PREFACE.
There would not, perhaps, be a more pleasant or profitable study, amongthose which have their principal end in amusement, than that of travelsor voyages, if they were writ, as they might be and ought to be, with ajoint view to the entertainment and information of mankind. If theconversation of travellers be so eagerly sought after as it is, we maybelieve their books will be still more agreeable company, as they willin general be more instructive and more entertaining.
But when I say the conversation of travellers is usually so welcome, Imust be understood to mean that only of such as have had good senseenough to apply their peregrinations to a proper use, so as to acquirefrom them a real and valuable knowledge of men and things, both whichare best known by comparison. If the customs and manners of men wereeverywhere the same, there would be no office so dull as that of atraveller, for the difference of hills, valleys, rivers, in short, thevarious views of which we may see the face of the earth, would scarceafford him a pleasure worthy of his labour; and surely it would give himvery little opportunity of communicating any kind of entertainment orimprovement to others.
To make a traveller an agreeable companion to a man of sense, it isnecessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he shouldhave overlooked much of what he hath seen. Nature is not, any more thana great genius, always admirable in her productions, and therefore thetraveller, who may be called her commentator, should not expect to findeverywhere subjects worthy of his notice.
It is certain, indeed, that one may be guilty of omission, as well as ofthe opposite extreme; but a fault on that side will be more easilypardoned, as it is better to be hungry than surfeited; and to miss yourdessert at the table of a man whose gardens abound with the choicestfruits, than to have your taste affronted with every sort of trash thatcan be picked up at the green-stall or the wheelbarrow.
If we should carry on the analogy between the traveller and thecommentator, it is impossible to keep one's eye a moment off from thelaborious much-read doctor Zachary Gray, of whose redundant notes onHudibras I shall only say that it is, I am confident, the single bookextant in which above five hundred authors are quoted, not one of whichcould be found in the collection of the late doctor Mead.
As there are few things which a traveller is to record, there are feweron which he is to offer his observations: this is the office of thereader; and it is so pleasant a one, that he seldom chuses to have ittaken from him, under the pretence of lending him assistance. Someoccasions, indeed, there are, when proper observations are pertinent,and others when they are necessary; but good sense alone must point themout. I shall lay down only one general rule; which I believe to be ofuniversal truth between relator and hearer, as it is between author andreader; this is, that the latter never forgive any observation of theformer which doth not convey some knowledge that they are sensible theycould not possibly have attained of themselves.
But all his pains in collecting knowledge, all his judgment inselecting, and all his art in communicating it, will not suffice, unlesshe can make himself, in some degree, an agreeable as well as aninstructive companion. The highest instruction we can derive from thetedious tale of a dull fellow scarce ever pays us for our attention.There is nothing, I think, half so valuable as knowledge, and yet thereis nothing which men will give themselves so little trouble to attain;unless it be, perhaps, that lowest degree of it which is the object ofcuriosity, and which hath therefore that active passion constantlyemployed in its service. This, indeed, it is in the power of everytraveller to gratify; but it is the leading principle in weak mindsonly.
To render his relation agreeable to the man of sense, it is thereforenecessary that the voyager should possess several eminent and raretalents; so rare indeed, that it is almost wonderful to see them everunited in the same person.
And if all these talents must concur in the relator, they are certainlyin a more eminent degree necessary to the writer; for here the narrationadmits of higher ornaments of stile, and every fact and sentiment offersitself to the fullest and most deliberate examination.
It would appear, therefore, I think, somewhat strange if such writers asthese should be found extremely common; since nature hath been a mostparsimonious distributor of her richest talents, and hath seldombestowed many on the same person. But, on the other hand, why thereshould scarce exist a single writer of this kind worthy our regard; and,whilst there is no other branch of history (for this is history) whichhath not exercised the greatest pens, why this alone should beoverlooked by all men of great genius and erudition, and delivered upto the Goths and Vandals as their lawful property, is altogether asdifficult to determine.
And yet that this is the case, with some very few exceptions, is mostmanifest. Of these I shall willingly admit Burnet and Addison; if theformer was not, perhaps, to be considered as a political essayist, andthe latter as a commentator on the classics, rather than as a writer oftravels; which last title, perhaps, they would both of them have beenleast ambitious to affect.
Indeed, if these two and two or three more should be removed from themass, there would remain such a heap of dulness behind, that theappellation of voyage-writer would not appear very desirable.
I am not here unapprized that old Homer himself is by some considered asa voyage-writer; and, indeed, the beginning of his Odyssey may be urgedto countenance that opinion, which I shall not controvert. But, whateverspecies of writing the Odyssey is of, it is surely at the head of thatspecies, as much as the Iliad is of another; and so far the excellentLonginus would allow, I believe, at this day.
But, in reality, the Odyssey, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, areto the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history,the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter. I am farfrom supposing that Homer, Hesiod, and the other antient poets andmythologists, had any settled design to pervert and confuse the recordsof antiquity; but it is certain they have effected it; and for my part Imust confess I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he writtena true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poemsthat have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for, though I readthese with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus,Thucydides, and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction.
The original poets were not, however, without excuse. They found thelimits of nature too strait for the immensity of their genius, whichthey had not room to exert without extending fact by fiction: and thatespecially at a time when the manners of men were too simple to affordthat variety which they have since offered in vain to the choice of themeanest writers. In doing this they are again excusable for the mannerin which they have done it.
Ut speciosa dehinc miracula promant.
They are not, indeed, so properly said to turn reality into fiction, asfiction into reality. Their paintings are so bold, their colours sostrong, that everything they touch seems to exist in the very mannerthey represent it; their portraits are so just, and their landscapes sobeautiful, that we acknowledge the strokes of nature in both, withoutenquiring whether Nature herself, or her journeyman the poet, formed thefirst pattern of the piece.
But other writers (I will put Pliny at their head) have no suchpretensions to indulgence; they lye for lying sake, or in orderinsolently to impose the most monstrous improbabilities and absurditiesupon their readers on their own authority; treating them as some fatherstreat children, and as other fathers do laymen, exacting their belief ofwhatever they relate, on no other foundation than their own authority,without ever taking the pains of adapting their lies to human credulity,and of calculating them for the meridian of a common understanding; but,with as much weakness as wickedness, and with more impudence often thaneither, they assert facts contrary to the honour of God, to the visibleorder of the creation, to the known laws of nature, to the histories offormer ages, and to the experience of our own, and which no man can atonce understand and believe.
If it should be objected (and it can nowhere be objected better than
where I now write,[L] as there is nowhere more pomp of bigotry) thatwhole nations have been firm believers in such most absurd suppositions,I reply, the fact is not true. They have known nothing of the matter,and have believed they knew not what. It is, indeed, with me no matterof doubt but that the pope and his clergy might teach any of thoseChristian heterodoxies, the tenets of which are the most diametricallyopposite to their own; nay, all the doctrines of Zoroaster, Confucius,and Mahomet, not only with certain and immediate success, but withoutone Catholick in a thousand knowing he had changed his religion.
What motive a man can have to sit down, and to draw forth a list ofstupid, senseless, incredible lies upon paper, would be difficult todetermine, did not Vanity present herself so immediately as the adequatecause. The vanity of knowing more than other men is, perhaps, besideshunger, the only inducement to writing, at least to publishing, at all.Why then should not the voyage-writer be inflamed with the glory ofhaving seen what no man ever did or will see but himself? This is thetrue source of the wonderful in the discourse and writings, andsometimes, I believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault, ofa kind directly opposite to this, to which these writers are sometimesliable, when, instead of filling their pages with monsters which nobodyhath ever seen, and with adventures which never have, nor could possiblyhave, happened to them, waste their time and paper with recording thingsand facts of so common a kind, that they challenge no other right ofbeing remembered than as they had the honour of having happened to theauthor, to whom nothing seems trivial that in any manner happens tohimself. Of such consequence do his own actions appear to one of thiskind, that he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity shouldhe omit the minutest thing in the detail of his journal. That the factis true is sufficient to give it a place there, without anyconsideration whether it is capable of pleasing or surprising, ofdiverting or informing, the reader.
I have seen a play (if I mistake not it is one of Mrs Behn's or of MrsCentlivre's) where this vice in a voyage-writer is finely ridiculed. Anignorant pedant, to whose government, for I know not what reason, theconduct of a young nobleman in his travels is committed, and who is sentabroad to shew my lord the world, of which he knows nothing himself,before his departure from a town, calls for his journal to record thegoodness of the wine and tobacco, with other articles of the sameimportance, which are to furnish the materials of a voyage at his returnhome. The humour, it is true, is here carried very far; and yet,perhaps, very little beyond what is to be found in writers who professno intention of dealing in humour at all.
Of one or other, or both of these kinds, are, I conceive, all that vastpile of books which pass under the names of voyages, travels,adventures, lives, memoirs, histories, &c., some of which a singletraveller sends into the world in many volumes, and others are, byjudicious booksellers, collected into vast bodies in folio, andinscribed with their own names, as if they were indeed their owntravels: thus unjustly attributing to themselves the merit of others.
Now, from both these faults we have endeavoured to steer clear in thefollowing narrative; which, however the contrary may be insinuated byignorant, unlearned, and fresh-water critics, who have never travelledeither in books or ships, I do solemnly declare doth, in my ownimpartial opinion, deviate less from truth than any other voyage extant;my lord Anson's alone being, perhaps, excepted.
Some few embellishments must be allowed to every historian; for we arenot to conceive that the speeches in Livy, Sallust, or Thucydides, wereliterally spoken in the very words in which we now read them. It issufficient that every fact hath its foundation in truth, as I doseriously aver is the case in the ensuing pages; and when it is so, agood critic will be so far from denying all kind of ornament of stile ordiction, or even of circumstance, to his author, that he would be rathersorry if he omitted it; for he could hence derive no other advantagethan the loss of an additional pleasure in the perusal.
Again, if any merely common incident should appear in this journal,which will seldom I apprehend be the case, the candid reader will easilyperceive it is not introduced for its own sake, but for someobservations and reflexions naturally resulting from it; and which, ifbut little to his amusement, tend directly to the instruction of thereader or to the information of the public; to whom if I chuse to conveysuch instruction or information with an air of joke and laughter, nonebut the dullest of fellows will, I believe, censure it; but if theyshould, I have the authority of more than one passage in Horace toalledge in my defence.
Having thus endeavoured to obviate some censures, to which a man withoutthe gift of foresight, or any fear of the imputation of being aconjurer, might conceive this work would be liable, I might nowundertake a more pleasing task, and fall at once to the direct andpositive praises of the work itself; of which, indeed, I could say athousand good things; but the task is so very pleasant that I shallleave it wholly to the reader, and it is all the task that I impose onhim. A moderation for which he may think himself obliged to me when hecompares it with the conduct of authors, who often fill a whole sheetwith their own praises, to which they sometimes set their own realnames, and sometimes a fictitious one. One hint, however, I must givethe kind reader; which is, that if he should be able to find no sort ofamusement in the book, he will be pleased to remember the public utilitywhich will arise from it. If entertainment, as Mr Richardson observes,be but a secondary consideration in a romance; with which Mr Addison, Ithink, agrees, affirming the use of the pastry cook to be the first; ifthis, I say, be true of a mere work of invention, sure it may well be soconsidered in a work founded, like this, on truth; and where thepolitical reflexions form so distinguishing a part.
But perhaps I may hear, from some critic of the most saturninecomplexion, that my vanity must have made a horrid dupe of my judgment,if it hath flattered me with an expectation of having anything here seenin a grave light, or of conveying any useful instruction to the public,or to their guardians. I answer, with the great man whom I just nowquoted, that my purpose is to convey instruction in the vehicle ofentertainment; and so to bring about at once, like the revolution in theRehearsal, a perfect reformation of the laws relating to our maritimeaffairs: an undertaking, I will not say more modest, but surely morefeasible, than that of reforming a whole people, by making use of avehicular story, to wheel in among them worse manners than their own.
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