The Tao of Travel

In the Sargasso Sea (1898) was recommended to me by the humorist S. J. Perelman, who told me that this depiction of a man struggling on a sea of weeds was like a version of living and writing in Hollywood. Perelman might have been introduced to the book by his friend Nathanael West, who mentions Janvier in his powerful Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust. Todd, West's main character, gets a glimpse of the place where movie sets are disposed of.

He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down on the other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburs, spotted with clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. In the center of the field was a gigantic pile of nets, flats and props. While he watched, a ten ton truck added another load to it. This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier's "Sargasso Sea." Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of a marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump.

The Sargasso Sea actually exists. It was first seen by Columbus, and described by Jules Verne (the Nautilus motored through it in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). As a convergence of ocean currents, it is an elliptical "free-floating meadow of seaweed almost as large as a continent" (Encyclopedia Britannica), rotating slowly clockwise. Because it is adjacent to Bermuda it is part of the mystery associated with the Bermuda Triangle. A breeding place for eels, this sea within a sea is bordered by the Gulf Stream on the west. Its name is from the profusion of brown floating gulfweed (genus Sargassum) visible on its surface.

It was thought, mistakenly, that the Sargasso Sea trapped ships, and contributing to the vivid ship-swallowing myth, this is the conceit that Janvier uses to great effect in his novel.

I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer's bridge—which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass swaying evenly in an easy wind ... So far as the world was concerned I was dead already—being fairly caught in the slow eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.

And later:

I had before me what I think must be the strangest sight that the world has in it for the eyes of man. For what I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest, which through four centuries—from the time when sailors first pushed out upon the great western ocean—has been gathering slowly, and still more slowly wasting, in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.

Janvier, a traveler, was widely read in his time, which was just a century ago. On his death, the appreciative New York Times obituary praised Janvier for his "suave irony, gentle aloofness," and went on, "His varied books of travel had the same combination of qualities—keen and close observation, with a curious sympathy of understanding and vividness of presentation."

Edgar Rice Burroughs: "I Can Write Better About Places I've Never Seen"

MANY PEOPLE, OF whom I am one, formed their first notions of Africa from the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan books—and films and illustrated comics. Even knowing this was fantasy adventure, readers, young ones especially, felt an incomparable thrill. Burroughs never set foot in Africa, though he knew something about roughing it—he'd been a cowboy, a soldier in the Seventh Cavalry, and a gold miner in Idaho.