COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

. latter
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
the acquirement of scientific knowledge. The narrative in the
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 maritime
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 desolation
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.) '
2 v 2
v/