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Studies in Travel Writing

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VENTRILOQUISTS AND
WANDERING TRUTHS
David Henige
Published online: 11 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: David Henige (1998): VENTRILOQUISTS AND WANDERING TRUTHS,
Studies in Travel Writing, 2:1, 164-180

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VENTRILOQUISTS AND WANDERING TRUTHS’

Davld Henlge

Why, Sir, said I, Hawkesworth has used your narrative as a London tavern
keeper does wine. He has brewedit.2
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Discussing the mixed reception scholarship has given to Madagascar, a travel

narrative attributed -- and de-attributed-- to Robert Drury, Neil Rennie, in one of the
works under review here, makes no judgement of his own, but instead raises a
question: “why [should] the difference between a narrative of travel and a novel ... be
so hard to tell” (Rennie 1995: 58). That is, why have two centuries of trying to
determine the authorship -- and hence the likely degree of reliability -- of Madagascar
been so futile? The question encapsulates not only Drury-or-not-Drury, but nearly
four millennia of works of fiction dressed up as factual travel narratives and factual
travel narratives that cannot be what they claim, and which might be believed more in
our time than in theirs.
I must begin by confessing my own orientation. One can approach travel literature
as unalloyed historical evidence -- after all travel accounts are very often used in
history-making. On the other hand, it is more common to treat travel accounts as
literature -- products of the context of their particular rhetorical and phenomenological
times. Despite its popularity, this approach is not widely used, understood, or
appreciated by historians. A third approach is simply to recognise that, while travel
accounts are always literature in almost any sense of the word, they are less
frequently intendedas history, however desperately historians might be to effect the
transformation. I speak from the historical side of this divide, but not as a historian
seeking, or expecting to find, such a transformation.
The travel account has of course a distinguished pedigree. Relating, or professing
to relate, the results of one’s peregrinations is one of the earliest discernible narrative
genres. All would trace it back at least as far as Herodotus, some farther, to the Iliad
and Odyssey, and some farther yet, to the ancient Egyptian tales of Sinuhe and
Wenamun. In every case questions arise as to how to treat even these earliest
accounts as history. Should Sinuhe’s observations (if they are indeed his) be used to
reconstruct the sociopolitical conditions of the areas (themselves in doubt) through
which he appeared to travel, observe, and then write about?3 Should serious efforts

164
 be made to reconstruct Odysseus' itinerary?4 How accurate were Herodotus'
accounts of the Pyramids and Babylon, and what were they based on?5
These are serious, if too often insoluble, questions that historians must confront
whenever they attempt to use such sources for historical purposes. That they have
continually and abjectly failed to do so is a truism in hiding. Take the recent large set
of examples in which some historians have placed extraordinary reliance on the
testimony of the chroniclers of the lndies -- travel accounts one and all -- beginning
with Columbus, passing through Cort6s and Bernal Diaz del Castillo for Mexico and a
host of participant chroniclers of the conquest of the Inca state, and culminating with
the later synthetic accounts of Las Casas, Oviedo, Herrera, and others.6 Treating
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these sources essentially as reportage, they draw in particular on the numbers in

them to construct fantastically ramified population estimates of the American Indian
population of the Americas that now threaten to drive more serious and reasoned
inquiry right from the field.'

The two works considered here can be no more than representative of a vast output
of book -- and article -- length studies of travel and its telling that marks the last
decade. One of them deals with one of the best known and widely used of all such
accounts. Marco Polo's account of a seventeen-year sojourn to, in, and back from
China has been mined for centuries by historians and others yearning to know more
about China under the Mongols. The other work considered here treats a larger array
of travel accounts, many of which fit into the genre often called imaginary voyages --
imaginary at least from the perspective of their authors if not always their readers.
Thus the two works might seem very different, yet in many ways they have strong
similarities.8 For, among other things, Wood claims that Marco Polo's account of his
sojourn in China is largely imaginative -- that in fact he personally never journeyed
beyond, at the minimum, the Genoese trading colonies on the Black Sea and at a
maximum western Central Asia. By this argument, Polo's /I Milione is little different
than, say, Foigny's or Tyssot du Patot's entirely imaginary (though couched as real)
accounts of cultures thriving somewhere, allusively and elusively, near Australia that
Rennie notices (Rennie 1995: 68-70).
To complicate matters, Polo's account is not necessarily Polo's account. Although
written as from the mouth of Marco Polo, then briefly in captivity and apparently with
little better to do than regale others with details of a trip to China, no original text
survives. The earliest known manuscript dates from 1351, more than half a century

165
 after it was transcribed (though there is a mention of Polo’s relation in a text dating
from 1307). Instead there are nearly 150 early manuscript versions, with quite
enough differences to test the mettle of any textual critic and, one would hope, any
historian. One commonality in this corpus is the claim that the texts do not actually
emanate from Marco Polo directly but from the one Rustichello da Pisa, Polo’s
prisonmate at the time.
Vicentini describes Rustichello as “‘Marco Polo’s ‘first’ transcriber”. (Vicentini:
199112). But it is well to bear in mind that the figure of the intermediate “scribe”
athwart the path between ‘author’ and reader, ventriloquists of uncertain effect, is a
long-entrenched topos in literature of just this kind. Bartolorn6 de las Casas played
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this role in the surviving text of what might or might not be Columbus’ journal of his
first voyage to America, while Inca Garcilaso de la Vega adopted precisely this guise
in writing what, he purported, were no more than the reminiscences of a survivor of
Hernando de Soto’s disastrous expedition to the southeastern United States.9
In casting doubt on Polo’s account, Frances Wood does not fail to discuss the
problematic role of Rustichello, whom she refers to as Polo’s “ghost writer“, nor the
text’s complicated manuscript tradition (Wood 1995: 39, 41 -48).lO She notes, for
instance, that the account in I1 Milione is very seldom cast in the first person (nor for
that matter are Columbus’ diario and La Florida del Ynca) and she wonders whether
this might not be “the result of co-authorship” (Wood 1995: 41). Yes, it might, but it
might be more -- and thus less -- as well. Various editors of I/ Milione and others
interested in this source have given greater or lesser prominence to Rustichello,
depending on their own proclivities. It seems unlikely that it will ever be possible to
set limits in either direction in this regard, quite as is the case, for example, with Las
Casas and Columbus, Inca Garcilaso and his unnamed informant, and every
Africanist historian who has depended on fieldwork during the past thirty years. All
things considered, it is perhaps incautious to claim, as Zumthor does, that in 1298
Marco Polo “dictated [to Rustichello] the text we know” (Zumthor 1994: 810). This,
after all, implies that Rustichello served as a metronomically faithful transcriber, a
category much evidence suggests is null, even in the most ideal circumstances.11
Having raised the issue of provenance, Wood goes on to argue her case that,
whatever else, the content of I/ Milione requires that we accept the uncongenial notion
that Marco Polo never set foot in, or eyes on, China proper. Wood points out a series
of anomalies. Only three of the more than sixty ‘Chinese’ personal names in I1 Milione
are recognisably Chinese, and there are no Chinese place names, just place names
in China with names that are nonchinese. Moreover, there are numerous errors
regarding dates, distances, and directions, and tales of impossible logistical
accomplishments (Wood 1995: 56-63). On the other side of the balance sheet, the
dense Chinese records from the time strangely fail to mention those Westerners who,

166
 if we are to believe Marco Polo, were granted positions of importance at the imperial
court for over a decade, and travelled widely in various administrative capacities.
Wood sees her strongest case to lie in a series of arguments from silence.
Nowhere in /I Milione, whatever the version, is there any mention of such central
items in Chinese life as tea, foot-binding, the Great Wall, or Chinese calligraphy, so
different from that with which the Polos were familiar, and so seemingly of some
interest. Nor of porcelain, eventually to become so popular in Europe. Surely it is
right to wonder about such omissions, but they alone, no matter how embarrassingly
numerous, cannot serve as a conclusive argument against Polo. Partisans of his
--
veracity would be able to bring arguments on his behalf the Great Wall was not
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quite as great in his time as later, the cultural importance of tea drinking might not
have seemed important to Polo, foot-binding he simply forgot about, the calligraphy
was too bizarre to bother European readers with details. And so on. Or defenders of
Polo's reliability could even imply that a series of erasures during the transmission
process eliminated all this information.12
Forgetfulness is a conveniently sovereign answer to all charges of apparent sins
of omission, especially, perhaps, since Polo was recounting his alleged experiences
in China under duress of imprisonment. Or for that matter, it could be argued that
these omissions were not Polo's but Rustichello's, or that they were eliminated from
manuscripts at early stages in the transmissional process.
However, in some measure these arguments can be countered. Support for
Polo's account on the basis of what he did not happen to remember seems
irreconcilable with certain data that are to be found in /I Milione. One such example
are the statistics provided for Hangzhou -- Polo's Quinsay. In his standard work on
historical demography, T. H. Hollingsworth encapsulates both the issue and its
problemisation all too well:

...Marco Polo has left various scraps of demographic information ... that are
useful. In particular, what he says implies that 'Hangzhou] had several million
inhabitants in the late-thirteenth century. This sounds unbelievable, but the
circumstantial evidence that Marco Polo provides is hard to refute.

Hollingsworth goes on to detail this evidence, in a way that makes it clear that
refutation is not his purpose:

Forty-three cartloads of pepper, each of 223 pounds ..., were consumed daily
in the city according to his informant, an official of the Imperial customs ...
[Hangzhou] had 12,000 bridges [thirty times the number in Venice at the same
time], and ten principal market-places, each a square covering 160 acres,

167
 occurring four miles apart along the main thoroughfares ... The crafts were
organized in 12 main guilds, with many lesser ones. Each of the 12 had
12,000 workshops that employed between 10 and 40 men ... [Polo] also says
that there were 3,000 public baths in [Hangzhou] ... [and] people went to the
baths “several times a month,” and if each stayed half a day, on average
600,000 people bathed daily and 5 million could bath[e] about 4 times a month.
(Hollingsworth 1969: 245-47 passim)

Now, some of this is Hollingsworth at work, but most of it is a faithful enough

representation of testimony in /I Milione. Rather than educing obliging belief, these
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data should prompt anyone to ask how Polo could remember the suspiciously
consistent daily consumption of pepper to the last ounce in Hangzhou while at the
same time forgetting about so many other things that he must have encountered
hundreds, even thousands, of times during his seventeen years in China.
But even without this particular paradox, everything about this passage cries out
for scepticism: the multiple use of the Biblical number twelve, the remorseless
symmetry, the profusion of precise but trivial details. Each of these -- and more --
recurs in the numerous imaginary voyages of later times, some of them detailed by
Rennie. To take them seriously, especially in a work published in a series called The
Sources of History; Studies in the Use of Historical Evidence, is quite astonishing, but
even more astonishingly, it is in tune with much of the work conducted by those intent
on establishing population levels in the absence of the requisite data. More to the
point here, the implied dichotomy between a Marco Polo who could forget many
important things yet could also remember a host of trifling matters needs a greater
airing. Wood does mention Polo’s pepper statistics but does not tease out this
paradox by wondering how Marco Polo could retain these data not only for the
duration of his stay in China, but for several years after his return (Wood 1995: 10).
Wood’s recapitulative argument against the veracity of Marco Polo’s I/ Milione
draws together a number of pregnant issues. For instance, the lack of an Ur-text
combined with a profusion of variant and derivative texts is an issue that both literary
critics and historians must confront when dealing with sources. Most modern
versions of Marco Polo’s travels breach textual integrity, being a potpourri of
information from several texts brought together to form yet another hybrid text.
No less importantly, Wood’s study indicates that, despite a minor tradition of
scepticism, the majority opinion on /I Milione is that it is largely an accurate rendition
of a slice of Chinese life under Khubilai Khan.13 Absurd arguments, like that of
Olschki, are employed to explain away the unpalatable defects of Polo’s account.
Why? Surely in large part because, without it, our ‘knowledge’ of several aspects of
the Yuan Dynasty’s way of life would be substantially impoverished, being available

168
 only through non-Western lenses. In this sense /I Milione is the very paradigm of the
indispensable travel account -- too detailed and too rare not to be greeted with open
arms, if not with open minds.
At the same time, Wood’s own treatment helps to explain why this is so. Despite
the fact that her intent is to wage all-out war on the defects of /I Milione, and though
she can cite numerous peculiarities, contradictions, and demonstrable impossibilities,
Wood cannot demonstrate beyond cavil that Polo’s account is nothing more than a
pastiche of other travellers‘ accounts and his own imagination, and so lacks
eyewitness credibility. The work has been around for nearly seven centuries, and
although, unlike most such accounts, there exists almost a surfeit of exactly
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contemporaneous material from the places allegedly visited, this is not enough to
establish an unimpeachable case either way. While certain positions -- e.g. that of
Hollingsworth -- are clearly unwarranted, the issue of how much of / I Milione can be
used to understand its subject remains -- and probably forever will remain -- moot.
Those who prefer to doubt all, any, or none of Polo’s testimony will each be able to
concoct a case invulnerable to overthrowing. Even Hollingsworth would be able to
challenge his critics to disprove any single datum about Hangzhou, only to find that
they cannot. Whatever else, Wood’s general argument should at least put paid to
such triumphalist assertions as “modern scholarship has proven Marco Polo’s
account of his travels to the East to be true” (Dutschke 1994: 33).

Neil Rennie’s Far-Fetched Facts is not intended for historians, is not written in typical
historical discourse, and is catalogued as literary criticism by the British Library and
the Library of Congress. So be it, and fair enough. But there is grist here, just the
same, for many historiographical mills. Although Rennie’s focus is not primarily on
the vast output of imaginary-as-real voyages of the seventeenth through nineteenth
centuries, he cannot and does not fail to discuss these as part of his writ.14 While
his context is not explicitly historical, the sheer weight of his argument, and his care in
citing much contemporary comment, should be enough to arouse the alarm of
historians prone to take these sources too seriously as factual.
Rennie begins with the Old Testament story of Solomon‘s expedition to “Ophir”,
which of course has since been identified with places as far away as Great Zimbabwe
as well as metaphor. Two chapters carry the argument into the eighteenth century
and the rest of FFf deals with this and the nineteenth century. The array of materials
Rennie addresses is vast and varied. It ranges from the unambiguously imaginary
voyages to imaginary places, such as the works of Tyssot du Patot and Veiras

169
 d’Allais, through possibly imaginary voyages, such as recounted in the journal of
Robert Drury, and on to accounts, like those of Cook and Banks, that strove to be
scientific, and finally to the nineteenth-century novels of Melville and others, intended
to be fairly frankly imaginative accounts of real places.15
One of Rennie’s stops is at Columbus and other early chroniclers of the Indies, for
whose works he collocates numerous examples of the sheer wonderment that these
writers expressed as such, but only leaves implied the similar, but underlying
wonderment that produced more measured prose -- prose likely to mislead because
of the relative absence of oohs and ahs. Thus Bernal Diaz del Castillo and other
chroniclers of Cort6s’ expedition against the Aztecs wrote casually and confidently
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about many things that seem logistically impossible, whether the size of enemy field
armies, the numbers of skulls arrayed on racks in almost every town, the numbers of
Aztec vessels on Lake Texcoco, or of Aztec shoppers in the marketplace at
Tenochtitlan. Yet these numbers, and the implications behind them, have severally
been welcomed with open arms in the past thirty years or so.
A work to which Rennie devotes some attention, and which can stand ready
surrogate for many other works that have at least the appearance of verisimilitude is
Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal During Fifteen Years’ Captivity on that Island,
first published in 1729 (Rennie 1995: 55-58, 239-40). There are enough elements of
Defoe and Swift in this work that the author took pains to reassure readers that his
work differed from theirs. Since, no matter what the purpose, any author would have
adopted just this line of protestation, this assertion alone has not convinced readers of
Drury that he was real or that his account is necessarily accurate. During the two
centuries since its publication it has been regarded variously as an authentic work of
someone named Robert Drury, as an authentic but pseudonymous work, and as yet
another putative work of Daniel Defoe. In addressing this checkered interpretative
record, Rennie concludes that a “connection” between Defoe and Madagascar “is
generally accepted as satisfactorily proven” (Rennie 1995: 58). And this connection,
he notes, consists in believingthat Defoe influenced Drury.
Rennie has good reason to feel this way, given the later course of the discussion.
However, a recent study draws quite a different, and more heartening, conclusion. In
it Mike Parker Pearson looks at the Journal and compares its testimony with linguistic
and ethnographic data from present-day southern Madagascar (Parker Pearson
1996). Parker Pearson concludes that “[tlhe Journal is a remarkable narrative which
indicates that someone with a cockney accent [because of the transcription of
Malagasy words], almost certainly Drury, spent a considerable amount of time in
Androy learning the language and many aspects of life ...” On the other hand, “there
are several omissions and errors”, and “[iln every case where we can evaluate his

170
 quantifications of distance, size, and weight he has exaggerated” (Parker Pearson
1996: 250).
In the end, though, Parker Pearson arrives at conclusions diametrical to those of
Wood respecting I1 Milione:

The Journal is not a work of fictional realism nor it is a fancifully

embroidered account based on a few authentic pegs. It contains a large
number of exaggerations, errors, misconceptions, and probably a few
deliberate lies, but where we can match it against a thorough knowledge of the
Antandroy past and present it comes through remarkably well ... For anyone
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working on the history and archaeology of the Antandroy and southern

Madagascar this is a most important guide though it has always to be used
with care. (Parker Pearson 1996: 251).

Which of the two conclusions is more like to be correct? Should the fact that Drury’s
work seems to pass muster affect our perception of I/ Mjljone? In fact it should not. If
nothing else, the ethnography of thirteenth-century China is not as available to us as
that of eighteenth-century Androy, and Polo provides few linguistic clues to grab onto.
At the same time it does indicate that the battle to rescue such sources from doubt,
and even from obloquy, is a winnable one.
It is fair to wonder whether Rennie would have treated Madagascar differently --
more historically, perhaps? -- had Parker Pearson’s study been available to him. His
even-handed treatment of the arguments available to him suggest that he would
have, but this instance points up again the barriers that historians and literary critics
have erected to sequester themselves from each other. Parker Pearson mentions
those literary studies that deal with Defoe and Drury, but no others, while it is perhaps
too hopeful to expect that material in a journal called Histofy in Africa will seep swiftly
over into the consciousness of those who read literary journals, even those with a
historical bent.
Rennie accords extended attention to Tahiti, headquarters of the archetypal “noble
savages” and a much better candidate for Columbus’ “earthly paradise” than
anywhere he had stumbled across. Once chanced upon, Tahiti was visited and
written about frequently by Spanish, French, and English navigators and botanists
from the late 1760% and has not yet ceased to draw substantial scholarly interest,
particularly by anthropologists. Writing about Tahiti quickly became intensive and
reading it much in vogue. Knowing there was a market and knowing as well what its
constituents expected to be told, writers on Tahiti found it compelling to oblige. Style
and expression remained important, though by now the accepted standard was quite
the opposite of Polo, Columbus, and Inca Garcilaso. Now a third party was to collect

171
 accounts and synthesise them. Was he thus to be the “author?” This is as hard to
answer now as it was then.
Rennie quotes some interesting passages in which John Hawkesworth, the
designated amanuensis, explained the method. It was “readily acknowledged by all
hands [=?]” that the work should be written “in the first person, ... without the
intervention of a stranger“, since this would “more strongly excite an interest, and
consequently afford more entertainment” (Rennie 1995:95). In other words, in this
case the ventriloquist‘s lips were not seen to move. Hawkesworth went on that others
had objected that this would prevent him from “any opinion or sentiment of my own,
however fair the occasion”. In the end it was decided to submit the manuscript for
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prior approval to those whose personae were being usurped; “all parties acquiesced
that Hawkesworth “might notwithstanding intersperse such sentiments and sentiments
as my subject should suggest”.16
Despite these precautions, problems arose. Hawkesworth noted, for instance,
that “[slome particulars that are related in one voyage will perhaps appear to be
repeated in another, as they would necessary have been f the several Commanders
had written the Account of their voyages themselves...”.I7 In a very real sense then
Hawkesworth became Rustichello and, by choosing the first-person mode of
expression, disguised his role the more effectively once the “General Introduction”
was safely navigated. Small wonder that Captain Cook himself felt aggrieved, and
complained he had “never had the perusal of the Manuscript nor did I ever hear the
whole of it read in the mode it was written, notwithstanding what Dr Hawkesworth has
said to the Contrary in the lnterduction [sic]” (Rennie 1995:96).18

IV

As I began by saying, the approach of this essay is that of a historianseeking, but not
necessarily with a superfluity of hope, to determine what is reliable historical evidence
in travel accounts, and why so much is not. The gap -- as exemplified here by Drury’s
Madagascar, but in a myriad of ways otherwise -- needs to be bridged between
literary critics who are not interested in historical questions per se but who so often
provide insights on the nature of sources, and historians who are not able or not
willing, and sometimes both, to seek out and absorb these insights. One method,
merely utilitarian, would be to establish a running bibliography of work on travel
accounts, whether text editions or interpretation. My guess is that several hundred
such studies in western languages appear each year, but nowhere is this production
faced and captured. Much of the work can be dredged from such portmanteau

172
 indexes as the MLA lnternational Bibliography,but only in laborious, time-consuming,
and discouragingly partial ways.19
Like most sources, travel accounts are neither as historical as historians would like
them to be, nor always as ahistorical and contextually-bound as literary critics would
have them. As a result, no reading that takes little account of both these aspects (not
to mention other possibilities such as meteorology, botany, and the like) can be
adequately satisfying. In this particular regard, perhaps, Wood’s work is the more
stimulating. By propounding a minimalist hypothesis and laying it on the table, she is
likely to provoke both pained outrage and enthusiastic agreement. In turn these can
begin to interact and in the process advance the cause of understanding the
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exigencies that mark the provenance and content of this text.20

Wood’s case, as she propounds it, actually is easier for historians to deal with than
if she had laid greater emphasis on the cultural imperatives that governed the
production of travel accounts before, during, and considerably after Marco Polo’s
time. Her stress on what is omitted from /I Milione is understandable and valuable,
but of no less interest is to explain why other details were included and in particular
forms. For instance -- to take just one example -- if Polo had actually been in China,
why were impossibly exaggerated travelling distances included? Wood answers by
arguing that Polo was not in China. Certainly this is an acceptable line of reasoning,
but there are others -- for instance, that the notion of the impossible was quarantined
from travel account even while it affected more mundane narrative -- a phenomenon
that occurs innumerably in the chronicles of the Indies. If so, then a catalogue of
impossible things leaves us still to wonder whether it is a case of being impossibly
witnessed or witnessed and impossibly processed on the way to being preserved.21
Ironically, even while criticising Marco Polo (or Rustichello da Pisa) as a fabricator
and inventor, this approach credits him with possessing the same ‘rational’ attitude
towards the need for accurate reporting as those that -- sometimes -- characterise
modern times. Yet, and it does not require a postmodernist bent to realise this,
observation and its recording are always context-bound. The travel-writing models
available to Marco Polo were not modern travelogues. Rather, in most cases they
were fiction dressed up as fact, consisting of an implicit pact between author and
reader that stipulated that, although much of what was said was not real, at least
some of it might be. When entertainment was the objective, this was enough.
Yet, and somewhat paradoxically, it might be the case that Rennie’s work will be
of more benefit to historians, precisely because it offers non-historical readings of any
number of texts that have been widely and ingeniously used as sources for various
forms of historical reconstruction. The very practice, whether or not intended as such,
of coupling James Cook and Denis Veiras d’Allais, Tahitians and Sevarambians, urgs
and ostriches, has the salutary effect of reminding us that an extraordinary range of

173
 travel literature co-existed then (and now, e.g., Tolkien, Borges, Coetzee and others),
but that the range of the discursive face of this literature was much more uniform.
The relations of Cook and of those who served with him, if not wholly fact, are at least
largely testable, while Veiras d’Allais’ account of Sevarambia is cut from a very
different cloth. To read them though, even now, forces us to remember this
distinction, not from the discourse itself, but from independent evidence as to what
exists and what does not. If we turn to a map, we will find Tahiti, New Zealand, and
Hawaii all there, but we will search in vain for Sevarambia, Brobdingnag, Bustrol, the
Isle of Pines, and the host of other imaginary places thrust at seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century readers, who had no such maps to consult.
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In closing, I would like to return to a crucial figure who lies behind so many travel
accounts -- not the putative authors and not the ingenuous readers, not the Marco
Polos or the Captain Cooks, but the Rustichellos and the Hawkesworths. It is no
accident that these figures feature in both the works under review since they play a
dangerously ubiquitous role in the genre. We have seen that those whom
Hawkesworth purported to represent were by no means satisfied with his
performance, but we have no evidence regarding Polo’s attitude towards the I/ Milione
that, we are led to believe, resulted from his reminiscences with Rustichello. Nor
have we any details regarding the production of /I Milione, though the data that
survive for Hawkesworth suggest that no such process was ever straightforward.
Nor is it accidental that neither Wood nor Rennie devoted much speculation to the
roles these intermediaries filled. Perhaps that is as necessary as it is reasonable.
Others have done this for Hawkesworth, but for Rustichello it cannot be done. But,
contextualised, there is ample cause for concern. Besides Las Casas and Inca
Garcilaso, already mentioned, there are numberless intermediaries who have created
narratives for which there are no other sources. They do not claim to be
eyewitnesses, but they do claim to pass on eyewitness testimony. In all four cases
mentioned here, their greatest claim to competency was their literary talent, which
means imaginativeness, invention, and the desire to please and impress the reader.
Hawkesworth freely admitted that he used this in discretionary fashion and made
no apologies when attacked. Although Inca Garcilaso was more reticent, he clearly
took pride in his Humanist discourse and he wrote in ways that could not have aped
those of his informant, even if there had been one. Much the same is true for Las
Casas, who frequently criticisedColumbus for his inferior Spanish. As for Rustichello,

174
 we can only assume a similar set of circumstances vis-8-vis the untutored merchant-
traveller Marco Polo.
When expression becomes paramount, content can only suffer. The question
facing historians is what the deleterious effects were in particular cases.
Hawkesworth romanticised the South Sea Islanders, in particular the Tahitians, to the
point of caricature, while Inca Garcilaso did the same for the American Indians, whom
he portrayed virtually as embryonic Humanists. /I Miliofle pictures Khubilai Khan, his
court, and his administration in relentlessly laudatory terms, while Las Casas was
constantly torn between flattering Columbus and exalting the Indians, a task whose
thorny and paradoxical aspects he clearly recognised, but just as clearly sought to
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overcome, with only modest credibility.

In addition to possible changes effected by transcribers and other transmitters of
travel texts, actual changes perpetrated by authors themselves must be considered.
One review of FFF chastised Rennie for his “perverse habit of quoting from the first
edition”, in this case, from the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels (Rawson 1996). The
principle of “authorial intent“ decrees that the last version prepared in an author’s
lifetime is to be considered the definitive expression of his views. Maybe so, but this
is no licence to eschew the sometimes onerous task of comparing all versions of a
manuscript that happen to exist, running from notes scribbled along the way to the
final polished published version, even if in some cases long after the author’s death.
Any number of authors more real than Lemuel Gulliver have changed their minds
along the way from seeing to telling. Famously, this is the case for David Livingstone,
and it is no less true, though less renowned, for most of the nineteenth-century
African explorers.22
Although neither of these works dwells on either of these issues, the approaches
that are adopted nonetheless remind their readers of several problematic aspects of
the travel account. For four millennia readers have faced this dilemma, without
necessarily realising it, and it would be panglossian to expect a shift in paradigms
soon. Even so, Wood’s and Rennie’s works are worthy commentary on the matter
and should serve to focus and foster further discussion, which in turn might result in
some advances in coming to terms with the production and consumption of such
texts.

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 Notes

1. This is ostensibly a review essay of Frances Wood, Did Marc0 Polo Go to China?
(London, 1995), and Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched facts: The Literature of Travel and the
ldea of the South Seas (hereafter FFF) (Oxford, 1995). In fact, I seek as much to
use these two works as a means of establishing a context and encouraging colloquy.
A shorter version of this essay first appeared in Literature &History
i Third Series 6, 2
(Autumn 1997). Thanks are due to the editors and to the publisher, Manchester
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University Press, for permission to include that material in this much expanded
version.

2. Boswell (1963: 309), referring to Hawkesworth’s edition of South Sea voyages

discussed below. Emphasis in original.

3. For doubts about the factuality of both Sinuhe’s and Wenamun’s accounts see
Purdy (1977); Baines (1982); and Greig (1990). Greig, like others, argues that the
presence of names of identifiable places is a warrant of authenticity; in fact of course,
as hundreds of examples attest, this need be nothing more than a standard way of
creating verisimilitude and thus inducing belief. Alessandra Nibbi (1985) argues for
an entirely different itinerary for this traveller.

4. For two extended, apparently serious, and wildly divergent examples of such
reconstructionssee Bradford (1963); and Severin (1987).

5. Recent attempts to deprive Herodotus of autoptic status include 0. K. Armayor

(1978 and 1985); and Fehling (1989). Lateiner (1989) and Pritchett (1993) answer
some of these criticisms.

6. Columbus represents another intersection between the two works under

discussion, since he is known to have relied on, and been much influenced by, Polo’s
description in the notions that underlay each of his four voyages. For this see Gil
(1987).

7. See Henige (1998).

8. And in fact there is some overlap, since Rennie (1995: 13-14) treats Polo briefly
and from the perspective of Rustichello.

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 9. For arguments that Las Casas was the senior co-author of the diario and that Inca
Garcilaso was the sole author of La Florida del Ynca see Henige (1986187and 1991).

10. The fact that Rustichello is best known as a translator of Arthurian romances into
Italian is not likely to provide comfort for those who would minimise his transformative
role: see Gathercole (1967).

11. E.g. Henige (1992).

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12. True enough, many, if not most, of these arguments have a quality of desperation
about them. Thus Olschki (1960:138-39)contends that Polo not only spent all his
time with the Mongol ruling class, but also all his attention; indeed, that he
“intentionally ignored [traditional Chinese] culture”. Olschki uses this positively
circular reasoning to explain why Polo never seemed to notice anything about this
culture. Likewise, Cleaves (1976)finds that vague accounts of unnamed persons
actually refer to the Polos.

13. For an example see Rossabi (1987:147-52). Although Rossabi speaks of

“curious omissions”, he accepts the descriptions in /I Milione with little demur.

14. Evidently, Fausett (1 993)appeared too late for Rennie to take account of it.

15.Rennie on Cook should be compared with Edwards (1 994:102-24).

16. Hawkesworth (1773,vol.1: iv-v); mostly but not entirely quoted in Rennie (1995:
95).

17. Hawkesworth (1773,vol.1: v), with emphasis added.

18. For an analysis of Hawkesworth’s editing techniques and the furore they created
see Pearson (1972);Abbott (1982:137-86, 220-26);and Edwards (1994:80-101).

19. For example, the MLA International Bibliography makes no attempt or pretence
at canvassing the entire body of historical journals.

20. This has already begun to happen. See, for instance, Morgan (1996).Morgan
decides that, while Polo can be convicted of “exaggeration and lying” the case against

177
 his travelling to China is unproven, and perhaps unprovable. For other recent studies
of Polo’s account, which supplement or complement Wood’s, see Gosman (1994);
Vicentini (199112 and 1992);Gu6ret-Lafert6 (1994: passim).

21. Some of this affects the writing of William of Rubruck, who preceded Marco Polo
by only a few years, though not quite as far as China; see Jackson (1994).

22. For Livingstone see Helly (1987). A similar case is discussed in Dawson (1987).
A recent compilation of accounts for West Africa shows the remarkable number of
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editions many of these works underwent and so the need to consult as many of them
as possible both in making value judgements as to their worth and in drawing on them
for geographical, ethnographic, and historical information: see Fage (1994). For an
admonitory example of how modern editing can subvert this process see Henige,
(1996).

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