Chapter I: THE ROMANTIC TYPE. Many of the old travellers, from Herodotus

onwards, were observant and enthusiastic; most were credulous and garrulous. In days when the critical spirit was young, and verification hardly possible, there could not but be a strong temptation to tell extraordinary “travellers’ tales”. And they did. Nor need we scoff at them loudly, for the type dies hard; every year such tales are told.

Oderico de Pordenone and other mediæval travellers who give some substance to the mythical Sir John de Maundeville were travellers of this genial type. Oderico describes an interesting connecting link between the animal and vegetable kingdom, a literal “zoophyte”, the “vegetable lamb”, which seems to have been a woolly Scythian fern, with its counterpart in the large fungus which colonials sometimes speak of as the “vegetable sheep”. As for the pretended Sir John, he had in his power of swallowing marvels a gape hardly less than that of the great snakes which he describes. But even now do we not see his snakes in at least the picture-books on which innocent youth is nurtured? The basilisk (one of the most harmless of lizards) “sleyeth men beholding it”; the “cocodrilles also sley men”--they do indeed--“and eate them weeping, and they have no tongue”. “The griffin of Bactria hath a body greater than eight lyons and stall worthier than a hundred egles, for certainly he will beare to his nest flying, a horse and a man upon his back.” He was not readily daunted, Sir John, for when they told him of the lamb-tree which bears lambs in its pods, his British pluck did not desert him, and he gave answer that he “held it for no marvayle, for in his country are trees which bear fruit which become birds flying, and they are good to eate, and that that falleth on the water, liveth, and that that falleth on earth, dyeth; and _they_ marvailed much thereat”. The tale of the barnacle-tree was a trump card in those days!

Another example of this type, but rising distinctly above it in trustworthiness, was the Venetian Marco Polo, who in the thirteenth century explored Asia from the Black Sea to Pekin, from the Altai to Sumatra, and doubtless saw much, though not quite so much as he describes. He will correct the fables of his predecessors, he tells us, demonstrating gravely that the unicorn or rhinoceros does _not_ allow himself to be captured by a gentle maiden, but he proceeds to describe tailed men, yea, headless men, without, so far as can be seen, any touch of sarcasm. Of how many marvels, from porcupines throwing off their spines and snakes with clawed fore-feet, to the great Rukh, which could bear not merely a poor Sinbad but an elephant through the air, is it not written in the books of Ser Marco Polo of Venezia?