RENEGADE PILGRIM TO MECCA. FOREMOST OF ITALIAN TRAVELLERS.
CHAPTER I. THE GREAT AGE OF THE RENAISSANCE AND OF DISCOVERY.
By the close of the Fifteenth Century, the relative stability of society and of its convictions during the Middle Ages was undone. The Italian, at least, had cast off the restraints of that rigid and traditional world, and was in reaction against it. For, social bonds were loosened, and the corporate life of guild and city was in decay. With the revival of letters, society became imbued once again with the Greek and Roman conception of man as a progressive creature, and was awakened to the richness of thought and feeling to be enjoyed in vigorous passionate life. Self-sufficiency, self-assertion, and force of will were admired above all other qualities, and it was the ambition of most men to achieve them. Each man strove to fulfil his own nature in his own way. Religion rapidly degenerated into an indispensable observance of formalities, a traditional habit, a customary cloak. The rigorous men of the Renaissance sought to live fully, freely, and with diversity; they thirsted for new and refreshing springs; they quaffed delightful and refreshing draughts; they boldly winged their way to unfamiliar spheres, or gratified sense and passion to the full. The age was aglow with all manner of ideality. On the whole its passions were unrestrained, save by prudence; unchecked by any moral curb, which it had counted foolishness. The religious rapture of Savonarola was an ephemeral phenomenon, and almost unique. Even in the gentle grace of Perugino’s Madonnas and the sweet innocence with which he invests the Child, we may mark the substitution of religious affectation for religious sincerity. The age loved pomp and magnificence; and these appear in the frescoes of Pinturicchio. It was a field for the development of a deep-seated, incalculable, yet persuasive force of Will: the spirit is portrayed in the subtle eye and inscrutable smile of Monna Lisa.
It was when the Renaissance was in full flood, but before Ariosto, “with his tongue in his cheek,” had achieved his cantoes of romantic chivalry; before Raphael plied his brush with too perfect and serene a finish; before Michael Angelo cast aside charm and beauty for the expression of strength and power, that the energy of the age found a new field for activity. The Turk swept the Ægean Sea and ruled the Western Roman Empire. But the great drama of History unfolds tragic irony surpassing the invention of poets. When the vast spaces of the great Church of Justinian rang with the shout of the victors, the knell of Moslem predominance sounded unheard. The Turk had captured the gateways of the East only to force the European, in adventures beyond the seas, to the domination of the world. Pioneers set out from Portugal and Spain, and tried to cut out the Moslem middleman; they steered to find a sea-way to the fabulous wealth of India. They coasted along amazing lands, peopled by strange races, and entered novel and unsuspected seas. Columbus found a new world beyond “wandering fields of barren foam”; Vasco di Gama was forcing his way round Africa. Many a narrow, ancient illusion was dispelled; and the minds of men were excited to a rapture of expectation. The hearts of pious Portuguese and Spaniards beat high at the hope of combining the salvation of heathen souls with the profitable enslavement of heathen bodies. All men were allured by the prospect of acquiring new markets, priceless gems, and the gold dust of El Dorado. The modern world of aggressive commerce was engendered in the very bosom of the High Renaissance.
CHAPTER II.—FROM VENICE TO DAMASCUS.
No commercial arithmetic called a certain Ludovico di Varthema to adventure. Like Dante’s Ulysses, “nothing could quench his inward burning to have full witness of the world.” “Ungifted,” so he tells us, “with that far-casting wit for which the earth in not enough, and which ranges through the loftiest regions of the firmament with careful watch and survey; but possessed of slender parts merely,” he fixed his mind on beholding with his own eyes some unknown part of the world and on marking “where places are, what is curious in their peoples, their different animals, and what fruit-bearing and scented trees grow there ... keeping before me that the thing which a single eye-witness may set forth shall outweigh what ten may declare on hearsay.” It is as if a cavalier of Boiardo or Ariosto had forsaken fairy land and sought novel adventure in the kingdom of knowledge. Varthema set out to see and know; and, although obviously a man of no great fortune, he would seem to have neglected remarkable opportunities of trading and growing rich.
That he was a Bolognese, we learn from the title-page of his volume—the Itinerario. As a citizen of Bologna, the Pope was his overlord; and we find him calling himself, by a pardonable license, a Roman. Whether eager curiosity was the only motive which impelled him to travel, we know not. He lets drop in the middle of his volume that he left a wife and children at home. Marriage in Italy was a matter of family arrangement, with a view to the increase of family wealth and power; and children could readily be left under the care of kinsmen. “The Italians make little difference between children and nephews or near kinsfolk,” wrote Bacon, “but, so they be of the lump, they care not, though they pass not through their own body.” And the family council has parental force in Italy, even to-day. The unsettled condition of every Italian State in the days of that “Most holy Lord the Pope Alexander Borgia,” his crafty, treacherous son, and hardly less crafty and treacherous native statesmen and foreign invaders, often made swift change of residence highly desirable. Of that affectation of the men of the Renaissance—excessive and trumpeted desire of fame, which was a mere imitation of the classics,—there is not a trace in Varthema: he cared as little for bubbles as for baubles. Whatever other motives may have incited him, lust of travel was his predominant passion. What his occupation had been is unknown. On an occasion when it was helpful to him to pose as a physician he did so; and his close observation of the structure and habits of animals and the qualities of plants, suggests the kind of educative discipline which a physician would receive. But since he confesses to having ordered a cold astringent preparation when a warm laxative was required, his knowledge of physic was limited or readily forgotten. Again, since, on one occasion, he takes military service as a Mameluke; professes himself, on another occasion, to be an adept in the manufacture of mortars; and we find him fighting with the intrepidity and skill of a proved warrior against Arabs in India, he may very well have been a soldier before setting out on his travels. In that age of confusion, when the successes of the French in Lombardy broke the balance of power among the Italian States, there was ample opportunity of martial employment. There is not a trace of the accomplished haunter of courts, no love of literature or of art apparent in the Itinerario. Varthema’s birth, upbringing, and “the fate of his bones” are secrets which lie securely hidden in the ruins of time. But his narrative endures—an imperishable monument. It reveals him as a true man of his period. His skill in dissembling, and his insensitiveness at the call of expediency to any obligation of truth or gratitude, contrast with his scrupulous pursuit of truth for its own sake and the accuracy of his observation. His record of travel is one which displays the coolness of his courage no less than its intrepid dash; it reveals a man constant of purpose, and endowed with ingenuity, resourcefulness, self-restraint, prudence, sagacity, and a sense of humour. Here indeed is a rare man!
In the year 1502 there was peace in the Levant. Lucrative trade between Venice and Egypt went on, unmolested by Turkish fleets. At the close of that year, Varthema took sail for Alexandria; the wind was favourable, and he reached the great port on one of the early days of 1503. Alexandria was the chief mart for the interchange of the wares of East and West, and therefore well known to Europeans; “Wherefore,” says Varthema, “yearning after new things as a thirsty man doth for fresh water, I entered the Nile and arrived at Cairo.” “Babylon,” as Europeans called Cairo, was reputed to be one of the most marvellous of cities; but our traveller was disappointed to find it far smaller than he had thought. He declines to discuss the government established there, or the arrogance of its Mameluke rulers; “for my fellow-countrymen well wot of such matters.” Close upon two centuries had passed since a Circassian slave clothed the Imam with a royal robe, usurped his mundane powers, reduced him to a nonentity, founded a dynasty, and ruled by military force from the Taurus and Euphrates to the Nile. This dynasty delegated authority to Emirs and Sheiks. It ruled by means of a soldiery, like itself, of slave origin, cruel, insolent and unbending. Children of Christian descent, brought mainly from the region which lies to the south of Caucasus, were instructed in the faith of the Moslem and trained to physical endurance, boldness, skill in warfare, and contempt of all men save their masters and themselves. These Mamelukes, as they were called, received liberal payment; they were allowed to keep a harem and to rear a family. The land lay crushed and impotent beneath this military caste. Military slaves, they exhibited the vices of slaves in office. As in the time of Ibn BatÛta, the Sultan of Cairo ruled; but now ruled over delegates who were frequently rebellious to his authority; yet he and they and all, even to the terrible ottoman Turk at Constantinople, who now held Eastern Europe in bondage from the Danube to Cape Matapan, acknowledged the headship of the Imam at Cairo as legitimate Caliph of the great Abbaside line.
Leaving Cairo, Varthema took ship for Beyrout. Here, he saw nothing noteworthy, save the ruins of an ancient palace, “which, so they say,” was once the residence of the princess whom St. George rescued from the dragon. We find a novel scepticism in this man of the new age. “So they say,” is a phrase of frequent recurrence in the Itinerario. The sceptic’s ears are as open as his brain is active; he repeats all the information given to him, however extravagant and however healthy his doubt; but he is careful to let the reader know that it is mere hearsay; he gives a hint of his own disbelief, and leaves the matter open to sane judgment: the piping times of a merchant in marvels have passed away. When Varthema has his own ends to serve, we shall find him telling a lie with as little scruple as any diplomatist of his generation; but he records faithfully and exactly what he went out to see and the incidents which befell him. We have the testimony of the precise Burton that “all things well considered, Ludovico15 Bartema, for correctness of observation and readiness of wit, stands in the foremost rank of oriental travellers”; and that great authority writes thus although he only quotes from Richard Eden’s imperfect and interpolated translation of a Latin deformation of the Itinerario; and probably knew of no other copy.
Occasionally Varthema falls into a not uncommon blunder: he exaggerates numbers; but he is always hard-headed, incredulous of tradition, and not at all given to romancing.
A short voyage of two days brought our Italian from Beyrout to Tripoli, whence he took the caravan-route to Hamath, a large city on the Orontes, once an outpost of Judah, retaken by Israel in the wars between the two kingdoms. At Menin, a land of luscious fruits and the serviceable cotton-plant, he found a population of Christian-subjects of the Emir of Damascus and two beautiful churches, “said to have been built by Helena, mother of Constantine.” He went on to Aleppo, and thence eight days of easy travel brought him to a city so ancient that its foundation is lost in unfathomed time. He writes of Damascus that “to set it forth is beyond my power.” Here he remained some months, in order to learn Arabic—a task quite indispensable for farther travel in Mohammedan lands. He tells us of the fortress, built by a Florentine renegade, a man skilled in physic, who cured a Sultan suffering from the effects of poison, and is venerated as a holy man. This transformation of the physician into the saint may have suggested some serviceable play-acting in India, of which we shall become spectators later on.
The military Empire of Cairo was in decay, and had become very corrupt. A vivid picture is set before us of delegated despotism and its concomitants; greed, graft, outrage and squeeze. Whenever a new Sultan succeeded to power, very large sums would be offered him for the rule of such a wealthy city as Damascus. Of course the gold would have to be wrung out of the resident merchants. If a good instalment of the promised “present” were not speedily forthcoming, the Sultan would find means to remove the dilatory Emir at the sword’s point, “or in some other way; but, let him make the present aforesaid, and he shall retain his rule.” “The traders of the city are not dealt with justly. The rulers vie with each other in oppressing them, by robbery or by dealing death.... The Moors are subject to the Mamelukes after the fashion of the lamb to the wolf.... The Sultan will send two missives to the governor of the citadel, one of which will command him to call together there such lords or traders as he may choose. And when they are gathered together in the citadel, the second letter is read to them, whereof that which is its purpose, is gotten without delay. Thus doth the lord aforesaid set about getting money.” We are told of the curious way in which strict guard is enforced at the citadel: throughout the night at intervals each sentinel signals to his next neighbour by beating a drum; he who fails to pass on a responsive rat-tat has to spend a twelvemonth in prison.
Varthema found the houses dirty outside—(they are still built of a sort of cob), but the interiors splendid, with fountains and mosaics and carvings and columns of marble and porphyry. He visited the Great Mosque “where, so it is said,” the head of St. Zechariah is kept; and was shown the exact spot where, “so it is given out,” Saul, breathing out threatenings and slaughter, saw a great light and heard the voice of Jesus; also the house “where (so they say) Cain slew Abel, his brother.”
“But let us now return to the liberty which the Mamelukes aforesaid enjoy in Damascus.... They go about in twos and threes, since it is counted for dishonour to go alone. And, should they chance to meet two or three ladies, license is granted to them, or they take it. They lie in wait for these ladies in certain great hostelries, which are called Khans; and, as ladies pass by the doorway each Mameluke will lay hold of the hand of one of them, draw her inside, and abuse her. The lady resists having her face seen; for women go about with face covered in such wise that while they know us, we do not know who they are.... And sometimes it chances that the Mamelukes, thinking to take some lord’s daughter, take their own wives; a thing which happened whilst I was there.... When Moor meeteth Mameluke, he must make obeisance and give place, or he is bastinadoed, even should he be the chief merchant of the city.”
We are told that rich Christian traders in every kind of merchandise dwelt in Damascus, but were “ill-treated.” Long-eared goats were brought up three flights of stairs to be milked for your meal. A detailed description is given of the productions of the city and the dress and customs of its people.
CHAPTER III
OVER THE DESERT TO MECCA
Now, the yearly caravan from Damascus to the Holy Cities of Arabia was in preparation—a journey which the pious Moslem makes by rail to-day. For, as has been truly remarked, “the unchanging East” is a venerable catchword: the Orient moves on, but slowly. No “unbelieving dog” might plant his foot on Arabian soil; no European Christian had ever seen its sacred fanes. Here was a golden opportunity for one “longing for novelty.” Varthema had learned to speak Arabic. That insinuating smile, persuasive accent, and ingratiating address, so characteristically Italian, were surely his, for we find that he never fails to secure the firm friendship of utter strangers whenever he may require it—nay, he exerts some exceptional fascination on all men, some dÆmonic force, as Goethe calls it. He says: “I formed a great friendship with the Captain of the Mamelukes” who were to accompany and protect the caravan. Doubtless, Varthema’s look and bearing were martial; and, as has been said, he may have acquired experience in the Italian wars. To his credentials he added the persuasive argument of a bribe. His new friend accepted him as one of the escort. True, he must profess conversion to the Mohammedan Faith. This was no great strain on the conscience in days when Borgia and Julius della Rovere and the Medici sat in the chair of St. Peter, and when most Christians contented themselves with a half-sceptical observance of habitual forms. Like Henry of Navarre, Varthema thought an apple off another tree than his own a matter of small moment in the fulfilment of his purpose. He repeated the necessary formula and became a Moslem. He had to take a new name. Might it be because he was committed to an unparalleled adventure that he took the name of the son of Amittei? He called himself Jonah.
This bold step was worthy of the Italian Renaissance, when a man had thought it shame not to fashion his own life to his own ends; when he might brush weak scruples aside, and overcome obstacles as the oar turns the wave, converting hindrance into help. Behold our unflinching traveller mounted on a spirited steed, armed to the teeth; ready to encounter all chances of battle, desert-thirst, and unknown peril—one fulfilling old Malory’s test: “he that is gentle will draw him unto gentle tatches.”
The caravan, of pilgrims and merchants, women, children and slaves (about 40,000 souls) and 30,000 camels, was guarded by only 60 Mamelukes, 20 being in the van, 20 midmost, and 20 bringing up the rear. Damascus was left on April 8th 1503, and on the third day El Mezarib was reached, a place on the high land east of the Jordan and about 30 or 40 miles from it. Here the caravan rested 3 days to give the merchants time to buy Arabian steeds. Doughty, that intrepid English traveller and writer of unique English, tells us that, not many years ago, El Mezarib remained the appointed place for gathering up the pilgrim multitude. In Varthema’s time the sheik of the district was both powerful and predatory. He is said to have owned 300,000 camels (50 times the number accorded to Job in the day of recompense), 40,000 horses and 10,000 mares. The number may be exaggerated; but the sheik was able to pounce down on the granaries of Egypt, Syria or Palestine when he was least expected—even believed to be a hundred miles away. “Truly, these folk do not run, but fly, swift as falcons; and they keep close together like a flock of starlings,” Varthema tells us. Their fleet spirited Arabian mares would run a whole day and night without stopping, and be fresh again after a draught of camels’ milk. He describes the marauding Arab very correctly as of dark complexion, small make, effeminate voice, and with long, stiff, black hair.
From El Mezarib, the caravan pursued its ancient course through Syrian and Arabian deserts; but more to the east than in later days. The scheme of travel was to march for about 20 hours; then to halt at a given signal and unload the camels; after resting for a day and night, a signal was again given, and, in a trice all was made ready, and cavalcade and “ships of the desert” were off again over rocky wastes and pathless seas of sand. Then as now, camels were fed on balls of barley-meal and watered every three days. Every eighth day, if no well was found, the ground was dug deeply for water, and the caravan halted a day or two. But it was invariably attacked by Bedouins when this happened. It was their amiable custom to lie in wait for the caravan and carry off women, children or any other unconsidered trifle which might fall within their grasp. Unhappy Joseph Pitts of Exeter (who was captured by Algerine pirates, professed Mohammedanism to escape cruelty, and accompanied his third master on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1680) describes how, between Mecca and Medina, “the skulking thievish Arabs do much mischief to some of the Hagges (pilgrims to Meccah). For in the night-time they steal upon them ... loose a camel before and behind, and one of the thieves leads away the camel with the Hagge upon his back asleep.” And, thirty years ago, Charles Montagu Doughty told us how the Bedouin youth would emulate Spartan boyhood and strain every power to rob a Hadji, for the glory of the feat.
There are many ruins to be found in Edom and Arabia Petrea. Like most men of sceptical turn, Varthema tempered a spirit of free enquiry with a little credulity. He saw distant rocks of red sandstone, fantastically shaped; they were “like blood on red wax mingled with soil.” He was told that these were the ruins of the cities of the plain, and writes, probably from conviction, certainly with commendable prudence, seeing that he had posed as an apostate: “Verily, Holy Writ doth not lie, for one beholds how the cities perished by miracle of God. Of a truth, I believe from the witness of my own eyes that these men were evil; for all around the land is wholly dry and barren. The earth may bear no single thing, and of water there is none ... and, by a miracle the whole ruin is there to be seen even yet. That valley was full twenty miles long; and thirty-three of our company died there from thirst, and divers others, not being quite dead, were buried in the sand, their faces being left uncovered.”
One day, when traversing what the Bible calls “the wilderness of Edom,” “we came to a little mountain, and near to it was a cistern; whereat we were well pleased and encamped on the said hill. The next day, early in the morning, 24,000 Arabs rode up to us and demanded payment for their water”—a time-honoured exaction of the Bedouin Arab, which in our own days is said to have supported one third of Arabia.—“We refused, saying that the water was the gift of God. Thereupon they opened battle with us, saying that we had robbed them of their water. We set the camels as a protecting rampart all round us and put the merchants in the midst thereof and we stood siege during two nights and two days; and a constant skirmish went on. By that time both we and our foes had come to an end of our water. The mountain was wholly encompassed by Arabs, and they averred that they would break through our defence. Our leader, finding himself unable to hold on, took counsel with the Moslem traders; and we gave the Arabs 1,200 ducats of gold. But, when they had gotten the money, they said that not even 10,000 ducats of gold should be satisfaction for their water; whereby we perceived what they sought more than money. So our sagacious leader agreed with the caravan that all men capable of battle should not mount on their camels, but look to their arms. In the morning we put the whole caravan forward, and we Mamelukes stayed behind. We made a strength of 300 fighting men; and we had not to wait long for the fray. We lost but one man and one woman, and we killed 600 of them.”
This statement evokes from a French author the ironic wit of his race: he thinks that the two who were slain may be pitied for their remarkably bad luck. Burton, who more than once accuses Varthema of exaggerating numbers, thinks that his statement here may confirm Strabo’s account of Ælius Gallus having lost two soldiers only in a battle with 10,000 Arabs. We must not forget that the Arab’s body was bare and wholly unprotected; he rode his steed bare-back, carried no fire-arms, and his only weapons were lance and bow. He attacked in dense formation. No wonder therefore that Arabs fell in masses as they came on, and that the carnage was still more terrible when they fled, helter-skelter “Come le rane innanzi alla nimica Biscia” as “frogs before their enemy the snake.”16 And the Mamelukes, few as they were, rode saddled steeds, were disciplined, protected by armour, possessed of fire-arms, and almost unerring of aim. Once Varthema saw one of the Mamelukes perform a feat which recalls the legend of William Tell: At a second attempt, he shot off from the bow a pomegranate poised on the head of a slave at a distance of about twelve or fifteen paces. And they were as expert horsemen as the Arabs. A Mameluke removed his saddle, put it on his head and replaced it while at full gallop.
Thirty days were spent in absolute desert, and the caravan was always attacked when it encamped by a water supply; but the only loss which the foe caused during about six weeks of journeying was in the big battle in which the man and woman were killed. A little later on and up to our own time, the water-cisterns were defended by fortifications. Leaving arid and rocky hills,
“Boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretched far away.”
“Through these,” says Varthema, “we travelled five days and five nights. Now you should understand all about it. It is a great level stretch of white sand, fine as flour, and if by mischance the wind blow from the south, all may be reckoned as dead; even with the wind in our favour we could not see each other ten paces off. Wherefore there are wooden boxes set on the camels, and in these the travellers sleep and eat. The guides go on in front with compasses, even as if they were at sea. Many died here from thirst; and very many, having dug for water and found it, drank it until they burst; and here are mummies made.”
It is interesting to know that, up to 1908, when the railway for the conveyance of pilgrims from Damascus to Mecca was completed, those of the richer sort still used the wooden protection which our author describes. Possibly the mummies of which he speaks were merely corpses dried in the sun; but the preservation of the dead body by embalming was a very ancient practice in these parts. Doughty found no actual mummies in the Nabatean temples; but he collected and brought back, from the funeral chambers at El Khreby, resinous matters of the same character as those found in Egyptian sarcophagi. Presently, Varthema shall see powders for the mummification of the dead sold outside the Mosque at Mecca. Dried human flesh was an important part of the stock in trade of an Arabian physician whom Burton came across. But faith in the efficacy of pulverised mummy has been by no means confined to Arabia. In the Seventeenth Century, Sir Thomas Browne, tells us in his “Urn Burial” that: “Mummy is become merchandise, Miriam cures wounds and Pharaoh is sold for Balsams”; and even within the last few years Harry de Wint found the repulsive drug on sale as a cure for cancer at Serajevo in Bosnia.
It so happened that the usual discomposing sounds, made by the movements of unstable sand-hills, broke the silence of the desert just where the Prophet had once stopped to pray. The superstitious Moslems must have been wholly dismayed and demoralized, for even the iron nerve of Varthema was strained; he tells us that he “passed on with great danger, and never thought to escape.” At last, a thorn bush or two broke the monotony of this “sea of sand,” and the travellers knew that Medina was now only three days off. Even more pleasing than the sight of vegetation to those pilgrims, who had “seen neither beast, bird, reptile, no, nor insect, for fifteen days,” was the pair of turtledoves that lodged in the branches of the thorn bush. And, most delightful of all was the well of water which gave being to this miniature oasis. The water-skins were refilled; and, so copious was the supply that sixteen thousand camels were re-laden with the precious burden. Hard by, on a mountain, dwelt a curious colony, who depended on the well for their water. Varthema could see them in the far distance, “leaping about the rocks like wild goats.” And one does not wonder at their excitement; for the cistern would not fill up again until the rains should come. Varthema learned that these people were Jews, who burned with hatred of all Mohammedans, probably not without very just cause. “If they catch a Moor, they flay him alive.” They had the shrill voice of a woman, were swarthy, and went about naked. Probably their “nakedness” really amounted to their wearing a simple loose robe or a loin-cloth only. That they lived on goats’ flesh is not remarkable; for it is the staple food of the Bedouin Arab. Probably they were of small stature; but Varthema dwarfs then into comicality: he gives them but five or six spans of height. But he only saw them from afar. That they were Jews is no fable. In spite of the general expulsion of Jews from Arabia with the first successes of Islam, the existence of a remnant of the Chosen People in this district has been well authenticated by Arabian writers; they were to be found there nearly three centuries after Varthema saw them, and towards the close of the past century Doughty heard tradition of them. By some accident Varthema, or more likely, his printer, places them between Medina and Mecca; but he came across them before he reached Medina. It is hard to account for their presence in this isolated and desolate district; and many are the explanations which have been offered, and varied are the legends which have grown up. Badger thought “that their immigration occurred after the devastation of Judea by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, and that the colony was enlarged by successive bands of refugees down to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and the persecutions to which they were subjected under the Emperor Hadrian.” Here is one of the many problems of History which are “beyond conjecture and hopeful expectation.”
Two days after this event, the pilgrims came up to another cistern of water; they were now only four miles from Medina. Everyone thoroughly cleansed himself thereat from all the grime and sweat of the hot, dusty desert, and put on fresh linen, in order that he might present himself purified before the sepulchre of the Prophet on the morrow. All around, the land “lay barren and under the curse of God”; but, two stones’ cast from the city there was a grove of date-trees and a refreshing conduit.
Our traveller found Medina to be but a poor place of about 300 hearths. Food was brought thither from Arabia Felix, Cairo and Ethiopia; first, to a port on the Red Sea, and thence overland by caravan—a journey which occupied four days. He found the inhabitants “scum”; a character which all travellers of all ages agree in giving them, and which they shared with the people of Rome and of all places whither pilgrims and the folk of many nations were wont to congregate. The Sunnites and Shiites there, the two great sects which divide the Moslem world “kill each other like beasts anent their heresies.” And Varthema, the pretended proselyte, suddenly remembers that he is writing for a Christian world, and is careful to assure it of his own conviction that “these (beliefs) are false—all of them.”
“One wished to see everything,” he says, so the pilgrims passed three days at Medina, “Some guide took each pilgrim by the hand and led him to the place where Mohammed was buried.” Varthema gives a description of the Mosque, than which, says Burton, nothing could be more correct. “It is surmounted,” writes the English traveller, “by a large gilt crescent, springing from a series of globes. The glowing imagination of the Moslems crown this gem of the building with a pillar of heavenly light, which directs, from three days’ distance, the pilgrim’s steps towards El Medinah.” Varthema avers that the marvellous light had a real matter of fact basis, being due to a cunning deception. Whether due to trickery, or to the suggestive efficacy of faith and expectant attention, the miracle once had a rival in the more ancient supernatural outburst, every Eastertide, of the holy fire at the altar of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Neither Varthema nor his friend the Captain of the Mamelukes was a man easy to dupe, or given to the conjuring up of visions. “At the third hour of the night,” we read, “ten or twelve greybeards came to our camp, which was pitched two stones’ throw from the gate, crying, some here, some there, ‘There is no God but God! Mohammed is the Prophet of God! O Prophet! Do obeisance to God! Do obeisance to the Prophet! We implore forgiveness of sin.’ Our captain and we ran out at this clamour; for we thought the Arabs were on us to rob the caravan. We demanded why they were crying out; for they made the same sort of din which may be heard among us Christians when a saint works a miracle.” (Varthema cannot conceal his sceptical temper!) “These elders answered: ‘Do ye not see the splendour coming forth from the tomb of the Prophet?’ Our Captain replied that, for his part, he could see nothing, and asked us if anyone had seen anything; but we all said, ‘No.’ Then one of the old men demanded: ‘Are you slaves?’ Which is to say, Mamelukes. Our Captain replied, ‘Yes, we are slaves.’ To which the old man responded: ‘O, sirs, it is not given to you to see these heavenly things; for you are not yet well grounded in the faith.’” Now, in the morning of the same day, the Captain had offered the SherÎf of the Mosque 3,000 ducats to see the body of the Prophet, telling him that he had neither father nor mother, brothers nor sisters, wife nor children, and had come thither to save his soul. Whereupon the SherÎf had fallen into a rage and demanded how he dared desire to behold him for whom God made the heavens and the earth. Since the body was entombed within closed-up, solid walls, such an audacious request marks the sceptical irreverence and haughty insolence of the Mameluke, even before one of the most sacred temples of Islam. The Mamaluke had declared himself ready to pluck out his own unholy eyes for love of the Prophet, if only he might see his body first. The SherÎf, probably in order to silence him, then said that Mohammed had been translated to Heaven by angels. So now, the Captain shouted contemptuously to the reverend greybeard who had told him that it was denied him to see the vision by reason of imperfect faith: ‘You fool! Shall I give thee three thousand ducats? By God, I will not. You dog, son a dog!’.... The Captain thought that enough; and said so; and, turning round to his comrades, exclaimed: ‘See where I wanted to throw away 3,000 seraphim!’ And he mulcted the Mosque by forbidding any of his men to visit it again.
Varthema dispels the popular belief that Mohammed’s coffin was suspended in mid-air by the attraction of a magnet. “I tell you truth when I affirm that there is no coffin of iron or steel, or any loadstone, or any loadstone mountain within four miles.”
The journey from Medina to Mecca was at this particular time beset with more than usual difficulty and peril. The Hejaz was nominally a vassaldom of Cairo; really, it was under the almost absolute rule of its own despot; and we learn from Arabian Chroniclers that the despotism was being fought for by rival brethren. Indeed, throughout Eastern lands, war between sons for succession to the throne rendered vacant by the death of a father was the rule. And, in the long run, this bloody business usually ended in the success of the most capable competitor; so that, however horrible, it did not work out badly; for what can be more fatal to a weak, subservient people than an incompetent ruler? “There was a very great war,” says Varthema, “one brother being against another; four brethren contended for the lordship of Mecca; so that we travelled for the space of ten days; and twice on our way we fought with 50,000 Arabs.” Probably Varthema habitually over-estimated numbers; but there is no doubt that he had cause for alarm before he reached the second of the two sacred goals.
Our traveller descended one of the two passes cut through the hills which girdle and defend Mecca, and found himself in a “very famous, fair and well-peopled” city. The caravan from Cairo had arrived eight days before. Joseph Pitts, the Exeter sailor, also tells us how the “caravans do even jump all into Mecca together.” “Verily,” says Varthema, “never did I see such a multitude gathered together in one place as during the twenty days I stayed thereat.” He writes us at some length, though not so minutely or correctly as Burckhardt, of the great house of Allah and of the Ka’abah within it—a building which conserves the form of the old heathen temple and which was a place of pilgrimage for ages before Mohammed; but this he did not know. He speaks of the sacred pigeons of the precincts; of the seven circuits made by the pilgrims; of the sacred well Zemzem, in whose brackish waters the Moslem cleanse themselves both spiritually and physically; for did not Hagar quench the dying Ishmael’s thirst therewith? of the sacrifice of sheep, and how the flesh was cooked over a fire made of camels’ dung; of elaborate rituals; of the gift of what was superfluous in the feast to the many famished poor among the pilgrims; of the ascent to Arafat, where Gabriel taught Adam to erect an altar; and of that strange, ancient relic of heathen times, the casting of stones at the devil. But he says not one word of the “Black Stone” of the Ka’abah, once the fetish of ancient Arabian worship, and kissed to-day by the Hadji (pilgrim). We learn that Mecca, like Medina, was fed from Arabia Felix and Africa. It was a mart as well as a place of pilgrimage.
Now for a marvel. In an enclosure of the Mosque were two unicorns! They were presents from an Ethiopian monarch to the Sultan of Mecca as the finest thing that could be found in the world ... the richest treasure ever sent. “Now, I will tell you of their make,” writes our author; “the elder is shaped like a colt of 30 months, and he has a horn on his forehead of about 3 arm lengths. The other is like a colt of one year, and his horn is the length of 3 hands. The colour is dark bay; the head like a hart’s, but no long neck; a thin short mane hangs over one side; the legs are slender and lean, like a goat’s; the foot, a little cloven, long, and much like a goat’s, with some hair at the back of the legs. Truly, this monster must be a very fierce and rare animal.”
Whatever our interpretation, this is no “traveller’s tale” of Varthema’s making. His painstaking veracity, except in the “practical politics” of life, has been confirmed a hundred times over. Later on in his book, we come across a description of the structure and habits of the elephant which is a triumph of sharp prose-vision and detailed matter of fact. One cannot doubt that he saw a beast at Mecca which resembled, not remotely, the Unicorn supporter of our Royal Coat of Arms. It is remarkable that Pliny describes a similar animal, and that Ctesias, Aristotle and Strabo speak of the Unicorn. The name occurs nine times in the Bible; but it is commonly supposed to refer to the Rhinoceros. Varthema’s strange beast was a very different animal, apparently resembling the horse-like creature with a solitary central horn which Niebuhr found repeatedly sculptured on the ruins of Persepolis. Similar beasts have been reported from Abyssinia and Cape Colony; and at one time the unicorn was believed in India to inhabit that refuge of the rare, inaccessible Thibet. Yet a generation that is still with us regarded the gorillas and pygmy men of Hanno as Carthaginian fables, until Du Chaillu brought back carcasses of the one and Stanley gave authentic word of the other. But scientists leave us no hope that some happy traveller shall come across a unicorn dead or alive. For the stumpy protuberance of the rhinoceros is an epidermal tissue, and the true bony horns of the deer tribe are developments which grow from, or correspond to, two frontal bones; and it would be impossible for a bony outgrowth to proceed from the mesian line. Varthema’s statement must be deemed by all who know anything of comparative anatomy to be incorrect. The great Owen thought that one of the two horns of the animal must have been broken off or remained undeveloped. Mr. Dollman, of South Kensington Museum, whose opinion the author sought through the kind agency of Mr. S. le Marchant Moore, thinks the creature was an onyx, with one of its horns suppressed and both gentlemen suggest “that Varthema saw the creature in profile, and having ascertained as well as he could under the circumstances, the existence of one horn, did not trouble himself much further about it: possibly the horn might have become more or less incurved.” We must leave the question there, until someone shall give us ocular evidence that Varthema made not the slightest blunder: truly his “horn shall be exalted!”
Varthema had now been signally successful in gratifying the passion to penetrate unknown and mysterious regions which Spanish and Portuguese discovery had aroused in him. So far as is known, he was the first European Christian to reach the holy cities of Arabia; and since his day no traveller ventured on the long and perilous route which he took. At least six Europeans managed to visit Mecca in the last century; but they all took the short route from the Red Sea.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ESCAPE FROM THE CARAVAN
And now, in the spirit of Alexander sighing for new worlds to conquer, he looked forward with dismay to the return-journey of the caravan. A perilous surprise awaited him which, with wonted adroitness, he turned to his purpose. “Having charge from my Captain to buy certain things, a Moor looked me in the face, knew me and asked me ‘Where are you from?’ I answered: ‘I am a Moslem.’ His reply was: ‘You lie.’ ‘By the head of the Prophet,’ I said, ‘I am a Moslem’; whereto he answered: ‘Come to my house’; and I followed him thither. Then he spake to me in Italian, telling me whence I had come that he knew me to be no Moslem; and that he had been in Genoa and Venice; whereof he gave me proof. When I understood this, I told him that I was a Roman, and had become a Mameluke at Cairo (!) Whereat he rejoiced greatly, and treated me with much honour.” Varthema now began to ask questions of his host; craftily affecting ignorance of recent events and pretending to be very hostile to Christians and greatly indignant at hearing of the appearance of the Portuguese in Eastern Seas. “At this, he showed me yet greater honour, and told me everything, point by point. So, when I was well instructed, I said to him: ‘O friend, I beseech you in the name of the Prophet to tell me of some way to escape from the Caravan; for I would go to those who are the Christians’ bitterest foes. Take my word that, if they knew what I can do, they would search me out, even as far as Mecca.’ Then he: ‘By the faith of our Prophet, tell me, what can you do?’ I replied that I was the most skilful artificer in large mortars in the world. Hearing this, he exclaimed: ‘Mohammed be praised for ever, who has sent such an one to the Moslem and God.’” Whereupon, a bargain was struck. The Moor was ready to hide Varthema in his house, if Varthema could induce the Captain of the Caravan to pass fifteen camels, laden with spices, duty free. Varthema was so confident of having thoroughly ingratiated himself with the Captain that he was ready to negotiate for the free passage of a hundred camels, if the Moor owned so many. “And, when he heard this, he was greatly pleased,” and gave full information as to how to get to India. There was no difficulty about bribing the Captain; and the day before the departure of the caravan, Varthema stole to the Moor’s house and lay there in concealment.
Next morning, two hours before daybreak, bands of men, as was the usage, went through the city, sounding trumpets and other instruments, and proclaiming death to all Mamelukes who should not mount for the journey to Syria. “At this,” says Varthema, “my breast was mightily troubled, and I pleaded with tears to the merchant’s wife, and I besought God to save me.” Soon he had the relief of knowing that the caravan was gone, and the Moorish merchant with it. He had left instructions with his wife to send Varthema on to Jidda, on the Red Sea, with the caravan returning to India. It was to start later than the Syrian caravan. Varthema was a man of winning ways, and he found no difficulty in fascinating man or woman. He was far from being as vain as, say, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, but, like that ingenuous gentleman, he does not neglect to inform us when he has pleased the fair. “I cannot tell how much kindness I received from this lady, and, in particular, from her niece of fifteen years. They promised to make me rich if I would stay on. But I declined their offer by reason of the pressing peril. I set out at noontide of the following day, with the caravan, to the no small sorrow of these ladies, who made much lament.”
In due time the caravan arrived at Jidda, which was then a very important mart and harbour. Varthema immediately made for a mosque, with thousands of indigent pilgrims, and stayed there a whole fortnight.
“All day long, I lay on the ground, covered up in my garments, and groaning as if I suffered great pain in my bowels and body. The merchants would ask: ‘Who is that, groaning so?’ Whereto the poor people about me would reply: ‘He is a poor Moslem who is dying.’ But when night came I would leave the mosque to buy food. Judge of what my appetite became when I could only get food (and that bad) once a day.”
When the caravan had left the port, he contrived to see the master of a ship bound for Persia who agreed to take him as a passenger; and on the seventeenth day of hiding at Jidda, the ship put forth on the Red Sea. To a true Moslem, the whole Eastern world as far as China was barely more perilous than the Mediterranean was to a Christian. Those were days when the seas teemed with pirates; but, on land, property was better safeguarded by the despotic rulers of Asia than it was in Europe. But the line between Eastern and Western traffic was rigidly drawn at certain marts of exchange. Such were Aleppo and Beyrout for commodities forwarded by way of the Persian Gulf; and still more important were Cairo and Alexandria, the marts of Mediterranean and Red Sea commerce. The Eastern trade was mainly in the hands of Arabs; but it was pursued by certain Greeks, Albanians and Circassians also, who, or their forefathers, had renounced Christianity for gain; and these were not few. Jidda and other ports of the Red Sea, as well as those of Somaliland, were crowded with ships, great and small, bearing spices, drugs, dyes and other Eastern goods for the markets of Western Asia and Europe. The Arabian coast of the Red Sea was hugged, and often, for days together, no progress could be made at night; for the multitude of rocks and sunken reefs rendered navigation perilous enough, even by day, and a look-out was always kept at the mast-head.
Varthema’s ship visited and made some stay at several ports which are now decayed. At one place, “coming in sight of dwellings on the shore, fourteen of us landed to buy victuals. But they were the folk called Bedouin; there was more than a hundred of them to our fourteen; and they greeted us with slings and stones. We fought for about an hour; and then they fled, leaving twenty-four of their number lying slain on the ground; for they were unclad, and the sling was their only weapon. We took all we could find, that is to say fowls, calves, oxen and other things for eating. But, in two or three hours time, the turmoil increased, and so did the natives of the land—to more than six hundred, in fact—and we were compelled to draw back to our ships.”
CHAPTER V. CERTAIN ADVENTURES IN
ARABIA THE HAPPY.
On arriving at Aden; which was a place of call for every ship trading with India, Persia, and Ethiopia, custom-house officers at once came on board the ship, ascertained whence and when it had sailed, the nature of its freight, and how many were on board. Then the masts, sails, rudders and anchors were removed to ensure the payment of dues. On the second day after Varthema’s arrival, a passenger or sailor on board called him a “Christian dog, son of a dog,” the usual polished address of the proud Moslem to one who, albeit a co-believer, had not the good fortune to be born in the faith. This exclamation aroused a suspicion that he was a spy; for, a year before, Portuguese had appeared for the first time in the Arabian Sea, had captured certain vessels, and killed many of their crews. He was seized at once and violently carried off to the deputy of the Sultan of Yemen. Now this Sultan was an unusually merciful man, who rarely (Varthema says never) put anyone to death; so he was merely clapped into gaol, and his legs fettered with eighteen pounds weight of iron. On the third day of imprisonment, some Moslem sailors who had escaped in the warfare with the Portuguese, attacked the prison with the intention of slaying him; and the inhabitants were divided as to what they should do. The Emir’s deputy decided to spare the prisoners (another suspected person would seem to have been incarcerated with Varthema); and they languished sixty-five days in gaol. Then a message came from the Sultan, demanding that they should be brought before himself. So, instead of voyaging to Persia, Varthema, still in irons, was put on a camel and taken an eight days’ journey inland to RadÂÄ. Ibn Abd-el WahÂb, Sultan of Yemen, was busy marshalling a large army. In it, were three thousand horsemen, born of Christian parents, but sold, while still children, by “Prester John,” as the Portuguese called the King of Abyssinia. These slaves formed the bodyguard of the Sultan. At this moment the rule of Yemen was disputed among petty despots, and the Sultan was bent on reducing the turbulent, rebellious tribes to his sole sway.
Varthema is brought in to the Sultan’s presence; his life hangs on a hair; it is as if the sharp edge of the scimitar were already at his neck; yet he does not lose his presence of mind. “I am of the country of RÛm, my lord,” he began; and he began with a “parliamentary expression” for, to an Arab, RÛm meant Asia Minor, recently the possession of New Rome, i.e., of the Byzantine Empire. “I became a Mohammedan at Cairo (another trifling inexactitude). I came to Medina of the Prophet, to Mecca, and then to your country. Everyone says, sir, that you are a sheik” (a Mohammedan priest). “Sir, I am your slave. Sir, do you not know that I am a Moslem?” The Sultan called upon him to repeat the formula: “‘There is no God but the God: Mohammed is the Prophet of God.’ But, whether it was the will of God, or by reason of fear which gat hold of me, I could not pronounce these words.” Our hero was indeed lucky, for the merciful Sultan only ordered him to be taken to prison and kept there under strict guard while he should be away. For he was about to attack SanÄa, the ancient capital of Yemen. And so, “they guarded me for three months, supplying me with a loaf of millet each morning, and another in the evening; yet six such loaves had not satisfied my hunger for a single day; nevertheless, if I might have had my fill of water, I had thought myself happy.”
In the East, the body of an insane person is believed to be occupied by some spirit; and mad folk are therefore treated as irresponsible. Varthema knew this, and he, two fellow-prisoners, one of whom he twice speaks of as “my companion,” and yet another, “a Moor,” arranged that one of the number should pretend to be mad in order to help the others. The trick is time-honoured in the East; thereby David escaped the hands of Achish, King of Gath. Lots were cast, and the lot fell to Varthema. We can see him, like the Israelite King, “changing his behaviour, scrabbling at the doors of the gate, and letting the spittle fall down upon his beard”; he was allowed to go out, crowds of children following him and shying stones at him. In self-defence he had to store up a plentiful supply of like missiles in his garment and give a sharp return. “Truly,” says he, “I never was so tired with labour and worn out as during the first three days of my feigning.”
Now, the prison adjoined the palace; and there remained in the palace one of the Sultan’s three wives with her “twelve or thirteen very comely maidens, rather more than inclining to black. This queen” (so Varthema dubs her) “was very tender-hearted to me. She was for ever at her lattice with her damsels, staying there throughout the day to see me and to talk with me; and I, while many men and merchants were jeering at me, went naked before the queen; for she took very great pleasure in seeing me. I might not go from her sight; and she gave me right good food to eat; so that I gained my point.”
One of the most striking characteristics of the men of the Renaissance is the combination of great intellectual power and lofty enthusiasm with mediÆval brutality. Now, the Sultana, in whose veins the warm blood of the East flowed freely, suffered from the dull monotony of the harem. She wanted excitement. She suggested to the supposed madman that he should slay and spare not; for the fault would not be imputed to him. He took the hint at once. He called on a fat sheep to declare its religion, repeating the very words which the Sultan had addressed to him: “Prove yourself a Moslem.” “The patient beast making no reply, I took a staff and broke its legs. The queen looked on laughing, and fed me with the flesh thereof during three days; nor do I remember to have eaten better. Three days later, I killed an ass, which was bringing water to the palace, in the same way; because that he would not become a Moslem. And, in like manner, I cudgelled a Jew, so that I left him for dead.” One of the gaolers, whom he declares to have been more mad than he, called him “Christian dog, son of a dog.” This was enough: a fierce battle by lapidation began—Varthema alone, on the one side; the gaoler and children on the other. Varthema allowed himself to be badly hit by two stones, “which I could have avoided easily; but I wanted to give colour to my madness. So I went back to my prison, and blocked the door up with large stones, and there I lived for the space of two days without meat or drink. The queen and others thought I might be dead, and caused the door to be broken open. Then these dogs brought me pieces of marble saying, ‘eat; this is sugar;’ and others gave me grapes filled with earth, and called it salt; but I ate the marble and grapes and everything, all mixed up.”
It was an enlightened custom in Mohammedan countries to examine into the mental condition of insane people at regular intervals. Rabbi Benjamin, of Tudela, the Spanish Jew, tells us that, in the sixth decade of the Twelfth Century, he found Commissioners in lunacy at Baghdad; although he also speaks of that barbarous practice of chaining the madman which obtained in England until some centuries later. Two Mohammedan Ascetics, who dwelt in the mountains as hermits, were brought to the prison to determine whether Varthema might be a person bereft of mere mundane reason through his exceptional sanctity, or only ordinarily mad. The hermits took opposite views on this knotty question, and spent an hour in violently contradicting one another. The prisoner lost all patience and, anxious to be quit of them, put a stop to the discussion by the simple device which Gulliver employed to extinguish the conflagration at Lilliput. “Whereupon,” says he, “they ran off crying ‘he is mad; he is no saint.’ The queen and her maidens saw all this, for they were looking on from their casement, and burst into laughter, vowing that ‘by God, by the head of the Prophet, there is no one in the world like this man.’”
Next day Varthema followed this up by laying hold of the gaoler by those two horns or tufts of hair which were then, as now, fashionable in Arabia, kneeling on his stomach, and so belabouring him that he “left him for dead,” like the Jew. The queen was again vastly entertained, and called out: “Kill those beasts.”
But it was discovered that, all this time, Varthema’s fellow-prisoners had been digging a hole through the prison wall, and, moreover, had contrived to get free from their shackles. The Sultan’s deputy was fully aware of the favour with which the Sultana regarded Varthema; and the lady knew him to be ready to carry out her commands. She ordered the prisoner to be kept in irons, but to be removed into a doorless lower chamber of the palace, and to be provided with a good bed, good food and perfumed baths. For, as the reader will guess, she had fallen in love with the captive. Sexual love among Arabians is anything but a refined or spiritual passion; and the harem has not been found precisely a temple of chastity anywhere,—mainly, perhaps, because it is a harem. And this lady possessed a temperament as sanguine and scandalous as any Messalina or Faustina or Empress of all the Russias. Alas! Fate doomed her to bloom unseen in Arabia, and waste her sweetness on its desert air. At the end of a few days, she started by bringing Varthema some dainty dish in the dead of night. He tells us how, “coming into my chamber, she called ‘Jonah! Come. Are you hungry?’ ‘Yes, by Allah!’ I replied; and I rose to my feet and went to her in my shirt. And she said: ‘No, no, not with your shirt on.’ I answered: ‘O Lady, I am not mad now’; whereto she: ‘By Allah, I know you never were mad. In the world there is no man like you.’ So, to please her, I took off my shirt, holding it before me for the sake of decency; and thus did she keep me for a space of two hours, gazing at me as if I had been a nymph, and making her plaint to God in this wise: ‘O Allah! Thou hast made this man white as the sun. Me, Thou hast made black. O Allah! O Prophet! my husband is black; my son is black; this man is white. Would that this man might become my husband! And while speaking thus, she wept and sighed continuously, and kept passing her hands over me all the time, and promising that she would make the Sultan remove my irons when he returned.’
“Next night the queen came with two of her damsels, and said, ‘Come hither, Jonah.’ I replied that I would come. ‘Would you like me to come and stay a little while with you,’ she asked. I answered, ‘no, lady. I am in chains; and that is enough.’ Then she said, ‘Have no fear. I take it all on my own head. If you do not want me, I will call Gazelle, or Tajiah, or Gulzerana to come instead.’ She spoke thus because she was working to come herself. But I never gave way; for I had thought it all out.”
Varthema had no desire to remain in Yemen, even should he mount its throne,—a far less likely event than discovery and a horrible death. “I did not wish to lose both my soul and my body,” he writes. “I wept all night, commending myself to God.”
“Three days after this the Sultan returned, and straightway the queen sent to tell me that, if I would stay with her, she would make me rich.”
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Varthema is the man to mould circumstances to his will: no web, however cunningly woven shall hold him prisoner; his keen wit is ready to comply with the Sultana’s request, if she will have his fetters struck off.
The lady fell into the trap. She manifests the clever, feminine guile of the harem in her dealings with Ibn Abd-el-WahÂb, but she is no match for Varthema. The Sultan is a strong man and a mighty man of valour; but he is uxorious, and as wax in her hands. She ordered the prisoner to be brought at once before the Sultan and herself. Ibn Abd-el-WahÂb, good easy man, asked Varthema whither he desired to go if he should choose to release him. The mendacious Italian replied: “‘O Lord, I have neither father nor mother; wife nor child; brother nor sister; only Allah, the Prophet, and you. You give me food, and I am your slave.’ And I wept without ceasing.” Then the artful Sultana reminded the Sultan that he would have to account to God, of whose anger he should beware, for having kept an innocent man so long time in prison. Abd-el-WahÂb proved as unsuspicious and benevolent as history declares him to have been; yet he was as firm and able as a ruler as he was bold and experienced in arms. His Sultana knew how to play on his merits and convert them into defects. He at once granted Varthema liberty to go whithersoever he chose. “And, immediately, he had my irons struck off; and I knelt before him; and kissed his feet and the hands of the queen. She took me by the hand, saying: ‘Come with me, poor wight, for I know thou art dying of hunger.’ When I was with her in her chamber, she kissed me more than a hundred times; and then she gave me excellent food. But I had seen her speak privily to the Sultan, and I thought she had begged me from him for a slave. Wherefore, I said: ‘I will not eat, unless you promise me my freedom.’ She replied: ‘Be silent, madman. You know not what Allah will bestow. If you are good, you shall be an Emir.’ Now, I knew what kind of lordship she desired to bestow on me; so I answered that she should let me get into fitter condition; for fear filled me with other than amorous thoughts. She replied: ‘By Allah, you say well. I will give you eggs, fowls, pigeons, pepper, cinnamon, cloves and cocoa-nuts every day.’17 So, at these good words and promises, I plucked up heart a bit. To restore me to health, I stayed fifteen or twenty days in the palace. One day, she sent for me and asked if I would go a-hunting with her; which offer I refused not; and, at our return, feigned me to fall sick by reason of weakness; and so continued for the space of eight days; during which time she was unceasing in sending persons to visit me. One day, I sent to tell her that I had vowed to God and Mohammed to visit a holy man at Aden, who was reputed to work miracles.”
We may not count meanness among the petits dÉfauts of this lady of spacious passions. She was “well pleased” with Varthema’s suggestion, and provided him with a camel and twenty-five golden ducats—a sum which would go a long way in Arabia. We shall see presently to what use he applied it. Eight days’ journeying brought him to the holy man of Aden; and the second day after his arrival, he professed that he was cured. He wrote to the Sultana that, since Allah had been so merciful, he wished to see the whole of her kingdom. “This I did because the fleet which was there could not set sail again for a month. I spoke with a skipper in secret, and told him I wished to go to India, and would give him a handsome present if he would take me. He replied that he wished to touch at Persia first.” Nothing better could have fallen in with Varthema’s wishes. Meanwhile he would explore Arabia Felix.
So, having adroitly contrived to reject the love of the Light of the Harem without exciting her fury, and even coming by her purse, he turns the opportune gift to account, and fills up the month of waiting by a zig-zag camel-ride through Southern Yemen—the first and boldest European traveller in the district, and the one who has penetrated
it must thoroughly. With the intention of doing this in his mind, he ends his chapters on “How the women of Arabia Felix are partial to White Men,” and on “The liberality of the Queen.”
His record of Southern Yemen bears witness to a shrewd observant eye and a tenacious memory. Probably he travelled mostly with caravans. He gives an account of the natural features of the land, its curious domesticated animals, its wild beasts, its vegetable productions, its trade, the colour, manners and dress of its strange natives—all borne out by a variety of independent testimony. He visited many cities. One, he found barbarous and poor; another, renowned for its attar of roses. Several of these towns were flourishing centres of trade. He even got to SanÄa, the walls whereof were so wide that “eight horses might go abreast on the top of them.” Apparently Abd-el-WahÂb had not yet conquered the petty chieftain, El MansÛr, who reigned there; so Varthema found himself in the domain of the Sultan’s bitter foe. We hear that rumour gave this ruler a mad son who would bite, and slay, and then feed on his human victims. Varthema again tells us of other madmen, Shiites and Sunnites, the rival sects of the Mohammedan world, who kill each other like dogs for Religion’s sake. At Yerim, he talked with many who asserted that they had reached their hundred and twenty-fifth year; but, since there was no registration of birth, we may venture to entertain our doubts. He tells us how it was the fashion throughout Arabia to twist the hair into horns, and how the women wore loose trousers. He came to El-Makrana, where “the Sultan keeps more gold than a hundred camels might bear; and I say this because I have seen it.” What became of that mighty bulk of gold? The Arabian chroniclers tell us the firm, merciful and increasing rule of Abd-el-WahÂb in Yemen had a tragic end: Turkish invaders captured him and put him to death, not in the heat of warfare, but in cold blood.
Varthema “ran some risk from the multitude of apes” (of which Niebuhr also speaks), and from “animals like lions (hyenas?). We passed on in very great danger from the said animals, and with no little hunting of them. However, we killed very many with bows and slings and dogs; and thereby passed in safety.”
On reaching Aden he repeated the trick which had proved so successful at Jidda. “I took shelter in a mosque,” he says, “feigning to be sick, and there I lurked all day long; but, at night, I went forth to find the skipper of the ship; and he smuggled me aboard.”
CHAPTER VI. EASTWARD HO!
For six days the wind was favourable; but it was now December of the year 1503; and on the seventh day out, the North Eastern monsoon drove the vessel back “with 25 others, laden with madder for the dyeing of clothes. By dint of very great labour, we made the port of Zeila” (on the African Coast, opposite to Aden); “and tarried there five days both to see it and to wait for better weather.” Zeila was a great place for traffic in gold and ivory, the law was well administered; but the cruel slave-trade prevailed there then as, in a different form, it did up to our own times. The Christian dominions of Abyssinian “Prester John” were raided by Arabs; his subjects captured; and sold in Egypt, Arabia, Persia and India. The merchants here would seem to have found a profitable trade in beasts left with but a single horn; for Varthema saw some, which, however, were quite different from those wonderful unicorns at Mecca. He gives a faithful description of the black and white Berbera sheep of Zeila.
The weather having improved, the ship touched at Berbera, and then sailed up the Gulf of Aden and across the Arabian Sea. Twelve days saw her at Diu, an island to the south of the Indian Peninsula of Kathiawar and subject to the Sultan of Gujarat. Varthema calls it the “port of the Turks”; but by Turks we must understand Mohammedan inhabitants of the Levant who had settled at Diu. It was an important halt for ships trading between India and Arabia and Persia. The vessel which bore Varthema must have been a tramp, picking up what cargo offered, and altering her course from time to time, to dispose of it; for, after spending two days at Diu, we find her taking a three days run up the Gulf of Cambay to Gogo, a place “of great traffic, fat, and rich; where all are Mohammedans.” She now recrossed the ocean to Eastern Arabia, and put in at Julfar, on the shores of Oman. Once again she reversed her course; and a favourable wind bore her to Muscat, a port which is still of some importance, and which, at that time, was one of the small independent States of Arabia. Then she tacked back, and came to New Ormuz, a port on the island of Jeruan.
Old Ormuz was a city on the mainland, which Marco Polo visited in the eighth decade of the Thirteenth Century, but, shortly after his time, almost all the population deserted the old city for the island. As in the days of Ibn BatÛta it was famous for its pearl-fisheries. “Here,” writes Varthema, “are found the largest pearls in the world”; and hence it is that Milton couples the wealth of Ormuz with that of India.18 “At three days’ voyage from this island, fishers pay out ropes, one from either end of their little boats. To each rope, a big stone is tied, so as to keep the boat moored; and they pay out yet another rope to the bottom, with a stone to it, from the middle of the boat, whereby one of these fishermen, having hung two bags round his neck and tied a big stone to his feet, goes down fifteen paces into the water, and stays there as long as he is able, to find those oysters wherein are pearls. These he puts into the bag, and gets quit of the stone at his feet, and comes up by one of the ropes aforesaid.” The pearl-diver is not given the wholly impossible time under water which Ibn BatÛta credited him with. With customary caution our Italian is content to say that he “stays there as long as he is able.”
This trade and the city of Ormuz were in the hands of Arabs, who paid tribute to the King of Persia, and were dependent for food on the mainland. Ormuz was one of the great centres along that trade-route between the East and the Levant, which traversed the Persian Gulf, and made its way by Bagdad, and the Euphrates Valley and Aleppo to the Mediterranean; just as Aden was one of the great centres of the other route through the Red Sea and Egypt to Cairo and Alexandria. Our traveller would pass along streets crowded with men from many nations.
From Ormuz comes a tale of cold-blooded parricide, fratricide, and subtle perfidy very characteristic of the dynastic families of Asia. “At the time when I visited this land, there happened that which you shall hear.” The Sultan of Ormuz had eleven sons, of whom the youngest was judged to lack half his wits, and the eldest was, beyond doubt, “a devil unchained.” This Sultan had purchased two Abyssinian children, and brought them up as carefully as if they had been his own sons; for it was a practice in Arabia and India to rely on the valour and sagacity of Abyssinian slaves, to entrust them with the most important military commands, and to consult them as closest advisers. One of these men was named Caim; the other Mohammed. One night, when, all was dark and silent in the palace, that “devil unchained,” the eldest son found an opportunity to put out the eyes of his father, his mother and all his brethren excepting those of his youngest brother; for he supposed him to be incapable of aspiring to the throne. Not satisfied with blinding his victims, he caused them to be burned alive within the palace-enclosure. Next morning he proclaimed himself Sultan; and the supposed fool fled to a mosque; for the rights of sanctuary were to be found there, if anywhere. At first, the city was in tumult; but the bloody deed was over and done with; and a city of trade is soon glad to quiet down and resume business. The problem now before the new Sultan was: how to get rid of Caim and Mohammed. Both men were in high position: that were a small matter; but they held command of fortresses. Somehow, he managed to get Mohammed to venture into his presence, and, after making much of him, breathed into his ear that, if he would slay Caim, he should be rewarded with the command of five fortresses. Mohammed protested: “‘O Sidi, I have shared bread with him from our childhood; for thirty years. By Allah, I cannot bring my mind to do this thing.’ Then said the Sultan: ‘Well, let it alone.’” Having failed in the attempt to induce Mohammed to murder Caim, the Sultan now tried to induce Caim to murder Mohammed. Caim made not the least demur, and straightway sought out his old friend and companion. Mohammed at once read what had happened written in the face of his false friend, and charged him with the fact. Caim, guilt-stricken, cast his dagger at the feet of Mohammed, fell on his knees, and implored forgiveness of the meditated crime. Mohammed reproached Caim in the mildest way, and then either from magnanimity or from policy, or from both, he passed over his treachery; but made him vow to go to the Sultan and pretend that he had done the deed.
“When the Sultan saw him, he demanded: ‘Hast thou slain thy friend?’ Caim answered: ‘I have, Sidi, by Allah!’ Then the Sultan: ‘Come here’; and Caim went close up to him; whereupon, the Sultan seized him and did him to death with his dagger.” Three days passed, and then Mohammed stole stealthily into the Sultan’s chamber, who, when he saw him, was greatly perturbed, and exclaimed: ‘O dog, son of a dog, are thou still alive?’ Mohammed replied: ‘Yea, I live, in spite of thee, and thee will I slay, thou worse than dog or devil!’ Both men being armed, they fought together for a space of time; but in the end, Mohammed killed the Sultan, and put the palace into a state of defence. But, because he was much beloved, the populace ran thither with shouts of ‘Long live Sultan Mohammed.’
Mohammed was a man as prudent and experienced as he was ready and resolute: he saw a way to do the state good service and to preserve for himself the reality of power while maintaining the shows of legality and removing the occasions of envy. At the end of twenty days, he call the chief citizens together, “and spake to them in this wise: That what he had done had been of strong necessity; that he knew he had no right to the throne; and that he begged them to allow him to transfer his power to the son who was supposed to be crazy. And thus the son became Sultan; but, nevertheless Mohammed rules. The whole city said, ‘of a surety, this man is the friend of Allah.’ For which reason, he was made Governor of the City and of the Sultan; the Sultan being in the state aforesaid.”
A very narrow little strait lies between Ormuz and the mainland of Persia. Varthema left his “tramp,” and crossed over. His itinerary through the ancient and renowned Empire is by no means clear; but we find him at Herat, 600 miles in a bee-line from Ormuz, and at that time the capital of KhÔrasÂn and the residence of its able ruler—Sultan Hosein Mirza, a man who boasted his descent from Timour the Tartar. Varthema speaks of Herat as being a great market for stuffs, especially silk stuffs, and for rhubarb. Badger, commenting on this statement, suggests that Herat lay on the direct route along which rhubarb was conveyed between Thibet, Mongolia, and the West. Certainly exports and imports of Persia, India, Turkestan and Afghanistan passed through Herat.
It strikes one as singular that, although Varthema Would seem to have journeyed some 1,500 miles in Persia, he says very little about the country. This may be because the Venetians were directly acquainted with that fascinating Empire; and consequent on this, a general knowledge of it would spread throughout Italy. For, when the great blow was struck at Venetian trade by the Turkish capture of Constantinople and Negroponte, and the “Queen of the Adriatic” no longer held “the gorgeous East in fee,” she sent three separate embassies on a bold and perilous mission. She sought to secure the alliance of Persia against their common foe, the Ottoman Turk. Few records of travel and adventure are more animating or fuller of interest than those of the Venetian Ambassadors, Barbaro and Contarini.19 Varthema must have made a bold journey. The “Adventures of Hadji Baba of Ispahan” probably furnish as true and vivid a picture of what life and travel in Persia were like in the early years of the sixteenth century as they do of that which was to be experienced in the early years of the nineteenth century, Persia has remained in the same case of what may be called immutable instability from the days when she was won for Islam down to the days of the immortal Morier and to our own times.
From Herat, he took the caravan-route back to Shiraz in Persia, a journey of fully 700 miles. Here was a great mart for the turquoises, rubies and other jewels of KhÔrasÂn and Badakshan, as well as for musk and ultramarine; and he learned something of the business capacity of the Persian; he complains that “our musk”—that delight, with other overpowering scents of his nation and time—“is adulterated by these folk, who are master-hands for intellect, and misleaders beyond all other peoples.”
It is a problem how Varthema contrived to cover such vast distances on what was probably a lean purse. He is silent as to his financial resources; as we have said it is unlikely that his private means were considerable, and it would seem that he did not trade. As a Mameluke he would receive payment which carried him to Aden; and the money which the enamoured Sultana furnished him with would partly, if not wholly, give him the means to reach Persia. But he employed his infinite power to charm; he was burthened with no weak scruple as to blinding a newly-captured friend and using him, with wise moderation, in the service of that central purpose which was the heart of all his being. And thus, as we shall presently see, like Iago, he made his fool his purse. But he is capable of appreciating the good qualities of the generous friend whom he made his dupe; and is careful to pay tribute to him. If he must deceive in order to use him, it is to realize his purpose of seeing the world at first-hand and recording its wonders.
After remarking on the tricks of Persian traders, he adds: “Yet I must also say they are the best companions and the most generous among men. I speak thus with knowledge; having had experience of a Persian merchant of Herat in KhÔrasÂn, whom I met in this city of Shiraz. He had known me at Mecca two years before, and spoke to me thus: ‘Jonah, what is your business here? Are you not the same man who went to Mecca some time back?’ I replied that I was, and that to find out about the world was the quest I was on. Then said he: ‘Allah be praised! for I shall have a companion to make discovery with me. Do not leave me.’ We stayed on fifteen days in this same city of Shiraz.” Varthema’s magnetic charm was at work; and luck stood his friend in bringing him across this old acquaintance.
The twain set off together from Shiraz, bound for Samarkand in Turkestan; for the merchant, whose name Was Cazazionor, insisted on keeping Varthema with him, and presumably payed all expenses. But they travelled through a land in turmoil. The struggle between the Ottoman Turks established in Europe and the Turcoman dynasty of the White Sheep established in Persia was happy indeed for the Christian world, since it diverted the forces of Constantinople to the East at a time when Europe lay divided and helpless, but it was disastrous for Persia and ended by throwing her into confusion. Just now Ismail-es-Sufi, a descendant from the Prophet, who had overthrown the forces of Bayazid, and laid the foundations of a great Persian dynasty, which endured more than two centuries, was consolidating a country which had been torn by internecine strife. As is so often the case, religious differences afforded the trumpet-call to the struggles of peoples. As in the days of Ibn BatÛta the Sunnites of the West fought the Shiites of the East for domination; but they fought in the name of Allah and under the banners of sectarian difference. In order to seat himself firmly on the throne, the Great Sofi, for so Europeans called the monarch of the new, able and powerful dynasty roused the enthusiasm of the native Shiites, and converted the less numerous native Sunnites to his own true faith by blood and iron. Varthema tells us that the Sofi was passing through the land with flame and slaughter.
Cazazionor, finding the country so disturbed, thought it wise to return towards Herat. So delighted was he with the personality and society of “Jonah” that he offered to give him his niece to wife. She was a beautiful girl named Sharus, a feminine noun in Persian as in other languages, although it signifies The Sun. Cazazionor took Varthema with him to his own home; which was probably at Shiraz; and presented the young lady to him. She could not have attained womanhood; for he was allowed to see her. He feigned delight at her beauty; but he says that his mind was “bent to other things”—probably less on wife and children at home than on his still insatiate desire for travel. After enjoying Cazazionor’s hospitality for eight days, he returned with his host to Ormuz, and took ship for Sind. They were landed at Joah, a port on the delta of the Indus, and proceeded to Cambay, an important harbour in Gujarat, whence fifty ships, laden with cotton, sailed yearly to different lands.
CHAPTER VII.
THE PAGANS OF NARSINGA.
Before BatÛta reached India, and therefore long before Varthema’s time, Afghan chiefs had swooped down on the fertile plains of India with the war cry of “Allah and the Prophet,” and Northern India, with the exception of its southern and western districts, where the Rajpoots maintained their independence, was now under the rule of various Moslem despots. The Deccan was under the sway of a powerful Moslem dynasty—the Brahmany Sultans; but what is now the presidency of Madras and Mysore was divided into a number of petty kingdoms, subject to the Hindu RÂja of Narsinga. A full century of conflict had resulted in a partial triumph of the Moslem: the sovereigns of Narsinga paid a certain tribute to be left at peace, although the western coast was, in a measure, protected by a wall of mountains. But Portuguese traders had just sailed into the Arabian Sea and had established themselves here and there at trading stations on the Malabar coast; and these they had fortified. On his outward journey, Varthema, for obvious reasons, showed no disposition to cultivate the acquaintance of these Christian Europeans.
Gujarat was under the rule of Fath KhÂn, whom Varthema calls Sultan Machamuth. “You shall now hear of the manner of his life. He and all his people are Mohammedans; and he keeps twenty thousand horsemen always with him. When he arises in the morning, fifty elephants, each with a man atop, come to the palace and do him reverence; and this is all the labour they are put to.... When he eats, fifty or sixty different kinds of music discourse; such as trumpets, different sorts of drums, recorders and fifes, and many others; and the elephants again do him reverence.... The Sultan’s moustachios are so long that he ties them up over his head, as a woman doth tie her tresses; and his beard, which is white, comes down to his girdle.” Fath KhÂn was greatly dreaded by his subjects; and they believed strange things concerning him; stories which are worthy of the Arabian Nights. These Varthema heard and set down, as did Barbosa, who travelled in the East a few years after the Sultan’s death. Machamuth was reputed to eat poison daily, so that, while he himself had become poison-proof, he had only to spit at a foe and death followed within half an hour. “Every night that he shall sleep with one of his three or four thousand women, they shall take her up dead in the morning.”
The Sultan was continually at war with a neighbouring Hindu RÂja; and his Kingdom of Gujarat had been taken from the Jains—“a race which eats of nothing wherein courseth blood, and will kill nothing that hath life. They are neither Moors nor heathens; and I believe that, if they should be baptised, they would all be saved by their good works; for they never do unto others what they would not that others should do unto them. For dress, some wear a shirt; some, only a cloth round their middle and a large red cloth on their head; and their colour is tawny. And the aforesaid Sultan took their kingdom from them because of their goodness.”
These Jains, who at first, mainly differed from Buddhists in believing that the purification of the soul resulted in a Heaven and not in NirvÂna, and the relation of whose creed to Buddhism is far from being clear, had built some of their remote and mysterious temples on the heights of Gujarat, where through clouds of incense, female figures, clothed in scarlet and gold might be seen, weaving strange figures and chanting monotonous psalms. But these, Varthema, posing as a pious Mohammedan, might not see; and he makes no reference to the famous temples of Gujarat.
From Cambay, the Persian and our Italian sailed along the coast to Chaul; thence to a port which has disappeared but which was near Ratnagiri, on the Concan coast; and thence to the island of Goa. “On this island there is a fortress by the sea, kept by a Mameluke with four hundred other Mamelukes. If the captain shall come across any white man he gives him much wage; but first he sends for two jerkins, made of leather, one for him and one for him that wishes to take service; each puts on a jerkin, and they fall to. If he prove himself a strong man, he is put among the able men; but if not, he is set to other task than that of fighting. The captain wages great battle with the RÂja of Narsinga” (Bijayanagar the capital of the Carnatic).
From Goa, seven days of land-travel brought the pair to “the city of Decan” (BÎjapÛr), a Mohammedan place where “the King lives in great pride and pomp. Many of them that serve him have their very shoes adorned with rubies, diamonds, and other jewels; so you may judge how many garnish their fingers and ears. They wear robes or shirts of silk, shoes and breeches after the style of sailors; and ladies go quite veiled, as in Damascus.”
Thence they returned to the coast, and visited ports, many of which have decayed or disappeared. These were subject, but not always friendly, to the RÂja of Narsinga; and the Kinglet of Honawar was friendly to the Portuguese. But in spite of incessant warfare, life and property were respected. The journey now lies along the Malabar coast to Cannanore: “the port to which steeds are brought from Persia, and you must know that the levy for each horse is twenty-five ducats.... Here we began to meet with spices.” Here, also, were Portuguese established.
They now turned their steps to Narsinga, where HeemrÂj held his court. Varthema calls him “King,” and indeed he ruled, for like the Frank “Mayors of the palace,” he had gradually usurped the powers of the real RÂja, and held actual sway in the place of an ancient race which boasted an uninterrupted succession lasting seven centuries. The city was great and grand; the court, splendid; the revenue, enormous; the army boasted 40,000 horsemen and 400 elephants, and was constantly doing battle with the Moslem and neighbouring Pagan States. “The elephant wears armour; in particular, head and trunk are armed. To the trunk a sword of two arms’ length is fastened, and as broad as a man’s hand.” “Seven armed men go upon the said elephant,” shielded by a sort of castle, “And in that manner they fight.” “The King wears a cap of cloth of gold; and a quilted garment of cotton when he goes to the wars; over this a garment beset with gold coins; and all manner of jewels are at the border thereof. His horse wears jewels which are of more value than are some of our cities. When he journeys for pleasure, three or four kings and five or six thousand horsemen attend him. Wherefore, one may account him a most powerful prince. The common people go naked save for a loin-cloth.... In this realm you may go where you list in safety; but it behoves you to beware of lions on the way.”
Varthema was very much impressed by the singular structure and equally singular habits of the elephant, and he speaks admiringly of its sagacity and strength. He devotes a considerable space to this noble beast; gives us the most accurate details; and recurs to the subject over and over again.
The Persian jewel-merchant and he left Narsinga after two days’ stay, and visited places which were of much importance then, but which have disappeared from the modern map. At last, they arrive at Calicut.
“Having come to the place where the greatest fame of India is gathered up” our traveller devotes the whole of his second book concerning India to Calicut and the manners and customs of its people, as being those of all the inhabitants of that part of the peninsula which lies between the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. From time out of mind Calicut had been a famous emporium; to it calico owes its name. When Islam arose, the spread of the Mohammedan faith stimulated the enterprise of the intrepid Arab sailor and merchant and of the renegade from Eastern Europe and Western Asia. The activity of the hardy Arab found scope by reason of the natural indolence of the Hindu and his dislike of the sea. A rich and well organized traffic sprang up between Persia and Arabia on the one side and China and the Spice Islands on the other. Even in China, the Arab contrived to settle; and Calicut remained the chief centre of the Eastern trade. Here, in the season of calm, might be seen the leviathan junks of China; and, at all times, the ships of every civilized Eastern people. But, by the time Varthema reached Calicut, the Arab had found Malacca to be a more convenient mart for the trade of the far-East; and Calicut, a little fallen from her high estate, had become mainly a market for the products of Southern India and Ceylon, and a port of call. And yet greater change was at hand. One of those new routes had been opened up which from time to time, abase the pride of commercial nations and transfer their wealth: the Portuguese rounded the Cape, reached East Africa, broke across the Ocean, and, in 1498, Vasco di Gama anchored off Calicut. The jealous Arabs burned down the factory which the native ruler had allowed the Portuguese to erect, and fierce seafights ensued, which were accompanied by much brutality. The contest was between the best sailors of Europe and the huge, but ill-built and ill-navigated fleets of the Arab traders. The latter were unable to expel or even to discourage the invaders, who, incensed at opposition, shewed no mercy, and suffered from severe reprisal. While Varthema was at Calicut, the Zamorin (as its ruler was called by those English travellers who arrived a little later) “agreed that the Moors should slay forty-eight Portuguese, whom I saw put to death. And for this reason the King of Portugal is always at war, and daily kills very many; and thereby the city is ruined, for in every way it is at war.” Our traveller arrived at Calicut at the precise time when India, cast into a welter by Mohammedan aggression in its lust for wealth and dominion, was confronted with the yet more insatiate greed of European adventures for fabled gold and direct markets. The competitors vied with one another in all the arts of treachery, cruelty and fraud.
Calicut was a city of mean appearance, occupying an area of about a mile; but the “compounds” were spread over a space of six miles. It was crowded with traders from Ethiopia, Arabia and Persia, Syria and the Levant, Bengal and Sumatra. Varthema calculates that no less than fifteen thousand Moors were domiciled there. He visited the palace of the Zamorin, which was divided into chambers by wooden partitions, on which supernatural beings were carved—beings named dÊvas in the Indian Scriptures, and taken by our Italian for devils. The flooring was a preparation of cow-dung, used then, as it is to-day, for its antiseptic properties. Ramna and Krishna and a demon-goddess called Mariamma were the chief objects of worship; so we are not surprised when we read that, in the “chapel” of the palace, the oil-lamps were set on tripods, “on each side whereof are three devils, in relievo, very fearful to behold. Such are the squires that bear lights to the King.” The chapel was small, but its wooden door was elaborately “carven with devils. In the middle of it is a devil seated, all in bronze; and the devil wears a three-fold crown, like unto that of the Papacy. He has four horns and four teeth, a huge mouth and nose, and his eyes strike terror into him that looketh thereon. Devils are figured around the said chapel; and on each side thereof a Satan is seated, in flaming fire, wherein are a great number of souls. And, the said Satan has a soul to his mouth with his right hand and with his left hand he grips a soul by its middle.” Perchance the chapel recalled memories of pictured hells on the walls of the Pisan Campo Santo, or of certain other mediÆval frescoes at Florence.
He went to a great religious festival near Calicut. “Truly,” he says, “never did I see so many gathered together save at Mecca. From fifteen days’ journey round about came all the Nairs and BrÂhmans to sacrifice.” Passing through trees which bore lights innumerable, one came to a tank, wherein the worshippers first bathed before entering the temple, which stood up from the middle of the tank. It had “two rows of columns, like San Giovanni in Fonte at Rome.” The head BrÂhmans first anointed the heads of the worshippers with oil, and then burned incense, with elaborate ritual, and offered the sacrifice of a cock at an altar laden with flowers. “At one end of the altar is a Satan, which all go up to worship, and then depart, each on his own way.”
Early in the morning, it is the duty of the BrÂhman to bathe in a tank of still water, and then to wash the idols with perfumed water; after which he burns incense before them; nor does the Zamorin eat of food that has not first been presented to the god. “Then the BrÂhmans lie flat on the ground, but in a secret manner, and they do roll their eyes in a devilish way, and twist their mouths horribly for the space of a quarter of an hour; and then the time to eat is come. And men eat of food which has been cooked by men; but the women cook for themselves.”
Varthema’s account of the manners and habits of Southern India is neither so wholly accurate nor arranged with such lucidity as Hiuen-Tsiang’s record of the region of Ganges and Jumna, written nine centuries before. Nor does Southern India present us with such a high civilization as does the empire of SÎlÂditya. But Varthema makes few statements that are not confirmed by other early travellers, and his record bears ample witness to a shrewd, observant eye and honest enquiry. He describes the BrÂhmans; the Nairs, or warrior-caste; the artizans and other castes of the Malabar Coast. We learn that no one of the two lowest castes may approach a BrÂhman within fifty paces “unless he bid him do so”; wherefore they shout a warning as they pass along, and take private paths through the marshes, for, should they not cry aloud, and should any of the Nairs meet them, they may be killed by him, and no punishment follow thereupon.
The Nairs “eat no flesh without sanction from the BrÂhmans; but other castes eat all manner of flesh, saving that of the cow.” The lower castes “eat mice and fish dried in the sun.” All sit on the ground at meals; and the upper castes use the leaf of a tree to scoop up their food from metal bowls; while the lower castes make balls of rice and take it by the hand from a pipkin. All castes and both sexes wear a cotton loin-cloth only. The lowest sort of people suckle their children for three months only, and then feed them on milk night and morning. “And when they have stuffed them therewith, they do not wash them, but cast them into the sand, where they lie until evening. As they are nearly black, one cannot tell whether they be little bears or buffaloes; and they look as if they were fed by the Devil.”
Justice was admirably administered—a characteristic of HÎndustÂn noticed and praised by Greeks, Romans, Arabians, and all travellers. In fact, life and property were fairly safe throughout all civilized Asia. Creditors, on proof of claim, drew a circle round their debtor with a green bough, and within this he must remain until he pay or perish. Should he leave the circle, his life was forfeit to the Zamorin. Murder was punished by impalement; wilful injury to another by fine. Traders transacted business by secret negotiation under a coverlet, certain signs being made with the fingers.
When a man is sick, he is visited by a dozen men, “dressed like devils,” who are accompanied by players on divers instruments. “These physicians carry fire in their mouths,” and go about on stilts fixed to their hands and feet; and so they go shouting and sounding the music; so that truly they would make a hale man fall to the ground for fear at the sight of these ugly beasts. They force ginger juice on the sick; and, in three days, he is well again—cured in the main, one may surmise, by workings of belief on his expectant imagination. Abracadabra is a useful and time honoured ally to the learned professions. The spirits which preside over the fertility of rice are propitiated in a similar manner by the same men. “When the Nairs die, their bodies are burned with much pomp, and some among them keep the ashes; but common folk are buried within the house or garden.”
Varthema tells us of certain social customs which persist to this day in Southern India. The caste or tribe of Nairs who preponderate there, maintain to-day the institutions of their ancestors before history began. Marriage is acknowledged to be the least stable and most diversified of all human institutions; but the Nairs retain more than a trace of the matriarchate and of the polyandry which was associated with the matriarchate. They count descent through the children of sisters only; and marriage is with them the loosest of ties; it involves no responsibility towards the woman or her child. Again the worship of the snake, and, for obvious reasons, of the cobra in particular, throughout India is a remnant of phallic worship. Let us hear what Varthema has to tell us of a state of society which exhibits a stage in the slow and fluctuating course of moral development from primitive promiscuity to the high moral standard extolled, if not completely attained, by the Christian West. There was a habit which is still regarded in many parts of the world as the seal of amity and the highest possible honour which a man can bestow on a friend. “The Pagans exchange their wives.” Indeed, they bestowed them on a friend with all the ready generosity of Cato the Censor to Hortensius. “And when the King takes to himself a wife, he chooses among the most worthy and honourable of the BrÂhmans” him to whom shall be accorded the jus primae noctis. The BrÂhman affects unwillingness “and the king must pay him four or five hundred ducats.” Here, almost for certain, we have a vestige of old phallic worship. When the king is journeying, he passes on his matrimonial privileges to a BrÂhman. Among the inferior castes, “one woman has five, six, and seven husbands, and even eight.... The children go according to the word of the woman.” “The son of one of the sisters of the late king follows him on the throne.” As to serpent-worship, “you must know that, when the King of Calicut has word as to the place where a nest of any of these vile animals is to be found, he has a little house builded over it for water.20 And, if anyone should kill one of these animals or a cow, he would be put to death. They say that these serpents are divine spirits; and that, if they were not spirits, God would not have bestowed on them so great power that, by biting a man but a little, he shall fall headlong and straightway die.” “And when these Pagans go a journeying, it is held for good luck to meet one of these creatures.... There are however, great enchanters: we have seen them grasp deadly serpents.”
The Zamorin “wore so many jewels in his ears and on his hands, arms, legs and feet, that here was a marvel to behold.” His treasury held the immense collection of many previous reigns, stored up for time of need. But that recent scourge of mankind, which spread so rapidly over the world, and which every nation called by the name of a neighbouring nation, had already reached India; this magnificent monarch had “the French disease in the throat.”
When the King eats, BrÂhmans, stand around him, at a space of three or four steps distant, bending the back, and holding the hands before the month. When the King speaks, there is silence, and much reverence is paid to his words.
In the warfare between the States of Southern India, an economy of bloodshed was observed which would have done credit to those Italian warriors of whom Machiavelli tells how the condottiere captain was circumspect to save his men, and the foughten field remained almost as bloodless as a chessboard. The Princes went forth to battle with great armies of foot-soldiery and elephants (but no cavalry), armed with swords, lances, bows and arrows, and furnished with shields. But when battle was joined, and the armies were distant from one another as far as two cross-bows’ shots might carry, BrÂhmans were ordered by one King to go to his royal foe, and ask that a hundred Nairs should fight on either side. Then the selected Nairs would meet midway between the two armies and fight by established rule—“two strokes to the head and one at the legs; and this though they should fight for three days. And when from four to six on either side are slain, the BrÂhmans go straightway into their midst, and make both sides return to their encampments.” Then the kings were wont to employ the BrÂhmans again to bear messages, one to another, asking if that were enough, or more were wished for. “The BrÂhman says ‘no.’ And the enemy says the same. Thus do they do battle together; an hundred set against an hundred.”
Varthema tells us of the habit of betel-chewing and gives us many other details of the life and manners of the people; of their skill as workmen; of their wretched shipping and of their poor navigation. He had the naturalist’s eye, and tells us much of the animals and plants of the district. He describes the crocodile as a “kind of reptile, as big as a boar, but with a greater head; it has four feet, and is four cubits long. It is engendered in certain marshes. The natives say it is without venom; but an evil beast; doing evil to folk by its bite.”
The Persian merchant had avowed that his desire was to travel, and not to trade, for he had enough; but all the same, he was sufficiently eager to find good markets. “My comrade,” whose name is now spelled somewhat differently—Cazazionor becomes Cogiazenor—“being unable to sell his wares for that the trade of Calicut was ruined at the hands of the King of Portugal; for the merchants that were wont to hie thither were not there, nor did they come; we set forth, taking the way of a river, which is the most beautiful I have ever seen, and came to a city called Cacolon, fifty leagues distant.” This “river”-way was by the Backwater of Cochin.
Cacolon, like so many places visited by our traveller is not to be found on a modern map, but was a mart of some importance in its day, “because of pepper of the best which grows in these parts.” Here dwelt a few native Christians “of St. Thomas, some of whom were merchants, believing in Christ.” A little later on Varthema’s journey, he is told of the tomb of the Apostle, “guarded by Christians.” That St. Thomas was the first missionary to India, and that he was martyred there is an ancient tradition. William of Malmesbury tells us in his “Chronicles of the Kings of England” how “Alfred sent many presents over sea to Rome and St. Thomas in India. Sighelm, bishop of Sherborne, sent ambassadors for this purpose, who penetrated successfully into India: a matter of astonishment even in the present time.” The legend concerning St. Thomas is however not earlier than the Fourth Century. Earlier tradition makes him the evangelist of Parthia; and St. Thomas was probably confused with one Thomas, a bishop, who arrived on the Malabar coast in the middle of the Fourth Century. The shrine of the saint is in a suburb of Madras. Indian Christianity was an offshoot of Syrian Gnosticism, and Indian Christians were subject to the authority of the Nestorian Patriarch at Mesopotamia. “These Christians say,” writes Varthema, “that a priest comes from Babylon every three years to baptize them.”
The next place reached by the travellers was Quilon in Travancore, the port of a powerful little kingdom “for ever at war with others.... At that time the king of this city was the friend of the King of Portugal, but we did not think it well to remain there, for he was fighting others.” The contentions of these petty sovereigns with each other gave the Portuguese the opportunity which has always offered itself to the invaders of India, and which they have never been slow to seize.
From Quilon, they sailed to the south, touched at a place where there was a pearl fishery, rounded the “head of India,” and arrived at a port of the Carnatic, which Varthema calls Coromandel. The King of Coromandel was also at war with a neighbour, so Cazazionor and other merchants hired a “sampan,” or flat-bottomed boat, and, “at great peril, by reason of many rocks and shoals,” sailed from the Coromandel coast and reached Ceylon.
CHAPTER VIII.
FARTHER INDIA, MALAYSIA AND THE BANDA ISLANDS.
Alas! the visit was of little profit. As in Ibn BatÛta’s time, nearly two centuries before, the island was divided between four kings, and “for that they were waging fierce war with each other, we could not tarry long time there.” Another reason for the short stay made in Ceylon was that Cazazionor got alarmed at false information concerning the good faith of one of the Kings to whom he was to carry his corals and saffron. This was given him by one of the Moorish traders who were settled in the ports of the island. This gentleman had the same kind of goods to dispose of as Cazazionor, and contrived to hoodwink the Persian with a commercial astuteness and subtlety worthy of a later age. Afraid that one of the kings would contrive to “convey” his merchandise he departed in haste, and Varthema with him.
The latter made marvellous use of eye and ear during his few days’ stay in Ceylon. He draws an admirable picture of the people, the climate, the cinnamon, the rich fruits and other vegetable produce, the roses and other flowers, the immense herds of elephants and the big rubies of the island. He was told of the impression of Adam’s foot on a high peak, but had no time to visit it, even had the fighting then going on allowed of it. It shows how feeble was the authority of an Indian overlord, and how little supreme sovereignty was concerned with matters other than tribute, that the warring RÂjas were the subjects of the RÂja of Narsinga, “because of rice, which is brought from the mainland.” “Some have lances of cane and swords, and they fight together with these; but they do not slaughter each other over much; for they are cowards.”
Three days rowing brought them to Pulicat, a town a little north of Madras. They abode with a Moorish trader, who eagerly bought the large store of corals, saffron, figured velvet and knives Cazazionor had with him. “As this land was waging fierce war with the King of Tarnassari, we were not able to stay very long. After a few days we set sail for the city of Tarnassari, which is at a thousand miles distance from here. And we arrived there in fourteen days.” In fact, they sailed across the Bay of Bengal to Tenasserim, a fertile province of the Malay Peninsula, at that time tributary to Siam. We find that the RÂja “is a most powerful lord and is for ever at war with the King of Narsinga and the King of Bengal. He has an hundred elephants in armour, which are the largest I have ever seen. He keeps an army of 100,000 men, part on foot, part on horse, ready for war. They are armed with small swords and shields, some of which are made of the shell of the tortoise and some are like those used in Calicut; and they have store of bows and of lances, some of which are of cane and some of wood. When they go to war they wear a garment much stuffed with cotton.... Much silk is made there.” As usual, the domesticated and wild animals are described. Varthema was much surprised at the size of the cocks and hens. “In this land we took great pleasure from some of the things which we saw, and, in particular, at the Moorish traders making some cocks fight every day in the streets where they dwell; and the owners will wage even to a hundred ducats as to which will prove to fight best. And we saw two which fought five hours on end, so that, when it was over, both of them lay dead.”
Tenasserim retained traces of phallic worship to an even greater degree than Calicut did. The extreme mark of friendship, so far as the jus primae noctis was concerned, was extended to every visitor, preference being given to white men from all lands; “for,” says Varthema of the natives, “they are a most liberal and agreeable people.” Yet, this obligation fulfilled, the husbands were most jealous of their wives, and whosoever should attempt to maintain relations with them would “put his life in jeopardy.”
At dead of night, the corpses “of every BrÂhman and of the king are burned, with solemn sacrifice to the devil. And they keep the ashes in vessels of earth, baked into a kind of glass, with narrow mouths. Such a vessel, with the ashes therein, is buried within the house. The sacrifice is made under trees, as at Calicut. And the fire is fed with all the perfumes that can be gotten ... together with coral. And while the body is burning, all the music in the city is sounded; and fifteen or twenty men, who are dressed as devils, stand there, with much rejoicing. And the wife is there, making very great lamentation; but no other woman.” Here Varthema saw the horrible practice of Suttee. He tells us of another custom which strangely recalls the Romantic Service of Love in the days of ProvenÇal minstrelsy. A passionate youth will burn his naked arm severely to prove to his mistress “that he loves her and that he is ready to do any great deed for her.”
“As to the manner of refection in this city, the Pagans eat all flesh, saving that of the ox, and eat on the ground from very beautiful vessels of wood, without a coverlet. They drink water, sweetened if it may be. They sleep on high beds of good cotton, with coverlets of silk or cotton. They wear a robe, with a quilt of cotton or silk.... Their ears are full of jewels; but of these the fingers are bare.”
We find that the son of the King succeeded to his father’s throne here; and not the sister’s son, as in Southern India. Deeds conveying property were written on paper instead of palm leaves. The bodies of Moorish traders who were unhappy enough to die here were first embalmed, and then buried, with the head turned towards Mecca. We are told of the flat-bottomed boat, the double canoe, and the junk; the latter carried small boats to Malacca, where they were unshipped and sailed on to the Spice Islands.
Cazazionor was able to dispose of some of his goods at Tenasserim; and then he and Varthema took ship for Bengal. Eleven days of fair wind bore them across the Bay of Bengal to a city which the ever whirling wheel of change has borne away, and the very site of which is indicated only on some ancient and imperfect map. Banghella was one of the first ports and one of the first cities of the age, situate on one of the mouths of the treacherous Ganges—a river of shifting currents and disappearing shores. Its Sultan was a Mohammedan, for ever at war with the Hindu RÂja of Narsinga. “Here,” says our traveller, “are the richest traders I have ever met with. Every year, fifty ships are laden with stuffs of cotton or silk ... and these goods go throughout Turkey, Syria, Persia, Arabia Felix, Ethiopia, and India. Here also are many merchants of jewels from other lands.... The stuffs aforesaid are woven, not by women, but by men.” Like Ibn BatÛta, he found Bengal the cheapest place to live in of the whole world.
The records of old pilgrims and travellers are a riot of surprise. Not one of the least unsuspected of Varthema’s adventures is his dropping here on Christian traders, who came from a Chinese city, which probably lay north of Pekin. “They had brought silken stuffs, aloes-wood, benzoin, and musk; and said that in their land were many Christian lords, subject to the great KhÂn of Cathay”—that is to say, to the Emperor of China. The reader will remember that the Chinese Government pronounced Christianity to be a satisfactory faith in Hiuen-Tsiang’s time. Fra Oderico tells us of the considerable number of Christians in China during the early years of the Fourteenth Century. Probably the Christian Chinese whom Varthema came across were Nestorians; strange products of the wasted subtlety of the Greek mind during its theological degeneracy; followers of the heretic Nestorius, who upheld that two natures, the human and divine, were in Christ’s body, but separate from one another. We may hope that, after so many centuries, such problems had ceased to perplex the good Christians of far-off Cathay. They said that their home was at Sarnau, a place probably identical with the Sanay or Sandoy of Fra Oderico. They wore their native silken breeches and red-cloth caps studded with jewels—a proof of the safety of the city-street and of the highways from land to land under Eastern despotism.
Men are not wont to carry the bitterness of religious prejudice into the market, where mundane profit is at stake; and Cazazionor, the Moslem; Varthema, the Catholic renegade; and the Nestorian heretics seem to have hobnobbed together very amicably. The latter were on their way to Burma, and told Cazazionor that there he might exchange some very fine branches of coral he had for rubies which would sell in Turkey for ten times as much. They proposed that our travellers should go on with them. So Cazazionor sold off all his merchandise, with the exception of “corals, saffron, and two pieces of cloth of Florence of a rose colour.... We departed from that place with the aforesaid Christians, and voyaged towards a city which is called Pego (Pegu), distant from Banghella some thousand miles.”
Now the King of Burma, being at war with the King of Ava, was away with his army. The party chartered a long dug-out canoe, and followed him; hoping to induce him to purchase. But they were forced to return, owing to the war; and five days afterwards the King of Burma, having gained a victory, returned to Pegu.
The very next day, the Chinamen, who, it would seem, had had previous dealings with the King, visited him, and were told to return two days later, “for that, the next day, he must sacrifice to the devil for having triumphed. When the time named had passed, directly the King had eaten, he sent for the aforenamed Christians and for my companion to bring the merchandise before him.” They found the RÂja magnificently set in jewels: his head, limbs, fingers, and even all his toes sparkled with precious stones; jewelled ear-rings dragged down the lobes of his ears to the length of half a palm, and the rubies on him “were more than the value of a very great city.... At night-time he shone like the sun.” Yet this resplendent monarch was “so entirely human and homely that a child might speak to him.”
Then Cazazionor and other merchants who would seem to have become his partners in this business of the corals, uncovered them. The monarch was so unbusinesslike, or allowed himself to behave so indiscretely, as to show enthusiasm at the sight of such magnificent coral-branches; “and truly there were two of these the like of which had never come to India before.” Now begins an Oriental comedy, wherein the trader shall simulate munificence, and extract tenfold from the monarch by craftily working on his natural generosity or regal pride.
The King asked if the corals were for sale. The reply was that they were at his service. The King sighed that war had emptied his treasury; but he was willing to barter rubies for the corals. “We made him learn through these Christians that all we desired was his friendship: let him take the goods and do as pleased him. He answered: ‘I know that Persians are a free-handed people; yet did I never see one so free-handed as this man’; and he swore by God and the Devil that he would see which should excel in generosity, he or a Persian.” So he ordered a casket of rubies to be brought in, and commanded Cazazionor to choose those he would like to have. “My companion answered: ‘O sire, you show me so much benevolence that, by my faith in Mohammed, all these things are a present, which I offer you. And understand, sire, that I journey about the world not to gather merchandise, but merely to see the different races of men and their ways.’ The King replied: ‘I cannot overcome you in generosity, but take this which I give you.’ And so he took a large handful of rubies from each of the (six) divisions of the casket aforesaid, and gave them, saying, ‘Take these for the generosity which you have shown towards me.’ And in like manner, he gave two rubies each to the Christians aforesaid ... which were worth about 1,000 ducats; and those of my companion were given a value of 100,000 ducats.” The Chinamen were apparently content with a commission of one per cent., for nothing is said of the vendor paying any. “Wherefore,” Varthema continues, “by this, the King may be judged to be the most free-handed ruler in the world; and his income is of about a million a year in gold,” derived from lac, cotton, silk, and valuable woods; and this he spent on his army.
The King gave the travellers free quarters which they occupied five days; when there came news that war had again broken out with Ava. So, having seen the burning of two widows, and other sights of Pegu, and found the Burmese “very fleshly,” the Chinamen, Cazazionor and Varthema embarked for Malacca.
It is possible that Varthema was not the very first European to visit the city which had become the most important port in Eastern waters; but it is certain that he was the very first European to describe it. It had taken the place of Calicut; it was nearer the sources of supply; the enterprising Arab had settled there and ruled the city, subject to the payment of a tribute to the King of Siam; and the recent descent of the Portuguese on the coast of Malabar had increased its importance. Here were to be found the huge, unwieldy junks of China—those floating towns, with gardens blossoming on their decks—for there was no longer need for them to creep through the straits and take the perils of the Indian Ocean; and the most halcyon of summer seas is never to be quite trusted. Malacca was a cheaper market than Calicut; and hither were sent the drugs, dyes, perfumes, and spices, the precious woods and other productions of China, Banda, the Phillipines, Siam, the Moluccas, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. “Verily,” writes Varthema, “I believe that more ships sail hither than to any other port in the world.” He remarks on the infertility of the soil; but speaks of the wealth of Malacca in sandal-wood and tin. The travellers were presented to the Moorish Sultan, who had appointed a Governor to do justice; but the inhabitants at that time were Javanese. “They take the law into their own hands; and are the vilest race ever created on earth. When the Sultan shall hinder, they say that they will no longer dwell on land, for that they are sea-farers”—that is to say they were quite able and ready to make a new settlement. “One may not go about here when it grows dark; for folk are killed as if they were so many dogs; and all the traders who come here sleep in their ships.” There was no market for jewels here; and the Chinamen, who still acted as guides to our travellers, advised them to be off. So a junk was hired, and the whole party turned back through the Straits for Pider, on the northern coast of Sumatra.
We are told that the natives of Sumatra were far from being a bellicose race. They were eager traders, very friendly to foreigners, excellent swimmers, and skilful in filigree work. “There were three crowned Pagan Kings; and their religion, way of life, dress, and habits are the same as at Tenasserim; moreover, the wives also are burned alive.” The houses were roofed with the shells of gigantic sea-turtles; and the ships were three-masted, with a prow fore and aft. Here were huge herds of elephants, finer than any he had seen; and the land was productive of long-pepper, benzoin, different kinds of perfumed wood and the silk-worm.
The Chinamen now became anxious to return to their own country; but Cazazionor wanted to see the land of nutmeg and clove: could they get there in safety? The Christians replied that they need fear no robbers; but there remained the chances of the sea; the island could not be reached in a large ship; a sampan must be bought. Two sampans were purchased, manned, and provisioned; and then the wily Persian who wished to keep the Christians as guides, began to work on them. “‘O dearest friends,’ said he, ‘although we be not of your race, we are all sons of Adam. Will you leave me and this other man, my companion, one who was born in your faith?’ ‘In our faith? Is not your companion a Persian?’ ‘He is a Persian now, because he was bought at Jerusalem.’” Whether this statement was a convenient lie, told by Varthema to Cazazionor, or was the calculated fabrication of the latter is not apparent; but it was effective; for “the Christians, hearing the name of Jerusalem, at once lifted up their hands towards Heaven; and kissed the ground thrice, and asked when I was sold at Jerusalem. We answered: ‘When I was fifteen years old.’” The Chinamen thought that Varthema must remember his native land, and Cazazionor at once saw his opportunity and used it. Quoth he: “‘He does indeed remember it. For months my sole delight has been in listening to the things he told me thereof; and he has taught me the words for the parts of the body and for different sorts of food.’” This settled the matter. The Christians consented to go on with them; and if Varthema would return to China with them, he might remain a Mohommedan, and they would make a rich man of him. “‘Nay,’ said Cazazionor, ‘I am much pleased to have your company; but he may not remain with you: for, out of the love I bear to him, I have given my niece to be his wife.’” A money-bargain settled the question; in two days, the Sampan was ready. “We put many kinds of food on board; and, in particular, the most toothsome fruits I ever tasted; and took our course to the island of Banda.”
Not even Marco Polo or Fra Oderico had ventured so far towards the rising sun. Varthema was the very first of European travellers to reach the Spice Islands. One of those who “cannot rest from travel, but must drink life to the lees,” he might, had he been a better lettered man, have quoted the lines of his own great countryman:
“Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto
Sol con un legno e con quella compagna
Picciola dalla qual non fui deserto.”
(“I put forth on the deep open sea, in but a single ship, and with that little band that had not deserted me.”) But if Varthema is no scholar, is he not for ever revealing himself as a single-minded, enthusiastic traveller; an excellent actor, and quite able to live up to his part, a man of sound judgment, native wit, sly humour, and pronouncedly brave; direct and unflinching of purpose; a little vainglorious, yet discrete?
The comrades traversed the landlocked straits of Malacca and the Java and Banda seas, and after fifteen days found themselves on an ugly, gloomy, and flat island, where dwelt “a beastly kind of men, without king or even governor.... The administration of justice is not needed; for the natives are so stupid that they could not do evil if they would. They are pagans.” Such was this specimen of the Nutmeg Islands. Two day spent here was more than enough for our travellers; so they set sail for the Moluccas—the Clove Islands—and found “the people even viler than those of Banda, but whiter; and the air is a little cooler.” We have a full description of the clove tree and are told that cloves were sold by measure, “for they understood not weights. We were now wishful to change to another land, in order to learn new things and all about them.” So Borneo was steered for; and, on the voyage, the Chinamen took delight in questioning Varthema concerning Christians and their faith. “And when I told them of the impress of our Saviour’s face, which is in St. Peter’s, and of the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul and many other saints, they advised me in secret that if I would go with them, I should be a very great lord, because I had seen these things. But I doubted if, after I had been led thither I should ever come to my own land again; and therefore I kept me back from going.” Varthema does not think of his indebtedness to his generous Persian host; he has no use for the inconvenient fidelities of friendship or the costly coercion of gratitude; such altruistic weakness did not afflict the men of the Renaissance; “ma per sÈ foro”—“they were for themselves.”
The temptation to visit China must have been strong for a man of Varthema’s spirit. A few missionary friars had reached Mongolia in the thirteenth century, a very few bold spirits had penetrated Asia as far as China at the end of that and the beginning of the next century; and Tartars kept up some commercial intercourse between Europe and China a little later. But when the great Tartar Empire fell into decay, and the Moslem recovered his grip of Central Asia, intercourse between West and Farthest East became impossible. The few missionaries who set forth for the Celestial Empire never returned, and China became a shadow and a name to Christian Europe. But it would be no easy matter for Varthema to slip away from the Persian just here and now; the difficulty of ever returning from China, even should he reach it, would indeed prove a formidable problem; and we may suspect, too, that the hardships of the voyage and the heat and discomforts of the climate were beginning to tell on Varthema’s iron nerve.
He found the natives of Borneo to be “Pagans, and good folk.... Every year much camphor is shipped; which they say is the gum of a tree that grows there. I have not seen it; and therefore I do not affirm it to be so. Here my companion hired a ship.... We directed our course to the very beautiful island called Java; and came there, always sailing southward, in five days.” On the voyage, the skipper pointed out the Southern Cross; and “told us that, to the south, beyond the island aforesaid (Java) dwell sundry other sorts of men, who steer by these stars which are set over against ours; and, further, they made known to us that the daylight stays but four hours in those parts, and that it is colder there than elsewhere in the world. Whereat we were much solaced and gratified.”
Now, there is no inhabited land to the south of Java where the shortest day is of four hours only; but the assertion of the Malay captain reads as if he had visited Australia, or had gotten some true information concerning that continent; and bold navigators of Malaysia may have ventured or been driven much farther over the Southern Ocean to a very high latitude; or, the statement as to shortened hours of sunlight and cold may have been a mere inference from the progressive diminution of the day and of heat in sailing south. It is said that indications of the discovery of Australia a very little after Varthema’s time are to be found on manuscript maps of unknown authorship. It is interesting to find that the skipper steered by means of a compass, which was not of Chinese make, for the magnet pointed to the north; and that he was provided with a chart intersected by perpendicular and horizontal lines.
Java was under the rule of several kings: “some adore idols as at Calicut; some worship the sun; others, the moon; many, an ox; very many, the first thing they shall meet of a morning; yet others, the devil.” Nonetheless, “I believe the natives to be the most true dealers in the world.... Some use pipes, from which they blow poisoned arrows from the mouth; which bear death however little blood they may draw.... Some eat bread made of corn; and some eat flesh of sheep or deer or wild pigs; and some eat fish and fruits. Among the flesh-eaters, when their fathers become so old as to be past labour, their children or relatives put them up for sale in the market-place; and those that buy them kill and eat them cooked. Likewise if any young man shall fall into any dire sickness; and if those that have knowledge deem that he shall die thereof, the father or brother of the sick one shall slay him; and they do not wait for him to die. And, having killed him, they sell him to be eaten of others. We, marvelling at such a business, some traders of this land, to us: ‘O you dull Persians, why do you leave such toothsome flesh to the worms?’ Whereupon, my companion cried out ‘Quick, quick, to the ship; for never again shall these folk come near me on land.’” This is a strange statement; but there is abundant evidence as to the prevalence of cannibalism throughout Malaysia at this period to confirm it. Yet, says Varthema, “justice was well administered”; the natives clothed themselves in silk, camelot and cotton garments; and traded with the gold and copper which their island furnished abundantly, as well as the finest emeralds in the world. They were a maritime people and fought their battles at sea.
Varthema had lost count of time. It was now the month of June. He was south of the equator, and had crossed the ecliptic; and, directed by the Chinamen, he found the sun casting a shadow in a direction the reverse of that of northern latitudes. “And thereby we learned how far we had come from our country, and stood amazed.... Having seen the manners of the island, we saw no great reason for remaining there; for we had to keep watch all night, lest some scoundrel should steal up to us, and bear us away, and eat us. Wherefore, having called the Christians, we told them that, as soon as they were ready, we would return to our land. Before we set off, however, my comrade bought two emeralds ... and two little male children with their private parts wholly cut away; for in this island there is a sort of merchants who follow no other calling than that of buying little children, from whom they cut all away, so that they are left as if women.”
It is obvious that different communities, at varying stages of civilization, inhabited Java; from “the truest dealers in the world,” and those who administered justice well, down to bestial savages. Tales, and perhaps evidence, of the cruel brutality of the Aborigines, affected the imagination of Cazazionor and Varthema strongly; they were not sure that the cannibals, finding themselves in the close neighbourhood of “Persians,” and therefore quite unusual visitors to Java, might not be tempted to try the flavour of a novelty; their Chinese guides, moreover, had taken them to most of the parts of Malaysia with which they were acquainted; the softening effect of an equatorial climate relaxed their desire to push on into that cold and gloomy region to the south, of which the Malay skipper had told them; and it would seem that, out of commercial jealousy or from rude humour, “merchants of the country” took a pleasure or sought a profit in playing upon their fears. So they hired a junk, and sailed boldly over the more open water, along the south-east coast of Sumatra, rounded the northern extremity of that great island, and saw Malacca again on the fifteenth day of voyage.
Here they stayed three days, while Cazazionor made up a cargo of spice, perfumes and silk; and here “our Christian companions stayed on. It were not possible to make a short history of how they wailed and lamented; so that, verily, had I not had a wife and children, I had gone with them” (this is the first and last time that Varthema mentions the relatively unimportant fact of his being a yoke-mate and father off the chain). “And likewise, they said they would have come with us, had they known how to travel safely.... So they stayed behind, saying that they would return to Sarnau; and we went on in our ship to Ciromandel” (Negropotam). Probably the Chinese would take passage in some junk of the fleet which came to Malacca every year.
CHAPTER IX.
SOME CUNNING MANŒUVRES.
Having unloaded the junk, our travellers chartered a sampan and sailed to Quilon. Now Varthema was very silent about the Portuguese at Cochin and Cannanore when he was on his outward voyage, and indeed he discreetly avoided them, lest discovery of his nationality should wreck his purpose. They must have been at Quilon, too, when he was there before; for the RÂja of the district had welcomed Pedro Alvarez Cabal in 1503, and permitted the building of a Portuguese factory. There were now 22 Portuguese settlers in this factory, which was fortified, of course; and a wave of home-sickness swept over the traveller: “I greatly desired to escape,” he says; “but I held on, because they were few in number, and I was afraid of the Moors; for there were merchants with us who knew that I had been to Mecca and to the tomb of the Prophet; and I feared lest they should take it into their heads that I would uncover their deceits; so I held me back from running away.” The gist of this statement is that Varthema feared the Portuguese garrison was too feeble to undertake the protection of a false hadji from the fierce resentment which Cazazionor and the Arab traders would evince. The excuse as to the uncovering of Mohammedan frauds is but a poor sop to whatever Christian prejudice might remain in Italy. His work done, he was on the look out for a really favourable opportunity of returning to Europe. He had small dread of failure. He had not lost his nerve in the least, this son of the Renaissance of so infinite resource, of such invincible self-confidence and of ability to match; unshakably resolute when confronted with any peril that was unavoidable, and deterred by no feeble scruple when by any means it was possible to evade it; one wholly sincere in gaining his end—a man of “virtu,” a manful man, as the Italians of his day termed it.
After a stay of twelve days at Quilon, the pair voyaged along the Backwater of Cochin to Calicut, and arrived there in ten days. There he found two Milanese refugees who had deserted from the Portuguese ships in which they had arrived at Cochin. It at once occurred to his quick brain that he might use these fellow countrymen of his. “Never had I more joy than in beholding these two Christians. They and I were going about naked” (i.e. girt with a loin-cloth only) “after the manner of the country. I asked them if they were Christians. Joan Maria answered: ‘Yea, verily.’ Then Piero Antonio asked me if I were a Christian. I answered: ‘Yea, praise be to God.’ Then he took me by the hand and led me to his house. And when we had come thither, we began to embrace and to kiss each other and to shed tears. In sooth, I could not speak like a Christian; my tongue seemed to be unwieldy and hampered; for I had been four years without speaking to (European) Christians. I spent the night following with them; and neither they nor I could eat or sleep, because of our great joy. You may think how we wished the night were a whole year, that we might talk together of diverse matters.” Varthema ascertained that these Milanese were skilled in the making of ordnance, and had instructed the natives in their art, which had brought them the favour of the Zamorin. Hence they feared to return to a Portuguese settlement and, indeed to attempt to escape by land. Experience had sharpened Varthema’s inborn ability at stratagem; and when he returned to Cazazionor in the morning and was asked where he had spent the night, he replied: “at the mosque, rendering thanks to Allah and to Mohammed for the blessing of a safe return; whereat he (Cazazionor) was much pleased. And, so that I might learn what was going on in the land, I told him I meant to keep on sleeping at the mosque, and that I did not hanker after riches, and that I wished to remain poor. And, wishing to make my escape, I saw no way but by deceit; for the Mohammedans being the most stupid of all folk, he was satisfied. And this I did to be able to talk often with the Christians; for they had daily word of everything from the court of the King. I began to act out my deceit, and put on the Moorish saint, and never would partake of flesh, excepting at the house of Joan Maria; but there we eat two brace of fowls together every night. And I would no longer mix with the merchants; nor did any man see me to smile; and I kept in the mosque all day, save when he (Cazazionor) sent for me that I should go eat with him; and he rebuked me for not eating flesh. Quoth I: ‘Eating overmuch leads man to sin greatly.’ And so I began to be a Moorish saint; and the man was happy who might kiss my hand, and some my knees.”
Luck was, as usual, on Varthema’s side. A merchant, a great friend of the Persian, falls sick, and our new Santon (holy man) is asked to visit him. He and Cazazionor go to the sick man’s house together; and Varthema assumes the air of a skilled physician, and puts various medical questions in the most approved manner. “Then my companion turned to me and asked: ‘O Jonah, knowest thou of any medicine for this my friend?’ I answered: ‘My father was a physician in my land, and what I know is by that practice which he taught me.’” Then the Persian asked “Jonah” to do his utmost. “‘Then’ quoth I: ‘In the name of Allah, the Pitiful, the Compassionate One!’ and felt his pulse, and found him to be very feverish.’” Questioning the patient in true professional style “Jonah” found that he was suffering from some intestinal obstruction. So our physician administered a series of clysters “which did more harm than good”; for by a singular blunder he had used astringent herbs in their preparation, and forgot to warm the last clyster, which put the patient into agony. Then a scene ensued which is told with Rabelaisan directness and is as coarsely comical as that pursuit of Monsieur de Porceaunac by the apothecaries, which delighted the court of the Grande Monarque. Jonah is a man of resource and unconquerable force of will; he has his man hoisted by the heels, and keeps him suspended, hands and head only touching the ground. The unhappy patient roars for mercy: “Stop, stop; I am killed, I am killed”; and Cazazionor exclaims: “O Jonah, is it your practice to do thus in your land?” Varthema preserves the assurance of the orthodox physician who cannot err; he asserts that it is no error, and goes on when the sick man is at the point of death. This last remedy is efficacious, however, though it leaves the patient in a painful condition; and Jonah, who was by no means without some grains of human compassion, ordered him some excellent remedies and gave him still better advice. The story which is told with a strong sense of humour, ends with a prescription worthy of the famous Abernethy. The patient is restricted to two meals a day; and is to take a mile of exercise before each of them; “for these folk eat eight or ten times a day. This order seemed to him to be without ruth. However, in the end he was wholly cured ; and thus my hypocrisy gat me great reputation. They said that I was the friend of Allah. This merchant would have me to take ten ducats; but I would take nothing. I even gave three ducats which I had to the poor; and this I did openly, so that they might know that I had no desire for gold or gear. Henceforward, happy was the man who might give me to eat at his house; happy he who kissed my hands and feet; and, when anyone kissed my hands, I played my part, letting him know that, being a saint, he gave me my desert. But my companion gat me most credit; for he also had faith in me, and said that I eat no flesh, and that he had seen me at Mecca and before the body of Mohammed, that I had always journeyed with him, that he knew my ways, that I was in verity a saint, and that, knowing me to be holy and devout, he had given me one of his nieces to wife. Thus, all men were my well wishers; and every night I went in secret to the Christians.”
At last, the Milanese told Varthema that there was word of twelve Portuguese vessels having arrived at Cannanore, and advised him to try to get there by land. He confesses that his courage failed him for an enterprise so hazardous; “for I might be killed by the Moors, I being white and they black.” The news was confirmed by two Persian traders who arrived from Cannanore, and who were immediately invited by the hospitable Cazazionor to sit down and eat with him and Varthema, who was with him at the time. The traders said that the Portuguese were building a strong fort at Cannanore: “What kind of people may these Portuguese be?” asked Cazazionor of Jonah. “I answered: ‘Do not speak of such a people; for they are robbers and sea-thieves one and all. Would I could see them all of our Mohammedan faith!’ Whereat he became very filled with malice; and, privily, I rejoiced.”
Next day, the Mohammedan traders, fully alive to the fact that the firm establishment of the Portuguese in India meant the ruin of their trade, flocked to prayers at the Mosque, and took Varthema with them. None but so holy a man should be imam and lead the prayers on such a grave occasion. So we find him solemnly reciting the Koran.
During the next few days, he pretended to be very ill, and, in answer to Cazazionor’s anxious enquiries, said he thought that the air of Calicut did not agree with him. The attachment of the Persian to Varthema was sincere and deep, and he was not in the least suspicious. He urged the new-found saint to go to Cannanore until they should be able to return to Persia together; he had a friend there who would give him hospitality. Varthema affected to hesitate “because of those Christians.” Cazazionor replied that there was no need to fear; he should remain within the city. “In the end, having paid good heed to the fleet which was being made ready at Calicut, and the army which had been mustered against the Christians, I set out to give them word of it, and to save me from the hands of dogs.”
But first he came to a final understanding with the Milanese. Then there were two dozen Persian, Syrian, and Turkish merchants with whom he was friendly at Calicut. Which would be the better course: to take leave of them, and so, possibly, to set them talking, and arouse suspicion; or to slip away, and so, if some ill-chance should stop him, to condemn himself by having observed secrecy? He decided to be off without speaking about it to any one except Cazazionor and his two friends who were about to return to Cannanore. So, early one morning, he set out in a boat with these two Persian merchants who kept silence about their journey because they were trying to evade the export-duties levied by the Zamorin. But their little bark had only got a bow-shot from the shore, when Nairs shouted to the skipper to return at once. They demanded by what right he was carrying Varthema off without sanction. “The Persians answered: ‘this man is a Moorish saint; and we are going to Cannanore.’ ‘We know full well that he is a Moorish saint,’ replied the Nairs; ‘but he understands the tongue of the Portuguese, and will tell them of all that we are doing; for a great fleet is being made ready;’ and they laid strict command on the captain of the ship that he should not give me passage; and he went by it. We stayed on the beach; and the Nairs went back to the King’s house. One of the Persians said: ‘Let us go to our lodging,’ that is, to Calicut. I said ‘Do not go back; for you will lose these fine pieces of cloth, seeing that you have not paid dues to the King.’ The other Persian said, ‘O sir, what shall we do?’ I answered ‘Let us go along the shore until we shall find a prau,’ which is to say, a small bark; and they fell in with this; and we went twelve miles of march, laden with the goods aforesaid. You can figure to yourself how my heart beat at finding me in so great danger. At last, we found a prau, which bore us to Cannanore.”
He immediately went to Cazazionor’s friend with his letter of introduction, wherein was a request that “Jonah,” who was a saint, and about to become a relation, should be entertained as if he were the writer, until such time as he should arrive. The merchant laid the letter on his head, and vowed that he would answer for his guest with that organ. A feast was prepared; but, alas! the ascetic saint, however resourceful and however hungry after the journey and its perils, must keep to his rÔle, and could only look on—a Tantalus of the Sixteenth Century. The repast finished, the company took a little walk by the sea, and Varthema marked where the fortress of the Portuguese was a building, and resolved to try for liberty the very next day.
He was up early in the morning, and expressed a desire to stroll about. The Persians said: “Go where you please”; but they went with him. He contrived to lead them in the direction of the fort and to get a little ahead of them. Happening to come across two Portuguese, he declared himself to be an escaped Christian; and one of them immediately hastened back to the fort, taking Varthema with him. Lorenzo de Almeyda, son of the Viceroy and Commandant of the fort was at breakfast. Varthema cast himself on his knees before him and besought protection. Just at this instant, the hubbub at Cannanore, which arose on the discovery of Varthema’s escape, dinned in their ears. The artillerymen made ready; but everything quieted down; and Varthema revealed the preparations for war which were being made at Calicut. Lorenzo de Almeyda sent him to his father Don Francisco, the Viceroy, who was at Cochin, where the Portuguese had supported a revolting tributary, and made themselves masters of a little State.
The Viceroy, delighted at getting accurate word of the designs in progress at Calicut, gave a very favourable audience to the refugee.
Varthema was quite sensible of the generous hospitality and sincere affection which Cazazionor had bestowed on him. He not merely mentions, but reiterates the fact. Yet he exhibits not the smallest compunction at having tricked and deserted him. All moral obligation was as a feather, when weighed against the achievement of personal freedom and that self-fulfilment which was the goal of the Italian of his period. One wonders what were the sentiments of that deluded and forsaken friend. As for Varthema, once more among Europeans, and those Europeans of a cognate race, he absorbs their prejudice against Orientals and “Moslem dogs”; and one realizes how deeper even than to-day, and how impassable, was the gulf which separated East from West. It is to his credit that he faithfully fulfilled his promise to Joan Maria and Piero Antonio; he obtained a pardon and safe-conduct for them from the Viceroy, and a promise as to their safety from all officials who might put an obstacle in the way. To induce the Viceroy to grant a pardon was easy; for that dignitary was aware that he was likely to deprive the foe of two artillerymen and add them to his own forces; moreover he would learn much from the intermediary messengers who were to be sent to them. On Varthema’s return to Cannanore, he found a serviceable Hindu, whom he sent five times to the two Milanese, holding his wife and children as a pledge of faithful service. The Milanese were instructed to say not one single word to their wives, who were natives, or to their slaves; but to leave these behind them, and steal off, at dead of night, with what money and valuable jewels they could bring with them. All was arranged; but a slave had been stealthily watching his master’s doings; he went to the Zamorin, and told his tale. The Zamorin refused to credit it; but put a guard over the Milanese. The slave, who probably was filled with a spirit of revenge, for which he may have had good cause, next went to the Moorish Cadi. The enraged traders, when the secret doings of the Milanese were made known to them, collected a hundred ducats and sent this to the “King of the Yogis,” or ascetic Fakirs. Presently, the homes of the Christians were surrounded by a mob of Hindu devotees, sounding horns, and yelling for alms. “They want more than alms,” said the unhappy men. The fanatics rushed the houses; and, although the two Europeans fought desperately for their lives, they were slaughtered; yet not before six Yogis lay dead at their feet, and forty were wounded. It was reported that the infuriated Hindus cut their throats when they had overwhelmed them and drank their blood.
Somehow, the native wife of Joan Maria contrived to escape from Calicut, and made her way to Cannanore, bringing her little son with her. Varthema, although he had left his Persian benefactor without a sigh, was touched at the condition of the little half-caste. He remembered the aid which the Milanese had given him and the pleasant nights they had spent together; and the tragedy which had ensued on their intercourse pierced his feelings. He became the guardian of his friend’s son, purchasing him for eight ducats in gold, and getting him duly baptized. But the little fellow was fatally infected with the new scourge, which it would seem the Portuguese had brought with them to the East, and he died exactly a year after baptism. “I have seen this scath three thousand miles beyond Calicut,” says Varthema; “and it is said that it began about seventeen years aforetime; and that it is far worse than ours.”
CHAPTER X.
WAR BY LAND AND SEA
Albeit sheltered by a cognate Latin people, our traveller had by no means found a haven of perfect safety. In a few days, we find him taking his part in a great sea-fight between the Portuguese fleet of eleven ships (of which two were galleons and one a brigantine), commanded by Don Francisco de Almeyda, and the great Indian fleet of two hundred and nine sail, which had gathered together from all those parts of the Malabar coast which remained in the hands of the Mohammedan traders. But only eighty-four ships of the Mohammedan fleet were large sail; the rest being praus, mainly propelled by the oar. Nor were they all meant to fight: many of them were traders under convoy. As they approached, “it was as if one looked on a very big wood.” Varthema, restored to western civilization and Christianity, is borne away by the inexorable spirit of the Portuguese sea-dogs. Never saw he braver men and he is with them in their prayers to God “to confound the heathen faith.” He tells us how the Admiral incited his men, by the passion of Christ, to thrust at these dogs; for this is the day which shall cleanse them from their sins; and how the Spiritual Father, crucifix in hand, exhorted them in language so beautiful that the graceless men shed tears. All received absolution, and then the Admiral sailed past two galleons of the foe, firing broadsides into them to find out of what mettle they were. Nothing further happened that day; and next morning, the Moorish Admiral made certain overtures to be allowed to pass by in peace. “Sail by if you can,” was the reply of the Portuguese Admiral; “but first learn what manner of men we Christians be.” “Mohammed is our trust against you Christians,” retorted the Moors, and then they crowded all sail and plied the oar. Don Francisco de Almeyda let them come on until they were immediately off Cannanore; “‘for he wished the ruler of the city to see what stuff Christians were made of’.... And when the time to eat had come, the wind freshened somewhat and our Captain said: ‘now, up, my brothers; now is the time,’ and sailed for the two biggest ships.” The Moorish fleet struck up all kinds of weird, inspiriting music while the fleets met. Thrice did Almeyda’s men cast their grappling-irons on the largest galleon, and thrice they failed; but the fourth attempt was a success. The retaliatory cruelties of the Moors at Calicut were remembered, and not one of the six hundred crew was suffered to escape. Another Moorish vessel was boarded, and five hundred Moors were slaughtered. But the enemy still fought desperately and well, and managed to divide the Portuguese fleet. The galley commanded by JoÃo SerrÃo, who had taken Varthema from Cannanore to Cochin was surrounded by fifty vessels, great and small; and the brigantine was boarded by fifteen Moors, who drove its crew to the poop. But the captain, one Simon Martin, called aloud to Jesus Christ for victory, smote off half a dozen Moorish heads with his own hands, and cast such fear into the surviving boarders, that they threw themselves into the sea for safety. Four other Moorish vessels now drew on; but Martin saved the situation by seizing an empty barrel and making as if it were a mortar; and seeing this, the attackers turned back. Don Francisco de Almeyda then sailed into the very midst of the convoyed traders, captured seven of them, laden with spice and other goods, and sank nine or ten more by gun-fire, amongst which was one with a cargo of elephants. The Moors fled, and the pursuit was kept up by ships’ boats, to prevent any attempt at swimming ashore. About two hundred swam twenty miles and escaped; but cross-bow and lance put an end to most. Next morning all the corpses that could be recovered from the waves, or the shore, or from captured ships, were counted: they numbered three thousand six hundred; but, “by God’s grace, no Christian was killed on galley or other ship; but many were wounded during the long day of battle.” The Moors were a match for the Portuguese in battle, but not in artillery, ships or seamanship. This sea-fight took place in March, 1506, and three months later the Viceroy rewarded Varthema’s services, by making him head-factor of the Portuguese warehouses. A man with so much knowledge of Mohammedan and Hindu customs and method, speaking Arabic, and with some smattering of the native tongue; a man, withal, with such experience of the ways of the world, so diplomatic, and so masterful, would be invaluable. A little later, he was sent from Cochin to Cannanore to get behind the curtain of certain frauds; for traders from Calicut had got safe-conducts there by passing themselves off as residents of Cannanore. About this time the RÂja of Cannanore died; and the new sovereign was no friend to the Portuguese. He got artillery from the Zamorin, and, from the 27th April until the 17th August there was open war, begun by Moorish traders, who attacked the Christians when they were going to a well to draw water. The latter retired to the fort, in good order; and Varthema and 200 men held it, under the captaincy of a certain Lorenzo de Britto. They had nothing to eat but nuts, rice and sugar. Water they had to draw from a well a bow-shot off, after fighting for it all the way. The investing force had more than 140 cannons; but, although it consisted of thousands of men, they were mainly armed with bows and arrows, spears, swords and shields. This host would rush on with fury, inspired by musical instruments of many kinds and the splutter of fireworks; but they never got within two stones’ cast of the fort; and every day half of a score of them were killed and the rest fled. “They said we kept the devil with us for our defence.”
At last, up came the Portuguese fleet under TristÃo da Cunha, of unperished name, and his three hundred knights in shining steel, who were dissuaded with difficulty from burning Cannanore to the ground. The ocean, up to now the auxiliary and defence of the Peninsula and its Moorish traders, had become a highway for the enterprise of the armed fleets of Europe. On the arrival of this strong force, the RÂja and the Moorish traders sued for peace, which the Viceroy had the foresight to grant. For, whatever victories the Portuguese might win, and at however small a cost, their position in the East was precarious. The Mohammedan world was weak as against Europe for the same reason that Europe was weak as against Constantinople: it was divided. Should the spirit of resistance once become so strong as to overcome local jealousies, with the whole Mohammedan world set aflame in Europe, Africa and Asia, and with the countless hosts of the Far East at the call of the Mohammedan trader, where had the Portuguese—nay where had Europe been?
Varthema, once again a devout Catholic, tells us how he spent leisure hours when there was peace with the natives, in trying to convert some of his old acquaintance among the traders of Cannanore to Christianity. He professes great disdain for the simplicity and ignorance of these Pagans! and the arguments he used were not precisely scrupulous, and were far from skilful.
In November, 1507, at the request of the Viceroy, Varthema accompanied him and TristÃo da Cunha to the assault on Ponani, a port to the south of Calicut. He tells us how, after the customary prayers and spiritual monitions, “a little before break of day, we opened war to the death on these dogs, who were eight thousand; and we, about six hundred.” Native troops have never had a chance against European arms and discipline. The disproportion of the opposing troops was about the same as at Plassey, two centuries and a half later; and if all De Almeyda’s troops were Europeans, as Clive’s were not, the latter were all led by European officers and trained in European methods. And if, opposed to Clive and the famous Thirty-ninth primus in Indis there were a few French auxiliaries, opposed to De Almeyda and Da Cunha were 64 Moors vowed to victory or death, “for each one of them was master of a ship.” “But God gave us His help, so that none of our folk were slain here; yet we killed 140; and of these, with my own eyes, I saw Don Lorenzo slay six; and he got two wounds; and many others were wounded also. For a little while the battle was most fiercely fought. But our galleys neared the shore; and then these dogs began to give way: and for that the water (of the river at Ponani) began to fall, we followed them no farther. But these dogs began to swell their numbers; so we set fire to their ships, burning thirteen thereof, most of them newly builded and big. And then the Viceroy withdrew all his troops to the headland; and here he made some knights; and of these, of his grace he made me one; and that most valiant leader, TristÃo da Cunha, was my sponsor.” And then they all embarked for Cannanore.
CHAPTER XI.
THE NEW WAY ROUND THE CAPE.
The home-bound fleet was now loading. Varthema had given the Portuguese a year and a half of faithful service; he tells us that he was anxious to return to Europe; he had had fully five years of perilous wanderings through Moslem and Pagan lands to where no European foot hitherto had pressed the soil; and he was urged “by the affection and kindly feeling I bore my country, and my desire to carry thither and place upon record news concerning a great part of the world.” The grace demanded was freely given to one who had worked and fought so well; and on December 6th, 1506, a fortnight after the last great fight, he went on board, and the San Vicenzo and other great ships set sail.
A long voyage across the ocean brought the fleet to the coast of what is British East Africa to-day. Malinda, Mombasa and the island of Pemba were touched at during the voyage along the eastern coast; then, Kiloa, the extreme limit of Ibn BatÛta’s voyage, a German port not so long ago; then, the Comoro islands, together with several other trading-places which the Portuguese had seized and fortified. All this part of the “Dark Continent” had been long peacefully penetrated by Arab traders and had profited by commercial intercourse with them; and the natives were incited to expel the intruder. The appearance of a rival had infuriated the Moslem trader, and the natives caught something of his spirit in resisting the new comers. They were now beginning to experience the tender mercies of the Christian. The Portuguese spread their faith among the palm groves of the South after the fashion of the Teutonic knights over the heaths of Prussia. They used the sword mercilessly; they burned towns and wrought every horror that can be inflicted by the passions of men released from discipline and from the restraints of a long voyage—men stimulating each other to brutality by mutual example, and infected with that mad fury which is apt to possess any excited gang. But Varthema tells us of the pleasure he felt at the successes of the Portuguese and the spread of Catholic truth. He found Pagans were baptized daily in Africa, as in India. “From what I have seen of India and Ethiopia,” he writes, “methinks the King of Portugal, should it please God, and his victories go on, will become the richest King on earth ... he is the means whereby the Christian faith is spread daily; wherefore it may be credited that God hath given him victory and will continue to prosper him.”
We must not accuse our whilom Mameluke of any grave insincerity in writing thus. No doubt he had an eye to the good will of Julius II., and the Catholic public; but every son of the church was expected to express himself in this way, and every son of the Renaissance was ready to do so. As has been said, the Italian of the age was not burthened by any undue sense of sin or overvexed about religion. These high matters were the care of a special profession—the clergy—and of an organized institution—the Church. The direst lapses into iniquity were “bad shots,” as sins were called by the Greeks—mere unfortunate glancings aside from the bull’s eye—and absolution was easily obtained. The main thing was to aim at making life a full, rich, and splendid success. None the less, the Rock of St. Peter was at once the emblem of European Civilization and the foundation on which in theory it rested: The Church and European civilization must be spread, to put an end to Mohammedanism, that enduring peril, and the Paganism from which it drew its recruits and no small measure of its wealth and power. This is what lies at the bottom of Varthema’s mind. The King of Portugal is destined to become the wealthiest and most powerful of rulers; and the possession of wealth and the unrestricted exercise of power of every kind, mental and moral and physical was the ideal of the age and the reward of its virtu.
At MoÇambique, an island off what is still Portuguese East Africa, the fleet remained fifteen days to take in provisions, and Varthema crossed to the mainland. He tells us of the blackness of the natives; of their woolly hair, thick lips, and “teeth white as snow”; of how the men wore bark and the women leaves as a loin-cloth; and of the clicking of their speech, like the noises, made by tongue and palate, with which the muleteers of Sicily urge on their steeds. (So probably at some time Varthema had visited Sicily). Finding these negroes “few and vile,” he and five or six others armed themselves, engaged a guide, and went on an excursion. They saw great herds of elephants roaming about; but by collecting dry wood, and setting fire to it, they scared the great beasts away. Yet, in the end, they were chased by three she-elephants who had their calves with them, and had to make for a hill in all haste. They escaped with difficulty, and doubtless had not done so but for the mothers of the herd being hampered by the calves they found themselves called upon to protect. The party crossed some ten miles over the ridge and came to cave-dwellers, of whom they purchased fifteen cows for a little rubbish of European manufacture. When on the way back to the ship, they heard a great uproar. It came from the caves, and greatly alarmed them, until they understood from the signs made by two negroes, who were driving the cows, that they need have no fear; and their guide assured them that these people were only quarrelling as to which of them should be the possessor of that rare treasure, a little bell.
Sailing from MoÇambique between the mainland and San Lorenzo (as Madagascar was then called), our traveller remarks that in his belief “the King of Portugal will soon be lord thereof; for two places there have already been seized and put to fire and flame.” After the Cape was rounded the fleet encountered terrific storms. The ships were dispersed by their violence, nor did they sight each other again during the remainder of the voyage.
Off St. Helena, the voyagers on Varthema’s ship were scared by the appearance of whales. “We saw two fishes, each as great as a great house, which, when on the surface, raise a kind of vizor, I should say of the width of three strides, and let it down when they go under again. We were so alarmed at the power of these fishes in swimming that we let off all our artillery.” He next describes the boobies of Ascension: birds “so simple and foolish that they let themselves be caught by the hand ... and, before they Were caught, they looked on us as at a miracle.... On this island are only water and fish and these birds.” A few days later, they saw the North Star on the horizon. They touched at the Azores, and at last reached the beautiful estuary of the Tagus, and anchored off the “noble city of Lisbon.”
And now we find our traveller, of whom it might, by the alteration of a pronoun be said as of the Egyptian Queen: “Nought could excel his infinite variety,” turned courtier. Don Emanuel, “the Fortunate,” was staying at his palace opposite the city, and Varthema crossed the Tagus to kiss the royal hand. So interesting a traveller with so much to relate was most graciously received and kept at court for some days. When he conceived himself to be sufficiently established there, he seized an opportune moment, presented the patent of Knighthood which the Viceroy had given him, and asked the monarch to confirm it. It was his majesty’s pleasure to order a diploma of knighthood to be drawn up on parchment, and then to sign it with his august hand. This document was impressed with the royal seal, and Varthema having seen it registered, took his leave, returned to Italy, and “came to the city of Rome.”
Julius II. sat on the throne of the Fisherman. That old warrior was the very man to appreciate the resolution, the resourcefulness, and the exploit of Varthema. Papa plusquam Papa, he had been a mighty man of valour from his youth upwards; his will of iron was unbroken, and he retained in full the ardour of earlier years. A man of virtu, he aspired to control and guide the restive Powers of Europe to his own ends; and to make Rome the centre of the Arts, as well as the political Mistress of the Western World. If he was Head-bishop of the Western Church, claiming supreme authority over the Christian world, he was also a Temporal Prince, a patron of letters and enlightenment. At this very time, Michael Angelo was busy, by Papal command, adorning the Sistine Chapel with stupendous fresco and endowing sculpture with all his own redundant energy and life. Raphael was employed in painting delicate poems on the walls of the Papal Stanze. It was intended that Rome should become the world’s magnificent capital—a temple to strike awe and submission into the beholder; its only defect, that perchance it might shelter an empty shrine. There was as yet little hint of the terrific revolt of priest and scholar, lanzknecht and trader, which was preparing beyond the Alps; a revolt which tore away half the Empire of the Papacy. Little did Theodosius dream of the overthrow of the sacred city, “urbs ÆquÆva polo,” as Claudian sings by the barbarians of the North; and as little did Julius deem that it was destined soon to be sacked by the same rude race. It was nothing to Julius that Varthema had posed as a renegade: here was a man after his own heart. Nor were most of the Cardinals indifferent to the discovery of memorable matters. If an alien faith had been successfully professed for a laudable purpose so full of commercial possibilities, a few aves and paternosters, or a slight penance, made amends in that lax age. Julius gave mandate by word of mouth that Varthema’s account of his adventures should be duly licensed, and Raphael, Cardinal of St. George, “Chamberlain of our Most Holy Lord the Pope of the Holy Roman Church,” “being advised thereto by many other Most Reverend Cardinals of the Apostolic See,” gave the necessary licence. “Holding the work worthy, not only of commendation, but of ample reward,” he granted that the author and his heirs should hold copyright for a space of ten years. The Cardinal did this on the ground, as he explicitly states that Varthema had, in his seven years of travel, corrected many of the errors of ancient geographers, and that the “public use and study” of his volume would be of service. Such a decision had been impossible after the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Council of Trent. It were hard, even in our days of more single purpose, severely to censure the sanction to publish the work of a Christian who had posed as a Mohammedan only to “promote,” as the cardinal says, “such studies as have always been held in the highest honour.” Varthema had fully described the products of the East and the localities whence they came; and such information was not only to the advancement of knowledge but to the commercial advantage of his time. Had the Papal Court decided otherwise, the world had lost a priceless record of virile purpose fulfilled and of remote regions hitherto hardly known or wholly unknown. The world is indebted to Julius II. and his Cardinals for their action, whether it be called broad-minded toleration or latitudinarian indifference. Probably the copyright was no unimportant matter to the returned wanderer. As has been remarked, we hear nothing of his having made money by trade in the countries he visited. He was no vulgar gainer of gold, but one who set out to behold the splendour of God on the earth and the amazing manners of that prodigy, man. He dedicated his Itinerario to Agnesina Colonna, a daughter of the illustrious house of Montefeltro, mother of that Vittoria Colonna whom Michael Angelo and her own pen have made famous, and the fourth of five distinguished women in whom learning and ability descended from mother to daughter. It appeared in 1510.21 The Dedication informs us that I, Varthema, “having gone over some parts of the countries and islands of the east, south and west, am of fixed mind, should it please God, to make enquiry into those of the north. And so, since I do not perceive that I am fitted for any other undertaking, to employ what remains to me of my fleeting days in this honourable task.” Clearly, seven years of peril by land and sea, the greater part of the time being spent in tropical heat, had not satiated the curiosity or abated the audacity of the born-traveller. But no new Itinerario came to tell us of Laps driving their teams of rein-deer, of the splendours of the Northern Lights, or of the marvel of the Midnight Sun.
The Itinerario of 1510 was reprinted more than once in Rome, Venice and Milan during the following fifty years. In 1515 it was translated into German; in 1520, it appeared in Spanish; in 1556, in French; and in 1563, in Dutch. In 1577, Richard Eden gave a truncated and corrupt form of the work, which he had translated from a Latin version into English. It was incorporated with his “History of Travayle in the West and East Indies,” and reprinted for private circulation by the Aungerville Society in 1884. But twenty-one years before this last date, the Hakluyt Society had printed a translation from the original Italian edition by the Rev. Geo. Percy Badger. The modern translation is faithful and eminently readable; Mr. Badger’s annotations are invaluable; and John Winter Jones supplied a preface which is a bibliography. But Richard Eden’s imperfect work necessarily conveys more of the vigorous diction and quaint archaicisms of the original because the English style of Elizabeth’s time more closely resembled that of ordinary Italian prose in the days of Julius II. Yet, readable and delightful as Mr. Badger’s translation is, Varthema remains known only to the specialized student; to the general reader, together with many another ancient worthy of heroic mould, he is unknown, even by name.