Travels in America and Italy

Front matter

TRAVELS IN AMERICA AND ITALY, BY VISCOUNT DE CHATEAUBRIAND, AUTHOR OF ATALA, TRAVELS IN GREECE AND PALESTINE, THE BEAUTIES OF CHRISTIANITY, &c. IN TWO VOLUME? VOL. I. LONDON : HENRY COLBURN, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1828. J. B. NICHOLS, 25, PARLIAMENT-STREET.

ADVERTISEMENT.

. I have nothing particular to say respecting the Travels in America here submitted to the reader : the narrative of them is taken, like the subject of The Natchez, from the original manuscript ofthe latter work. These Travels carry with them their commentary and their history. My different works contain frequent recollections of my peregrinations in America. I thought at first to collect them and to introduce them under their proper dates into my narrative, but I relinquished this intention to avoid in serting them twice ; I have therefore contented myself with referring to these passages. Some, however, I have quoted when they appeared necessary to the due understanding of the text, and were not too long. In the Introduction I give a fragment of the Memoirs of my Use in order to familiarize the reader with the young traveller whom he is to follow beyond sea.

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. black, and white — the Indians, the Negroes, and the Celts, or other nations of the north. The pastoral nations find their progenitor in Shem, the commercial in Ham, and the military in Japhet. The Greeks and Romans designate Japetus as the father of mankind. Homer — whether there ever existed a poet of that name, or whether the works attributed to him are but a collection of the traditions of Greece — Homer has left us in the Odyssey the narrative of a voyage. He also transmits to us the notions entertained in this remote antiquity respecting the figure of the earth. According to these notions the earth repre sented a disk surrounded by the river Ocean. He siod has the same cosmography. Herodotus, the father of history, as Homer is the father of poetry, was, like Homer, a traveller. He traversed the whole known world of his time.

How charmingly he has described the manners of nations ? In those days they had but a few coasting charts of the Phœnician navigators, and Anaximander's map of the world corrected by Hecatæus : Strabo men tions an itinerary of the world by the latter. Herodotus distinguishes only two divisions of the earth, Europe and Asia: Libya, or Africa, would seem from his accounts to be but a vast peninsula SKETCH OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. of Asia. He gives the routes of some caravans in the interior of Libya, and the concise narrative of a voyage round Africa. An Egyptian king, Necos, sent out Phœnicians from the gulph of Arabia ; these Phœnicians returned to Egypt by way of the Pillars of Hercules ; they were three years in performing their voyage, and related that they had seen the sun on their right.

Such is the statement of Herodotus. The ancients had therefore, like ourselves, two sorts of travellers : the one traversed the land, the other the sea. Nearly about the time that Herodo tus wrote, Hanno, the Carthaginian, accomplished his Periplus.* Something is yet extant of the col lection made by Scylax of the maritime excursions of his time. Plato has left us the romance of that Atlantis which some have conjectured to be America. Eu doxus, the fellow-traveller of the philosopher, com posed a universal itinerary, in which he combined geography with astronomical observations. Hippocrates visited the tribes of Scythia : he ap plied the results of his experience to the alleviation of human suffering. Xenophon holds a conspicuous place among those * I have given it entire in the History of Revolutions. b2

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. armed travellers who have contributed to make us acquainted with the world which we inhabit. Aristotle, who outstripped the progress of know ledge, considered the earth as being spherical : he computed its circumference at four hundred thousand stadia ; he believed, as Christopher Columbus after wards did, that the coasts of Hesperia were opposite to those of India. He had a vague idea of England and Ireland, which he calls Albion and Ierne ; the Alps were not unknown to him, but he confounded them with the Pyrenees. Dicearchus, one of his disciples, wrote a charming description of Greece, some fragments of which are still extant, while another of Aristotle's disciples, Alexander the Great, carried the name of that same Greece to the banks of the Indus. The conquests of Alexander effected a revolution in the sciences as well as among nations.

Androsthenes, Nearchus, and Onesicritus, visited the southern coasts of Asia. After the death of the son of Philip, Seleucus Nicanor penetrated to the Ganges ; Patroclus, one of his admirals, navigated the Indian Ocean. The Greek kings of Egypt opened a direct commerce with India and Tapro bane ; Ptolemy Philadelphus sejit geographers and fleets to India ; Timosthenes published a description SKETCH OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. of all the known ports, and Eratosthenes furnished mathematical bases for a complete system of geo graphy. The caravans also penetrated into India by two routes ; the one, descending the Ganges, ter minated at Palibothra ; the other turned Mount Imaus. Hypparchus, the astronomer, announced an ex tensive land as connecting India with Africa : this you may consider if you please as the world discovered by Columbus.

The rivalry of Rome and Carthage made Polybius a traveller, and caused him to visit the coast of Africa as far as Mount Atlas, that he might make himself better acquainted with the people whose his tory he purposed to write. Eudoxus of Cyzicus en deavoured, during the reigns of Ptolemy Physcon and Ptolemy Lathures, to make the tour of Africa by the west ; he also sought a more direct route from the ports of the Arabian Gulph to those of India. Meanwhile the Romans removed other veils by extending their conquests toward the north. Pythias of Marseilles had already reached those shores whence the destroyers of the empire of the Cæsars were to issue. Pythias sailed as far as the seas of Scandinavia, fixed the position of the Sacred Cape

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. and of Cape Calbium (Finisterre) in Spaip, visited the island of Uxisama (Ushant), that of Albion, one of the Cassiterides of the Carthaginians, and pushed on to the famous Thule, which some will have to be Iceland, but which, according to all appearance, is the coast of Jutland. Julius Cæsar elucidated the geography of the Gauls, and commenced the discovery of Germany and the coast of the isle of the Britons : Germanicus carried the Roman eagles to the banks of the Elbe. During the reign of Augustus, Strabo combined together in one work the information left by pre ceding travellers and that which he had himself acquired. But, if his geography throws new light upon some part of the globe, on other points he makes the science retrograde. Strabo distinguishes the Cassiterides from Great Britain, and he appears to believe that the former, (which, in his hypothesis, can be no other than the Scilly islands) produced tin ; now, the tin was extracted from the mines of Cornwall ; and long before the Greek geographer wrote, the tin of Albion had been imported by way of Gaul into the Roman world.

In Gaul or Celtica, Strabo nearly suppresses the Armorican peninsula ; he knows nothing of the Bal tic, though it was already regarded as a large salt lake, along which was the coast of Yellow Amber, the modern Prussia. At the period in which Strabo flourished, Hyp palus fixed the navigation of India by the Gulph of Arabia, by trying the regular winds which we call monsoons ; one of these winds, the south-west, that which wafted him to India, assumed the name of Hyppalian. Roman fleets sailed regularly from the port of Berenice about the middle of summer, arrived in thirty days at the port of Ocelis, or at that of Cane" in Arabia, and thence in forty days at Mu ziris, the first mart of India. The return in winter was accomplished in the same space of time ; so that the ancients were less than five months in going to India and returning from it.

Pliny and the Peri plus of the Eythrean Sea (in the minor geographers) furnish these curious details. After Strabo, Dionysius Periegetes, Pomponius Mela, Isidorus of Charax, and Pliny, add to the knowledge previously acquired concerning foreign nations. Pliny, in particular, is valuable for the number of voyages and relations which he quotes. In reading his work, we see that we have lost a com plete description of the Roman empire, compiled by command of Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus ; that we have likewise lost commentaries on Africa by

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. king Juba, extracted from Carthaginian books; that we have lost an account of the Fortunate Islands by Statius Sebosus, Memoirs on India by Seneca, and a Periplus of Polybius, the historian ; losses that must ever be regretted. Pliny knows something of Tibet ; he fixes the easternmost part of the world at the mouth of the Ganges ; towards the north he has a glimpse ofthe Orkneys ; he is acquainted with Scandinavia, and gives to the Baltic Sea the name of the Codan Gulph. The ancients had both maps of routes and a sort of books of posts ; Veges distinguishes the former by the epithet of pieta, and the latter by that of annotata. Three of these itineraries are still extant : the Itinerary of Antoninus, the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, and the Table of Peutin ger. The top of this table, which began at the west, has been torn ; the Spanish peninsula is wanting, as well as western Africa ; but the table extends eastward to the mouth of the Ganges, and exhibits the routes in the interior of India.

This map is twenty-one feet long, and about a foot wide ; it is a zone, or a high road of the ancient world. Such was the extent of the labours and knowledge of travellers and geographers before the appearance of Ptolemy's work. Homer's world was a perfectly circular island, surrounded, as we have said, by the river Ocean. Herodotus makes this world a plain without any precise limits. Eudoxus of Gnidus transformed it into a globe about thirteen thousand stadia in diameter ; Hipparchus and Strabo gave to it a circumference of two hundred and fifty-two thousand stadia, of eight hundred and thirty-three stadia to a degree. On this globe was marked a parallelogram, the longer side of which ran from west to east ; this parallelogram was divided by two lines, which intersected each other at right angles : the one, called the diaphragm, marked the length or longitude of the earth from west to east ; it was seventy-seven thousand eight hundred stadia long ; and the other, shorter by one half, indicated the width or latitude of this earth from north to south.

The calculations are made from the meridian of Alexandria. From this geography, which represent ed the earth as being much longer than broad, we see how we came by those improper terms longi tude and latitude. In this map of the inhabited world were placed Europe, Asia, and Africa ; Africa and Asia were joined to the austral regions, or were separated by a sea which very much shortened the former. In the north, the continents terminated at the mouth of

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. the Elbe; in the south, about the banks of the Niger ; in the west, at the Sacred Cape, in Spain ; and in the east, at the mouths of the Ganges ; under the equator a torrid zone, under the poles a frigid zone, were reputed uninhabitable. It is curious to remark, that almost all the nations called Barbarians, who conquered the Roman empire, and from whom the modern nations are descended, dwelt beyond the limits of the world known to Pliny and Strabo ; in countries the very existence of which was not suspected. Ptolemy, though he fell into important errors, nevertheless gave mathematical bases to the position of places. In his work a considerable number of Sarmatian nations made their appearance. He clearly indicates the Wolga, and again descends to the Vistula. In Africa he confirms the existence of the Niger, and perhaps his Tucabath may also mean Tombuc too; he also mentions a large river which he calls Gyr.

In Asia, his country of the Sines is not China, but probably the kingdom of Siam. Ptolemy sup poses that the continent of Asia stretches south ward till it joins an unknown land, which land is united towards the west with Africa. In the Serica of this geographer we cannot but recognize Tibet, which furnished Rome with the first raw silk. With Ptolemy ends the history of the travels of the ancients, and Pausanias is the last who exhibits to us that antique Greece, the spirit of which has nobly roused itself in our days at the call of a new civilization. The barbarous nations appear ; the Roman empire crumbles to pieces ; and from the race of the Goths, Franks, Huns, and Sclavonians, issue another world and other travellers. These nations were themselves vast armed cara vans, which set out from the rocks of Scandinavia and the frontiers of China to discover the Roman empire.

They came to teach these pretended mas ters of the world, that there were other men besides the slaves subject to the yoke of the Tiberiuses and the Neroes ; they came to make the geographers of the Tiber acquainted with their country : the latter could not avoid placing these nations on the map ; they could not help believing the existence of the Goths and Vandals, when Alaric and Genseric had inscribed their names on the walls of the Capitol. It is not my intention to describe here the migra tions and settlements of these Barbarians ; I shall merely seek among the ruins which they heaped up

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. the links of the chain which connects the ancient travellers with the travellers of modern times. An extraordinary derangement took place in geo graphical investigations, in consequence of the de rangement of nations. What the ancients have fur nished us with the best account of, was the country which they themselves inhabited ; beyond the limits of the Roman empire all was to them deserts and darkness. After the invasion of the Barbarians, we know scarcely any thing of Greece and Italy, but we begin to penetrate the countries which produced the destroyers of ancient civilization. Three causes revived travels among the nations established on the ruins of the Roman world : religious zeal, desire of conquest, and a spirit of adventure and enterprise, mixed with the greediness of commerce. Religious zeal led the earliest as well as the latest missionaries into the most distant countries.

Before the fourth century, and almost in the time of the Apostles, who were themselves pilgrims, the priests of the true God carried the torch of the faith into all quarters. While the blood of the martyrs flowed in the amphitheatres, ministers of peace preached mercy to the avengers of the Christian sufferers : the conquerors were already in part conquered by the Gos pel, when they arrived under the walls of Rome. The works of the fathers of the Church mention a great number of pious travellers. They are a mine which has not been sufficiently wrought, and which, merely with reference to the geography and history of nations, contains rich treasures. So early as the fifth century of our era, an Egyp tian monk traversed Ethiopia and composed a to pography of the Christian world ; and an Armenian, named Chorenenzis, wrote a geographical work.

The historian of the Goths, Jornandes, bishop of Ravenna, in his history and in his book De Origine Mandi, records in the sixth century important par ticulars respecting the northern and eastern coun tries of Europe. Warnfrid, the deacon, published a history of the Lombards ; another Goth, the ano nymous writer of Ravenna, produced, a century later, a general description of the world. St. Boni face, the apostle of German y, sent to the Pope "a kind of memorial respecting the people of Sclavo nia. The Poles appeared for the first time during the reign of Otho II. in the eight books of the valuable Ditmar Chronicle. St. Otho, bishop of Bam berg, at the invitation of a Spanish hermit, named Bernard, travelled through Prussia, preaching the

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. faith. Otho saw the Baltic, and was astonished at the magnitude of that sea. We have unfortunately lost the journal of travels in Sweden and Denmark, performed, under Louis le Debonnaire, by Anscaire, a monk of Corbie ; unless this journal, which was sent to Rome in 1260, should still exist in the Va tican library. From this work Adam of Bremen has derived part of his own account of the king doms of the North ; he makes mention moreover of Russia, the capital of which was Kiow, though in the Sagas the empire of Russia is called Garda vike, and Holmgard, the present Novogorod, is de signated as the principal city of that nascent empire. Giraldus Barry and Dicuil have, the one drawn a picture of the principality of Wales and Ireland during the reign of Henry II. ; and the other re turned to the examination of the measures of the Roman empire under Theodosius.

We have maps of the middle ages ; a topogra phical delineation of all the provinces of Denmark about the year 1231, seven maps of the kingdom of England and the neighbouring islands in the twelfth century, and the famous book known by the name of Domesday Book, undertaken by command of William the Conqueror. In this statistical survey we find a register of the cultivated, inhabited, and waste lands of England ; the number of freeinha bitants and serfs, and even that of the cattle and bee-hives. On these maps are rudely drawn the towns and abbeys : if, on the one hand, these de signs are prejudicial to geographical details, they af ford on the other some idea of the arts of that time. The pilgrimages to the Holy Land form a considerable part of the graphic monuments of the mid dle ages. They took place so early as the fourth century, since St. Jerome asserts, that pilgrims came to Jerusalem from India, Ethiopia, Britain, and Hibernia : it appears even that the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem was composed about the year 333 for the use of the pilgrims from Gaul.

The first years of the sixth century present us with the Itinerary of Antoninus of Placentia. After Antoninus comes in the seventh century St. Arculf, of whom Adarnannus wrote an account ; in the eighth century we have two narratives of travels to Jerusalem, that of St. Wilibald, and an account of the holy places by the Venerable Bede ; in the ninth century, Bernard Lemoine ; in the tenth and eleventh, Olderic, bishop of Orleans, Eugisippus the Greek ; and lastly, Peter the Hermit. Then commence the Crusades ; Jerusalem remained in the hands of French princes eighty-eight

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. years. After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, the faithful continued to visit Palestine, and from Phocas in the thirteenth century to Pococke in the eighteenth, pilgrimages succeed each other without interruption.* We see those traveller-historians of whom anti quity presented models, reappearing with the crusades. Raymond d'Agiles, canon of the cathedral of Puy en-Velay, accompanied the celebrated bishop Adhemar to the first crusade. Having become chaplain to the count of Toulouse, he wrote, with Pons de Balazun, a valiant knight, an account of all that he had witnessed by the way and at the taking of Jerusalem. Raoul de Caen, a faithful servant of Tancred's, relates the life of that knight ; and Robert Lemoine was present at the siege of Jerusalem. Sixty years later, Foulcher de Chartres and Odon de Deuil likewise went to Palestine ; the former with Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, the latter with Louis VII. king of France.

Jacques de Vitry be came bishop of St. Jean d'Acre. William of Tyre, who flourished towards the end of the kingdom of Jerusalem, passed his life on the * See the second Memoir in the Introduction to my " Travels in Greece, &sc." roads of Europe and Asia. Several writers of our ancient chronicles were either monks and itinerant prelates, as Raoul, Glaber, and Flodoard, or war riors, as Nithard, grandson of Charlemagne, Wil liam of Poitiers, Ville Hardouin, Joinville, and many others who relate their distant expeditions. Pierre Devaulx Cernay was a kind of hermit in the terrible camps of Simon de Montfort. Once arrived at the chronicles in the vulgar tongue, we ought particularly to notice Froissart, who wrote, properly speaking, nothing but his own travels : it was almost on horseback that he penned his history.

He passed from the court of the king of England to that of the king of France, and from the latter to the little chivalrous court of the counts of Foix. " When I had sojourned in the city of Paumiers three days, there came to me by chance a knight of the count of Foix who was returning from Avignon, the which was named Messire Espaing du Lyon, a brave man, and a prudent and comely knight, who might then be about fifty years of age. I joined his company, and we were six days by the way. In riding along, the said knight (for he had said his prayers in the morning) chatted most of the day with me, enquiring the news ; and vol. i. c

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. so when I asked him in like manner he answered me." We see Froissart arriving at great inns, dining nearly at the same hours that we dine, going to the bath, &c. The careful perusal of the travels of that period leads me to believe that the domestic civilization of the fourteenth century was infinitely more advanced than we imagine it to have been. Turning back to the moment of the invasion of civilized Europe by the nations of the North, we find Arabian voyagers and geographers exploring in the Indian seas shores unknown to the ancients : they made highly important discoveries in Africa also. Massudi, Ibn-Haukal, Al-Edrisi, Ibn-Alou ardi, Hamdoollah, Abulfeda, El-Bakooi, give very circumstantial descriptions of their own country and of the country subdued by the arms of the Arabs. They saw in the north of Asia a frightful country, surrounded by an enormous wall and a castle of Gog and Magog.

About the year 715, under the caliph Walid, the Arabs were acquainted with China, whither they sent merchants and am bassadors by land ; they penetrated to that country by sea also in the ninth century. Wahab and Abu zaid landed at Canton. So early as the year 850 the Arabs had a commercial agent in the province of that name ; they traded with some towns in the interior, and, strange to tell, they there met with christian communities. The Arabs gave to China several names : Cathay comprised the northern provinces, Tchin, or Sin, the southern. Entering India under the protection of their arms, the disciples of Mahomet speak in their descriptions of the beautiful valleys of Caehe mire as pertinently as of the voluptuous valleys of Grenada. They had thrown colonies into several islands of the Indian Ocean, as Madagascar and the Moluccas, where the Portuguese found them after they had doubled the Cape of Good Hope.

While the military merchants of Asia were making in the east and south discoveries unknown to Europe, overrun by barbarians, such of those barbarians as remained in their original country, the Swredes, the Norwegians, and the Danes, set about, in the north and west, other discoveries alike unknown to Frankish and German Europe. Other, the Norwegian, penetrated to the White Sea, and Wulfstan, the Dane, described the Baltic Sea, which Eginhard had already described, and which was called by the Scandinavians the Salt Lake of the East. Wulfstan relates that the Estians, or people dwelling to the east of the Vistula, drank the milk c2

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. of their mares, like the Tartars, and bequeathed their property to the best horseman of their tribe. King Alfred has transmitted to us an abridg ment of these accounts. He it was who first divided Scandinavia into provinces, or kingdoms, as they still subsist. In the Gothic languages Scandinavia bore the name of Mannaheim, which signifies the land of men, and which the Latin of the sixth cen tury has energetically rendered in the words ojficina gentium, the manufactory of mankind. The Norman pirates established in Ireland the colonies of Dublin, Ulster, and Connaught ; they explored and subjected the Shetland Islands, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides ; they advanced to the Fero Islands, to Iceland, which became the archives of the history of the north, to Greenland, which was then habitable and inhabited ; and lastly, per haps to America.

We shall treat hereafter of this discovery, and also of the voyage and map of the two brothers Zeni. But the empire of the caliphs was overthrown : out of its ruins were formed several monarchies : the kingdom of the Aglabites, and subsequently of the Fatimites in Egypt, and the despotisms of Al giers, Fez, Tripoli, and Morocco, on the coast of Africa. The Turcomans, converted to Islamism, subdued western Asia from Syria to mount Casbhar. The Ottoman power passed over into Europe, swept away the last traces of the Roman name, and pushed its conquests beyond the Danube. Gengis Khan appeared; Asia wras overrun, and again subjugated. Oktai Khan destroyed the kingdom of the Cumanes and the Nioutchis ; Mangu possessed himself of the caliphat of Bagdad ; Kublai Khan conquered China and part of India.

From this Mongol empire, which reduced almost the whole of Asia under one and the same yoke, have arisen almost all the Khanats found by the Europeans in India. The European princes, alarmed by these Tartars, who had extended their ravages to Poland, Silesia and Hungary, sought to make themselves acquainted with the countries where such prodigious move ments originated : popes and kings sent ambassa dors to these new Scourges of God. Ascelin, Carpin, Rubruquis, penetrated into the country of the Mongols. Rubruquis found that Caracorum, the chief city of this Khan, the sovereign of Asia, was about as large as the village of St. Denis : it was surrounded by a mud wall, and contained two mosques and a Christian church. There were itineraries of Great Tartarv for the

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. use of the missionaries : Andre Lusimel preached Christianity to the Mongols ; Ricold de Monte Cru cis also penetrated into Tartary. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela left an account of all that he saw or heard concerning the three parts of the world (1160). Lastly, Marco Polo, a Venetian noble, was for twentysix years incessantly travelling in Asia. He was the first European that penetrated into China, India beyond the Ganges, and some ofthe islands of the Indian Ocean (1271-95). His work became the manual of all the merchants in Asia and of all the geographers in Europe. Marco Polo speaks of Pekin and Nankin ; he names also a city of Quinsa'i as the largest in the world : there were reckoned to be twelve thousand bridges over the canals which ran through it, and the daily consumption of pepper there amounted to ninety-four quintals.

TheVenetian traveller makes mention in his accounts of porcelain, but he says nothing of tea. It was he who made us acquainted with Bengal, Japan, the island of Borneo, and the Chinese sea, in which he calculates that there are seven thousand four hundred and forty islands rich in spices. These Tartar or Mongol princes, who swayed Asia and overran some provinces of Europe, were not princes destitute of merit: they neither sacrificed their prisoners nor reduced them to slavery. Their camps were filled with European artisans, missionaries, and travellers, who even held impor tant posts under their government. It was easier to penetrate into their empire than into those feudal countries where an abbot of Clugny regarded the environs of Paris as a region so remote and so un known that he durst not venture to repair thither.

Marco Polo was followed by Pegoletti, Oderic, Mandeville, Clavijo, Josaphat, Barbaro: they com pleted the description of Asia. At that time people frequently travelled by land to Pekin; the expenses of the journey amounted to three hundred or three hundred and fifty ducats. China had then a paper money, called babisci or balls. The Genoese and the Venetians traded with India and China in caravans by two different routes : Pegoletti marks with the utmost detail the stations of one of these routes (1353). In 1312 we find at Pekin a bishop, named John de Monte Corvino. Meanwhile time passed on : civilization made rapid progress : discoveries owing to chance or to the genius of man for ever separated the modern ages from the ages of antiquity, and stamped new

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. generations with a new seal. The mariner's com pass, gunpowder, and printing, were invented to guide the navigator, to defend him, and to preserve the cords of his perilous expeditions. The Greeks and Romans had been bred on the shores of that extensive inland water which is more like a vast lake than an ocean. The empire having passed into the hands of Barbarians, the centre of the political power became fixed principally in Spain, in France, and in England, in the vicinity of that Atlantic, which, toward the west, washed un known shores. It therefore behoved mariners to brave the long nights and the tempests, to pay no regard to seasons, to sail out of port in the days of winter as well as in those of summer, and to build ships, the strength of which was proportionate to that of the new Neptune which they had to en counter.