marah,” mentioned in Exodus; and he observes that the little rill which is still found in that place has a brackish taste, unless diluted by the dews and rains. Proceeding thirty leagues southward from this place, without meeting with any thing remarkable, they arrived at Elim, upon the northern skirts of the desert of Sin, where, as the Scriptures relate, the Israelites found twelve wells of water and seventy palm-trees. Of the wells our traveller could discern nine only remaining, the other three having been filled up by the sand; but the seventy palm-trees had multiplied to upwards of two thousand, and under their shade was the “Hummum, or Bath of Moses,” which the inhabitants of the neighbouring port of Tor held in great veneration. Here they enjoyed the first view of Mount Sinai, rearing its rugged summit above the plain, and overlooking the whole surrounding country. The traject of the desert of Sin occupied nine hours, and they were nearly twelve hours more in threading the winding and difficult ways which divide that desert from the plain of Sinai. At length, however, they reached the convent of St. Catherine, supposed to be built over the place where Moses saw the angel of the Lord in the burning bush, when he was guarding the flocks of Jethro. This convent, or rather fortress, is nearly three hundred feet square, and upwards of forty in height, constructed partly with stone, partly with earth and mortar. The more immediate place of the Shekinah is marked by a little chapel, which the monks, who are of the order of St. Basil, regard with so remarkable a degree of veneration, that, in imitation of Moses, they take their shoes from off their feet whenever they enter it. This, with many other chapels dedicated to various saints, is included within what is called the “Church of the Transfiguration,” a spacious and beautiful structure, covered with lead, and supported by a double row of marble columns.
The door of this convent is opened only when the archbishop, who commonly resides at Cairo, comes to be installed; and therefore our travellers, like all other pilgrims, were drawn up by a windlass to a window, nearly thirty feet from the ground, where they were admitted by some of the lay brothers. From a notion which prevails but too generally among mankind, that holiness consists in thrusting aside, as it were, the gifts which the hand of Providence holds out to us, the poor men who immure themselves in this wild prison condemn their bodies to extraordinary privations and hardships, not only abstaining, like Brahmins, from animal food, but likewise from the less sinful indulgences of butter, milk, and eggs. With an inconsistency, however, from which even the Pythagoreans of Hindostan are not altogether free, shellfish, crabs, and lobsters are not included within the pale of their superstitious humanity; and of these they accordingly partake as often as they can obtain a supply from their sister convent at Tor, or from Menah el Dizahab. Their ordinary food consists of bread, or biscuit, olives, dates, figs, parched pulse, salads, oil, vinegar, to which, on stated days, half a pint of date brandy is added.
From this convent to the top of Mount Sinai, a perpendicular height, according to our traveller, of nearly seven thousand two hundred feet, there was formerly a stone staircase, built by the Empress Helena; but in many places the effects of her pious munificence have disappeared, and the ascent of the mountain is now considered by the monks sufficiently difficult to be imposed as a severe penance upon their pilgrims and votaries. Dr. Shaw did not, when he had reached it, find the summit very spacious, nor does he seem to have greatly enjoyed the extensive view which it commands over scenes rendered profoundly interesting and memorable by the wanderings of the children of Israel. On descending into the desert of Rephidim, on the western side of the mountain, he was shown the rock of Meribah, from which Moses caused water to gush forth by the stroke of his wand. It was about six yards square, lying tottering, as it were, and loose near the middle of the valley, and seemed to have been formerly a part or cliff of Mount Sinai, which hangs in a variety of precipices all over this plain. The waters had now ceased to flow, but the channel they had once occupied remained, incrustated, to borrow the doctor’s expression, like the inside of a tea-kettle that has been long used, and covered with several mossy productions, whose life and verdure were preserved by the dew.
Having terminated his researches in these desert scenes, which seem to have thrown new light upon numerous points of sacred geography, our traveller returned to Cairo, descended the Nile, and proceeding by sea to Syria, arrived in that country about the commencement of December, 1721. Here he seems, for he has left no exact account of his movements, to have pursued nearly the same route with Maundrell, whose description he regarded as so accurate in general, that he merely noticed such places and things as had either been omitted or imperfectly represented by that traveller. Though it was the middle of winter when he passed through Syria and Phœnicia, the aspect of the country was verdant and cheerful, particularly the woods, which chiefly consisted of the gall-bearing oak, at the roots of which the turf was gemmed with anemones, ranunculuses, colchicums, and the dudaim or mandrakes. The air here, as in Barbary, is temperate, and the climate healthy; and, in like manner, westerly winds bring rain, while the east winds, blowing over immeasurable tracts of land, are generally dry though hazy and tempestuous.
The excursions of our traveller in this country appear to have been few and timid, and he remarks, apparently as an apology for this circumstance, that it was necessary to be upon all occasions attended by a numerous escort; for that numerous bands of Arabs, from fifty to five hundred in number, scoured the plains in every direction in search of booty. But even the presence of an escort was not always a safeguard; for the caravan with which Dr. Shaw travelled to Jerusalem, consisting of at least six thousand pilgrims, protected by three or four hundred spahis and four bands of Turkish infantry, with the mutsellim, or general, at their head, was attacked by one of the marauding parties, and treated with the greatest insult and barbarity. Scarcely was there a pilgrim out of so great a number who was not robbed of part of his clothes or of his money; and those who had not much of either to lose were beaten unmercifully with their pikes or javelins. Our traveller himself was not allowed to remain a mere spectator of the scene, for when the banditti had taken possession of the visible wealth of the party, correctly judging that there still remained a considerable portion which had been adroitly concealed, he was forcibly carried off among the hostages, which they seized upon to ensure a ransom, to Jeremiel or Anashoth. In this desperate position he remained all night, exposed to barbarities and insults, and it is exceedingly probable that his captivity would have been of much longer duration, had not the Aga of Jerusalem, with a numerous body of troops, next morning attacked his captors and set him at liberty.
Having visited the several holy places in and about Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho, and the Jordan, he returned, in April, 1722, towards the seacoast; and in journeying by night through the valleys of Mount Ephraim, was attended for about an hour by an ignis fatuus, which assumed a variety of extraordinary appearances. Sometimes, says the traveller, it was globular, or else pointed, like the flame of a candle; afterward it would spread itself, and involve their whole company in its pale inoffensive light; then at once contract and suddenly disappear. But in less than a minute it would begin again to exert itself as before, running along from one place to another with great swiftness, like a train of gunpowder set on fire; or else it would spread and expand itself over two or three acres of the adjacent mountains, discovering every shrub and tree which grew upon them. The atmosphere from the beginning of the evening had been remarkably thick and hazy, and the dew, as they felt upon their bridles, was unusually clammy and unctuous. This curious meteor our traveller supposes to be of the same nature with those luminous bodies which skip about the masts and yards of ships at sea, and known among sailors by the name of corpo santo, as they were by that of Castor and Pollux among the ancients.
While the ship in which he had embarked was lying under Mount Carmel, about the middle of April, he beheld three extraordinary flights of storks, proceeding from Egypt towards the north-east, each of which took up more than three hours in passing, while it was at the same time upwards of half a mile in breadth![[1]] During cloudy weather, and when the winds happen, as they frequently do, to blow from different quarters at the same time, waterspouts are often seen upon the coast of Syria, particularly in the neighbourhood of Capes Latikea, Grego, and Carmel. Those which Dr. Shaw had an opportunity of observing seemed, he says, to be so many cylinders of water falling down from the clouds, though by the reflection, as he imagined, of the descending columns, as from the actual dropping of the water contained in them, they sometimes appeared, especially at a distance, to be sucked up from the sea. Before we return with our traveller to Barbary, it may be worth the while to notice a remark which he made upon the economy of silk-worms in Syria: there being some danger that, owing to the heat of the climate in the plains, the eggs should be hatched before nature has prepared their proper food, the inhabitants regularly send them, as soon as they are laid, to Conobine, or some other place on Mount Libanus, where their hatching is delayed by the cold until the mulberry buds are ready for them in the spring. In Europe, on the contrary, the mulberry leaves put forth before the eggs of the silk-worm feel the influence of the sun; and at Nice, where many silk-worms are bred, it is the custom, as Dr. Smollet informs us, in order to hasten the process of hatching, to enclose the eggs in small linen bags, which are worn by the women in their bosoms until the worms begin to appear.
[1]. Catesby, in his account of Carolina, gives a no less extraordinary description of the flights of pigeons:—“In Virginia I have seen the pigeons of passage fly in such continued trains, three days successively, that there was not the least interval in losing sight of them, but that some where or other in the air they were to be seen continuing their flight south. When they roost (which they do on one another’s backs), they often break down the limbs of oaks by their weight, and leave their dung some inches thick under the trees they roost upon.”—P. 23.
It should have been remarked, that previously to his visit to Syria he had sailed to the island of Cyprus, where he seems to have visited Limesol and the principal places on the coast; but of this part of his travels no detailed account remains. Setting sail from Acra, he traversed the Ægean, coasted along Peloponnesus, and passing between Malta and Sicily, without touching at either, arrived safe at Bona, in the kingdom of Algiers.
Thenceforward his excursions were confined to the coast of Barbary, and as these appear to have been undertaken at various intervals by way of relaxation and amusement, to vary a course of life in itself remarkably monotonous, he did not judge them worthy of being particularly described. He observes, however, in general, that in all the maritime towns of Africa and the Levant where there were British factories he was received with distinguished hospitality, enjoying, not only the use of the houses of the English residents, but likewise of their horses, janizaries, and servants. In the interior of Barbary, where there were no Europeans, the style of hospitality was different. Here there was a house set apart for the reception of strangers, in which they were lodged and entertained for one night at the public expense, having the attendance and protection of an officer appointed for the purpose. Occasionally, when neither towns nor villages appeared, they lodged more romantically in a cavern, beneath the shelf of a rock, under the arches of ancient cisterns, or in a grove of trees; and at other times threw themselves upon the bare sand, and made the sky their mantle. When they happened to fall in with an Arab encampment, or douar, as it is termed in Barbary, they were almost invariably entertained with hospitality, the master of the tent in which they lodged killing a kid or a goat, a lamb or a sheep, according to the number of his guests, and causing the half of it to be immediately seethed by his wife, while the remainder was cut into kabobs, or small pieces, and roasted for the travellers to take away with them next day. On these occasions, if his hosts were particularly obliging, and entertained him with “savoury” viands, our traveller would generally, he says, present the master of the tent with a knife, a couple of flints, or a small quantity of English gunpowder, and the lallah, or lady, with “a skein of thread, a large needle, or a pair of scissors.” An ordinary silk handkerchief of two shillings value, he adds, was a present for a princess.
During his residence at Algiers, but in what year I have been unable to discover, he seems to have married the widow of Mr. Edward Holden, formerly consul of that place, who outlived him, and erected a monument to his memory. In 1723, the year after his return from Syria, a violent earthquake was felt at Algiers, which threw down a number of houses, and stopped the course of several fountains; but in the year following a still more violent shock was felt, which seems to have shaken the whole coast, while the air was clear and temperate, and the quick-silver standing at the greatest height. At such times the barometer, he observes, was not affected with any sudden alterations, nor was there any remarkable change in the air, which was neither more calm nor windy, hazy, nor serene, than at other times. During the same year, while sailing in an Algerine cruiser of fifty guns towards Cape Bona, he felt an earthquake at sea, which produced so prodigious a concussion in the ship, that at each shock a weight of twenty or thirty tons appeared to have fallen from a vast height upon the ballast. At this time they were five leagues to the south of the Seven Capes, and could not reach ground with a line of two hundred fathoms.
In the year 1727 he visited the kingdom of Tunis, which was not, he observes, divided, like Algiers, into provinces, governed each by a provincial bey, but was wholly under the immediate inspection of the bey, who annually made the circuit of his dominions with a flying camp, and collected the tribute. The seacoast, the Zeugitania of the ancients, was more thickly inhabited, and exhibited more contentment, prosperity, and other marks of good government than any portion of the neighbouring kingdom. Upon arriving at Biserta, Utica, and the ruins of Carthage, Dr. Shaw throws open the floodgates of his learning, in endeavouring to determine the extent of the encroachments made by the mud of the Bagrada upon the sea, the site of the little city which Cato rendered illustrious by his death, and the circumference and topography of Dido’s capital. Bochart, with a still greater luxuriance of quotation, had, by comparing the testimony of the ancients, determined its circumference to have been nearly forty-five miles; but according to Dr. Shaw, the peninsula upon which it stood does not much exceed thirty miles in circumference, and the city, he thinks, could never lay claim to above half that extent. However, as at the beginning of the Punic war the number of its inhabitants is said to have amounted to seven hundred thousand, while it was pronounced by Suidas the largest and most powerful city upon earth, I cannot believe it to have been no more than fifteen miles in circumference, an extent not at all answerable to the idea which the ancients have left us of its greatness. It seems probable, therefore, that our traveller’s survey was hastily and imperfectly performed.
Quitting these renowned ruins, he proceeded towards Tunis, coasting along the lake, formerly a deep and extensive port, which stretches out before the capital, and communicates by a narrow channel with the sea. The water in this large basin nowhere exceeds seven feet in depth, while the bottom for nearly a mile round the whole sweep of the shore is generally dry and noisome, the common sewers of Tunis discharging themselves into this great receptacle. At a distance, however, the prospect of the lake is not without beauty, its surface being frequently enlivened by large flocks of the flamingo, or phœnicopterus, the bird to which the Hindoo legislator compares a beautiful young woman. It is likewise celebrated for the number and size of its mullets, which are reckoned the sweetest in Barbary, and the roes of which, when pressed, dried, and salted, are called botargo, and considered a great delicacy.
The city of Tunis, situated upon an acclivity on the western shore of the lake, and commanding a fine view of the ruins of Carthage, and of the circumambient sea, as Livy expresses it, as far as the island Ægimurus, the modern Zembra, being surrounded by lakes and marshes, would be exceedingly insalubrious were not the effects of the miasmata in a great measure counteracted by the vast quantities of mastic, myrtle, rosemary, and other gummy and aromatic plants which grow in the neighbourhood, and being used as firewood to warm their baths and ovens, communicate a sensible fragrance to the air. Tunis, however, is absolutely destitute of water, having, as Leo Africanus observes, neither rivulet, fountain, nor well; and the inhabitants are consequently reduced to rely upon what they can catch in cisterns when it rains, or upon what is brought into the city from a brackish well in the vicinity in leathern bags, and sold about the streets as a precious article of traffic. The Tunisians, our traveller observes, are the most civilized people of Barbary, agreeable in their intercourse with strangers, and coveting rather than shunning, like other Mohammedans, all occasions of coming into contact with Christians. The population of the city at this period was said to exceed three hundred thousand; no doubt an extravagant exaggeration, as the circumference of the place did not much exceed three miles.
From this city our traveller continued his journey towards the east, and passing by Rhodes, the ancient Ades, Solyman, and Masourah, arrived at the sanctuary of Sidi Daoud, situated among the ruins of the ancient Nishna. Here he was shown the tomb of the saint, which was found upon examination to be nothing but a Roman prætorium, the pavement of which was adorned with the most elegant mosaics in the world; the general design being as bold and free as that of a picture, while the various figures, which consisted of horses, birds, fishes, and trees, were executed with the most delicate symmetry, and in a variety of brilliant colours so judiciously intermingled and contrasted as to produce an admirable effect. He next fixes at Lowhareah, the site of the ancient Aquilaria, where, during the civil wars, the troops of Cairo were landed, and cut to pieces by Sabura. The remaining ruins were insignificant; but the immense quarries from whence, according to Strabo, the materials for the building of Carthage, Utica, and other neighbouring cities were obtained, still remain open, and are supposed to have furnished Virgil with the original hint of his “Nympharum Domus,” &c., in the first book of the Æneid, though Addison rather supposes that the Bay of Naples is entitled to this honour. Be this as it may, from the sea to the village of Lowhareah, a distance of about half a mile, the interjacent mountain, from the level of the sea to the height of twenty or thirty feet, according to the disposition of the strata, is hollowed out, while enormous pillars are left standing at regular distances to support the superincumbent mass, through which small shafts or apertures were bored at intervals for the admission of fresh air. However, that the reader may perceive the justness of the doctor’s illustration, I will continue the description in his own words, and then subjoin the passage of Virgil referred to: “Moreover, as this mountain is shaded all over with trees, as the arches here described (the openings to the quarry) lie open to the sea, having a large cliff on each side, with the island Ægimurus placed over-against them; as there are likewise some fountains perpetually draining from the rocks, and seats very convenient for the weary labourer to rest upon: from such a concurrence of circumstances, so exactly corresponding to the cave which Virgil places somewhere in this gulf, we have little room to doubt of the following description being literally true, notwithstanding some commentators may have thought it fictitious, or applicable to another place.”
Est in secessu longo locus. Insula portum
Efficit objectu laterum, quibus omnis ab alto
Frangitur, inque sinus scindit sese unda reductos.
Hinc atque hinc vastæ rupes, geminique minantur
In Cœlum scopuli: quorum sub vertice latè
Æquora tuta silent. Tum sylvis scœna coruscis
Desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra.
Fronte sub adversa scopulis pendentibus antrum:
Intus aquæ dulces; vivoque sedilia saxo;
Nympharum domus. Hic fessas non vincula naves
Ulla tenent: unco non adligat anchora morsa.
From Cape Bon, the Promontorium Mercurii of the ancients, which projects into the sea a little to the north of Aquilaria, the inhabitants assured our traveller that they could, in clear weather, discern the mountains of Sicily, more than sixty miles distant. Following the bend of the shore, and passing by the sites or ruins of several ancient places, he proceeded through a rugged road, delightfully shaded with olive trees, to Hamamet, or the “City of Wild Pigeons,” so called from the prodigious number of those birds which breed in the neighbouring cliffs. At Seloome, a small hemispherical hill, he entered the ancient province of Bizacium, once renowned for its fertility, probably erroneously, as the soil is dry, sandy, and of no great depth, though admirably adapted to the olive tree, which flourishes in great perfection all along the coast. The interior is not at all more fertile. Our traveller’s whole employment during this journey was determining the sites of ancient cities, and illustrating other points of geography; but he observed nothing very striking or picturesque until he reached the shores of the Lesser Syrtis, all along which there runs a succession of small flat islands, banks of sand, and oozy shallows, into which the inhabitants wade out for a mile or two from the shore, fixing up numerous hurdles of reeds in various windings and directions as they go, and thus taking immense quantities of fish. Owing to the violent east wind which blew during his whole journey along this coast, he was prevented from observing the flux and reflux of the tide here, from which some authors have derived its name—(“à σύρω [TN], traho, quod in accessu et recessu arenam et cœnum ad se trahit et congerit.”—Eustathius)—though he was informed that at the island of Jerby, the eastern boundary of the Syrtis, the sea rises upwards of six feet above its usual height, a circumstance which has likewise been observed in the Gulf of Venice.
This was the boundary of his travels along the coast, from which he now turned towards the interior, and arrived upon the shores of the Lake of Marko, the Palus Tritonis of the ancients. This lake is about sixty miles in length, and in some places about eighteen in breadth; but it is not one unbroken sheet of water, being interspersed with numerous islands, one of which, though uninhabitable, is large, and covered with date trees. The inhabitants, who have a tradition for every thing, say that the Egyptians, in one of their expeditions into this country, encamped some time upon this island, and scattering about the stones of the dates which they had eaten, thus sowed the palm groves, which at present abound there; and hence, perhaps, the lake itself acquired the name of the “Plains of Pharaoh.” To direct the marches of the caravans across this shallow lake, a number of trunks of palm-trees are fixed up at certain distances, without which travelling would be extremely difficult and dangerous, as the opposite shores are nearly as level as the sea, and even the date trees which grow upon them are too low to be discovered at more than sixteen miles distance. At Tozer, on the western bank, a great traffic in dates is carried on with the merchants of the interior, who bring slaves from the banks of the Niger to be exchanged for fruit.
Proceeding to the west from the Lake of Marko, our traveller next traversed a barren and dreary waste, the haunt of robbers and murderers; and as he passed along he saw upon the ground the blood of a Turkish gentleman, who, he afterward learned, had been murdered two days before. Immediately after he had left this ominous spot, five of the assassins, mounted upon black horses, and closely muffled in their burnooses, or loose cloaks, suddenly made their appearance; but observing that his companions were numerous and well armed, they met them peaceably, and gave them the salaam. Continuing his journey westward, without meeting with any further adventures, he returned to Algiers.
Dr. Shaw seems, after this expedition into Tunis, to have remained quiet for several years, occasionally making excursions into the interior, and proceeding westward, in 1730, as far as the river Mulloviah. Having already travelled over the whole of these provinces, from the sea to the desert, when following the track of Leo Africanus, it will be unnecessary to pursue the footsteps of Dr. Shaw. He remarked, however, during his excursions among the ridges of Mount Atlas, an extraordinary race of mountaineers, with light complexions and yellow hair, which seems to have escaped the researches of Leo and all other travellers. These people he with great probability supposes to be descended from the Vandals, who, in the time of Procopius, were said to be dispersed among the native tribes, though it is more probable that they took possession of these fastnesses, of which the rude inhabitants were never able to dispossess them. In the city of Kosantina he observed a second Tarpeian rock, from which, since the foundation of the city, such criminals as might be condemned to capital punishment have been precipitated into the river Ampsaga, which dashes along at its base.
In his inquiries into the natural history of these countries, our traveller bestowed particular attention upon the palm and the lotus-tree, the latter of which, though greatly celebrated in ancient authors, is still comparatively little known. From the descriptions of Herodotus, Theophrastus, and Pliny, he infers the identity of the lotus of the ancients with the seedra of the Arabs, which is a shrub of common occurrence in the Jereed, and other parts of Barbary; and has, he observes, the leaves, prickles, flower, and fruit of the ziziphus or jubeb; except that in the lotus the fruit is round, smaller, and more luscious; while the branches, like those of the paliurus, are neither so crooked nor so much jointed. The lotus fruit, which greatly resembles gingerbread in taste, is still in great repute, and is sold in all the markets of the southern provinces of Barbary. Among the beasts of burden in use at Algiers is the kumrah, an animal produced between the ass and the cow, and having the single hoof of the former, with the tail and head of the latter, though without horns.
The prodigious clouds of locusts which sometimes infest the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and the tremendous devastations which they commit, have been described by many travellers; but by no one, I think, has a more vigorous picture of their movements and appearance been given than by Dr. Shaw in the following passage:—“Those,” says he, “which I saw in 1724 and 1725 were much bigger than our common grasshoppers, and had brown spotted wings, with legs and bodies of a bright yellow. Their first appearance was towards the latter end of March, the wind having been for some time from the south. In the middle of April their numbers were so vastly increased, that in the heat of the day they formed themselves into large and numerous swarms, flew in the air like a succession of clouds; and, as the prophet Joel expresses it, they darkened the sun. When the wind blew briskly, so that these swarms were crowded by others, or thrown one upon another, we had a lively idea of that comparison of the Psalmist, of being tossed up and down as the locust. In the month of May, when the ovaries of those insects were ripe and turgid, each of these swarms began gradually to disappear, and retired into the Metijiah and other adjacent plains, where they deposited their eggs. These were no sooner hatched in June than each of the broods collected itself into a compact body, of a furlong or more in square; and, marching afterward directly forwards towards the sea, they let nothing escape them, eating up every thing that was green and juicy; not only the lesser kinds of vegetables, but the vine likewise, the fig-tree, the pomegranate, the palm, and the apple-tree; even all the trees of the field; in doing which they kept their ranks like men of war, climbing over, as they advanced, every tree or wall that was in their way; nay, they entered into our very houses and bed-chambers, like so many thieves. The inhabitants, to stop their progress, made a variety of pits and trenches all over their fields and gardens, which they filled with water; or else they heaped up therein heath, stubble, and such-like combustible matter, which were severally set on fire at the approach of the locusts. But this was all to no purpose; for the trenches were quickly filled up, and the fires extinguished by infinite swarms succeeding one another; while the front was regardless of danger; and the rear pressed on so close that a retreat was altogether impossible. A day or two after one of these broods was in motion, others were already hatched to march and glean after them, gnawing off the very bark and the young branches of such trees as had before escaped with the loss only of their fruit and foliage. So justly have they been compared by the prophet Joel to a great army; who further observes, that ‘the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.’
“Having lived near a month in this manner, like a sword with ten thousand edges, to which they have been compared, upon the ruin and destruction of every vegetable substance that came in their way, they arrived at their full growth, and threw off their nympha state by casting their outward skin. To prepare themselves for this change, they clung by their hinder feet to some bush, twig, or corner of a stone; and immediately, by using an undulating motion, their heads would first break out, and then the rest of their bodies. The whole transformation was performed in seven or eight minutes; after which they lay for some time in a torpid and seemingly in a languishing condition; but as soon as the sun and the air had hardened their wings, by drying up the moisture that remained upon them after casting their sloughs, they reassumed their former voracity, with an addition both of strength and agility. Yet they continued not long in this state before they were entirely dispersed, as their parents were before, after they had laid their eggs; and as the direction of the marches and flights of them both was always to the northward, and not having strength, as they sometimes had, to reach the opposite shores of Italy, France, or Spain, it is probable they perished in the sea: a grave which, according to these people, they have in common with other winged creatures. The locust, I conjecture, was the noisome beast, or the pernicious destructive animal, as the original words may be interpreted, which, with the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, made the four sore judgments that were threatened against Jerusalem. The Jews were allowed to eat them; and, indeed, when sprinkled with salt and dried, they are not unlike in taste to our fresh-water crayfish.”
Among the fish on the coast of Barbary the most curious is the penna marina, or sea-feather, which the fishermen sometimes find entangled in the meshes of their nets; and which, during the night, is so remarkably glowing and luminous as to enable the fishermen to discover by their light the size and quantity of the other fish which may happen to be enclosed within the same net.
In his remarks upon the moral condition of the inhabitants of Tunis and Algiers, he informs us that the sciences which were formerly so assiduously cultivated by the Moors are now neglected or despised: but they have still, as of old, a passion for poetry and music, and many a wandering dervish, like the Αοιδοί [TN], or chapsists of antiquity, excites the admiration and generosity of the Moorish Arabs, by his enthusiastic improvisatores, accompanied by the rude notes of the Arabelbah, or bladder and string. Wild nations, whose feelings and passions are allowed a freer play than ours, are far more susceptible than we are of the delights which nervous poetry and simple melody are calculated to produce; and the Moors, whose tunes our traveller describes as merely “lively and pleasant,” are so deeply affected by music, that, in the warmth of their imagination, they lend their own sensations to inanimate objects, affirming seriously that the flowers of mullein and mothwort will droop upon hearing the mizmoune played.
Provisions, in the time of Dr. Shaw, were exceedingly cheap, a large piece of bread, a bundle of turnips, or a small basket of fruit, being to be purchased for less than a quarter of a farthing. A fowl might be bought for a penny or three halfpence; a sheep for three shillings and sixpence; and a cow and a calf for a guinea. The usual price of a bushel of the best wheat was fifteen pence. Bruce, whose fate it has been to have his testimony upon several important points called in question by ignorant conceited persons, has been ridiculed for asserting that the flesh of lions is commonly eaten by a tribe of African Arabs. Our traveller himself, who had been laughed at for making the assertion in conversation, introduced it timidly into the appendix of his first edition; but in the second it was restored to its place in the narrative, where it is said that “the flesh of the lion is in great esteem, having no small affinity with veal, both in colour, taste, and flavour.”
The majority of persons appear to believe, with Shakspeare, that the Moors are a black, ill-favoured people; but, on the contrary, the Moorish women would be considered beautiful even in England, and the children have the finest complexions in the world. The men, from constant exposure to the sun, are generally swarthy, but never black; and the fine olive tinge they thus acquire only renders their complexions the more agreeable to the eye, as Heber observes of the Hindoos. In these countries, as in Southern Asia, women are nubile at a very early age, being very frequently mothers at eleven, and grandmothers at twenty-two. The circumstance which renders the seclusion of women necessary in such countries is, that the age of puberty precedes the age of discretion; for the passions reaching their maturity long before the reason, they stand in need of being directed by the reason of others until their own is ripened, and when it is they have lost the habit of consulting it. The ancient custom of hiring old women, who, as the prophet Amos expresses it, “are skilful in lamentation,” to perform at funerals, still prevails in Barbary; and so powerful is the effect of this scenical representation of sorrow, that when they are ἀλαλάζοντας πολλά, or “wailing greatly,” expressing their mimic grief by sound, gestures, and contortions of countenance, they seldom fail to work up the bystanders to an ecstasy of sorrow, so that even the English, who know it to be artificial, are deeply touched by it.
The superstitious practices of the Mohammedans in general, and particularly of those inhabiting Northern Africa, are strange and numerous, many of them being apparently offshoots from pagan practices, bequeathed to their ancestors by the Grecian or Roman colonists who subdued and inhabited these coasts. They suspend upon the necks of their children, as the Romans did their bulla, the figure of an open hand, generally the right, which they likewise paint upon their ships and houses, to avert the effects of the evil eye. At the same time the number five is unlucky, and “five in your eyes,” meaning the five fingers, is their proverb for cursing and defiance. Adults wear small scrolls, as the Jews did their phylacteries, containing verses from the Koran, as a charm against fascination, witchcraft, sickness, and misfortune. In one particular they appear to differ from the superstitious in Europe, who generally imagine that faith in the force of the spell is necessary to its efficacy; for their horses and cattle, which can be supposed to have but little faith in such matters, have similar scrolls suspended round their necks, no doubt with equal benefit. Their belief in jenoune, or genii, a class of beings between angels and devils, and which, like the fairies of our ancestors, are supposed to frequent shades and fountains, is deep-rooted and universal. These equivocal beings assume, they imagine, the form of toads, worms, lizards, and other small animals, which, being offensive to man, and lying frequently in his way, are extremely liable to be injured or destroyed. Therefore, when any person falls sick, fancying he may have harmed one of the jenoune lurking in some obscene shape, he immediately consults with one of those cunning-women who, like the veneficæ of antiquity, are versed in all expiatory ceremonies of this nature, and at the direction of the sorceress proceeds on a Wednesday with frankincense and other perfumes to some neighbouring spring, where a cock or a hen, a ram or a ewe, according to the sex or rank of the patient, is sacrificed to these spirits.
Dr. Shaw returned to England in the year 1733. In the course of the next year he took his degree of doctor of divinity, and was shortly afterward elected fellow of the Royal Society. Having employed five years in the composition and correction of his travels, he at length, in 1731, brought out the first edition, which was attacked by Dr. Pococke in his Description of the East. The numerous coins, busts, and other antiquities which he had collected in his travels he bestowed upon the university. Upon the death of Dr. Felton in 1740, he was nominated by his college principal of St. Edmund Hall, which he raised from a ruinous state by his munificence. He was at the same time presented to the vicarage of Bramley, in Hampshire, and likewise enjoyed during the remainder of his life the honour of being regius professor of Greek at Oxford. He died in 1751, in the sixtieth year of his age, and was buried at Bramley, where a monument was erected to his memory by his widow. The Shawia in botany received its name in honour of Dr. Shaw.
FREDERIC HASSELQUIST.
Born 1722.—Died 1752.
Hasselquist was born on the 3d of January, 1722, at Isernvall, in Eastern Gothland, in Sweden. His father, Andrew Hasselquist, who was the clergyman of the place, died in great poverty while our traveller was yet a youth; and to add still further to his misfortune, his mother likewise was shortly afterward so extremely debilitated both in mind and body as to be compelled to take refuge in the infirmary of Vastona. Hasselquist would therefore in all probability have been condemned to a life of obscurity and poverty had not M. Pontin, his maternal uncle, undertaken the care of his education, and sent him with his own children to the college of Linköping. But all the friends of Hasselquist seemed destined to be short-lived. Not long after his entrance at college the loss of this kind benefactor reduced him to the necessity of teaching for a livelihood until he should be of the proper age to enter into the university.
In 1741 he entered a student at the university of Upsal; but poverty, which when not overwhelming acts as a spur to genius, was still his faithful companion, and compelled him for a subsistence to exercise his talents in the way of all others best calculated to give them amplitude and vigour. He became a tutor. At the same time, however, he enjoyed the advantage of attending the lectures of the various professors; and the knowledge thus acquired was immediately digested, examined, and enlarged, to be transmitted in other lectures to his own humble pupils.
Physic and natural history, for which, according to Linnæus, he had an innate inclination, were his favourite studies. He had likewise, it is said, a taste and some talents for poetry. An enthusiastic devotion to the sciences, which, as the world goes, is often allowed to be, like virtue, its own reward, is sometimes advantageous, however, when it happens to be exhibited in the proper quarter. This was experienced by our traveller. His ardent passion for knowledge, which neither poverty nor a feeble constitution could subdue, at length, after a five years’ struggle, attracted the attention of the university authorities, who in 1746 obtained him a pension from the king. And in the course of next year he proved, by his “Dissertation on the Virtues of Plants,” that the progress he had made in the sciences amply justified the favour which had been shown him.
It was in the same year that he first conceived the idea of travelling in the East. Linnæus, in one of his botanical lectures, having enumerated the countries, the natural history of which was known, as well as those which were placed in the contrary predicament, happened to make mention of Palestine among the latter; for at that period it was as much a “terra incognita” to science as the most remote districts of India. He expressed his astonishment that theologians and commentators, whose business it is to understand the Scriptures, should have so long neglected the natural history of the Holy Land, by which so much light might be thrown upon them,—the more particularly as many divines had made the botany of other countries their study. These remarks were not lost upon Hasselquist. He immediately formed the design of repairing the neglect of former ages, and had no sooner taken this resolution than he communicated his intentions to Linnæus. The latter, who seems to have regarded him with something approaching to paternal affection, experienced considerable astonishment at his design, and made use of many arguments to turn him from the prosecution of it; dwelt upon the length of the way, the difficulties, the dangers, the expenses, and, worst of all, his delicate state of health and consumptive habit. But who was ever deterred by arguments from the prosecution of a favourite scheme? Hasselquist’s mind had already tried the strength of all these reasons, and found that, like the bands of flax round the limbs of Samson, they had no force when opposed to the efforts of the will. His health, he maintained, could be improved only by travelling and change of climate,—dangers he appears, like a true traveller, to have classed among imaginary obstacles; and as to the expense, why, rather than relinquish the idea he would travel on foot. In short, says Linnæus, it was clear that he was absolutely determined on travelling.
Hasselquist was not ignorant, however, that whether on foot or on horseback, moving from place to place is no easy matter without money. Not being one of that erratic race “who had no stomach but to fight,” he reflected that beefsteaks and plum-pudding, or some solid equivalents, would be no less necessary in Palestine than in Sweden; and therefore made an essay of his genius for overcoming difficulties by encountering those which beset his first step. It would seem that in Sweden there are many persons of distinction in whom the indolence sometimes superinduced by the possession of wealth extinguishes a natural passion for travelling, who, previous to entering upon that path which leads from this world to the next, lay aside a small sum which they find too heavy to take with them, for the benefit of those adventurous souls who have but slight acquaintance with those pleasures which take a man by the sleeve when he is about to put his foot in the stirrup, and smile away his resolution. For some of these whimsical legacies Hasselquist made application; but as they were not particularly burdensome to the persons in whose hands they had been placed, he applied in vain. Among his brethren of the faculty he was more successful; and in addition to the funds with which they furnished him, he obtained from the professors of civil law and theology certain small pensions which the king had placed at their disposal. And although extremely moderate, considering the object which he had in view, these resources seem to have appeared sufficient in the eyes of our traveller.
This first difficulty removed, he began to prepare himself for the proper execution of the task he had undertaken, by the study of the Arabic and other oriental languages; and that he might not interrupt his academical studies, continued to be present at the public lectures, underwent the usual examinations, and maintained the requisite theses; so that, though absent, he might yet receive the honours to which his merit entitled him. Having in the spring of 1749 acquired the degree of licentiate, he proceeded to Stockholm, where he delivered a course of lectures in botany, which procured him the patronage of all the lovers of that science. The Levant Company, moreover, in consideration of his extraordinary merit, offered him a free passage to Smyrna on board of one of their ships.
His project having succeeded thus far almost beyond his hopes, he embarked on the 7th of August, 1749, at Stockholm, and sailed down the Baltic, landing at various points on the coast of Sweden for the purpose of examining the plants and other natural productions of the country. The voyage down the Baltic was attended with storms; but the pleasure imparted by the extraordinary features of the scenery, the sandy, columnar mountains of Gothland, the dazzling peaks of Iceland, and the gloomy beech forests of Malmo caused him to attend but little to the inconvenience they occasioned. In traversing the German Ocean and the English Channel, they approached so near our shores that the chalky cliffs and hills which run along the coast were visible; and on entering the Strait of Gibraltar, they discovered on the one hand the mountains of Africa, bare of vegetation, and looking like prodigious heaps of limestone, or moving sand; and on the other those of Spain, with cloud-capped summits, and lighted up at night by numerous watchfires and limekilns. The coasts of Sicily, of the Morea, of Candia were seen in passing, and on the 15th of September they came to an anchor in the harbour of Milo.
Though Hasselquist was by no means destitute of a relish for the beauties of nature, he was not precisely travelling in search of the picturesque. His affections were fixed upon those “children of the spring,” as flowers are termed by an old poet, which in the country where he now was long survive their parent; and was exceedingly delighted, on landing, to observe that numerous plants were still in flower, though others had already been deprived of their beauty by autumn. Among the former were the autumnal dandelion, the anemone coronaria, both white and blue, and the oleander, with a species of rhamnus with small white flowers.
The harbour of Milo is almost wholly surrounded by high mountains, upon one of which stand an ancient castle and village in a position singularly picturesque. On arriving at the town, over a road formed of flint and limestone, he was greatly struck by the air of poverty and misery which everywhere appeared; the houses differed in nothing from prisons, except that their inmates could go in and out when they pleased; and all around were ruins of splendid edifices, which added to their misery, by reminding them of the very different condition of their ancestors. However, poor as they were, they continued to bring up immense numbers of children, with which the whole town swarmed like a beehive. The costume of the women was extraordinary. More cynical even than the Spartan virgins, whose scanty tunic the reader may admire in Mr. Hope’s Costume of the Ancients, the women of Milo went entirely naked to the waist, from whence depended a short petticoat which was very far from reaching the knee. The crown of the head was covered with small pieces of linen, but the hair hung dishevelled to the girdle.
From Milo they sailed for Scio, which Hasselquist regarded as the most beautiful spot in the world; and, after narrowly escaping shipwreck in the gulf, reached Smyrna on the 27th of September. Here he was received and entertained with the utmost kindness and hospitality by M. Rydelius, consul of Sweden, to whom he was nearly related, and who during his stay exerted whatever influence he possessed in furtherance of his designs. M. Peyssonel, likewise, the French consul, showed him very particular attentions, and imparted to him much curious information respecting many of the natural productions of the East.
Among Hasselquist’s favourite researches was an inquiry into the state of the medical science and profession in the countries he visited. In ancient times, he had read that the professors of the healing art had been regarded as the possessors of celestial knowledge; temples had been erected and medals struck in gratitude for the benefits they had conferred on mankind; but at the period of his visit to Smyrna things had greatly changed for the worse. Some few sparks of their ancient genius still burst forth occasionally among the Greeks; but in general they had to struggle up through mountains of prejudice and ignorance; and, indeed, were it not that the love of gain rather than of science occasionally led a few adventurers into the civilized countries of Europe, in which, however, each age despises the science of the one that preceded it, scarcely a trace of medical knowledge would subsist in the Levant. One of the results of his inquiry was, that of all countries islands are the most fertile in illustrious physicians. Cos was the birthplace of Hippocrates, and England of Mead and Sydenham. Scio, too, was fertile in able physicians. He does not, however, pretend to assign any reason for the fact.
The Franks of Smyrna began their carnival with the year, during which a long series of costly balls and suppers were given. Among the musicians employed on these occasions it would be to little purpose, our traveller remarks, to seek for an Orpheus or a Linus; but the favourite dance of the Greek women, which surely could not be the Romaika, or “dull roundabout,” of the tiresomeness of which Lord Byron complains, greatly delighted our traveller. Fifteen young women arranged themselves in a half-moon, and, skilfully keeping time with the sounds of the lute and violin, performed a number of graceful movements, following their leader, who directed their steps by the waving of a scarf which she held in her hand, through various intricate figures, admirably imitating the mazes of a labyrinth. The girls accompanied their movements with songs, which Hasselquist, though a snake and beetle collector, seems to have enjoyed exceedingly. Of the dress of the dancers, he merely observes that it was in the ancient mode,—that is, if we may judge from vases and bas-reliefs, a single tunic covering only one of the breasts, and open at the sides from the girdle downwards.
With the month of February commenced the spring; and Hasselquist, who was really actuated by passion for the objects of his studies, willingly quitted the city and its amusements to ramble abroad among the fields and woods. Here the orange, the pomegranate, the fig-tree, the olive, the palm, and the cypress intermingled their foliage; and it would, perhaps, be necessary to have imbibed something of the tastes of a naturalist to conceive the pleasure with which our traveller, to whom most of them were new, beheld them put forth their blossoms, or otherwise manifest their being under the influence of spring. One of the greatest ornaments of the gardens in the environs of Smyrna, which are enclosed by hedges of willows planted along the brink of a ditch, is a species of ivy, which, when it finds a proper support, bends round into arches, or hangs from tree to tree in festoons, in so rich and beautiful a manner, that Hasselquist, who seems to have had a high notion of royalty, thought it ought to have adorned the garden of a king. Nature, however, is no respecter of persons. Kings or no kings, Turks, Jews, and gentiles are all one to her. In fact, if we may judge of her political opinions by facts, Nature abhors the foppery and rhodomontade of courts, since, when she has any magnificent or sublime spectacle to exhibit to mankind, she retires to scenes where palaces would be exceedingly out of place, and piles her eternal snows, or pours down her cataracts, or puts her terrible sand-columns in motion in barrenness and solitude.
The spring once begun, every day disclosed some new beauty to the naturalist. Wherever he turned his eyes, thickets of almond trees covered with snow-white blossoms, or fields over which anemones and tulips were sprinkled thick as daisies or buttercups in an English meadow, met the view. The anemone, in particular, was everywhere abundant, in all its varieties of purple, deep-red, and scarlet, with a ring of white round the base of its leaves. One of Hasselquist’s favourite walks of this season was the vast Turkish cemetery in the neighbourhood of Smyrna. Here, amid cypresses and a profusion of balsamic and aromatic trees and shrubs, he philosophized on the generation and decay of plants, ignorant, poor fellow, that within the small sweep of the horizon which bounded his view his own mortal remains would soon be deposited, and that the seeds of the flowers before him would shortly germinate upon his grave.
Having sufficiently examined the environs of Smyrna, Hasselquist set out on the 11th of March for Manisa, the ancient Magnesia, on a botanizing excursion. The face of the country in this part of Anatolia was more wild and savage than could be conceived by those who had never visited the East. Mountains and valleys resembling the surface of a stormy sea suddenly converted into solid ground, covered with mosses and wild apple-trees, traversed by deep ravines, by chasms, by mountain torrents, and beautified in various places by the pale flower of the oriental saffron; such were the scenes which the roots and acclivities of the ancient Sipylus presented to the view of our traveller. On arriving at Manisa he was well received by the governor, an extremely young man, who had sixteen women in his harem. Indeed, a physician is generally treated with consideration by the Turks; and our youthful governor, who happened just then to stand in need of his services, conducted himself with distinguished politeness towards the hakim, or doctor. In return, Hasselquist merely requested permission to botanize at his leisure in the environs of the city, a favour which was very readily granted him.
In a letter to Linnæus, within a few days after his return to Smyrna, he observes: “I have been botanizing on the Mount Sipylus of the ancients, which is one of the highest mountains in Asia, and covered all the year round with snow. I have likewise collected several insects, which no person ever disturbed before; among which I was surprised to observe many which are described in the ‘Fauna Suesica.’ I send you a small fly which I found yesterday in a fig. It was enclosed in the germ of a female fig, which it had entirely devoured. I am ignorant whether this be the insect that impregnates the fruit; but shall endeavour, before my departure, to acquire all the information in my power respecting the fig-tree insects. I have a chameleon and several turtle-doves in my apartment, and I have for some time been employed in observing their manners. It would give me great pleasure if I could send you a few of those doves to adorn your gardens at Upsal; and as it is not difficult to preserve them, I shall endeavour to fulfil my desire. I have collected an abundance of the cornucopiæ,[[2]] that rare plant which you so strongly recommended me to search for in the environs of Smyrna. I have completed the description of it, and shall send you a few specimens. When its seeds are ripened, I shall not fail to send you a quantity of them for the garden of the Academy.”
[2]. A singular species of grass.
Hasselquist sailed from Smyrna about the end of April, and on the 13th of May arrived at Alexandria. His first care, of course, was to visit the gardens of the city. The Egyptian Mussulmans, it is well known, imagine that the horse is too noble an animal to be bestrode by any but true believers; and therefore, those honest Mohammedans who cannot afford to indulge that sublime contempt for all those who differ from them in opinion, which is one of the principal luxuries of their betters, pay great attention to the rearing and management of asses, the only coursers which Franks can safely make use of in Egypt. In consequence, the asses of the Delta surpass all other asses in beauty; and many of them, according to the testimony of our traveller, who, however, seems to have been somewhat partial to the race, are even valued at a higher price than horses. It was necessary to make these preliminary remarks upon asses before we could venture to exhibit our physician parading the streets of Alexandria on such a charger, exposed to the smiles of those Nilotic nymphs whose notes of rejoicing he afterward in revenge compared to the croaking of the frogs in the Rosetta canal.
From Alexandria he ascended along the canal to Rosetta. The fields, then under water, had been sown about a week previously with rice, but it was already three inches high; the frogs, which lay in myriads at the bottom of the canal, croaked most hideously; the mosquitoes stung; the buffaloes, offended at his red garments, attempted to gore him. However, by the aid of patience and a janizary, he at length reached Rosetta, from whence he proceeded up the Nile to Cairo. Here, at the house of Mr. Burton, the English consul, he saw a tamarind-tree, the leaves of which closed up in the evening at sunset, and expanded again with the dawn. Among the curious practices of Egypt he noticed, in this city, one of the most extraordinary: that is, that the women sometimes hatch eggs by keeping them perpetually under their armpits, until the desired effect is produced.
Though there are nations whose incivility is proof against the most courteous behaviour, a traveller may almost always conjecture from the character of his own manners the sort of reception he shall meet with in whatever country he may visit. Hasselquist’s manners were gentle and inoffensive, and accordingly he found even the Turks polite. Shortly after his arrival at Cairo he was taken by the English consul to witness a grand feast given by a Turkish gentleman on the occasion of his son’s circumcision. It had already lasted thirty days, during all which time he had kept open house, and accompanied his repasts by fireworks, illuminations, concerts, and dances. The fireworks, though inferior to those sometimes set off in Europe, were extremely fine; and the illumination was brilliant and ingenious. However, the most curious part of the spectacle, in the opinion of Hasselquist, were the spectators themselves, who, seated in a ring on the ground, looked with invincible gravity at the various efforts which were made to amuse them. The Christian guests, immediately on their arrival, were presented with coffee and carpets, and they sat down and imitated the silent manner of the other guests. Hasselquist was assured that the expense of this feast of thirty days would not amount to less than eight thousand ducats; but, in return, the master of the house received presents of immense value on the occasion, not less, it was reported, than thirty camel-loads.
A few days after this circumcision-feast our hakim enjoyed an opportunity of observing one of the inconsistencies of Mohammedan manners. A company of almé, or dancing girls, came to perform before the window of the consul’s house, and, in a country where other women never go out without a veil, exhibited themselves in a state bordering upon that of nature. From the age of Herodotus down to the present day, the Egyptians have always possessed the reputation of being among the most lascivious nations upon earth, and their patronising the performance of these dancing girls, who exhibit themselves with an effrontery which our opera dancers have not hitherto ventured to imitate, is a proof of it. These almé, whose ability is estimated by the greater or less facility with which they inflame the passions of the spectators, are generally country girls, and sometimes married women. They are of a dark complexion. Their dress consists of a single tunic, round the edges of which are suspended a number of small bells and hollow pieces of silver, which, tinkling as they proceed through their voluptuous movements, serve instead of music.
Dr. Southey, a man of universal reading, laments that we have been less curious respecting the modes by which the human body is rendered proof against the poison of venomous serpents, than in learning from savages the modes of preparing their destructive drugs. Hasselquist, who was altogether of the same opinion, assiduously endeavoured, during his residence in Egypt, to extract from the Psylli the secret of their profession, a secret which has been religiously preserved during two thousand years; but, as he could offer these serpent-charmers no equivalent for the danger they would have incurred by imparting it, for they must inevitably have provoked the enmity of their brethren, his efforts were necessarily unsuccessful. It is customary with persons who affect superior wisdom to make short work with all affairs of this kind, by putting on an air of absolute incredulity, by which they would intimate that they have fathomed the secrets of nature, and are perfectly competent to prescribe the limits beyond which her operations cannot pass. These sages, on the subject of the Psylli, at once cut the Gordian knot by asserting that before they take any liberties with venomous serpents, they carefully extract the tooth to which the poison bag is attached, and thus, with all their boasted skill, perform nothing more marvellous than those who handle live eels. This, however, is not the fact. Hasselquist examined the serpents upon which they had exerted the force of their charms, and found that the poison-tooth had not been extracted.
The most favourable time for observing the performances of these singular people is in the month of July, when the violent heat of summer hatches myriads of serpents, scorpions, lizards, and every abominable reptile among the sands of Egypt, and sends them forth rejoicing in the vigour of their youth and the potency of their virgin poisons. About the beginning of this month a female serpent-charmer, understanding his desire to possess specimens of some of the most deadly of the subjects, went forth into the fields, accompanied by an Arab, and took up specimens of four different species, that is, of the common viper, the cerastes of Alpinus, the jaculus, and a kind of sea-serpent, which she brought to our traveller. The French consul, and all the French in Cairo who happened to be present on her arrival, were struck with terror; and crowds of people immediately collected to behold this daring magician, for as such she was regarded, handle with careless impunity reptiles which no other person present would have touched for the wealth of the universe. In thrusting them into a bottle she held them in her hand as she would have held her stay-lace (if she had had one); and when they crept out again, not admiring their close lodgings, and apparently irritated at the attempt to imprison them, she still seized them with the same coolness, and thrust them in as before.
That these Psylli, for they are doubtless the same race with those who exhibited the force of their spells over the serpent tribes in ancient Rome, possess some important secret there seems to be no reasonable ground for doubting, and it seems equally probable that it might be extorted from them by the force of that golden spell which commands all others; but all that Hasselquist was able to learn was, that the serpent-charmers carefully avoided all other venomous reptiles, such as scorpions, lizards, &c., while those whose profession it was to deal with the latter kept aloof with equal solicitude from the contact of serpents; that, previously to their going out in quest of their prey, they never failed to devour a quantity of serpents’ flesh, both boiled and roasted; and that, in addition to all this, they had a number of superstitious practices, among which the most efficacious was the being spitten upon by their sheikh; though Hasselquist seriously opines that this last circumstance could be of no manner of utility! Perhaps, however, the whole secret lies in the using of serpents, or whatever other reptiles they profess to charm, for food; for by this practice they communicate to their perspiration, and, in fact, to their whole body, a snakish odour, which reconciles the reptiles to their touch, and causes them to regard their charmers and destroyers as genuine members of their body politic.
Hasselquist could not, of course, omit while at Cairo to visit the pyramids. The country about Gizeh, to which he proceeded by water, was so fertile and so admirably cultivated, that it was an object of perpetual admiration; and in winter the whole of this part of Egypt appears, when contemplated from an eminence, to be nothing but one vast sea of verdure, extending in every direction farther than the eye can reach. On arriving in the neighbourhood of the pyramids, he was hospitably entertained by an Arab sheikh, who was encamped there with his tribe. Two kids were slain, and reduced to an admirable pilau; and with a rough board for a table, a rush mat for a table-cloth, and their fingers for spoons, the whole party made a frugal but wholesome supper. It is necessary, says our traveller, that in such cases we should accommodate ourselves to the ways of the people, which if we do, there is no nation upon earth among whom we shall find so much friendship, frankness, and benevolence as the Arabs.
Having passed the night with these hospitable Bedouins, he pushed on to the pyramids over a plain covered with villages, and was soon standing in wonder and admiration at the base of the principal of these gigantic temples of Venus. When the effervescence of his astonishment had somewhat subsided, he entered with his Arab guides into the interior, which, no less than the external appearance, he found greatly to exceed the most exaggerated idea he had formed of their prodigious grandeur from descriptions or designs. After groping about for an hour and a half by torchlight through those mysterious chambers sacred to the generative power of nature, of which beauty has always been one of the principal symbols, from the sting which its appearance infixes in the human soul, he issued forth filled with enthusiasm, under the influence of which he attempted to climb up to the apex of the temple. The sun, however, had rendered the granite steps burning hot, so that when he had ascended about half-way he began to imagine he was treading on fire, and relinquished his design. On another occasion, during the inundation, when he made a second attempt, a violent wind arose, and swept with so much fury round the pyramids, that Hasselquist began to fear it might convert him into a bird, and whirl him off to the Red Sea or Nubia, and finally gave up his undertaking. The fact is, his bodily strength failed him in both cases.
He had been assured at Cairo and elsewhere that in the burning sands surrounding the pyramids no living thing, whether animal or vegetable, was to be found. This account he did not altogether credit, believing that Providence had condemned no spot on earth to utter sterility; and on narrowly examining the sands, he found among them one plant, the chondrilla juncea, a species of small lizard, and the formica-leo, or lion-ant, which had formed considerable establishments in the neighbourhood of the pyramids. These laborious little insects were running by thousands over the sands, each having in his claws a small bit of flint, a grain of sand, or a tiny morsel of wood, to be used in the construction of their dwellings. Several of these Hasselquist discovered. They were built in round holes in the loose soil, in a globular form, about twice the size of a man’s fist, and were entered by a cylindrical opening at the top not larger than the hollow of a goose-quill. To prevent surprise, numerous small openings led to subterraneous apartments below, through which, when their upper chamber was demolished, they always retreated with safety. It was no small compliment to the genius of these diminutive architects that their works could attract attention in the vicinity of the most sublime among the artificial wonders of the world, and appear, as they did to Hasselquist, still more wonderful than those prodigious creations of man.
Restrained in the indulgence of his curiosity by the extreme scantiness of his finances, poor Hasselquist was for the most part compelled to confine himself to the environs of Cairo. Had his means permitted him to execute the designs he had formed, few travellers would have surpassed him in curious or useful researches; though neither his tastes nor physical powers inclined him to undertake those daring personal adventures which in many travellers are almost the only things deserving of notice. His entering at the risk of his life into a mosque at Old Cairo proves, however, that he was courageous even to foolhardiness when he had an object to gain. But this achievement rather disgusted him with enterprises of that kind; for when he had put his head in jeopardy to gratify his curiosity, he found absolutely nothing to reward his hardihood.
Having visited the mummy-pits, and studied with great care the natural history of Cairo and its environs, he descended the Nile to Damietta. The soil of this part of Egypt, even when the inundation fails, is rendered extremely fertile by the heavy dews, for which it is indebted to its vicinity to the sea, and by the rain which falls at intervals during the whole winter and spring. It was about the middle of March when he arrived in this city, and already the male-palm had begun to put forth its blossoms. The female tree flowered a few days later. One of the latter, a magnificent tree, equal in height to a Norway pine, grew in a garden directly opposite his window. On the evening of the 20th of March it had not yet put forth its blossoms; but when he rose next morning before the sun, he found it had flowered during the night, and saw the gardener climbing up to its summit with a handful of the male flowers in his hand, which he scattered over those of the female tree. This was done while the dew was yet falling; and our enthusiastic naturalist regarded the sight as one of the most delightful in nature.
He set sail from Damietta on the 1st of April, and in four days arrived at Jaffa, in the Holy Land. Here he was entertained at a convent of Catholic monks, the principal of whom, a Spaniard by nation, was greatly scandalized at learning that motives foreign to devotion had directed his steps to Palestine. Next day, however, he escaped from their impertinent inquiries, and set out for Jerusalem. The country from Jaffa to Rama consists of a succession of small hills alternating with narrow valleys and wide plains, some cultivated, others barren. The soil was a light reddish sand, and so filled with moles that there was scarcely a yard of ground in which there was not a molehill.
On arriving at Jerusalem he visited all the holy places usually shown to strangers, and then set out with the other pilgrims for Jericho and the Dead Sea. Descending along the banks of the Jordan, the waters of which he found very inferior to those of the Nile, he arrived on the barren shores of the Asphaltic Lake, consisting of a gray sandy clay, so extremely soft that their horses often sunk in it up to their knees. The whole plain was covered with salt like the soil of Egypt, and various kinds of plants and flowers were found growing on it. The apples of Sodom, those
——Dead Sea fruits that tempt the eye,
But turn to ashes on the lips,—
were found in abundance near Jericho. This apple is the fruit of the solanum melongena of Linnæus, and is sometimes actually filled with dust or ashes. But this happens when the fruit has been attacked by the tenthredo insect, which, absorbing all the moisture of the pulp, converts the harder particles into dust, while the skin retains its form and colours.
Having returned with the pilgrims to Jerusalem, he proceeded to visit the other sacred places celebrated in the New Testament,—Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mount Tabor; on which last spot, he observes, he drank some excellent goat’s milk. From thence he proceeded to the Lake of Tiberias, where to his great surprise he found many of the fishes of the Nile. At Japhia, or Jaffa, a village near Nazareth, he found great quantities of the plant which he supposed to be the mandrake, or dudaim of the Scriptures. This plant was not then in flower, nor could he procure an entire root for want of a mattock. It grows in great plenty throughout Galilee, but is not found in Judea. The Arabs denominate it “devil’s meat.”
From thence he descended to the seacoast, visited the ruins of Tyre, and proceeded by night to Sidon. Here he found various objects highly interesting to a naturalist in the immense gardens of this city, from whence prodigious quantities of fruit are annually exported. The mulberry-tree is found in great abundance in this part of the country, which has led the inhabitants to pay great attention to the rearing of silk-worms, which here, as at Nice, are hatched in little bags which the women wear in their bosoms by day, and at night place under their pillows. In botanizing among the neighbouring hills he was invited by a shepherd to share his dinner. It consisted of half-ripe ears of wheat roasted over the fire, a sort of food mentioned in the Scriptures, and warm milk. The practice of eating unripe corn in this manner likewise prevails in Egypt, where Turkey wheat and millet are substituted for the proper wheat.
On the 23d of May, 1751, he sailed from Sidon in a small French ship bound for Cyprus, and on the 28th cast anchor in the harbour of Larnaco. Though he visited this island with no intention of travelling in it, being once there he could not forbear making a few excursions into the interior, of which the first was to the mountain of Santa Croce, the loftiest in the country. In the rusty-coloured limestone rock which forms the basis of this mountain are mines of lead, copper, and rock-crystal; which last, of which some fine specimens are found near the ancient Paphos, was at first mistaken for a diamond-mine by the Turks. A few days after his return from Santa Croce he visited Famagosta, once, when in possession of the Venetians, a splendid city; but now a heap of miserable ruins.
From Cyprus he sailed to Rhodes and Scio, and thence to Smyrna, carrying along with him an incredible quantity of curiosities in the three kingdoms of nature, which he had collected in Egypt and the Levant. His sole desire now was to return by the first occasion which should present itself to Sweden; but his strength had been so much impaired by the fatigue of travelling and the heats of Palestine, that he was constrained to defer his departure from Smyrna. His disorder, however, which was a confirmed consumption, proceeded rapidly; and although, as is usual with persons labouring under that disease, he continued to preserve hope to the last, his struggles were soon over. His death happened on the 9th of February, 1752, in a small country-house in the neighbourhood of Smyrna.
His friends in Sweden, by whom he was much beloved, were greatly afflicted at the news of his death; and to add to their sorrow, they learned at the same time, that having during his residence in the East contracted a debt of one hundred and fifty pounds, his collections and papers had been seized by his creditors, who refused to give them up until the debt should be paid; and that thus his name and reputation seemed likely to perish with his body. Neither Linnæus nor any other of Hasselquist’s friends in Sweden were able to raise this small sum; when the queen, being informed of the circumstance, generously advanced the money from her own private purse; and therefore it is to the munificence of this lady that we owe one of the most curious books of travels of its kind that have ever appeared. In about a year after this the collections and papers arrived at the palace of Drottningholm; and Linnæus, who was no novice in these matters, declares that he was exceedingly surprised at the number and variety of the curiosities, among which were the rarer plants of Anatolia, Egypt, Palestine, and Cyprus; stones and earths from the most remarkable places in Egypt and Palestine; the rarer fishes of the Nile; the serpents of Egypt, together with its more curious insects, drugs, mummies, Arabic manuscripts, &c.
The editing of Hasselquist’s manuscripts was confided to Linnæus himself, and unquestionably it could not have been intrusted to better hands. The work, in fact, remains, and will remain, a lasting monument of the superior talents of the traveller, and of the taste, munificence, and affection of his friends.
LADY WORTLEY MONTAGUE.
Born 1690.—Died 1762.
This lady, whose claims to be ranked among distinguished travellers none, I think, will be disposed to contest, was born in 1690 at Thoresby, in Nottinghamshire. Her maiden name was Mary Pierre-pont, and she was the eldest daughter of Evelyn, Duke of Kingston, and Lady Mary Fielding, daughter of William Earl of Denbigh. Having had the misfortune to lose her mother while yet only four years old, she was thrown at once among the other sex, and thus acquired from her earliest years those masculine tastes and habits which distinguished her during life, and infused into her writings that coarse, unfeminine energy, that cynical contempt of decorum, and bearded license, if I may so express myself, which constitute her literary characteristics, and render her compositions different from those of every other woman. It was not the mere study of Latin, which the virtuous and judicious Fenelon considered highly beneficial to women, and which at all events may be regarded as a circumstance perfectly indifferent, that produced this undesirable effect; but an improper or careless choice of authors, operating upon a temperament peculiarly inflammable and inclining to voluptuousness. She acquired, we are told, the elements of the Greek, Latin, and French languages under the same preceptors as Viscount Newark, her brother; but preceptors who might, perhaps, be safely intrusted with the direction of a boy’s mind are not always adequate to the task of guiding that of a young woman through the perilous mazes of ancient literature. In fact, among her favourite classical authors Ovid seems to have been the chief at a very early period of her life; for among her poems there is one written in imitation of this author at twelve years of age, containing passages which it has not been thought decent to publish. At a later period her studies were directed by Bishop Burnet, who would seem to have recommended to her the Manual of the ungracious and austere Epictetus, a work which, although she laboured through a translation of it, now included among her works, could have possessed but few charms for her ardent, erratic fancy.
During this early part of her career she lived wholly in retirement at Thoresby or at Acton, near London, where she acquired what by a license of speech may be termed the friendship of Mrs. Anne Wortley, the mother of her future husband. With this lady she maintained an epistolary correspondence, from the published portions of which we discover that both the young lady and the matron were exceedingly addicted to flattery, and that at nineteen the former had already begun to entertain those unfavourable notions of her own sex which in a woman are so justly regarded as ominous of evil. “I have never,” says she, “had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex; and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.”
Her friendship with Mrs. Wortley paved the way to an acquaintance with that lady’s son, which, after much negotiation and many quarrels, the causes of which are rather alluded to than explained in the published correspondence, ended in a private marriage, which took place August 12, 1712. Lady Mary now resided chiefly at Wharncliffe Lodge, near Sheffield, where her son Edward was born, while her husband was detained by his parliamentary duties and political connexions in London. It would appear from various circumstances that Mr. Wortley Montague was a quiet, unambitious man, endowed with very moderate abilities; but his philosophic indifference or timid mode of wooing honours by no means answered the views of his wife, who was haunted in an incredible manner by the desire of celebrity, and who, possessing a caustic wit, a vivacious style, and splendid personal attractions, was conscious, that if once fairly launched upon the tide of the great world she could not fail of effecting her purpose. In the letters which emanated from her solitude we discover, amid a world of affected indifference, her extreme passion for exciting admiration. Now literary projects engross her thoughts; and now she aims, by goading her husband up “the steep of fame,” to open herself a wide field for the exhibition of her Circean powers.
In 1714 Mr. Montague was appointed one of the lords of the treasury; upon which Lady Mary quitted her retirement and appeared at court, where her beauty, her wit, and the ingenuous levity of her manners (a commendable quality in those days) commanded universal admiration. Her genius now moved in its proper sphere. Surrounded, flattered, caressed by the most distinguished characters of the age, she tasted of all those gratifications which the peculiarities of her temperament required; and being in the very flower of her age, looked forward with well-founded hopes to numerous years of the same kind of enjoyments. It was at this period that her intimacy with Pope, who was just two years older than herself, commenced; and as her latest biographer with a pardonable partiality observes, both he and Addison “contemplated her uncommon genius at that time without envy!” From which one might infer that it was literary jealousy, and not the rage of a neglected lover, that afterward rendered Pope the inveterate enemy of Lady Mary.
However this may be, upon Mr. Montague’s being appointed ambassador to the Porte in 1716, our traveller, smitten with the desire of tasting the pleasures of other lands, resolved to desert all her admirers, and visit with her husband the shores of the Hellespont. They commenced their journey in August; and having crossed the channel, proceeded by Helvoetsluys and the Brill to Rotterdam, where she greatly admired the thronged streets, neat pavements, and extreme cleanliness of the place, which at present would scarcely strike a traveller arriving from London as any thing extraordinary. In travelling from Holland, the whole country appeared like a garden, while the roads were well paved, shaded on both sides with rows of trees, and bordered with canals, through which great numbers of boats were perpetually passing and repassing. The eye, moreover, was every minute alighting upon some villa; while numerous towns and villages, all remarkable for their neatness, dotted the plains, and enlivened the mind of the traveller by exciting ideas of plenty and prosperity.
At Cologne, whither she had proceeded by way of the Hague and Nimeguen, she was greatly amused at the Jesuits’ church by the free raillery of a young Jesuit, who, not knowing, or pretending not to know, her rank, allowed himself considerable liberties in his conversation. Our traveller herself fell in love with St. Ursula’s pearl necklaces; and, as the saint was of silver, her profane wishes would fain have converted her into dressing-plate. These were the only relics of all that were shown her for which she had any veneration; but she very shortly afterward learned, that, at least as far as the pearls and other precious stones were concerned, the holy fathers had been very much of her opinion; for, judging that false jewels would satisfy a saint as well as true ones, they sold the real pearls, &c., and supplied their places with imitations. Our lady-traveller, though exceedingly aristocratical in her notions, and possessed of but small respect for mere untitled human beings, was compelled by her natural good sense to remark, what other observers have frequently repeated since her time, the extreme superiority of the free towns of Germany over those under the government of absolute princes. “I cannot help fancying one,” she says, “under the figure of a clean Dutch citizen’s wife, and the other like a poor town lady of pleasure, painted and ribanded out in her headdress, with tarnished silver-laced shoes, a ragged under-petticoat; a miserable mixture of vice and poverty.”
At Ratisbon the principal objects of curiosity were the envoys from various states, who constituted the whole nobility of the place; and having no taste for ordinary amusements, contrived to divert themselves and their wives by keeping up eternal contests respecting precedents and points of etiquette. Next to these the thing most worthy of notice, from its extreme impiety, was a group of the Trinity, in which the Father was represented as a decrepit old man, with a beard descending to his knees, with the Son upon the cross in his arms, while the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, hovered over his head.
From Ratisbon she descended the Danube to Vienna, delighted, as the vessel shot with incredible velocity down the stream, by the amazing variety and rapid changes in the scenery, where rich cultivated plains, vineyards, and populous cities alternated rapidly with landscapes of savage magnificence; woods, mountains, precipices, and rocky pinnacles, with castellated ruins perched upon their summits. In Vienna she was disappointed. Its grandeur by no means came up to the ideas which she had formed of it from the descriptions of others. Palaces crowded together in narrow lanes; splendour on one hand, dirt and poverty on the other, and vice everywhere: such, in few words, is the sum of her account of the Austrian capital. The Faubourg, however, was truly magnificent, consisting almost wholly of stately palaces.
Here Pope’s first letter written during her residence abroad reached her. It is marked by every effort which wit could imagine, being gay and amusing; but betrays the fact, which, indeed, he did not wish to conceal, that he was seriously in love, and deeply afflicted at her absence. Conscious, however, of the criminality of his passion, he labours to clothe it with an air of philosophical sentimentality, feigning, but awkwardly and ineffectually, to be merely enamoured of her soul. This circumstance compelled him to shadow forth his meaning somewhat obscurely and quaintly for a lover, and deprived him of the advantage of conveying his feelings from his own heart to hers through those glowing trains of words which kindle the souls of the absent almost as effectually as the corporeal presence of the persons beloved. The reply of Lady Mary is conceived with consummate skill: pretending to be in doubt whether she ought to understand him to have been in jest or earnest, she nevertheless confesses, that in her present mood of mind she is more inclined towards the latter interpretation; and then, feeling that her footsteps were straying
per ignes
Suppositos cineri doloso,
she starts suddenly out of the dangerous track, and plunges into the description of an opera and a German comedy. Here she is perfectly at her ease; and the coarseness of the subject, which she affects to condemn, so evidently delights her, that she describes in the broadest terms an action the most outrageously gross, perhaps, that was ever endured on the stage.
It has often been remarked, that the interest of a book of travels arises not so much from the newness and strangeness of the objects described, as from the peculiar light which is reflected upon them from the mind of the traveller. This fact is strikingly exemplified in the case of Lady Mary, who, though journeying through places often visited, throws so much of energy and vivacity, and frequently of novelty, into her concise yet minute sketches, that we never pause to inquire whether the objects delineated now come before us for the first time or not. Besides, her sex and the advantages she enjoyed brought many peculiarities both of costume and manners within the range of her observation, of which ordinary travellers can know nothing, except from hearsay, or from points of view too distant to admit of accurate observation. Upon her being presented at court she was struck—as who would not?—by the extravagant appearance of the ladies, who stalked about with fabrics of gauze and ribands a yard high upon their heads, and whalebone petticoats, which with pleasant exaggeration she describes as covering whole acres of ground. The reigning empress perfectly enraptured her with her beauty; and her admiration supplies her with so much eloquence, that a complete picture is wrought out. In other respects the court of Vienna was very much like other contemporary courts—that is, overflowing with every variety of moral turpitude, except that the Viennais had not the hypocrisy to pretend to be virtuous.
From this city our traveller made an excursion into Bohemia, the most desert part of Germany, where the characteristics of the villages were filth and poverty, scarcely furnishing clean straw and pure water, and where the inns were so wretched that she preferred travelling all night in the month of November to the idea of encountering the many unsavoury smells which they abounded with. In this country, however, she made but a short stay, but proceeded across the Erz Gebirge mountains into Saxony. This part of the journey was performed by night. The moonlight was sufficiently brilliant to discover the nature of the frightful precipices over which the road lay, and which in many places was so narrow that she could not discover an inch of space between the wheel and the precipice, while the waters of the Elbe rolled along among the rocks at an immeasurable depth below. Mr. Wortley, who possessed none of the restless sensibility or curiosity of his wife, and preferred a comfortable doze to the pleasure of gazing at moonlit crags throwing their giant shadows over fathomless abysses, or of discussing the chances of their being hurled into some of these gulfs, composed himself to sleep, and left our traveller to her reflections. For some time she resisted all temptation to disturb him; but observing that the postillions had begun to follow his example, while the horses were proceeding at full gallop, she thought it high time to make the whole party sensible of their danger, and by calling out to the drivers, awakened her husband. He was now alarmed at their critical situation, and assured her that he had five times crossed the Alps by different routes, without having ever seen so dangerous a road; but perhaps he had not been awakened by his companions.
Escaping from the terrors of these mountain scenes, she was extremely disposed to be pleased with even roads and the security of cities, and in this mood of mind found Dresden, which is really an agreeable city, wonderfully pleasing. She here picked up a story which, as it is exceedingly illustrative of kingly notions of love, may be worth repeating. The King of Poland (Elector of Saxony) having discovered that the Count de Cozelle had a very beautiful wife, and understanding the taste of his countrywomen, paid the lady a visit, “bringing in one hand a bag of a hundred thousand crowns, and in the other a horse-shoe, which he snapped asunder before her face, leaving her to draw the consequences of such remarkable proofs of strength and liberality.” I know not, adds our fair traveller, which charmed her most, but she consented to leave her husband, and give herself up to him entirely.
From Dresden she proceeded to Leipzig, to Brunswick, to Hanover,—where the ladies, wearing artificial faces, were handsome to the hour of their death,—and thence back again to Vienna. Here she observes that no women were at that period permitted to act upon the stage, though certainly the regulation did not emanate from motives of delicacy. To show their sympathy for physical as well as moral deformity, the emperor and empress had two dwarfs as ugly as devils, especially the female, but loaded with diamonds, and privileged to stand at her majesty’s elbow at all public places. All the other princes of Germany exhibited similar proofs of a taste for the ugly, which was so far improved by the King of Denmark that he made his dwarf his prime minister. “I can assign no reason,” says Lady Montague, “for their fondness for these pieces of deformity, but the opinion all the absolute princes have that it is below them to converse with the rest of mankind; and not to be quite alone, they are forced to seek their companions among the refuse of human nature, these creatures being the only part of their court privileged to talk freely with them.”
Though it was now the depth of winter, Mr. Wortley, who apparently was thoroughly tired of the stupid gayeties of Vienna, determined to escape from them, notwithstanding that all the fashionable world, Prince Eugene among the rest, endeavoured to divert him from his purpose by drawing the most frightful picture of Hungary, the country through which their road lay. The life led by Prince Eugene at the modern Sybaris seems to have inspired our traveller with a generous regret, the only one perhaps she ever felt for a stranger, and gave rise in her mind to that sort of mortification which reflections upon the imperfections of human nature are calculated to give birth to.
The ambassador commenced his journey on the 15th of January, 1717; and the snow lying deep upon the ground, their carriages were fixed upon traneaus, which moved over the slippery surface with astonishing rapidity. In two days they arrived at Raab, where the governor and the Bishop of Temeswar, an old man of a noble family, with a flowing white beard hanging down to his girdle, waited upon them with polite attentions and invitations, which their desire to continue their journey compelled them to reject. The plains lying between this city and Buda, level as the sea, and of amazing natural fertility, but now through the ravages of war deserted and uncultivated, presented nothing but one unbroken sheet of snow to the eye; nor, excepting its curious hovels, half above and half below the surface of the earth, forming the summer and winter apartments of the inhabitants, did Buda afford any thing worthy of observation. The scene which stretched itself out before them upon leaving Buda was rude, woody, and solitary, but abounding in game of various kinds, which appeared to be the undisturbed lords of the soil. The peasants of Hungary at that period were scanty and poor, dressed in a coat, cap, and boots of sheepskin, and subsisting entirely upon the wild animals afforded by their plains and woods.
On the 26th they crossed the frozen Danube, pushed on through woods infested by wolves, and arrived in the evening at Essek. Three days more brought them to Peterwaradin, whence, having remained there a few days to refresh themselves after their long journey, they departed for Belgrade. On their way to this city they passed over the fields of Carlowitz, the scene of Prince Eugene’s last great victory over the Turks, and beheld scattered around them on all sides the broken fragments of those instruments with which heroes open themselves a path to glory: sculls and carcasses of men, mingled and trodden together with those of the horse and the camel, the noble, patient brutes which are made to participate in their madness.
During their pretty long stay at Belgrade, Lady Mary, whose free and easy disposition admirably adapted her for a traveller, contracted an acquaintance with Achmet Bey, a Turkish effendi, or literary man, whom she understood to be an accomplished Arabic and Persian scholar, and who, delighted with the novelty of the thing, undertook to initiate our female effendi in the mysteries of oriental poetry, judiciously selecting such pieces as treated of love. In conversation with this gentleman she learned with surprise that the Persian Tales, which at that time were in Europe supposed to be forgeries, and consequently of no authority or value, except as novels, were genuine oriental compositions, like the Arabian Nights, and therefore to be regarded as admirable illustrations of manners.
Leaving Belgrade and the agreeable effendi, they proceeded through the woody wilds of Servia, where the scanty peasantry were ground to the earth by oppression, to Nissa, the ancient capital; and passing thence into Bulgaria, our fair traveller was amused at Sophia with one of those little incidents which, from her naïve mode of describing them, constitute the principal charm of her travels. This was a visit to the baths. Arriving about ten o’clock in the morning, she found the place already crowded with women, and having cast a glance or two at the form and structure of the edifice, which consisted of fine apartments covered with domes, floored with marble, and adorned with a low divan of the same materials, she proceeded into the principal bathing-room, where there were about two hundred ladies, in the state of nature, seated upon cushions or rich carpets, with their slaves standing behind them, equally unencumbered with dress. The behaviour of both mistresses and maids, however, was characterized by equal modesty. But their beauty and the exquisite symmetry of their forms, which, in the opinion of Lady Mary, at least equalled the most perfect creations of Guido or Titian, defied the powers of language, and compelled the astonished observer, in default of accurate expressions, to have recourse to poetical comparisons, and descriptions of the effects produced upon the mind. It is well known that Homer, despairing of presenting his hearers or readers with a complete picture of Helen’s beauty, has recourse to the same artifice, representing the old statesman exclaiming, as she approaches them veiled upon the ramparts,
Oὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺς
Tοιῇδ᾽ ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν·
Aἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν. [TN]
When, to cut the matter short, he tells us at once that she resembled the immortal goddesses in beauty; and our traveller, with equal felicity, observes, that they were as finely proportioned as any goddess, and that most of their skins were “shiningly white, only adorned with their beautiful hair divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or riband, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces.” She was here thoroughly convinced, she observes, of the correctness of an old theory of hers, “that if it were the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed”—for, continues she, “I perceived that the ladies of the most delicate skins and finest shapes had the greatest share of my admiration, though their faces were sometimes less beautiful than those of their companions.” The whole scene was highly picturesque. Some of the ladies were engaged in conversation, some were working, some drinking coffee or sherbet, and others, more languid and indolent, were reclining negligently on their cushions, “while their slaves, generally pretty girls of seventeen or eighteen, were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty fancies.”
This spectacle our traveller quitted for the purpose of examining the ruins of Justinian’s church; but after the bath these appeared so remarkably insipid, that, pronouncing them to be a heap of stones, which may be predicated of most ruins, she returned to her apartments, and prepared with regret to accompany her husband over the Balkan into Roumelia. The road throughout a great proportion of this route lay through woods so completely infested by banditti, that no persons but such as could command the attendance of a numerous escort dared venture themselves among them; and, in fact, the janizaries who accompanied ambassadors and all public functionaries exercised towards the peasantry a degree of oppression so intolerable, that, had the whole population resorted to the profession of robbery for a livelihood, it would have by no means been a matter of wonder. On the ambassador’s arrival at a village, his attendant janizaries seized upon all the sheep and poultry within their reach—“lambs just fallen, and geese and turkeys big with egg”—and massacred them all without distinction, while the wretched owners stood aloof, not daring to complain for fear of being beaten. When the pashas travelled through those districts where perhaps the meat and poultry were lean and tough, as in all probability the peasantry treated them, as often as possible, to the grandsires of their flocks and barn doors, the great men, in addition to the provision they devoured, exacted what was expressly denominated “teeth-money,” as a small compensation for their having worn out their teeth in the service of the public. But though Mr. Wortley and Lady Mary seem to have been ambitious of imitating these three-tailed personages in many respects, they would appear throughout their journey to have eaten the poor people’s fowls and mutton gratis.
On arriving at Adrianople, where the sultan was at that time residing with his court, Lady Mary suddenly found herself in a new world, but extremely suited to her taste. Her principal companion was the French ambassadress, an agreeable woman, but extravagantly fond of parade, with whom she went about seeing such sights as the place afforded, which, every object in the city, except her husband, being new, were sufficiently numerous. The sultan, whom she saw for the first time going in solemn procession to the mosque, was a fine, handsome man of about forty, with full black eyes, and an expression of severity in his countenance. This prince, Achmet III., has been said, upon I know not what authority, to have afterward become enamoured of our fair traveller. The report, in all probability, was unfounded; but the reasons which have induced a contemporary biographer[[3]] to come to this conclusion are particularly various: independently of Turkish prejudices, which, according to his notion of things, would prevent an emperor from conceiving any such idea, it was not at all probable, he imagines, that a person possessing a Fatima with such “celestial charms” (as Lady Mary describes), and so many other angelic creatures, should have thought for a moment of an “English lady.” What prejudices the sagacious author alludes to, it is difficult to discover; it would not be those of religion, as the imperial harem, it is well known, is constantly replenished with Circassians and Georgians, Christians and Mohammedans, indiscriminately. This point, therefore, must remain doubtful. With respect to Fatima, whatever may have been her charms, she could have been no bar to the sultan’s admiration of Lady Mary, being the wife, not of the sultan, but of the kihaya. The other “angelical creatures” whose influence he rates so highly may very possibly have restrained the affections of their master from wandering beyond the walls of the seraglio; nevertheless, stranger things have happened than that a prince in the flower of his age, neglecting the legitimate objects of his attachment, should allow a greater scope to his desires than either religion or the common rules of decorum would warrant. The best reason for rejecting this piece of scandal is, not that Lady Mary was an “English woman,” and therefore, as M. Duparc would insinuate, too ugly to rival the slaves of the sultan, but that there is no good authority for admitting it.
[3]. M. Duparc, in the “Biographie Universelle.”
Leaving this point undetermined, however, for want of evidence, let us proceed to the costume of the “angelical creatures” of whom we have been speaking. But Lady Montague must here take the pen into her own hand; for, in describing the mysteries of the toilet, she possesses a felicitous, luxuriant eloquence, which it would be vain in any thing out of petticoats to endeavour to rival. “The first part of my dress (she had adopted the Turkish habit) is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your petticoats. They are of a thin rose-coloured damask, brocaded with silver flowers. My shoes are of white kid leather, embroidered with gold. Over this hangs my smock, of a fine white silk gauze, edged with embroidery. This smock has wide sleeves, hanging half-way down the arm, and is closed at the neck with a diamond button; but the shape and colour of the bosom are very well to be distinguished through it. The antery is a waistcoat, made close to the shape, of white and gold damask, with very long sleeves falling back, and fringed with deep gold fringe, and should have diamond or pearl buttons. My caftan, of the same stuff with my drawers, is a robe exactly fitted to my shape, and reaching to my feet, with very long, straight falling sleeves. Over this is my girdle, of about four fingers broad, which all that can afford it have entirely of diamonds or other precious stones; those who will not be at that expense have it of exquisite embroidery or satin; but it must be fastened before with a clasp of diamonds. The curdee is a loose robe they throw off or put on according to the weather, being of a rich brocade (mine is green and gold), either lined with ermine or sables; the sleeves reach very little below the shoulders. The headdress is composed of a cap, called talpack, which is in winter of fine velvet, embroidered with pearl or diamonds, and in summer of a light shining silver stuff. This is fixed on one side of the head, hanging a little way down, with a gold tassel, and bound on, either with a circle of diamonds (as I have seen several), or a rich embroidered handkerchief. On the other side of the head the hair is laid flat; and here the ladies are at liberty to show their fancies, some putting flowers, others a plume of herons’ feathers, and, in short, what they please; but the most general fashion is a large bouquet of jewels, made like natural flowers; that is, the buds of pearl, the roses of different-coloured rubies, the jessamines of diamonds, the jonquils of topazes, &c., so well set and enamelled, ’tis hard to imagine any thing of that kind so beautiful. The hair hangs at its full length behind, divided into tresses braided with pearl or riband, which is always in great quantity. I never saw in my life so many fine heads of hair. In one lady’s I have counted a hundred and ten of the tresses, all natural.”
Our traveller, whose faith in the virtue of her sex was exceedingly slender, informs us, however, that these beautiful creatures were vehemently addicted to intrigue, which they were enabled to carry on much more securely than our Christian ladies, from their fashion of perpetually going abroad in masquerade, that is, thickly veiled, so that no man could know his own wife in the street. This, with the Jews’ shops, which were so many places of rendezvous, enabled the fair sinners almost invariably to avoid detection; and when discovered, a sack and a horse-pond, when the Bosphorus was not within a convenient distance, terminated the affair in a few minutes. Still the risk was comparatively small, and “you may easily imagine,” says Lady Mary—who seems to have thought that women are never virtuous except when kept within the pale of duty by the fear of imminent danger—“you may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from a lover’s indiscretion!” Had we met with so profligate an article of faith in the creed of a male traveller, we should have inferred that he had spent the greater part of his life in gambling-houses and their appendages; but since it is a lady—an ambassadress—an illustrious scion of a noble stock, who thus libels the posterity of Eve, we place our finger upon our lips, and keep our inferences to ourselves.
Pope, in a letter to her at Adrianople, accompanying the third volume of his translation of the Iliad, pretends, as a graceful piece of flattery, to imagine that because she had resided some few weeks on the banks of the Hebrus among Asiatic barbarians, and barbarized descendants of the Greeks, she could doubtless throw peculiar light upon various passages of Homer; and the lady, interpreting the joke seriously, replies, that there was not one instrument of music among the Greek or Roman statues which was not to be found in the hands of the Roumeliotes; that young shepherd lads still diverted themselves with making garlands for their favourite lambs; and that, in reality, she found “several little passages” in Homer explained, which she “did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of.”
During her stay at Adrianople she discovered something better, however, than Turkish illustrations of Homer, for it was here that she first observed the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which she had the hardihood to try upon her own children, and was the first to introduce it into England. Among the Turks, who, in all probability, were not its inventors, it was termed ingrafting, and the whole economy of the thing, according to the invariable policy of barbarians, was intrusted to the management of old women. Upon the return of the embassy to England, a Mr. Maitland, the ambassador’s physician, endeavoured, under the patronage of Lady Montague, who ardently desired its extension, to introduce the practice in London; and in 1721, the public attention having been strongly directed to the subject, and the curiosity of professional men awakened, an experiment, sanctioned by the College of Physicians, and authorized by government, was made upon five condemned criminals. With four of these the trial perfectly succeeded, and the fifth, a woman, upon whom no effect was produced, afterward confessed that she had had the small-pox while an infant. The merit of this action of Lady Montague can scarcely be overrated, as, by exciting curiosity and inquiry, it seems unquestionably to have led the way to the discovery of vaccination, that great preservative of life and beauty, and produced at the time immense positive good.[[4]]
[4]. A writer in the Annual Register for 1762, thus calculates the amount of the benefit conferred on the British public by Lady Montague:—“If one person in seven die of the small-pox in the natural way, and one in three hundred and twelve by inoculation, as proved at the small-pox hospital, then, as 1,000,000 divided by seven, gives 142,857½, 1,000,000 divided by 312, gives 3,205 46-312. The lives saved in 1,000,000 by inoculation must be 139,652 11-31. In Lord Petre’s family, 18 individuals died of the small-pox in 27 years. The present generation, who have enjoyed all the advantages of inoculation, are adequate judges of the extremely fatal prevalence of the original disease, and of their consequently great obligations to Lady Mary Wortley Montague.”—Sir Richard Steele, in the Plain Dealer, prefers the introduction of this practice to all “those wide endowments and deep foundations of public charity which have made most noise in the world.”
To return, however, to Adrianople: among the most remarkable things which our fair traveller beheld during her residence in the East was Fatima, the wife of the kihaya, or vizier’s lieutenant, a woman “so gloriously beautiful,” to borrow the expression of her panegyrist, that all lovely things appeared to dwindle into insignificance in her presence. The passage in which this lady is described, though in a certain point of view it may be liable to objection, is in every other respect the finest portion of Lady Mary’s travels; exhibiting a remarkable power of affording the imagination of the reader glimpses of corporeal beauties which language is never sufficiently rich and vivid to paint exactly, and betraying at the same time so enthusiastic and unreserved an admiration of another woman’s superior perfections, that we with difficulty recognise in these hurried, ingenuous overflowings of natural eloquence, the female Diogenes of 1740. The whole palace of the kihaya appeared at the moment a fairy creation. Two black eunuchs, meeting the traveller at the door, led her into the harem, between two rows of beautiful female slaves, with their profuse and finely-plaited hair hanging almost to their feet, and dressed in fine light damasks, brocaded with silver. She next passed through a magnificent pavilion, adorned with gilded sashes, now all thrown up to admit the air, and opening into a garden, where there grew a number of large trees, with jessamine and honey-suckles twisted round their trunks, and emitting an exquisite perfume. A fountain of scented water was falling at the lower end of the apartment into three or four basins of white marble, at the same time diffusing an agreeable odour and a refreshing coolness through the air. Over the ceiling the pencil had scattered flowers in gilded baskets. But all these things were forgotten on beholding Fatima. When Lady Mary entered she was sitting on a sofa raised three steps above the floor, and leaning on cushions of white embroidered satin. Two young girls, “lovely as angels,” sat at her feet clothed in the richest costume of the East, and sparkling with jewels. They were her daughters. The mother, however, was so transcendently beautiful, that, in the opinion of Lady Mary, neither these girls, nor any thing that ever was called lovely, either in England or Germany, were capable of exciting the least admiration near her. There is truth in the old saying, that beauty possesses a power which irresistibly subdues the soul. No one ever looked for the first time upon a beautiful form without experiencing a certain awe, or consciousness of being in the presence of a superior nature, which the pagans imagined people felt when some deity overawed them with its Shekinah. That an acquaintance with the intellectual or moral imperfections which too frequently attend on beauty very quickly dissipates this impression, we all know: but at the outset most persons feel like our traveller, who says, “I was so struck with admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of body! that lovely bloom of complexion unsullied by art! the unutterable enchantment of her smile!—But her eyes!—large and black, with the soft languishment of the blue! every turn of her face discovering some new grace.”
Into the details of her dress, in the description of which Lady Mary employs warm colouring, it is not necessary to enter. Fatima, on her part, very quickly divined the taste and temperament of her guest, and after a little conversation, carried on through the medium of a Greek lady who accompanied the traveller, she made a sign to four of her beautiful slaves to entertain the stranger with music and dancing. Those who have read descriptions of the fandango of the Spanish ladies, the chironomia of antiquity, or the performances of the Hindoo dancing girls, or voluptuous almé of Egypt, will perhaps be able to form a just conception of the dance with which the ladies of the harem amuse themselves and their female visiters. “This dance,” says Lady Montague, “was very different from what I had seen before. The tunes so soft!—the motions so languishing!—accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner.”
Before her departure from Adrianople, she went to visit the mosque of Sultan Selim I., and being in a Turkish dress was admitted without difficulty; though she supposes, no doubt rightly, that the doorkeepers understood well enough whom they had allowed to enter. The walls were inlaid with Japan china in the form of flowers, the marble pavement was covered with rich Persian carpets, and the whole body of the edifice free from those pews, forms, and chairs which encumber our churches, both Protestant and Catholic, and give the latter, during week-days, the appearance of a lumber-room. About two thousand lamps were suspended in various parts of the building, which, when lighted at night, must show off to great advantage the solemn splendour of the architecture.
The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows, which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along, literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypress-tree in the garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best way to come down again. Navigators in the South Sea have found whole nations who, like this romantic Ottomite, lived perched upon trees, like eagles, descending only when in lack of prey or recreation.
The first objects which struck her on arriving at Constantinople were the cemeteries, which upon the whole seemed to occupy more ground than the city itself. These, however, with their tombs and chapels, have been so frequently described by modern travellers, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them, curious as they are; though we may remark, in passing, that their fancy of sculpturing a rose on the monuments of unmarried women is a delicate allusion to the purity of the dead. In the month of June they were driven by the heat of the weather to the village of Belgrade, fourteen miles from Constantinople, on the shores of the Black Sea, one of the usual retreats of the European embassies. Here our fair traveller found an earthly representation of the Elysian Fields:
Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.
Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestit
Purpureo.
Their house, the site of which, nothing more remaining, is still visited by European travellers, stood in the middle of a grove chiefly of fruit-trees. The walks, carpeted with short soft grass, were shady and cool; and on all sides a perpetual verdure was maintained by numerous fountains of pure, beautiful water. From the house and various other points views were obtained of the Black Sea, with its picturesque verdant shores, while the fresh breezes which blew continually from that quarter sufficiently tempered the heat of summer. The charms of such scenes inspire gayety even in the oppressed. For here the Greeks, forgetting for a moment the yoke of the Ottomite, assembled in great numbers of both sexes every evening, to laugh and sing, and “dance away their time.”
From an absurd request which had been made to her by Lady Rich to purchase her a Greek slave, Lady Montague, having observed that the “Greeks were subjects, not slaves!” takes occasion to describe to her friend the various kinds of female slaves which were to be found in Turkey. And though brief, her account is not particularly incorrect. But she eagerly seizes upon this opportunity to disparage the relations of all former travellers, treating them collectively as a herd of low people, who had never enjoyed the advantage of conversing with barbarians of quality. She was therefore ignorant that Busbequius, Pietro della Valle, Chardin, and others had lived upon most familiar terms with Turks of the highest consideration in the empire; and that, excepting in what relates to the harem, from which their sex excluded them, they might have afforded her ladyship very important instruction upon several particulars of Turkish manners. Upon cosmetics her authority, of course, is paramount. Neither Della Valle nor Chardin ever daubed their faces with balm of Mecca, and consequently could not pretend to speak of its virtues with the same confidence as Lady Mary, who, as she confesses with indignation, was rendered, by the indiscreet application of it, a perfect monster for three days. Having been presented with a small quantity of the best sort, “I with great joy,” says she, “applied it to my face, expecting some wonderful effect to my advantage. The next morning the change indeed was wonderful; my face was swelled to a very extraordinary size, and all over as red as my Lady H——’s. It remained in this lamentable state three days, during which, you may be sure, I passed my time very ill. I believed it would never be otherwise; and to add to my mortification, Mr. Wortley reproached my indiscretion without ceasing. However, my face is since in statu quo; nay, I am told by the ladies here that it is much mended by the operation, which I confess I cannot perceive in my looking-glass.”
On the 6th of June, 1718, she left Constantinople with regret. And at this I do not wonder, for there was in her character a coarse sensual bent, closely approximating to the oriental cast of mind, which in a wild unpoliced capital, where, according to her own account, women live in a state of perpetual masquerade, might still more easily be yielded to even than in London. Of study and the sciences she had by this time grown tired. She regretted that her youth had been spent in the acquisition of knowledge. The Turks, who consumed their lives “in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating,” appeared upon the whole much wiser than the English, who tormented their brains with some scheme of politics, I use her own words, or in studying some science to which they could never attain. “Considering what short-lived weak animals men are,” she adds, “is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure?” And lest any one should mistake her after all, she subjoins, “but I allow you to laugh at me for my sensual declaration in saying that I had rather be a rich effendi with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.” No doubt; and Lais, Cleopatra, or Ninon would have said the same thing.
Sailing down the Dardanelles, they cast anchor between the castles of Sestos and Abydos, where,
————In the month of cold December,
Leander, daring boy, was wont,—
What maid will not the tale remember?—
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
Here she enjoyed a full view of Mount Ida,
Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove,
And the world’s master lay subdued by love.
The quotation is Lady Montague’s. Descending a league farther down the Hellespont, she landed at the promontory of Sigeum, and climbed up to visit the barrow beneath which the heroic bones of Achilles repose. Experiencing no enthusiasm at the sight of these Homeric scenes, she was unquestionably right in not affecting what she did not feel; but who, save herself, could have viewed the plains of Troy, the Simois, and the Scamander without having any other ideas awakened in the mind than such as the adventure of Æschines’s companion and the lewd tale of Lafontaine had implanted there? However, to do her justice, though she gives her favourite ideas the precedence, she afterward observes, “there is some pleasure in seeing the valley where I imagined the famous duel of Menelaus and Paris had been fought, and where the greatest city in the world was situated.” Here, though she is mistaken about the magnitude of the city, there is some sign of the only feeling which ever ought to lead a traveller out of his way to behold such a scene; and she goes on to say, “I spent several hours here in as agreeable cogitations as ever Don Quixote had on Mount Montesinos;” in which cogitations let us be charitable enough to suppose that “the tale of Troy divine” was not forgotten.
From the Hellespont they sailed between the islands of the Archipelago, and passing by Sicily and Malta, where they landed, were driven by a storm into Porta Farina, on the coast of Africa, near Tunis, where they remained at the house of the British consul for some days. Being so near the ruins of Carthage, her curiosity to behold so remarkable a spot was not to be resisted; and accordingly she proceeded to the scene, through groves of date, olive, and fig-trees; but the most extraordinary objects she met with were the women of the country, who were so frightfully ugly that her delicate imagination immediately suggested to her the probability of some intermarriages having formerly taken place between their ancestors and the baboons of the country.
From Tunis they in a few days set sail for Genoa; whence after a little repose they proceeded across the Alps, and through France, to England, where they arrived on the 20th of October, 1718.
Shortly after her return she was induced by the solicitations of Pope, whom two years of reflection had not cured, to take up her residence at Twickenham. But the poet must very soon have discovered that, in comparison with the “rich effendis” and “three-tailed” pashas of the East, his poor little, ailing person, in spite of his grotto and his muse, had dwindled to nothing in the estimation of Lady Mary. Lord Hervey, who, though he wrote verses, had not been “blasted with poetic fire,” was considered, for reasons not given, more worthy of her ladyship’s friendship. However, these changes were not immediately apparent, and other affairs, which came still more home to her bosom than friendship, in the interim occupied her attention; among the rest the idea of realizing immense sums by embarking in the South Sea scheme. She likewise allowed the poet, whom the original had captivated so long, to employ the pencil of Sir Godfrey Kneller in copying her mature charms to adorn his hermitage. She was drawn in the meretricious taste of the times: and the physiognomy of the portrait answers exactly in expression to the idea which we form of Lady Mary from her writings; that is, it exhibits a mixture of intellectuality and voluptuousness, of calm, confident, commanding complacency, bordering a little on defiance or scorn. Pope received the finished picture with the delight of a lover, and immediately expressed his conception of it in the following lines:—
The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,
That happy air of majesty and truth,
So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,
My narrow genius does the power deny),
The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,
Where every grace with every virtue’s joined,
Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,
With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,
With just description show the soul divine,
And the whole princess in my work should shine.
The verses are insipid enough, like most compliments; but they express an opinion which circumstances very shortly afterward compelled him to change, when the princess became transformed into a modern “Sappho” and, thrown with Lord Fanny, Sporus, Atossa, and many others, into a group, was “damned” by satire to “everlasting fame.”
Lady Montague’s life, many years after her return from the East, was spent like that of most other ladies of fashion, who mingle a taste for literature and politics with gallantry. Her letters to her sister, who now, through the attainder and exile of her husband, Erskine Earl of Mar, resided abroad, abound with evidences that the pleasures which she had heretofore regarded as the summum bonum soon palled the appetite; and that as the effervescence of animal spirits which, during her youth, had given a keen relish to life subsided, a metamorphosis, the reverse of that of the butterfly, took place, changing the gay fluttering summer insect into a grub. A cynical contempt of all things human succeeded. Into the grounds of her separation from her husband I shall not inquire. Ill health was at the time the cause assigned. The triumph of the political party to which she was opposed has since been absurdly put forward to account for it: but she had, no doubt, other reasons, much more powerful, for cutting herself off, during a period of twenty-two years, from all personal intercourse with her family.
Be this however as it may, in the month of July, 1739, she departed from England, and bade an eternal adieu to Mr. Montague and the greater number of her old friends. Her first place of residence on the Continent was Venice, from whence she made an excursion to Rome and Naples, and, returning to Brescia, took up her abode in one of the palaces of that city. She likewise visited the south of France and Switzerland. The summer months she usually spent at Louverre, on the lake of Isis, in the territories of Venice, where gardening, silk-worms, and books appear to have afforded her considerable amusement. In 1758 she removed to Venice, and, her husband dying in 1761, she was prevailed upon by her daughter, the Countess of Bute, to return to England. However, she survived Mr. Montague but a single year; for, whether the sudden transition to a northern climate was too violent a shock for her frame, or that a gradual decay had been going on, and was now naturally approaching its termination, she breathed her last on the 21st of August, 1762, in the seventy-third year of her age.
Her letters have been compared with those of Madame de Sevigné, but they do not at all resemble them. The latter have a calm, quiet interest, a sweetness, an ingenuous tenderness, a natural simplicity, which powerfully recommend them to us in those moments when we ourselves are calm or melancholy. Lady Montague’s have infinitely more nerve and vigour, excite a far deeper interest, but of an equivocal and painful cast, and while, in a certain sense, they amuse and gratify, inspire aversion for their writer. On the other hand, Madame de Sevigné is a person whom one would like to have known. She is garrulous, she frequently repeats herself; but it is maternal love which causes the error. In one word, we admire the talents of Lady Montague, but we love the character of Madame de Sevigné.
RICHARD POCOCKE.
Born 1704—Died 1765.
This distinguished traveller was born at Southampton, in the year 1704. The scope of his education, which, besides those classical acquirements that usually constitute the learning of a gentleman, embraced an extensive knowledge of the principal oriental languages, admirably fitted him for travelling with advantage in the East. But previously to undertaking that longer and more important journey upon the history of which he was to rest all his hopes of fame, he resolved to visit some of the more remarkable countries of Europe; and accordingly, on the 30th of August, 1733, he departed from London, and proceeded by the usual route to Paris. The curiosities of this accessible country, France, of which we often remain in utter ignorance, because they are near, and may be easily visited, appeared highly worthy of attention to Pococke. He attentively examined the palaces and gardens of Versailles, St. Germain, and Fontainebleau; the remains of antiquity at Avignon, Nismes, and Arles; and the architectural and picturesque beauties of Montpellier, Toulon, and Marseilles.
From France he proceeded into Italy, by the way of Piedmont; and having traversed the territories of Genoa, Tuscany, the territories of the church, of Venice, and of Milan, he returned through Piedmont, Savoy, and France, and arrived in London on the 1st of July, 1734.
This tour only serving to increase his passion for travelling, he, on the 20th of May, 1736, set out from London on his long-projected journey into the East. He now directed his course through Flanders, Brabant, and Holland, into Germany, which he traversed in all directions, from the shores of the Baltic to Hungary and Illyria. He then passed into Italy, and proceeding to Leghorn, embarked at that port, on the 7th of September, 1737, for Alexandria in Egypt, where he arrived on the 29th of the same month.
It is a remark which I have frequently made during the composition of these Lives, that when an original-minded traveller directs his course through a well known but interesting country, we follow his track and peruse his observations with perhaps still greater pleasure than we should feel had he journeyed through an entirely new region. In the former case we in some measure consider ourselves competent to decide upon the accuracy of his descriptions and the justness of his views; while in the latter, delivered up wholly to his guidance, and having no other testimony to corroborate or oppose to his, we experience an involuntary timidity, and hesitate to believe, lest our confidence should lead us into error. Besides, in no country can the man of genius fail to find matter for original remark. No man can forestall him, because such a person discovers things literally invisible to others; though, when once pointed out, they immediately cease to be so. His acquirements, the peculiar frame of his mind, in one word, his individuality, is to him as an additional sense, which no other person does or can possess; and this circumstance, which is not one of the least fortunate in the intellectual economy, delivers us from all solicitude respecting that lack of materials for original composition about which grovelling and barren speculators have in all ages clamoured; while the consciousness of mental poverty has generated in their imaginations an apprehension that every one who approached them had a design upon their little pedler’s pack of ideas, and driven them into anxious and unhappy solitude, that, like so many spiders, they might preserve their flimsy originality from the rough collision of more robust minds.
The feeling which leads learned and scientific men one after another to Egypt is the same with that which, after long years of absence, induces us to visit the place of our birth. Philosophy, according to popular tradition, had its birthplace on the banks of the Nile—though those of the Ganges appear to possess a better claim to the honour; and it is to examine the material traces of early footsteps, urged by some obscure secret persuasion that momentous revelations respecting the history of man might be made, could we, if I may hazard the expression, re-animate the sacred language of the Egyptians, who, as Shelley phrases it,
Hung their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,
that traveller after traveller paces around the mysterious obelisks, columns, and sarcophagi of Karnac and Edfu. Countries which have never, so far as we know, been inhabited by any but savage tribes, however magnificent may be their scenery, however fertile their soil, can never, in the estimation of the philosophical traveller, possess equal attractions with India, Persia, Egypt, or Greece: they resemble so many theatrical scenes without actors; and after amusing the eye or the imagination for a brief space of time, excite a mortal ennui which nothing can ward off. The world itself would be a dull panorama without man. It is only as the scene of his actions, passions, sufferings, glory, or shame, that its various regions possess any lasting interest for us. Where great men have lived or died, there are poetry, romance,—every thing that can excite the feelings or elevate the mind. “Gray Marathon,” Thermopylæ, Troy, Mantinea, Agincourt, Waterloo, are more sublime names than Mont Blanc or the Himalaya. On the former we are lifted up by the remembrance of human energy; the latter present themselves to us as prodigious masses of brute matter, sublime undoubtedly, but linked by no glorious associations with the triumphs or the fall of great or brave men.
The above remarks appeared necessary to explain why we are never weary of accompanying travellers through Egypt, Palestine, and the other celebrated lands which border the Mediterranean: I now proceed with the adventures and researches of Pococke. On arriving at Alexandria, a city which, when taken by the Arabs, contained four thousand palaces, as many baths, four hundred public places or squares, and forty thousand Jews who paid tribute, he immediately exerted himself to gratify his curiosity, and this so imprudently, that he led several soldiers into a breach of duty, in showing him the ruins of the ancient Pharos without permission, for which they were afterward punished. Several travellers have pretended that the coffin of Alexander the Great is still preserved in a Mohammedan mosque in this city, and we find Bruce, thirty years after Pococke, making very diligent inquiry among the inhabitants respecting it. It is certain that the remains of the Macedonian king were deposited in a golden coffin in the royal tombs of Alexandria; but in the age of Augustus his bones had already been transferred from their gorgeous lodgings to humbler ones of glass, in which they were brought forth from their narrow house for the inspection of the tyrant, who threw flowers and placed a golden crown upon the coffin. However, when we reflect that even in so peaceful a city as Caen, the remains of William the Conqueror could not be preserved a few hundred years from popular insult, it seems extremely improbable that those of Alexander should have been suffered to escape for two thousand years in a place which has experienced so many and such dreadful vicissitudes.
From Alexandria he proceeded to Rosetta, in company with the English consul; and on approaching within a few miles of the city, was surprised to find a tent pitched, and an excellent collation laid out for them in the desert, for which they were indebted to the politeness of the French merchants, several of whom came out more than a league to meet them. Horses, likewise, were sent for their use by the Turkish governor of the city, whose opinions respecting the natural fitness of asses to be the coursers of Franks seem to have been quite heterodox. To add to the compliment, servants were sent whose business it was to run along by the side of the equestrian travellers; and in this unusual style they entered Rosetta.
It was now the latter end of October, and Egypt, which goes annually through as many changes as a butterfly, was already beginning to put on its winter dress, in which alone, according to the opinion of connoisseurs, it should be contemplated by the admirers of the beautiful. Its landscapes, it is well known, are very peculiar. There are no glaciers, toppling crags, or mountain torrents; but there are gardens filled with palm, orange, and almond trees; fields of young rice more green than the emerald; villages perched on little eminences, and flanked by date groves; diminutive lakes with reeds on greensward enamelled with flowers around their margin; and to crown all, one of the mightiest rivers in the world rolling along its broad waters through scenes of sunshine and plenty, and through ruins of such prodigious magnificence, that they seem rather to be the remains of a former world than the works of that race of pigmy stature which now inhabits it. A large portion of the rich fields in the vicinity of Rosetta belongs to Mecca; and the inhabitants have a tradition that a member of the prophet’s family resided on a neighbouring spot, where a mosque was afterward erected, to which, should the Holy City ever be wrested from the faithful, all devout persons would go on pilgrimage.
Locke, in combating the doctrine of innate ideas, and in order to show that modesty, as well as all the other virtues, is an acquired habit, cites from Baumgarten a description of the nudity and immoral practices of the Mohammedan saints of Egypt, which in that country were not merely tolerated, but vehemently approved of. Two of these naked saints Pococke himself saw in the city of Rosetta. The one, he observes, was a good-humoured old man; the other a youth of eighteen; and as the latter walked along the streets the people kissed his hands. He was moreover informed that on Fridays, when the women are accustomed to visit the cemeteries, these holy men usually sat at the entrance, when the visiters not only kissed their hands, but carried their religious veneration so far as to practise the same ceremony with which the ancients adored their Phallic divinity, and the modern Hindoos pay their reverence to the Lingam. Something of this kind our traveller says he witnessed at Cairo, but that the sight was too common to command the least attention.
Having seen the principal curiosities of this city, and visited the Greek patriarch, who entertained him with a pipe, a spoonful of sweet syrup, and coffee, he set out on the 4th of November for Cairo, sailing in a large kanja up the Nile. Besides the constantly shifting scenes presented by the shores of the river, which were of themselves sufficient to render the voyage a pleasant one, the passengers were amused by Arab story-tellers, and representations of rude farces, in which the sailors themselves were the performers. The lakes of natron, a little of which dissolved in vinegar is, according to Hasselquist, a sovereign remedy for the toothache, Pococke did not visit; but he was informed by some of the passengers that their environs abounded with wild boars. On the 11th of November they arrived at Cairo. This city, during his stay in Egypt, may be regarded as his home, from which his excursions radiated in various directions. Though the principal object of Pococke’s travels, perhaps, was the examination of antiquities, and the illustration of ancient geography, he very wisely extended his researches to the modern condition of the country, and the manners of its actual inhabitants. He visited the convents of dervishes and monks, the cells of hermits, the cemeteries of Turks, Jews, and Christians, and observed with care the character and costume of every class of the population, from the sovereign bey to the houseless courtesan, who, like Tamar in the Bible, sat by the wayside to inveigle passengers. His remarks upon ancient Memphis,—the site of which, as I have already observed in the life of Shaw, he fixed at Metraheny,—and on the pyramids, are still, notwithstanding all that has been since written, highly worthy of attention. He was not, like Hasselquist, deterred from ascending to their summit by the heat of the stones or by tempestuous winds; he measured their dimensions; descended into the well; and speculated on their use and origin.
Shortly after his visit to the pyramids, he set out on an excursion to the district of Faioum, and the Birket el Keroun, or Lake Mœris, with the governor of the province, who happened to be just then returning home from Cairo. His companion was a middle-aged Mussulman, of a lively, cheerful temper, who made no scruple of associating with a Frank, or even of eating with him, and drinking liqueurs, which are not prohibited in the Koran, not having been invented when it was written. It could not, however, be said that they fared too luxuriously on the way; their meals, like those of Forster and his Ghilān Seid, consisted for the most part of bread, cheese, and onions. After this frugal supper, they reposed at night in a grove of palm-trees.
Having traversed a succession of small desert plains, sprinkled with Egyptian flints, they entered a valley bounded on both sides by hills, composed entirely of oyster-shells, which rest on a bed of reddish clay. Of these shells the uppermost remain in their original state, while those which lie deeper, or are scattered over the plain, are petrified. On arriving at Tamish, the most northern village of the district, the kasheff, or governor, was met by several Arabs, who, observing him to be accompanied by a stranger, immediately began to exhibit their skill in horsemanship, and in the management of the lance. Here the quality of their fare improved. The onions were replaced by pilaus, roast lamb, fowl, soup, and sherbets; and in the morning they had for breakfast bread and butter, poached eggs, honey, cheese, and olives. Faioum, in fact, should be the land of good living. It is the Arsinoitic Nome of the ancients, which, in Strabo’s opinion, was the finest spot in all Egypt; and although it no longer, perhaps, deserves this character, it still produces corn, wine, olives, vegetables,—in one word, whatever they choose to sow or plant will thrive. The olive, which requires cultivation in the gardens of Alexandria, grows spontaneously in this district. The grapes, too, are of a superior quality, and so sweet that a thick syrup made from them serves the Mohammedans instead of sugar. But Pococke soon found that even wine was not an unknown blessing in the Arsinoitic Nome; for, at a supper to which he invited the traveller, the honest kasheff got a little tipsy, threw off his gravity, and behaved as frivolously, says Pococke, as a European.
It was in this canton, according to the ancients, that the Labyrinth of the Twelve Kings was situated, and Pococke, perhaps erroneously, imagined himself to have examined its ruins, from which he proceeded to the shores of Lake Mœris. This lake, the Egyptian priests informed Herodotus, was the creation of art; but observing its extraordinary dimensions, it being no less than fifty miles in length by about ten in breadth, our traveller supposes that the art consisted in the inventing of the tale, and causing it to be believed, which in boldness and ingenuity fell very little short of the actually scooping out of that prodigious basin. But credulity often goes by the side of skepticism. Having rejected as a fable the artificial origin of the lake, Pococke supposes himself to have discovered in an extravagant tradition now current among the Arabs, the basis of the ancient mythus of the Elysian Fields, and the Infernal Ferryman. The common people, he observes, make frequent mention of Charon, and describe him as a king who might have loaded two hundred camels with the keys of his treasury! From this he infers that the fable of Charon took its rise on this spot, and that the person known under this name was the officer intrusted with the keys of the Labyrinth and its three thousand apartments, who, when the corpse of any prince or chief came thither to be interred, made inquiries concerning the actions of his life, and, according as they were good or bad, granted or refused the honours of the tomb. But as the Lake Acherusia, or Acheron, was in the neighbourhood of Memphis, according to Diodorus, he supposes that the same ceremonies were practised at both places, though originating here. Guigniant, a contemporary French writer, supposes that the ruins discovered by Pococke were not those of the Labyrinth, which, in fact, have only recently been found and described by his countrymen Bertre and Jomard.
The original destination of the Labyrinth has not yet been satisfactorily explained: some learned men suppose it to have been a kind of senate-house, where the representatives of the various nomes assembled for political deliberation; others regard it as a real Pantheon, consecrated to the worship of all the gods of Egypt; while a third class insist that, to whatever other uses it may have been applied, its principal object was to afford an asylum to the mummies of the kings who erected it.
Non nostrum tantas componere lites.
However this may be, it seems extremely probable that the idea of the Elysian Fields did actually originate in Egypt, and migrate thence into Greece. Those delicious habitations of the dead, as Creuzer observes after Diodorus, which are spoken of by the Greeks, really existed on the banks of a lake called Acheron, situated in the environs of Memphis, and surrounded by beautiful meadows and cool lakes, and forests of lotus and reeds. These were the waters which were yet to be traversed by the dead who had passed the river, and who were journeying to their sepulchral grottoes in the kingdom of Osiris or Pluto, the Ὅρμος ἀγαθῶν, “haven of the good, the pious, the virtuous,” to which none were admitted whose lives were incapable of sustaining the strictest scrutiny. The heaven of the Egyptians, contrary to what might have been expected, was a place of more complete happiness and enjoyment than that of the Greeks. The very word Elysium, according to Jablonski, signified glory and splendour; but before they could arrive at this region of joy, all human souls were condemned to pass through a circle of transmigrations, greater or less, according to their deeds.
To return, however, to Pococke: From Faioum he returned by Dashone and Saccara to Cairo, from whence he set sail on the 6th of December for Upper Egypt. Having visited various important ruins by the way, he arrived on the 9th of January, 1738, at Dendera, where he found the ruins of the ancient edifices filled with ashes, and the remains of more modern buildings. In fact, the Arabs had perched their miserable little cabins upon the very summit of the temple of Athor-Aphrodite, or the Egyptian Venus, in order to enjoy a cooler air in summer.
From hence he continued to ascend the stream, visited the ruins of Thebes, Elephantina, Philæ, and the Cataracts; whence he returned to Cairo, where he arrived on the 27th of February. It was now his intention to visit Mount Sinai, but finding upon inquiry that the monks of that mountain were then at open war with the neighbouring Arabs, he deferred the excursion, and proceeded down the eastern branch of the Nile to Damietta, where he embarked for the Holy Land.
Pococke arrived at Jaffa on the 14th of March, where, having delivered up his money, according to custom, to the monks, lest he should be robbed by the Arabs, he immediately departed by way of Rama for Jerusalem. The country, at this time, was in a state of great confusion. Feuds of the most desperate kind existed among the numerous Arab clans encamped in this part of Palestine; and from whatever tribe the traveller might take a guide, he necessarily exposed himself during the journey to the hostility of every other horde. However, since the danger was inevitable, and, perhaps, after his tame and secure movements in Egypt, somewhat necessary to give a greater poignancy to his pleasures, he put himself under the guidance of a respectable Arab horseman, followed by a servant on foot, and departed on his way. The Arab, who shared the risk, went a little out of the direct road to the place where his tribe was encamped; and not being subject to that jealousy which induces the Turk to keep his wife from the sight of strangers, he introduced the traveller into his harem, and allowed him to sit down by the fire with his wife and some other women.
It being now evening, the women, having regaled him with bread and coffee, showed him a carpet, on which they desired him to take a little rest. He expected they were to set out in an hour or two in order to reach Jerusalem before day; but lay down, and, falling asleep, remained in that comfortable position until long after sunrise next morning. The Arab now went out and left him in the harem, when the women, who are all the world over generous and hospitable, exerted themselves to entertain and regale him with fresh cakes, butter, and coffee. The mistress of the tent never quitted him for a moment, and while he remained here he was in safety, for the precincts of the harem are sacred in the East. At length the Arab himself returned, and promising him that they should depart in the evening, threw a striped mantle over his shoulders, and went out to walk with him in the fields. Contrary to his expectations, the Arab actually set out with him as soon as it was dark, and carefully avoiding all villages, camps, and inhabited places, in every one of which he anticipated danger, he arrived safely with him at Jerusalem two hours before day.
During his stay in this holy city Pococke visited and examined every remarkable spot within its precincts and environs, and his researches threw considerable light on numerous points of sacred topography. He likewise made an excursion to Jericho and Jordan, and on his return from this journey descended along the banks of the brook Kidron to the Dead Sea. From the number of decayed trees and shrubs which he saw in the water, he conjectured that this lake had recently overflowed its ancient shores, and encroached upon the land. The country in these districts was formerly liable to volcanic eruptions; abounds in warm springs of a powerful odour, and in wells of bitumen, which ooze out of the rocks, and is carried into the sea by the river. It having been asserted by Pliny and others that animals and other heavy bodies floated involuntarily in the water of this sea, Pococke undressed, and made the experiment; and, strange to say, so powerful was the effect of prejudice upon his mind, that he fancied he could not sink in it, and says that when he attempted to dive his legs remained in the air, and having once got the upper hand of his head, gave him considerable trouble to reduce them to their natural subordinate position. However, though he was persuaded, he says, that the result would have been still more striking, his faith in Pliny was not sufficiently powerful to induce him to make the experiment in deep water; which was fortunate, for as, apparently, he could not swim, his travels, had he done so, would have terminated there. On coming out of the sea he found his face covered with a crust of salt, which, he observed, was likewise the case with the pebbles on the shore. The pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was changed was a little farther south, and therefore he did not see it; but he was assured by the Jews, who seem to have tasted it, that the salt of this pillar is very unwholesome. On this point, however, Pococke merely remarks that he will leave it to the reader to think as he pleases upon the subject.
Having visited all the most remarkable places in this part of Palestine, he returned to Jaffa, where he embarked on the 22d of May on board of a large boat bound for Acra. At this period the sea along the whole coast of Syria was infested by Maltese pirates. By an agreement entered into with the monks of Palestine, these corsairs engaged not to meddle with any of these boats within eighty leagues of the Holy Land; but, in spite of this arrangement, they frequently boarded them, seizing and carrying off into slavery every Mohammedan passenger, and pillaging both Turks and Christians with remarkable impartiality. The vessel in which Pococke was embarked escaped the clutches of these vagabonds, and arrived safe at Acra. From this part he made an excursion into the northern parts of Palestine and Galilee; visited Mount Carmel, Cæsarea, Nazareth, Mount Tabor, Cana, and the Lake of Tiberias; extended his researches to Mount Hermon and the sources of the Jordan; and then, returning to the coast, departed for Tyre, Sidon, and Mount Lebanon.
The mountains in this part of Syria are inhabited by the Maronites and Druzes, people whose manners and customs I shall have occasion to describe in the life of Volney. Pococke’s stay among them was short, and his occasions of observing them few, but the result of his limited experience was favourable; for he pronounces the Maronites more simple and less addicted to intrigue than the other Christians of the East, and for courage and probity prefers the Druzes, who are neither Christians nor Mohammedans, before every other oriental people. Nevertheless it is conjectured that the latter are the descendants of the Christian armies who were engaged in the crusades. They themselves profess, according to our traveller, to be descended from the English; at other times they claim a French origin; and the probability is that they know not who were their ancestors. Like the Yezeedees of Mesopotamia, they are sometimes compelled to dissemble their incredulity and frequent the mosques; but Pococke learned that in their secret books they blasphemed both Christ and Mohammed. This hypocrisy is not altogether consistent with their character either for courage or probity. They had among them a sort of monks called akel, who abstained from wine, and refused to sit at their prince’s table lest they should participate in the guilt of his extortions. These men Pococke regards rather as philosophers, however, than as monks. Their religion, if they had any, consisted in the worship of nature; and from their veneration for the calf, the lingam, and the yoni, the figures of which they were said to preserve in a small silver box, I should conjecture that both they and their religion are an offshoot from the great Brahminical trunk; and the same thing may with equal probability be said of the Yezeedees, the Ismaelaah, and the Nessariah, whose doctrines had found their way into the west, and caused the founding of altars to the yoni in Cyprus long before the birth of history.
Our traveller continued his researches among the rude tribes who inhabit the fastnesses of Lebanon, visited the cedars, Baalbec (where he found the body of a murdered man in the temple), Damascus, Horus, and Aleppo; and having made an excursion across the Euphrates to Orfah, returned by way of Antioch and Scanderoon to Tripoli, where he embarked on the 24th of October for Cyprus.
On approaching Limesol from the sea, its environs, consisting entirely of vineyards, and gardens planted with mulberry-trees, and interspersed with villas, present a charming landscape to the eye. The wines for which the island is celebrated are all made here. In Cyprus what principally interests the traveller are the footsteps of antiquity; he seeks for little else. The temples and worship of Venus, hallowed, if not spiritualized, by poetry, have diffused a glow over the soil which neither time nor barbarism, potent as is their influence, has been able to dissipate. The heart thrills and the pulse quickens at the very names of Paphos and Amathus. A thousand pens have celebrated their beauty: Love has waved his wings over them. Pococke seems, however, notwithstanding his passion for beholding celebrated places, to have visited these scenes with as much coolness as he would a turnip-field.
Non equidem invideo: miror magis.