The Tao of Travel

In that country they take their daughters and their sisters to their wives, and their other kinswomen. And if there be ten men or twelve men or more dwelling in an house, the wife of everych of them shall be common to them all that dwell in that house; so that every man may lie with whom he will of them on one night, and with another, another night. And if she have any child, she may give it to what man that she list, that hath companied with her, so that no man knoweth there whether the child be his or another's. And if any man say to them, that they nourish other men's children, they answer that so do over men theirs ... And I asked them the cause why that they held such custom: and they said me, that of old time men had been dead for deflowering of maidens, that had serpents in their bodies that stung men upon their yards, that they died anon: and therefore they held that customs to make other men ordained therefore to lie by their wives, for dread of death, and to assay the passage by another [rather] than for to put them in that adventure.

Marco Polo's Human Oddities

Let me tell you next of the kingdom of Lambri [in present-day Sumatra], which also has a king of its own but professes allegiance to the Great Khan. The people are idolaters...

Now here is something really remarkable. I give you my word that in this kingdom there are men who have tails full a palm in length. They are not at all hairy. This is true of most of the men—that is, of those who live outside in the mountains, not of those in the city. Their tails are as thick as a dog's. There are also many unicorns [probably rhinos] and a profusion of wild game, both beast and bird.

—

The Travels of Marco Polo,

translated by Ronald Latham (1958)

Andaman is a very big island. The people have no king. They are idolaters and live like wild beasts. Now let me tell you of a race of men well worth describing in our book. You may take it for a fact that all the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes like dogs; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastiffs. They are a very cruel race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour him.

—

The Travels of Marco Polo

21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited

FOR A WRITER TO DESCRIBE A PLACE HE OR SHE has not bothered to visit is not only self-deluded but deeply insulting to the people living there and to those travelers who actually troubled to go there. Laziness, indifference, contempt, fear of the place, fear of travel, fear of being disillusioned, and the novelist's natural instinct to fantasize—all are factors in the decision of a writer to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul Bellow did, conjuring up an Africa he had never seen while sitting in his book-lined study in Tivoli, New York, without ever having to swat a tsetse fly. Even so, you know a writer's mind, and especially his or her fantasies, from the fiction. You know what they think of themselves, and other people, and of the world.

The results of such leaps of imagination can be odd, and bad karma seems to blight the fiction of faked countries, because none of these works has remained popular or widely read. Kipling's imagined Mandalay is an exception, and seems to have displaced the real city. The writers cooking up a country tend to overdo it: look no further than Bellow's Henderson the Rain King or the Tarzan novels. Joseph Conrad, who piloted a river steamer up the Congo River, and afterward wrote Heart of Darkness, about a man piloting a river steamer up the Congo River, is subtle, understated, and powerful.

David Livingstone claimed to have been the first to put Lake Nyasa on the map in 1859, but this was accomplished in 1846 by a Portuguese trader, Candido de Costa Cardoso. In the search for the source of the Nile, the Welsh explorer John Petherick (1813–1882) produced a map of Bahr-el-Ghazal in 1858 and described his travels in his Egypt, the Soudan, and Central Africa three years later. But his fellow explorer John Speke publicly disputed the map and the book, claiming that Petherick had lied about his travels, had not been that far south or west, and had concocted both the map and the trip from hearsay. The Nile explorer Samuel Baker wrote in his diary, "Petherick's pretended journey published in England was entire fiction ... Petherick is a gross impostor."

Even the traveler, looking closely, often gets things wrong. Richard Henry Dana's Hawaiians in Two Years Before the Mast (1840), after months of sailing, mistook the island of Nantucket for the whole of the United States, because it was all they saw: the mainland is not visible from the island.