The Tao of Travel

In his detective fiction, macabre stories, and even his early science fiction, Poe shows himself to be a reader of travel, history, and the arcane—the Red Death, the Spanish Inquisition ("the horrors at Toledo"), the devil in the belfry in the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss; "The Assignation" takes place in a believable Venice.

Now and then there's a serious geographical lapse, as in "Silence—A Fable," which takes place in a "dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire ... yellow ghastly river ... hippopotami." Elsewhere, his work is distinguished by its exactitude. Poe had never been to France, yet the French loved Poe in Baudelaire's translations. Detective Auguste Dupin appeared in "The Purloined Letter," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and also in "Murders in the Rue Morgue," where he is here, walking with the narrator in Paris, part of a paragraph that is convincing in its precision:

You kept your eyes upon the ground—glancing, with a petulant expression, at the holes and ruts in the pavement (so that I saw you were still thinking of the stones), until we reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks. Here your countenance brightened up, and, perceiving your lips move, I could not doubt that you murmured the word "stereotomy," a term very affectedly applied to this species of pavement.

Some corpses are found to be horribly mutilated, and this leads to the Rue Morgue, "one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch." It turns out that the murderer is an enraged orangutan with a razor, but Poe knows (as some other authors do not) that orangutans come from Borneo.

The opening of his terrifying story "The Descent into the Maelstrom" is Poe's most impressive fictional representation of an actual landscape:

"We are now," [the old man] continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him—"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast—iwn the sixty-eighth degree of latitude—in the great province of Nordland—and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher—hold on to the grass if you feel giddy—so—and look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea."

I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it, its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.

The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water in every direction—as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.

This goes on for many more pages, with the revelation of the maelstrom, showing that Poe, a man who had hardly been anywhere—and certainly nowhere like this—was able to create a credible landscape out of his reading and his imagination.

Thomas Janvier, In the Sargasso Sea

JANVIER, WHO IS forgotten now, was born in 1849, educated in Philadelphia, lived in New York City, and traveled in Europe and Mexico. He wrote biography, history, and travel; he published a guidebook about Mexico and short stories set in France; and with one exception he wrote directly from experience, describing places he'd been—Provence and Mexico.