A Traveller's Tale

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 464, 14 May 1948, Page 12

A Traveller's Tale

THE PILGRIMAGE OF ARNOLD VON HARFF, Hakluyt Society (N.Z. Secretary, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington). HE original documents of history appeal to us in two different ways: they are valuable as information; they are amusing. The chronicle of the adventures of this young German nobleman in his journey to the East in the last years of the 15th Century, skilfully translated and annotated by Malcolm Letts, is both. It is amusing because of the naive and yet shrewd manner in which his observations are set down-the Venetian galley, 174 feet long, with its crew of 500, its master’s cabin "with a bed gilded over and furnished as in a prince’s court" and "Item on the great sail a rare painting of St. Christopher. . . ." It is amusing too be‘cause it so often reveals the character ‘of the writer: even the vocabularies he ‘conscientiously compiles wherever he goes, Dalmatia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, ‘Egypt, show, sometimes with a scandalous clarity, what men on a journey are expected to have most occasion to demand. es In von Harff the actual and the fabulous tetid to merge, for the high Middle Ages were still in the full possession of the sense of wonder. He sees and depicts two Amazons. (The illustrations are not the original drawings, but German 19th Century copies.) He is a mountaineer of proved endurance and gains the summit by "great stony rocks" of Mount Oreb, and on another occasion "Item we climbed in great fear over the sharp rocks to the summit of the mount" called Quarantana} near Jericho; but did he also climb Ruwenzori (the Mountains of the Moon) and find "much snow lying there"? Mr./Letts gives good reason to think not. In fact, he considerably curtails von Harff’s journey, lopping off India, Madagascar, and the Nile, both source and basin. Where von Harff did credibly go is sufficiently impressive. Travelling as @ merchant-von ,Harff never practised the austerities of the pilgrim’s life if he could help it-he went from Cologne down into Italy, sailed from Venice to Egypt, explored Sinai, travelled through Arabia to Aden, called at Socotra (nearby is the island of the Amazons), explored Palestine, and returned to Cologne by a circuitous route through Turkey, Constantinople, the Balkans, Lombardy, the South of France, and Spain (to visit the/shrine of St. James of Compostella). St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland had to be left for another time. Arnold von Harff, as painstaking as he is deyout, writes it all down, mile by mile, turning to Marco Polo or to Mandeville to fill out his too matter-of-fact adventures with something nearer to his reader’s expectations, and presents it all, with full solemnity, to his ‘master, the Duke of Julich and Gelders. With the itineraries, the alphabets and vocabularies, the miles and the marvels, he jots down the amount of merit accruing to the pilgrim at every shrine he visits. At the end he counsels his readers who may wish to tread the same paths that

his guide book describes to "take with them two purses made of human skin, end one ‘out of deerskin, all three well filled with gold below and white money above." The gold below signifies carefulness, the silver above wisdom. Then "Bind the two bundles close to your heart, and the third by the navel, so that they may not be stolen, And in truth, brother, if you do not do this you will not be able to compass this pilgrimage joyfully and without care."

David

Hall