TRAVELLERS OF THE 14lH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 435 2 



exception of an occasional allusion to some pleasantly flavoured 

 or strangely formed fruit, or to the extraordinary dimensions 

 of particular kinds of stems or leaves of plants. Amongst 

 animals they describe, with the greatest predilection, first, 

 those which exhibit most resemblance to the human form, and 

 next, those which are the wildest and most formidable. The 

 cotemporaries of these travellers believed in all the dangers 

 which few of them had shared, and the slowness of navigation 

 and the want of means of communication, caused the Indies, 

 as all the tropical regions were then called, to appear at an 

 immeasurable distance. Columbus* was not yet justified 

 in writing to Queen Isabella, " the world is small, much 

 smaller than people suppose." 



The almost forgotten travels of the middle ages to which 

 we have alluded, possessed, however, with all the poverty of 

 their materials, many advantages in point of composition over 

 the majority of our modern voyages. They had that cha- V 

 racter of unity which every work of art requires ; everything 

 was associated with one action, and made subservient to the 

 narration of the journey itself. The interest was derived from 

 the simple, vivid, and generally implicitly believed relation of 

 dangers overcome. Christian travellers, in their ignorance of 

 what had already been done by Arabs, Spanish Jews, and 

 Buddhist missionaries, boasted of being the first to see and 

 describe everything. In the midst of the obscurity in which 

 the East and the interior of Asia were shrouded, distance 

 seemed only to magnify the grand proportions of individual 

 forms. This unity of composition is almost wholly wanting 

 in most of our recent voyages, especially where their object is v/ 

 the acquirement of scientific knowledge. The narrative in the 

 . latter case is secondary to observations, and is almost wholly 

 lost sight of. It ^ only the relation of toilsome and frequently 

 uninstructive mountain ascents, and above all of bold mari- 

 time expeditions, of actual voyages of discovery in unexplored 

 regions, or of a sojourn in the dreadful waste of the icy polar 

 zone, that can afford any dramatic interest, or admit of any 

 great degree of individuality of delineation; for here the deso- 

 lation of the scene, and the helplessness and isolation of the 



* Letter of the Admiral from Jamaica, July 7, 1503 : " El mundocs 

 poco; digo que el mundo no es tan grande como dice el vulgo" (Navar- 

 retc, Coleccion de Viages esp. t. L p. 300.) 



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