The Phoenicians asked to see the pharaoh Necko and collect their reward. Too bad, they were told, he died years ago. The new pharaoh had no interest in their travels. In fact, he had no interest in reminding people of the old pharaoh. He seized the Phoenicians’ boat and confiscated their exotic animals and slaves.
Some of the sailors made it home to Phoenicia. Few people remembered them. They were looked at as ghosts or as strangers, which would have been harder to bear if they didn’t feel it themselves.
2
For a few centuries, many people wanted to believe that a medieval Welsh prince sailed to America, discovering the continent long before Columbus. They dated his voyage to 1170. They had minimal proof. There was no real documentary evidence for the expedition of Prince Madoc, only an accumulation of folklore passed down through the British aristocracy. Nor was there any archaeological evidence of a Welsh colony in the Americas, though much time was spent scouring the midlands for traces.
The believers of this theory studied every axhead and arrowhead, rampart and earthwork, for a suggestion of mist-wreathed Wales. If those hard things offered any clues, it was only in thin and reedy whispers. So fantastic rumors spread: in Alabama, breastplates emblazoned with a Welsh coat of arms; a stone citadel in Kentucky; old Welsh landings in Mexico, Florida, and Newfoundland; and, most of all, clear-eyed Indians across the continent who spoke Welsh.
Several men in the seventeenth century claimed separately to have been saved by knowledge of Welsh. Captured by surly Indian tribesmen, they squealed for mercy in their mother tongue. The Indians muttered among themselves and then circled around the captives. They smiled and produced meandering sounds that resembled Welsh. The Welshmen were freed; their comrades who spoke no Welsh were killed.
Thomas Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis to look out for Indians who spoke Welsh. Brigham Young dispatched Welsh-speaking missionaries to various tribes south of Utah in the hope of recovering Madoc’s descendants. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the consensus was that the Mandan people of the Midwest were the most likely heirs of the Welsh prince. But the population was so decimated by smallpox and displaced by conquest that it was hard to determine if there were any real Mandans left. They had become a myth in their own time.
This was real: Three Hopi men were brought to Salt Lake City in 1863. They were sat down in a room full of Welshmen. For hours, the Welsh speakers flooded them with syllables, fragments, full sentences in all the dialects of the valleys and coasts, in old Welsh, in ancient Brythonic. The Hopi men were strung up in the singsong of Merlin. They cut their way free with the sharpest knife they had. We’re very sorry, they said in English, but we don’t understand a word.
3
Many vessels cluttered the heaving floats from West Africa to the Caribbean. There were human bodies, of course, those chained people destined for the sugar plantations, full of despair and anger and other hungry thoughts. But there were also mosquitoes for whom the journey across the ocean must have spanned many generations. The mosquitoes roamed and ate and spawned and died. What is more infinite in the mind of a blood-sucking insect: the slave ship’s multitude of bodies, its countless miles of veins and whispering capillaries, or the lonely plots of African wetland that the mosquito once imagined as its own? Perhaps some folkloric memory of the sky persevered among the mosquitoes, transmitted in the dark from mother to larvae. A male mosquito lives only ten to twenty days. The life of a female mosquito can last as long as one hundred days. With favorable winds and a sure navigator, it could have been that an ancient female mosquito emerged from the ship’s belly to fizz in the light of another continent.
The mosquitoes brought yellow fever to Haiti. It offered a grisly liberation, sweeping through the ranks of Napoleon’s brigades with such relentlessness that as many as half of the French troops were laid low by the fever. Guerrilla warfare, desertion, and a British blockade did in the rest. Haiti was free. The triumphant black armies took the cities of their erstwhile masters. Whites were expelled, their property seized.
But some whites were allowed to stay. Several hundred Poles chose to settle along the sea, building a hamlet whose future name, Cazale, was a Creole estrangement of one of their surnames. History regularly produces these little enclaves of the uncanny. With their usual bad luck, the Poles had lost their own nation several years earlier to Russia and Austria. Napoleon embraced them into his legions and promised to restore their country. But he found the Poles too revolutionary for his liking, so he packed them off to Haiti to reclaim the colony, where he hoped they would do him the favor of dying.
There were Poles who stayed loyal to France, who bellowed and expired on the ramparts of Cap Français or in the mountains, places equally far from Poland. There were Poles who died, like everybody else, of yellow fever. And there were Poles who wondered whether they, the downtrodden of Europe, stolen from their woodlands to do the savagery of others, were blacker than they had realized, and simply switched sides.
When Pope John Paul II visited Haiti in 1983, local leaders and clergy produced various specimens for the pontiff’s amusement, men and women fair enough to suggest some plausible history of Polishness. Polish photographers still journey to modern-day Cazale. They search for light skin, for green and blue eyes, blond hair. They shoot freely, wandering through back gardens, claiming any face that isn’t in their (and our) view entirely black. A grandmotherly smile beams up from the washing. A square-jawed youth angles his head and looks away while a much darker man trims his hair. A nurse holds up a pale baby to the camera. There is no memory in these photos, only desire.
Look instead at icons of Ezili Dantò, the Haitian spirit of independence, a fiery beauty who supports righteous causes and now blesses the weddings of lesbians, who loves nothing more than Barbancourt rum, fried pork, and cigarettes. Draped in gold, she has three scars on her cheek received during the war against the French. She carries her daughter Anais in the bend of her left arm.
In every aspect of framing and composition, her image copies the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, that famous icon of the Virgin Mary whose lithograph Polish soldiers worshipped in the heat and desolation of Haiti’s war. We can imagine the transfer of the image; it snapped as a banner above the Polish regiments, it was worn by many Poles as an amulet. In an act of unexpected friendship and common feeling, a Polish soldier may have gifted his amulet to a Haitian rebel, his black comrade. Or maybe he had his throat slit. The Black Madonna, who could not help him, was plucked from his corpse.
She carried her own military history. Her icon was pierced by the arrows of Tatars and slashed by radical Hussite iconoclasts. The legend goes that she was painted on planks of wood in Constantinople by the apostle Luke. Before that, she was just a cedar table, on whose face Mary herself once ate a meal.
4
An Anglo-Saxon poet walked alone through the remains of a fallen Roman city. His people were responsible for its devastation. Maybe they kept a guilty conscience, because they avoided the ruined town as an evil place haunted by toga-clad wraiths steaming in the baths, spectral fishmongers hurling phosphorescent cod across the plazas. This barbarian, however, was brave enough to enter (poets have absolutely nothing to lose). He gazed in awe at the walls burst long ago, their iron steadings bound with rust. He picked his way between the toppled battlements. Since he only ever knew buildings made from wood and thatch, he was convinced that giants sculpted the enormous stonework.
And yet this world of archways and columns and marble solemnity didn’t seem so far off from his own. He paused in a gutted basilica, watching the birds be birds under its cavernous eaves, and could only think of the big gloom of his mead hall, the bearded warriors drunk and asleep on the boards, the women yawning and wringing beer from their skirts. He came into a building that once housed baths, its pools now full of debris, and recalled how he hated bathing, the pink itch of being clean. Lichen and rime had clambered over the towers. Among the broken pillars of a courthouse, he saw the
shadows of his own people’s justice: his thane weighing the blood price of a crime, the criminal pacing steadfast to his dismemberment. The barbarian felt the border dissolve between his living world and the empty city. The ruin became his own. He was overtaken by this notion: this city of giants may seem so other, but it is the fate of my people. He returned quivering to his damp wooden hamlet, shaken even though he hadn’t seen a single ghoul. Nothing—not even his name—survives him except a poem and its record of his ancient awe. Brosnað enta geweorc.
5
During a war that would become a footnote to later wars, a Russian army seized the city of Edirne. The retreating Ottomans set fire to their stores of ammunition, which they had kept in the warehouses of the old imperial palace. The palace exploded for three days. Four hundred years earlier, the vast complex had been squarely at the center of things, a capital of sorts, but then Istanbul became Istanbul and Edirne fell in prestige. Perhaps feeling neglected, it decided to put on a show. BOOM went the roofs of the eighteen baths. BOOM went the kitchens, fire flailing through their chimneys. BOOM water towers crashed down on the gates. BOOM latticed balconies crumbled into courtyards. BOOM fish leapt from ornamental pools, blinking. BOOM flames ate up silk carpets and sacks of grain. BOOM the half-walls and spy holes and velvet corridors that once saw viziers ghosting and princes tussling and sultans seething now heaved in ash up to the sky.
Other parts of Edirne, where people still lived, were also destroyed in the Russian siege. In the chaotic aftermath of the city’s conquest, people came to the ruined palace to scavenge materials for their own homes, grateful for a higher quality of rubble. The sultans bring war upon our heads, at least they can patch up our walls. When the Ottomans retook Edirne some time later, little remained of the old palace, only a handful of denuded buildings and one solitary bath.
A court official was horrified by the pillage. It’s one thing for boorish foreigners to stomp all over our monuments, quite another for our subjects to do the same. He took it upon himself to search for traces of the palace in the homes of Edirne’s people. It was unlikely they would willfully return the palatial bits, and in any case, he resolved not to make any strong demands. Instead, the official made a catalogue of his discoveries, a list to remember the grandeur.
In the home of a saddler, filled with the leather breath of the man’s work, the official saw pearl-dappled slabs of marble glowing by the stove. In the home of a scrivener, turtles from the sultan’s gardens roamed across the floor with candles strapped to their shells. In the bakeries, the assistants fanned bread fresh from the ovens with peacock feathers. The official poked about churches and the few places of the Jewish quarter, but the people ate their porridge and asked for the news as if theirs was an unchanged world out of time. In the camp of Gypsies on the city’s outskirts, they whispered children to sleep using pictures from ancient illuminated manuscripts to tell Gypsy stories. In an apothecary, a water pipe gurgled through ivory mouths shaped like Chinese dragons. In the marketplaces, traders exchanged coins that had not been used in centuries. The operators of Edirne’s telegraph post sat on cushions worthy of queens. In every house high and low, the official’s feet passed silently over the blue rumor of tile.
A sentry at the main city gate took the official by the hand to his guard post. It seemed like an impossible structure, assembled from fragments of the palace. The ribbed, conical plume of a kitchen chimney sat at its top. Inside, the official could make out the corners of fountains, the grooves of hydraulic channels, gossamer stone screens, the buffed marble of a sultan’s grand dais. The sentry knocked against walls of tiled flowers. You see, he said, it was built to last.
6
Afanasii Nikitin, a Russian merchant, didn’t particularly like India. He arrived in Gujarat in 1471 with a stallion (to trade), a journal (to record), anxious Christian beliefs (to fret about in solitude), and his penis. He struggled to acquire goods of interest to Russians, likely because he had little to offer in return (Russians had yet to invent the MiG). People stared at him on the streets and were amused by his skin color. He thought Indians were black and shameless, a prescient insight then, since so many Indians now deride their own countrymen as black and shameless.
In the account he left us he chooses to spend an inordinate amount of time describing the cheapness of Indian women. You can have them for two coppers, he says, but if you really like them and want to throw your money to the wind, give them five. That was the generous extent of his wanderlust. Afanasii reports hearsay that in China, the women pay to sleep with white foreigners in the hope that they will give birth to white children. He sketches the outline of the Indian Ocean from Cambay to Cathay, defining each point by the value of its tradable commodities and the ease of sex—a perfectly male mercantilism.
Over the course of his narrative, one gets the sense that Afanasii might have converted to Islam. Certain holy invocations and sayings seem translated directly from Persian or Arabic into Russian. He asks for forgiveness for taking an Arabic name. That is the fault of travel, he says, it upsets your moral foundations. He consoles himself in his constant belief in one god. When he accompanies a sultan in his attack on a Hindu kingdom, Afanasii relishes giving accounts of men killed, elephants stampeded, horses toppled, towns sacked, temples destroyed.
Nowhere in his diary is there any suggestion that he missed being home.
A stallion’s letter to Afanasii Nikitin
For me, you were given some sum. Not once did you stroke my mane, even though you liked admiring me from behind and feeling my muscular haunches. I know. My eyes are on the sides of my head, you see. I have a better sense of before and after than you do. Before me, there was only a man and his horse. After me will come textiles, coins, pepper, more coins, gems, slaves, more pepper, and even more coins; you will do well in Hormuz and Ethiopia, be penniless by the time you get to Trebizond, shiver in Crimea. As you die of pneumonia on your way home to Tver, remember that at the beginning we were lonely together. You tried to ride me once, but fell off.
An Indian prostitute’s letter to Afanasii Nikitin
Holding your bald and beaded head in my hands, I feel the texture of a boiled potato, the skin crinkling, soft yellow flesh lifting to steam. But potatoes have not yet arrived in my country from the new world, so let me say this instead: You are a yam, and I will eat you if I must.
7
When Odysseus returns to his own land, he carries the bloody world of the Iliad to Ithaca. He slaughters the suitors and lynches their chambermaid collaborators (“for a little while they twitched their feet,” the poet tells us, “but that did not last long”), and then, after one further skirmish, is restored to wife and throne. After so long on alien seas, he has finally come home.
But the real ending of his tale is left to the imagination. Many chapters previously, the prophet Teiresias tells Odysseus that once home, he must carry an oar deep into the hinterland until he reaches a place where the people have not heard of the sea. At that point, he should plant the oar in the ground and offer a big, meaty sacrifice to Poseidon, thereby making a final peace with the prickly deity who tossed him around the Mediterranean.
The Homeric poet does not describe this last voyage, but grants us the leisure of its imagining. Eventually, after some time at home Odysseus misses his former solitude. He doesn’t explain to Penelope why he must leave—the two find talking to each other difficult—only that a prophecy needs fulfilling. She makes no protest, and wraps a bundle for him. In the morning, he sets off down Ithaca’s dust paths, oar over his shoulder, a few dogs at his heels. The dogs stay with him, panting alongside through sheepfolds and meadows, until they come to the normal limit of their master’s rambling. He crosses over a stream, or into a pass that slopes toward the uplands, or through some other crease in the countryside understandable to the hounds as a border. Nuzzling his knees, they look up at Odysseus. Go home, he says, and strides on. Whimpering, the dogs drop away.
A few days into his walkin
g, he begins to question the people he meets. What am I carrying? They think this leathered man has lost his mind. He must be a drifter addled by the sun. It’s an oar, they say with concern, why on earth are you walking around with an oar? Which way is the sea? Odysseus asks. They point and watch Odysseus turn in the opposite direction and walk on.
How can it be that there are people who don’t know about the sea? he thinks as his sandals fray and his face bristles anew. Everybody knows the sea and its gods and spirits, just as they know the land, revere Demeter with her holy pigs and snakes. Duality exists in all things, there is no earth without sea, no sea without earth. This is an impossible quest, he thinks, Poseidon is toying with me again.
The oar begins to feel like an anchor. To distract himself from its weight, he makes his shoulder a groove and waves the oar behind him, as if he was rowing himself onward. Travelers on the narrowing trails ask him if he is looking for the coast. He shakes his head. The deeper he journeys beyond the regular swellings of villages and towns, the easier it becomes to lose the path. Just like the sea, it is possible for the land to bear no trace of the passage of people. Odysseus is comforted one night when he sees a campfire across an empty Thracian valley, fragile as the lantern hanging from a distant ship. He lays the oar down and lets the earth move in waves beneath his back till he falls asleep.
When wolves come for him one dusk, he uses the oar to brush them aside. He scuttles bandits, too, swinging the oar at their necks, jabbing the blade into their ribs. The oar is the symbol of the sea; it marks Odysseus as the emissary of Poseidon. And yet it is made from the strongest wood, solid enough to crack the heads of any pirates.
His sandals fray beyond repair. He walks on, barefoot. The answers to his questions grow more tenuous and vague, as if they do not describe an object, but rather the idea of an object. Odysseus feels hopeful. Meeting a traveler or coming into a scraggly farmstead, he has to scour all the vocabulary of his roaming, all the memories of strangers and foreign slaves to ask simply, What is this? After some confusion, his interlocutors explain that it is an oar, a paddle, an instrument of water. They mime the gliding shape of a trireme, the breathing of sails.
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