New Writing

There is a self-contradictory passion in humankind to appreciate, and embrace, the proposition that there are things that are inexplicable. Some of these mysterious phenomena are real, some imagined and others straddle the two worlds. We take delight in hearing of a far-distant and mysterious domain of giants, or tiny people, dragons, demons or otherworldly monsters; of kingdoms far beyond any conceivable maritime journey. We are thrilled to learn of stately galleons traversing unknown ocean deeps to lands filled with gorgeous palaces, golden ornaments, enormous jewels, spices and wealth untold; of arcane knowledge, miraculous cures, and fountains of youth, or lands where death does not walk. Some readers will think “Oh, but this is idle fantasy, a naïve yarn for dreamers”. Others will call to mind the likes of Plato with his Atlantis anecdote, Jules Verne, H.Rider Haggard or other pioneers of science fiction.

Eugene Fields’ whimsical wooden shoe excursion by Elvin herring fishermen is a classic bedtime nursery rhyme that parents read to toddlers. Nonetheless, the allure of such enchanted nautical expeditions endures into adulthood. Spellbinding seafaring tales come down to us out of the mists of prehistory, relating the terror of tempest-driven ships blown far off course, subsequent shipwreck and stranding on a mysterious and demon-inhabited shore. They convey the armchair reader across tempestuous seas to the beaches of astonishing realms — Atlantis, Mu, Antillia, Ultima Thule, the Seven Cities of Cibola. These tales reside at the border between fantasy and documentary. We assume, or perhaps desire, that some actual place or voyage most likely inspired them.

We realize that we cannot reach these fabulous places in our lifetime, for they are vanished or merely hidden, but all the same, we picture ourselves aboard all manner of seagoing vessels traveling thence. All these supernatural themes — and more — echo through the myths, legends and tall tales that children — and imaginative grown-ups — learn in every culture. Sometimes in order to reach these wondrous kingdoms, one must trudge along grueling overland paths through scorching desert wastes, dark primeval forests and over windswept craggy peaks. More frequently the magical realms are accessible solely by sea. The terrifying, angry seaways, the menacing and capricious, turbulent ocean is the perilous pathway to our fabled isles, our dreamscapes.

Many have observed that the ancient tall tale about discovery and danger on unexplored high seas is the ancestor of modern science fiction’s journey through space and time. Venturing far beyond the edge of the mapped oceans, exploration ships penetrated a realm where mysterious land masses seem to emerge suddenly from horizon-cloaking mists. There were no charts encompassing the watery fringes. Such charts as there were depicted chimeras, glaring distortions and omissions, and all manner of horrors lurking in the void. So the adventurers sailed into the unknown deeps, wary of ship-devouring monsters and fiendish coasts.

Sailors’ eyewitness anecdotes appeared to corroborate accidental sightings of bizarre, startling islands and continents peopled by strange, at times sinister, eerie beings. Such strange places and beasts are a common feature of travel literature from ancient times to around 1850. Fantastic isles appeared on mappa mundi (world maps) and sea charts compiled by clear-headed cartographers, who frequently drew images of extraordinary creatures on the maps. The anomalous islands kept their names, but withdrew to the fringes of the unknown world after methodical voyagers filled in the blank spaces with more accurate reports.

In bygone times imaginary travel accounts were indistinguishable from the real. Fireside readers of explorers’ narratives (other than those who were planning their own voyage) hungered for fantastic vistas prefigured by the ancient cosmographers. The author or authors often intentionally feigned the facade of authenticity. The initial realism of a scrupulously recorded ship’s voyage lent credibility to the visionary scenes to follow.

After all, it was the seas and the lands beyond, up until the 15th-16th century Age of Discovery and even afterwards, that comprised the primeval Great Unknown. The Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts, as well as the biblical exploits of Noah, Jonah and St. Paul, testify as to the antiquity of the seafaring parable.

In Europe, the emergence of the imaginary journey as a literary genre in its own right coincides with the era of big discoveries, 1550-1750. As if, disappointed at what was in fact beyond that previously impassable ocean, the people of the Old Continent resolved to fabricate the fantastic realms of which they dreamed.

A few fantasists used authentic-sounding make-believe accounts of shipwreck or vessels being blown far off course to develop theoretically ideal societies. The uncharted islands thus accidentally “discovered” were vehicles for satires on the shortcomings of the existing social order or projections of the author’s perfect model government. Whereas the imaginary islands or continents may have been fanciful, the journey thence was quite convincingly described.

The relationship between the travel literature (as a non-fiction genre) and the extraordinary voyages (as a fiction genre), on the one hand, and utopian literature, on the other is apparent in hindsight. Using various literary samples and also previous theoretical commentaries on utopianism, one might find that utopias are symbiotically merged with voyage narrative. This cohabitation refers not only to the plot necessity of introducing utopian descriptions through a geographical travel to far away places, but also to the presence of the main character and traveler, who is also a story-teller and a raisonneur of the utopian society.

It can be seen that the boundary separating genuine voyages of discovery and their fictional counterparts is porous. Even the book usually classified as the first work in the genre of utopian imaginary travels, Utopia itself, uses reports of the genuine early 16th century New World voyages of Amerigus Vespucci to lend credence to its dubious yarn. In later publications the travels of buccaneer-scholar Dampier, Cook, La Pérouse and other navigators are frequently employed in the same way: to validate storybook inventiveness by slipping in genuine ship’s logs and seamen’s journals.

This phenomenon embraces not merely the sea voyage as depicted in purely creative literary fiction, but also something between the true-life account of travels upon the great oceans and the sea-faring novel. By the 19th century, the distinction was obvious. However, in the 16th through 17th centuries readers could not be certain whether they were reading a romance or an authentic travel report. This hybrid form was sometimes a premeditated deception, but almost always it is a nautical fantasy couched in realistic terms. It’s a matter-of-fact record of a fabulous, invented voyage to parts unknown.

The names of the unusual creatures inhabiting these mystical islands and continents seem dreamlike -- lamia, basilisk, hippogriff, phoenix, manticore, golem, unicorn, kraiken, siren, mandrake, roc, sphinx. Creatures of myth or make-believe, these bizarre beings lurk forever in the recesses of our imaginations, killing with a glance, rising from the ashes of their own funeral pyres, seducing sailors to their doom with a song. They are the stuff of extravagant travelers' tales, hiding closely beyond the horizon, somewhere in the marvel-filled realm of the Christian Dark Age kingdom of Prester John, perhaps in re-emerged Atlantis, or just off the map in those misty regions illustrated on medieval maritime charts with surreal living things.

The ship is a powerful mythical image in the mind's eye. Observe that there is no comparable travel literature featuring aircraft. Airplanes are momentary modes of transportation. Air journeys last only hours, at most a few days, compared to the weeks, months or sometimes years required for a sea voyage. One might be confined aboard an international airplane flight for a day or so; excluding airport layovers due to cancelled, delayed or missed flights. However, note that the leisurely and massive dirigible, also called an airship, has stimulated travel lore entailing prolonged excursions as has the airship’s precursor, the hot air balloon. Lengthy trips aboard luxury trains sometimes play a part in mystery novels, but such settings – traversing well-mapped landscapes — can’t compare with the sense of isolation, remoteness, adventure and danger of maritime voyages upon unexplored seas.

With respect to spaceships (again, note the “ship” label), there is a distinct parallel, because interplanetary or intergalactic travel occupies extended periods of time, during which the craft serves as both home and conveyance for the voyager, much like the sea-going ship in the classic form of imaginary voyage. Also, space, like the oceans in sea literature, is a vast mysterious, abyss, amorphous and filled with unforeseen perils as well as strange “islands” in the form of planets populated with monsters or habitable moons and speeding asteroids threatening shipwreck. Imaginary ocean voyage literature is acknowledged as the prototype and counterpart of the contemporary variety of science fiction describing journeys to solar systems and galaxies light years from our miniscule planet earth.

Seventeenth and eighteenth century exploration was responsible for three broad kinds of travel literature: genuine travel accounts; imaginary or extraordinary voyages; and a third group which might be termed travel liars, or pseudo travelers, whose intention it was to deceive. The second and third types are what concern us here: imaginary voyages that emulate the real thing just for the sheer fun of it.

The imaginary voyage is a well defined genus of literature in the English speaking world as well as in Europe where the type is known as voyages imaginaries, betraying the French origin of its 17th and 18th century Golden Age The imaginary voyage genre developed early and depends for its interest largely upon the fact that outside of a localized area — mainly the Mediterranean seaboard and the northern coast of Africa — the rest of the world was as mysterious as the surface of Mars is to us today, notwithstanding images and telemetric data relayed to 21st century enthusiasts by the various orbiters and robot probes.

Thus, cosmic voyage is a perfectly natural outgrowth of the voyages imaginaries. Most historians of science fiction reverentially refer to the imaginary sea voyage as a forerunner and typically specify Homer’s Odyssey as the archetype. It follows that a survey of fantastic sea voyages ought to commence with a glance at that progenitor of the class. Certainly Homer was relating much that was pure literary imagination and mythology, but most modern critics insist that his saga was likely based on some half-remembered survivors’ accounts of remarkable, perilous ocean voyages, possibly Phoenician reports of adventures beyond the bounds of knowledge. Thus, his saga should be considered as one of the hybrid narratives featured here.

The story line of the Odyssey is well known and, rather than dwell on the epic hero’s misadventures, I will just note the most significant aspect for my purpose. The Odysseus journey is the archetypical nostos, or voyage of return. In this case, the framework is Odysseus’ recounting to his long-suffering faithful wife Penelope his 10-year effort to return from the Trojan War to his home and family. The mixture of realistic maritime events and settings with the fantastical realms and actions of the gods and demi-gods is a hallmark of this primeval literature. Some of Homer’s material interacts with the equally ancient tale of Jason and the Argonauts and is mirrored in the subsequent seafaring aspects of Virgil’s Aeneiad and Dante’s Inferno.

The vivid descriptions of Odysseus’ ship handling and navigational skills are especially precise and verify that Homer was likely basing his fable on some actual epic voyages of his time. Perhaps he is reflecting factual incidents when some storm-tossed mariners were blown far off their protected coastwise (“from cape to cape”) travels to the very fringes of the known world. As noted above, some writers hypothesize that Homer was influenced by tales told by Phoenician mariners, who, it is believed, traveled far beyond the restricted eastern Mediterranean circle traversed by the early Greek sailors.

In the blend of the fantastic and the real, Homer (and the anonymous author of the Argonautica) set the pattern for the entire genre. It is unlikely that readers (or listeners) of the Odyssey in the ancient epoch made any such distinction. Bear in mind, sea voyages in the ancient world — and even into the late medieval period — were fraught with unknown hazards. Returning voyagers reported chimerical events and objects that their awestruck senses told them were true. This is not unlike folks who have been brought up on tales of UFO events convincing themselves that otherwise rationally explicable phenomena are “sightings”. So, Homer reiterated tales of shifting reefs as being magically “clashing rocks”, and music-like sounds of winds coursing through a narrow ravine might seem like beckoning “siren songs” luring over-curious mariners to founder on the shoals. Was Homer, or his informants, fantasizing, or caught up in some kind of mythological reverie? Or was this tale of lost ships and strange islands based on some combination of fact and inaccurately recollected or embellished nautical lore?

A late 19th century school text edition of the Odyssey states the following opinion: "Throughout these books [books 9-12] we are in a wonderland, which we shall look in vain for on the map”. The view that Odysseus's landfalls are best treated as imaginary places is perhaps held by the majority of classical scholars today. In distinction to this skeptical outlook, some recent academics, actual and armchair travelers, have tried to plot Odysseus's travels, believing that they reflect accurate geography. Homer was quite familiar with Phoenician tales, told by a people who were making some audacious maritime forays in the 9th century BC, A good deal of this oral tradition may have been imperfectly grafted onto his saga of gods, goddesses and enchanted isles.

The most daring early scholars held that Homer’s traveler sailed only as far west in the Mediterranean as Sicily and Libya. This is in distinct contrast to the more cautious analysts who allowed only that he stayed in the vicinity of the Greek Isles. More intriguingly, there is a modern school of thought that has Odysseus moving out into the Atlantic Ocean. Let’s examine this bold thesis.

The ancient geographer Strabo's (early 1st century AD) opinion that Calypso's island and Scheria (home of the Phaecians) were projected by the poet as being in the Atlantic Ocean has had significant influence on modern theorists. Two centuries ago, a French academic argued that the Underworld visited by Odysseus comprised the islands at the mouth of the river Rhine. A more extreme view, that the whole geography of the Iliad and the Odyssey can be mapped on the coasts of the northern Atlantic, occasionally surfaces. According to this, Troy is in southern England, Telemachus's journey is in southern Spain, and Odysseus was wandering the Atlantic coast. Another example: a 20th century author, argued that Circe's island is Madeira, Calypso's island one of the Azores, and the intervening travels record a discovery of North America: Scylla and Charybdis are in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, and Scheria in the Caribbean. Another authority proposed that Odysseus's journey to the Underworld takes place in South America. For that scholar, the river Acheron is the Amazon; after a long voyage upstream Odysseus meets the spirits of the dead at the confluence of the Rio Santiago and Rio Marañon.

While some dismiss these speculations as the work of over-imaginative cranks or myth-spinners in the glory days of mythical lore, it is at least feasible that seafarers of the ninth and eighth centuries BC ventured westward beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar). Certainly, the reticent Phoenicians did, and it was known that they spread deliberate lies about monsters and malevolent gods who shattered ships that dared to violate these forbidden straits They did so in order to discourage any competitors from destroying their monopoly of the tin and woolen trade from the Normandy coast, Cornwall in the British Isles and the amber and copper imports from the Danube basin and the Baltic seacoast.

So far as the Argonauts are concerned, the consensus of modern understanding shows their voyage as proceeding eastward through the Hellespont, into the Black Sea, and returning to Greece by a longer, southerly route – nonetheless an ambitious itinerary for the miniscule, 70-100 foot biremes of that day, circa 500 BC.

Perhaps we will never know what Homer, or his sources, really conceived as Odysseus’s travel itinerary, but the whole imaginary ocean voyage field owes him and the anonymous author of the Jason quest a debt.

Did one Pytheas of Massala (Marseilles) travel beyond his Cornwall tin-gathering expedition to the fringes of the Arctic Ocean in the time of Alexander the Great? Maybe. Nautical archaeologist Barry Cunliffe thinks so and has gone to great lengths to trace his possible journey to ice-bound seas.

The case that can be made for trans-Atlantic voyages by medieval Irish monks, whether or not in the company of the revered fifth century AD missionary, Saint Brendan, is a reasonable one. We know that Ireland was the center for a vigorous culture during the fifth and sixth centuries CE, preserving Christian civilization in Northern Europe after the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire. During this period, Irish monks ventured out into the North Atlantic in pursuit of some kind of spiritual or divine mission and Irish folklore traditions take in North Atlantic voyages pre-dating Brendan. They reached the Hebrides, Orkneys, and Faeroe Islands. The Norse sagas suggest that Irish monks were even in Iceland when the Norse settled there after about 870 CE (though no archaeological evidence has yet confirmed this).

According to legend, he was in his seventies when he and 17 other monks set out on a westward voyage in a curragh, the noted wood-framed boat covered in sewn ox-hides about 35 feet long and 12 feet in the beam. The monks sailed about the North Atlantic for an improbable sojourn of seven years, according to details set down in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, transcribed in the tenth century. During this far-reaching expedition, they encountered many extraordinary things such as a griffin and a devil-whale. Finally they found the island, which is an earthly paradise, but they have to return home. They return with fruit and precious stones from the island. Undoubtedly the story of Saint Brendan was a good deal exaggerated in order to provide allegorical lessons, much in the same manner of Homer’s tale and the Argonautica Despite this, some of the places that he visited seem to correspond with actual locations.

While some have dismissed the alleged voyage as pure invention, based on the fantastic imagery, in the l970s Tim Severin became fascinated with the Brendan story. He studied maps and charts and did extensive research before coming up with his “Stepping-Stone Route”. He maintained that, by using prevailing winds and currents, it would be possible for a small open boat to travel from Ireland to North America. He also maintained that the only way to prove it was to do it, similarly to how Thor Heyerdahl attempted to prove that the Peruvians were the original settlers of Easter Island by building and sailing the Kon Tiki raft or that, more controversially, that the ancient Egyptians might have reached American shores.

Severin built a 36-foot boat utilizing a framework of ash covered with ox hides. Experimentation proved that oak bark comprises the most seaworthy tanning mixture for these hides. He named the boat the Brendan, and, with some like-minded friends, he set sail from Galway. As they traveled he realized that many of the landmarks and other events mentioned in the Navigatio, make a lot of sense to someone in a very small boat. The coast of Iceland, with its many active volcanoes, might well have seemed like the edge of Hell, and an iceberg looks exactly like a crystal column. Did it “prove” that the Brendan narratives are factual? Not exactly, but it showed that such voyages were at least possible using the maritime technology available to the Irish Christian messenger.

Long ago, in my youth, sailing and rowing a diminutive 12-foot duck punt, known as a Barnegat Sneak Box, around bays, streams, inshore islets bordering the Atlantic sea coast of New Jersey, my attention was drawn to the traditions surrounding a cluster of islands that, up until the mid 19th century, adorned authoritative atlases of the Atlantic Ocean. They vary in their placement by several hundred miles, but invariably they are lodged somewhere in the watery void between the temperate Azores and frigid Newfoundland. Their names evoke Gulliver's Travels, Treasure Island, and Tolkien's Middle Earth: Frisland, Estotiland, Drogeo, Icaria, Buss, Isle of Demons, Antillia, and Hy Brasil.

These places are enshrined in such enduring literary hoaxes as the 16th century faux travelogue of the Zeno brothers and three spurious expeditions that cluttered and confused the knowledge of the elusive Northwest Passage, namely the "Voyages of Imagination" (perhaps better called "Imaginary Voyages") of Juan de Fuca, Bartholomew de Fonte and Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado. They reside alike in sober ships' logs and literary fabrications. Yet they persisted on authoritative sea charts until the mid-19th century. They baffled and frustrated, were found then lost again in the fog of half-remembered geographic illusion. Some poet-scholars, like the insightful contemporary Scottish author Margaret Elphinstone (see http://www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk/) seek them still, somewhere between pure invention and wondrous possibility.

Ms. Elphinstone’s 2001 novel, Hy Brasil, is what used to be called a "literary conceit": a sort of reverie with realist pretensions worked out in a believable world of make-believe. It is not, as some might suppose, a utopia or even its opposite a dystopia. Those genres embrace the dramatic presentation of some political or philosophical theory of what ought or ought not to be.

Elphinstone, happily, does not drone about economic or political values, but merely supposes. She asks the question: "what if one of the lost islands of lore and legend were to manage to survive into our own time-frame?" But her answer does not conceive some elusive Brigadoon, a magical kingdom that periodically disappears then reappears (Hy-Brasil itself, according to one legend is perpetually shrouded in fog, appearing out from the mist only once in every seven years, but can never be reached). Her Hy Brasil has been a fixture of the mid-Atlantic since some adventurous Irish holy men, predating and including the venerable Brendan, allegedly landed there in the time of the equally legendary King Arthur. Yet sailors and cartographers speculated on its location and very existence up until the late Victorian epoch. It wasn't a pure figment of imagination although it continues to be cloaked in mystery.

Rather than articulate the hypothesis in terms of the fantastic, the author, who has embraced Atlantic journeys and islands as her special literary niche, grounds the legendary island group firmly in our universe. So we have no faeries, goblins, sprites, dragons and trolls come a-calling. There's no Gawain, Lochinvar Frodo, Gandalf or Narnia to beguile us, or lost civilizations found — only menacing drug-smugglers, radical politicos, pub-crawling charlatans, modern-day pirates and simmering volcanoes. These mundane forces play out in the post Cold War world, where a once thriving fishing industry has waned, and NATO has largely abandoned it's mid-Atlantic outpost, leaving the archipelago bereft of resources albeit unaccountably flush. Nonetheless the reader senses that magic and myth lurks in Elphinstone's captivating true-life Hy Brasil. There is something delightfully ethereal about this island nation. She is not the first, but only the latest and most fastidious practitioner of the imaginary voyage genre.

Among the more successful predecessors that inform Ms. Elphinstone’s tale, we should mention the spurious 14th-century book Travels of Sir John Mandeville as well as other implausible voyage narratives similarly inspired by Marco Polo’s record of his 13th century adventures in the Orient. In particular, Utopia (1516 and later editions) by Sir John More is widely acclaimed as the model and inspiration for the 17th and 18th century Voyages Imaginaires. But the reverend More was crafting a political treatise with “real voyage” trappings, and, as such not exactly germane to our inquiry.

The late medieval Arab tales of Sinbad the Sailor are also widely held to be roughly based on authentic dhow voyages in the Indian Ocean and perhaps the South China Sea dating from the 5th to 7th centuries AD. On othe other hand, some have conjectured that the 15th century global voyages of the Moslem eunuch in the Chinese court, Admiral Zheng-he, was the true-life inspiration for Sindbad’s exploits.

As for John Mandeville, who compiled his book in the late 14th century, I’ve included him here only because he is one of the first of the travel imposters. That is not to say he totally fabricated his own possible journeys, but he was early exposed as a plagiarist or copyist of other more authentic accounts of expeditions and simply rehashed these earlier accounts, flavored perhaps with a dash of his own authentic travelogue. Walking in the footsteps of the success of Marco Polo’s published adventures, much of which was exaggerated by the author, Mandeville wrote A Book of Wonders of the World. He was a successful pan-European-whose journeys proved, for the most part, to be fanciful and invented. Mandeville, who claims to have gone to China, most likely did not get past Egypt. Nonetheless, his accounts influenced contemporaries and even Columbus was taken in by his fabrications.

The 17th and 18th century ruminations of Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, with its numerous imitators in many languages, inspiring the literary genre typed the Robinsade are but the most notable entries in the literature. One can appreciate Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as a late 16th century example of the type, loosely based on a true-life Bermuda shipwreck and marooning narrative of the good ship Sea Venture.

All of the foregoing examples are part of the rich tapestry that inspired Edgar Alan Poe (especially his The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard and other modern expositors of the lore of lost islands, including the intrepid Margaret Elphinstone. Who knows but that, using these marvelous narratives as a guide, the armchair explorer might not re-discover these lost and wondrous isles ?