Aztecs, Mayas, and Toltecs ...

 AZTECS, MAYAS, AND TOLTECS: WHENCE DID THEY COME?

“Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who flourished in the beginning of the sixteenth century,” wrote Prescott, “was a native of Tezcuco, and descended in a direct line from the sovereigns of that kingdom.… He filled the office of interpreter to the viceroy, to which he was recommended by his acquaintance with the ancient hieroglyphics, and his knowledge of the Mexican and Spanish languages.… He has often lent a too willing ear to traditions and reports which would startle the more skeptical criticism of the present time. Yet there is an appearance of good faith and simplicity in his writings, which may convince the reader, that, when he errs, it is from no worse cause than national partiality. And surely such partiality is excusable in the descendant of a proud line, shorn of its ancient splendors, which it was soothing to his own feelings to revive again,—though with something more than their legitimate lustre,—on the canvas of history.… His earlier annals—though no one of his manuscripts has been printed—have been diligently studied by the Spanish writers in Mexico … and his reputation, like Sahagun’s, has doubtless suffered by the process.”

Others have expressed a much less tolerant opinion of this prince among scholars. The “century of source criticism” considered him to be nothing more nor less than a romantic teller of tales, a kind of Indian bard. They gave no credence at all to his colorful account of his people’s past. And it is very true that some of Ixtlilxochitl’s statements are hard to swallow—indeed, virtually unbelievable. The two most important German students of Mexican archæology, Eduard Seler and Walter Lehmann, were the first to give the Tezcucan chronicler belated credit for having told far more truth than anyone had ever suspected.

Repeatedly in our history of archæology we have encountered situations where some new collection of data has threatened to knock the accepted and hard-won historical picture into a cocked hat. We have seen, too, how often this danger, for a time, has been met either by ignoring the new facts or by carefully skirting them. For there is a self-protective, conservative tendency at work in science as well as everywhere else.

The know-nothing spirit has had its day in Mexican archæology. For example, certain Mexican ruins are half-buried in lava, which suggests that they are very old. These prehistoric artifacts, which were found in the shadow of much younger monuments, could not be fitted into the cultural picture developed through the study of the later Mexican and the Mayan societies. Whenever during the nineteenth century the archæologists ran into one of these antique structures—no one made it his business to seek them out—they turned their eyes the other way. Prescott’s interesting remarks on Teotihuacán, the city of ruins past which Cortés marched on his flight from Mexico City after the noche triste, could not be entirely ignored, one might think. Nevertheless they were, and almost all archæologists can be charged with this obvious oversight until the turn of the last century.

Cautious intimations and many question marks—that was about all the commentary on these very old ruins amounted to. Then, in rapid succession, the ruins were laid bare. An excavation program that could have been undertaken long before was abruptly condensed in three decades. The most surprising feature of this persistent neglect is the fact that no expeditions had to be outfitted to get at these particular pyramids. There was no need here for risking fevers, encounters with jungle animals, fighting one’s way through swamp and forest with the machete, and the like. All the archæologist had to do, believe it or not, was board a train and ride to the sites. He could even see them on a Sunday afternoon walk. For several of these largest and most impressive monuments of Middle American culture lay within an hour’s ride by train from the center of Mexico City—indeed, actually on the municipal boundary lines.

Ixtlilxochitl was a baptized native prince, a well-educated man, thoroughly versed in the religious practices of the Mexican Indians. When the wars of the period of conquest were over, he began to sketch out the history of his people. He kept his ear pressed close to the lips of tradition. His history (which later generations refused to trust) went back to gray primeval times when the city of Tula (Tollan in the present Mexican state of Hidalgo) was founded by the Toltec people. Ixtlilxochitl told great tales about these Toltecs. They had known how to write, he maintained, and how to reckon, make calendars, build palaces and temples. The rulers of Tula also had a great reputation for wisdom. Their laws were just, their religion was mild and free from the cruelties of later epochs. Their empire, according to Ixtlilxochitl, lasted five hundred years. Then came famine, civil war, and dynastic quarrels. Another people, the Chichimecs, got control of the land. The Toltec survivors migrated first to Tabasco, later to Yucatán.

It is notable that the first man—he was a Frenchman—to validate Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles by an actual find did not even then succeed in establishing the Indian historian’s credibility among archæologists as a whole. In the first place, no reputable archæologist believed in the existence of the city of Tula, which figured so prominently in the Indian Prince’s writings. Ixtlilxochitl wrote factually enough about his Tula, but no matter, he was blandly ignored. Some commentators suggested that Tula and the mythical Thule were somehow connected. Even the very physical existence of a little town called Tula to the north of Mexico City made no impression, for nowhere in the vicinity of Tula were to be seen any of the ruins mentioned in the legends recorded in the works of Ixtlilxochitl. Even when the Frenchman Désiré Charnay in the course of a treasure hunt in the 1880’s found vestiges of a pyramid at Tula de Allende, the archæologists paid no attention to his report.

Not until World War II, at a time when almost all the rest of the world was busy making ruins of contemporary artifacts, did Mexican archæologists begin to excavate the ancient Toltec sites.

And behold!

In 1940 the whole archæological world had to bow before Prince Ixtlilxochitl! Had not similar submissions been exacted for Homer by Schliemann, and for the Bible by Layard? The amazed archæologists found ancient Tula, first city of the Toltecs! Previously they had found the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. They discovered well-preserved reliefs and fine sculptures under three feet of rubbish and earth.

Thus in rapid succession artifacts of the Toltec “culture beneath the cultures” was brought into the light of day. Actually the inhabitants of Mexico City had lived for several hundred years in the very midst of these pyramids without knowing about them. They had walked by them on the way to work in the fields. They had lain at their feet when they took time out for a drink of pulque, that man-murdering agave schnapps which the Toltecs themselves used to ferment. One might say that all the people of Mexico City and environs had to do was follow their noses and bump into a pyramid.

The exploration of the Toltec pyramids proceeded with the typically swift pace of an archæological investigation once fairly launched. Within three decades excavations of the most sensational import were carried out. In 1925 the archæologists digging out the Pyramid of the Serpent at the northwest boundary of Mexico City found that they were working not on one pyramid, but on eight of them—an onion in stone, so to speak, one shell nested within another. Calendrical data revealed that probably every fifty-two years another shell had been added to the pyramid. A little arithmetic shows that this structure alone had been worked on for over four hundred years. Except for the cathedral building of the West, there is no single architectural project anywhere that continued so long. In the middle of Mexico City archæologists dug for the remains of the great teocalli, the one destroyed by Cortés, and actually found the foundation walls. The excavators then betook themselves out of the city, to the present-day San Juan Teotihuacán, some thirty-one miles away. Here was located the largest of all the pyramid fields, the most splendid relic of the ancient Toltec culture, the city “where god was offered prayers.” (Such is the meaning of the name Teotihuacán. Note the peculiarity that the Mexican word teo is the same as the Old Greek word for “god.” It is only proper to add, however, that no inferences of any kind may be drawn from this phonetic coincidence.) The already exposed section of this field of ruins now covers 7.6 square miles—and but a fraction of the whole field has been opened up. This is the city that the Toltecs, before their flight southward, seemingly covered with a layer of earth a yard deep—a supererogatory measure hardly less astonishing than the structures themselves. The larger of the pyramids—they are stepped pyramids with the characteristic stairways—is 128 feet in height.

Eventually the archæologists struck out into the provinces. Eduard Seler was the first to describe the fortress pyramid of Xochicalco, fifty miles south of the Mexican capital. Diggings were carried out at Cholula, where Cortés committed one of his worst acts of betrayal. Working inside the largest pyramid—which once covered a larger area than the Pyramid of Cheops—the excavators disclosed labyrinthine passages five eighths of a mile long. The search then moved farther south. In 1931 Alfonso Caso, a Mexican, on government commission, dug into Monte Albán at Oaxaca—and what every excavator almost certainly secretly hopes for came to pass. Alfonso Caso found a treasure—the treasure of Monte Albán.

“Is there any other spot on earth,” asks Egon Erwin Kisch, a noted journalist of our time, “so completely shrouded in darkness and so mute in the face of all our questions? Which feeling is paramount in us, enchantment or bewilderment?” And then he inquires into the reasons for this conflict of feeling. “Is it the spatial complex, the outlines of which suggest a prospect of infinity? Or is it the pyramids, which look like stately stairways leading on and up into the inner reaches of heaven? Or is it the temple court which—thanks to our powers of imagination—is filled with many thousands of Indians in impetuous prayer? Or is it the observatory, with peepholes let into the masonry walls which provide a line of sight along the azimuth of the meridian? Or is it the spectacle of a stadium such as Europe has never built from ancient Roman days to the twentieth century, one hundred and twenty steeply rising tiers of stone seats?

“Or is it the system,” he goes on, “of arranging hundreds of tombs so that no grave disturbs its neighbor, with consequent avoidance of a cemetery effect? Could it be the gay mosaics, the frescoes with their figures, scenes, symbols, and hieroglyphs? Or the vessels of clay, sacrificial bowls of noble sweep, urns of geometric rectilinearity, four-footed, and within each of the feet a little bell that tinkles for help if an intruder threatens to make off with it?

“Or is it the ornamentation?…

“Who would have ever imagined ‘savages’ could polish rock-crystal with such precision technique, or assemble necklaces in twenty rows made of 854 chiseled and mathematically equal constituent parts of gold and precious stones? A brooch shows a knight of death that Lucas Cranach himself could not have made more apocalyptic. Garters that are like the ones worn by the Knights of the Garter. Ear-rings seemingly woven from tears and thorns. Headdresses—tiaras worthy of a pope of popes. Plaited rings to set off the fingernails. Bracelets and arm-bands with fat embossments, cloak-pins, and clasps made of jade, turquoise, pearls, amber, coral, obsidian, jaguar-teeth, bones, and mussel shells. A gold mask over the cheeks and nose of which is sculptured a trophy made of human skin. Fans fashioned from the feathers of the quetzal bird—what Byzantine empress, what Hindu maharani, what American multimillionairess ever in her whole life owned such a lovely trinket as many of these Indians keep beside them even in the grave?”

“Questions, nothing but questions on Monte Albán,” is the Kisch chapter heading for this piece on Mexico. But is it only Monte Albán that invites interrogation?

We must admit that up to the present we know less than nothing about the master builders of pre-Aztec times. Less than nothing also implies, in this case, that we are burdened with a great deal of false information. Mexico and Yucatán are jungle-lands; and when the archæologist begins to interpret the Toltecs, he loses himself in these jungles. How much is actually known?

This much has been confirmed: the Aztec, Mayan, and Toltec cultures are all closely related. All three societies built pyramids, with steps leading up to the gods of sun or moon. All these pyramids, we know today, were located according to astronomical lines of sight and erected under calendrical dictate. Oliver G. Rickertson, Jr., an American, was the first to prove this, in 1928, using evidence found on a Mayan pyramid in Uaxactún. Today we have further proof of this practice in later times from Chichén-Itzá, and for more ancient times from Monte Albán. All these peoples lived under the Damoclean sword of their great calendrical cycles, as for example when they believed that the world came to an end every fifty-two years. The power of the priesthood depended on the universal acceptance of such ideas. The priests alone were able to avert the threat of disaster. The means that they used to do this became with the passage of time more drastic—that is, more cruel—and finally degenerated into frightful human offerings and the feast of Xipec Totec, the god of earth and spring, in whose honor the priests flayed human beings, drawing the bloody skin off the quivering victim while he was still alive.

The sky god Quetzalcoatl as a feathered serpent, from a relief at Xochicalco. Drawing by Miguel Covarrubias from his “Mexico South” (copyright 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.).

The close relationship of Aztecs, Mayas, and Toltecs appears again in their gods, which in this respect are comparable to the Greek and Roman pantheons. One of the principal Aztec-Toltec gods was the great and wise Quetzalcoatl, who was called Kukumatz in Guatemala, and Kukulcan in Yucatán. His image, the plumed serpent, is found on both the oldest and the most recent Indian edifices. Even the mode of life was—and still is—much the same among all the Middle American Indians. And although their languages are numerous, they all belong—if we take into account only the civilized tribes—to one or the other of two large linguistic groups.

Once these basic kinships have been established (recently an almost incalculable amount of detail has been collected on the subject) the question of external relationships arises, of the wavelike contacts among these peoples as they flowed against and over one another—in short, the question of their history. Here, so far as the very oldest phase goes, we are groping in the dark. In spite of outstanding research, which has yielded a highly accurate correlation of the Mayan calendar with our own, we still lack fixed points of reference. The jungle we are clearing away from the pyramids and palaces of prehistoric America gives up abundant architectural remains, but as yet no panoramic vision of the past. We find dates, but no history. We can spin theories, but the supporting facts are inadequate.

Some investigators, basing their opinion on a variety of signs, believe that the great pyramid in Mexico City was built by the Toltecs in the fourth century of our era.

Now, several of these pyramids located at different sites from Tula to Monte Albán have been discussed, yet one of the most important has yet to be mentioned. This is the Pyramid of Cuicuilco, which stands on a mound 22.4 feet high, situated at the southern limits of Mexico City. The Pyramid of Cuicuilco rises up out of a weird landscape of darkly stony aspect. At one time the volcanoes Ajusco and Xitli (perhaps only the latter) erupted. The god within the pyramid was apparently remiss in diverting the glowing flood of lava that flowed about the pyramid, for half the structure was drowned in bubbling muck. The archæologists investigating this phenomenon called on colleagues from another faculty, the geologists, for help. How old is the lava, they inquired. The geologists, not realizing that their answer was knocking a world picture awry, answered: “Eight thousand years.” We have learned since then that this answer was wrong, because the geologists’ methods of dating are inadequate for relatively brief time spans.

We now assume, though without absolute proof, that the early American Indians were descendants of Mongolian tribesmen who came either by boat or by way of a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska and so down the coast to the lower latitudes of the continent. Where the Toltecs in particular came from, assuming the existence of a migratory parent group, and why the Toltecs should have been the only people from Alaska to Panama capable of inventing the ingenious devices that mark their culture, we do not know.

Indeed, we do not even know exactly whether it really was the Toltecs who set the cultural stage in Middle America. What prehistoric role, we might ask, was played by the Zapotecs, or the Olmecs, vestiges of which societies can be found all over Mexico? If we name the Toltecs as the precursors of the Mayan and Aztec cultures, we are using the word Toltec as a collective label for all the creators of Middle American culture. The term Toltec may mean nothing but “master builder.”

We may be justified, in order to clarify the interaction of the three great Indian empires, in taking the liberty of quoting an analogy between Middle American and Old World cultures mentioned in one of the works on Mexico by the German archæologist Theodor-Wilhelm Danzel: “Occasionally in order to characterize the Aztec, as distinguished from the Mayan, culture,” he says, “analogies with the Old World have been adduced, in which the Aztecs have been compared to the Romans, and the Mayas to the Greeks. These parallels, on the whole, are apt. The Mayas were indeed a people who (like the Greeks) split up into many communities, who quarreled among themselves, and who formed temporary alliances only when it became necessary to resist a common enemy. But even though the Mayas did not distinguish themselves as a political power, they have to their credit remarkable achievements in sculpture, architecture, astronomy, and mathematics.

“The Aztecs, on the other hand,” he goes on to say, “were a warlike folk, who built their empire on the ruins of another people (the Toltecs) unable to resist the power of their onslaught. The Toltecs, if we carry our analogy still further, would parallel the Etruscans.”

We might draw still another analogy. In respect of historical function the Toltecs are similar to the inventive Sumerians. The Mayas, in this analogy, then become the Babylonians, who as the usufructuaries of the Sumerians’ superior inventions built a cultural empire of their own. And the Aztecs, in this context, then bring to mind the bellicose Assyrians, who used their superior mentality for pure power ends. Carrying out the parallel still further, Mexico City, “beheaded” at the height of its fame by the Spaniards, compares with proud Nineveh, capital of the Assyrians, which suffered a like fate at the hands of the Medes.

Both analogies, however, fail to hit the mark in one respect. They give no clue to why the Toltecs, long after their own empire had collapsed, should suddenly decamp and penetrate the New Empire of the Mayas, where they left their stamp on the city of Chichén-Itzá. There is no parallel for this in ancient history. But did such a thing actually happen? Everything in fact could have been quite different. There is a Mexican legend that suggests a different historical sequence, a legend in which even the coming of the Spaniards is prefigured in mythical language.

The legend tells how the Indian deity Quetzalcoatl came from the “Land of the Rising Sun.” He wore a long white robe and had a beard; he taught the people crafts and customs and laid down wise laws. He created an empire in which the ears of corn were as long as men are tall, and caused bolls of colored cotton to grow on cotton plants. But for some reason or other he had to leave his empire. He took his laws, his writings, his songs, and went away down the same road he had come. In Cholula he tarried, and there once more gave the people the benefits of his wisdom. Then he betook himself to the seashore, where he began to weep, and ended by immolating himself in fire, whereupon his heart became the morning star. Others say that he went aboard his ship and journeyed back to the land whence he came, across the sea. But all the legends of Quetzalcoatl unanimously agree that he promised to come again.

The Aztecs attack Tehuantepec (Durán). Drawing by Miguel Covarrubias from his “Mexico South” (copyright 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.).

One of the greatest Mayan and Aztec gods, Quetzalcoatl, known in Guatemala under the name of Kukumatz, and in Yucatán as Kukulcan. All these names mean “Feathered Serpent.” The drawing is after a relief found in Chichén-Itzá, and illustrates the Toltec influence on Mayan art of the New Empire.

So often throughout our story have we seen the kernel of a legend historically validated that we must not make the mistake of dismissing this story as mere poetic invention, however fictitious it may appear at first sight. May we not think of the white robe as connoting a white skin? Especially in view of the fact that Quetzalcoatl is supposed to have worn a beard, whereas beards are extremely rare among Indians.

It has been suggested that Quetzalcoatl was actually a missionary from some distant, unknown country. The theory that he may have been an early Catholic missionary of the sixth century may safely be dismissed. Nor need we spend much time on the supposition that he was the Apostle Thomas himself. Those who seek to use the legend of Quetzalcoatl as a possible support for the notion that Mayan culture was founded by Atlanteans—a theory that once appealed to the young Thompson—can hardly expect to prevail. The Atlantis theory enjoys absolutely no scientific probability.

There is simply a great deal we do not yet know.

We know only this: the Spaniards, who appeared to the Aztecs as “the white gods from the east” when they first arrived in Mexico, because the Aztecs remembered the bearded white god and his promise to return—these representatives of European civilization surely did not behave like descendants of Quetzalcoatl, who had preached morality and justice.

Ceram, C. W.,

   Gods, graves, and scholars.

Cast Ashore on the Coral Reef — We Find a Desert Island

 When we realized that the seas had got hold of us, the anchor rope was cut and we were off. A sea rose straight up under us, and we felt the Kon-Tiki being lifted up in the air. The great moment had come; we were riding on the wave back at breathless speed, our ramshackle craft creaking and groaning as she quivered under us. The excitement made one’s blood boil. I remember that, having no other inspiration, I waved my arm and bellowed “Hurrah!” at the top of my lungs; it afforded a certain relief and could do no harm anyway. The others certainly thought I had gone mad, but they all beamed and grinned enthusiastically. On we ran with the seas rushing in behind us; this was the Kon-Tiki’s baptism of fire. All must and would go well.

But our elation was soon dampened. A new sea rose high up astern of us like a glittering, green glass wall. As we sank down it came rolling after us, and, in the same second in which I saw it high above me, I felt a violent blow and was submerged under floods of water. I felt the suction through my whole body, with such great power that I had to strain every single muscle in my frame and think of one thing only—hold on, hold on! I think that in such a desperate situation the arms will be torn off before the brain consents to let go, evident as the outcome is. Then I felt that the mountain of water was passing on and relaxing its devilish grip of my body. When the whole mountain had rushed on, with an ear-splitting roaring and crashing, I saw Knut again hanging on beside me, doubled up into a ball. Seen from behind, the great sea was almost flat and gray. As it rushed on, it swept over the ridge of the cabin roof which projected from the water, and there hung the three others, pressed against the cabin roof as the water passed over them.

We were still afloat.

In an instant I renewed my hold, with arms and legs bent round the strong rope. Knut let himself down and with a tiger’s leap joined the others on the boxes, where the cabin took the strain. I heard reassuring exclamations from them, but at the same time I saw a new green wall rise up and come towering toward us. I shouted a warning and made myself as small and hard as I could where I hung. In an instant hell was over us again, and the Kon-Tiki disappeared completely under the masses of water. The sea tugged and pulled with all the force it could bring to bear at the poor little bundles of human bodies. The second sea rushed over us, to be followed by a third like it.

Then I heard a triumphant shout from Knut, who was now hanging on to the rope ladder:

“Look at the raft—she’s holding!”

After three seas only the double mast and the cabin had been knocked a bit crooked. Again we had a feeling of triumph over the elements, and the elation of victory gave us new strength.

Then I saw the next sea come towering up, higher than all the rest, and again I bellowed a warning aft to the others as I climbed up the stay, as high as I could get in a hurry, and hung on fast. Then I myself disappeared sideways into the midst of the green wall which towered high over us. The others, who were farther aft and saw me disappear first, estimated the height of the wall of water at twenty-five feet, while the foaming crest passed by fifteen feet above the part of the glassy wall into which I had vanished. Then the great wave reached them, and we had all one single thought—hold on, hold on, hold, hold, hold!

We must have hit the reef that time. I myself felt only the strain on the stay, which seemed to bend and slacken jerkily. But whether the bumps came from above or below I could not tell, hanging there. The whole submersion lasted only seconds, but it demanded more endurance than we usually have in our bodies. There is greater strength in the human mechanism than that of the muscles alone. I determined that, if I was to die, I would die in this position, like a knot on the stay. The sea thundered on, over and past, and as it roared by it revealed a hideous sight. The Kon-Tiki was wholly changed, as by the stroke of a magic wand. The vessel we knew from weeks and months at sea was no more; in a few seconds our pleasant world had become a shattered wreck.

I saw only one man on board besides myself. He lay pressed flat across the ridge of the cabin roof, face downward with his arms stretched out on both sides, while the cabin itself was crushed in, like a house of cards, toward the stern and toward the starboard side. The motionless figure was Herman. There was no other sign of life, while the hill of water thundered by, in across the reef. The hardwood mast on the starboard side was broken like a match, and the upper stump, in its fall, had smashed right through the cabin roof, so that the mast and all its gear slanted at a low angle over the reef on the starboard side. Astern, the steering block was twisted round lengthways and the crossbeam broken, while the steering oar was smashed to splinters. The splashboards at the bow were broken like cigar boxes, and the whole deck was torn up and pasted like wet paper against the forward wall of the cabin, along with boxes, cans, canvas, and other cargo. Bamboo sticks and rope ends stuck up everywhere, and the general effect was of complete chaos.

I felt cold fear run through my whole body. What was the good of my holding on? If I lost one single man here, in the run in, the whole thing would be ruined, and for the moment there was only one human figure to be seen after the last buffet. In that second Torstein’s hunched-up form appeared outside the raft. He was hanging like a monkey in the ropes from the masthead and managed to get on to the logs again, where he crawled up on to the debris forward of the cabin. Herman, too, now turned his head and gave me a forced grin of encouragement, but did not move. I bellowed in the faint hope of locating the others and heard Bengt’s calm voice call out that all hands were aboard. They were lying holding on to the ropes behind the tangled barricade which the tough plaiting from the bamboo deck had built up.

All this happened in the course of a few seconds, while the Kon-Tiki was being drawn out of the witches’ caldron by the backwash, and a fresh sea came rolling over her. For the last time I bellowed “Hang on!” at the top of my lungs amid the uproar, and that was all I myself did; I hung on and disappeared in the masses of water which rushed over and past in those endless two or three seconds. That was enough for me. I saw the ends of the logs knocking and bumping against a sharp step in the coral reef without going over it. Then we were sucked out again. I also saw the two men who lay stretched out across the ridge of the cabin roof, but none of us smiled any longer. Behind the chaos of bamboo I heard a calm voice call out:

“This won’t do.”

I myself felt equally discouraged. As the masthead sank farther and farther out over the starboard side, I found myself hanging on to a slack line outside the raft. The next sea came. When it had gone by I was dead tired, and my only thought was to get up on to the logs and lie behind the barricade. When the backwash retreated, I saw for the first time the rugged red reef naked beneath us and perceived Torstein standing, bent double, on gleaming red corals, holding on to a bunch of rope ends from the mast. Knut, standing aft, was about to jump. I shouted that we must all keep on the logs, and Torstein, who had been washed overboard by the pressure of water, sprang up again like a cat.

Two or three more seas rolled over us with diminishing force, and what happened then I do not remember, except that water foamed in and out and I myself sank lower and lower toward the red reef over which we were being lifted in. Then only crests of foam full of salt spray came whirling in, and I was able to work my way in on to the raft, where we all made for the after end of the logs which was highest up on the reef.

At the same moment Knut crouched down and sprang up on to the reef with the line which lay clear astern. While the backwash was running out, he waded through the whirling water some thirty yards in and stood safely at the end of the line when the next sea foamed in toward him, died down, and ran back from the flat reef like a broad stream.

Then Erik came crawling out of the collapsed cabin, with his shoes on. If we had all done as he did, we should have got off cheaply. As the cabin had not been washed overboard but had been pressed down pretty flat under the canvas, Erik lay quietly stretched out among the cargo and heard the peals of thunder crashing above him while the collapsed bamboo walls curved downward. Bengt had had a slight concussion when the mast fell but had managed to crawl under the wrecked cabin alongside Erik. We should all of us have been lying there if we had realized in advance how firmly the countless lashings and plaited bamboo sheets would hang on to the main logs under the pressure of the water.

Erik was now standing ready on the logs aft, and when the sea retired he, too, jumped up on to the reef. It was Herman’s turn next, and then Bengt’s. Each time the raft was pushed a bit farther in, and, when Torstein’s turn and my own came, the raft already lay so far in on the reef that there was no longer any ground for abandoning her. All hands began the work of salvage.

We were now twenty yards away from that devilish step up on the reef, and it was there and beyond it that the breakers came rolling after one another in long lines. The coral polyps had taken care to build the atoll so high that only the very tops of the breakers were able to send a fresh stream of sea water past us and into the lagoon, which abounded in fish. Here inside was the corals’ own world, and they disported themselves in the strangest shapes and colors.

A long way in on the reef the others found the rubber raft, lying drifting and quite waterlogged. They emptied it and dragged it back to the wreck, and we loaded it to the full with the most important equipment, like the radio set, provisions, and water bottles. We dragged all this in across the reef and piled it up on the top of a huge block of coral, which lay alone on the inside of the reef like a large meteorite. Then we went back to the wreck for fresh loads. We could never know what the sea would be up to when the tidal currents got to work around us.

In the shallow water inside the reef we saw something bright shining in the sun. When we waded over to pick it up, to our astonishment we saw two empty tins. This was not exactly what we had expected to find there, and we were still more surprised when we saw that the little boxes were quite bright and newly opened and stamped “Pineapple,” with the same inscription as that on the new field rations we ourselves were testing for the quartermaster. They were indeed two of our own pineapple tins which we had thrown overboard after our last meal on board the Kon-Tiki. We had followed close behind them up on the reef.

We were standing on sharp, rugged coral blocks, and on the uneven bottom we waded now ankle-deep, now chest-deep, according to the channels and stream beds in the reef. Anemones and corals gave the whole reef the appearance of a rock garden covered with mosses and cactus and fossilized plants, red and green and yellow and white. There was no color that was not represented, either in corals or algae or in shells and sea slugs and fantastic fish, which were wriggling about everywhere. In the deeper channels small sharks about four feet long came sneaking up to us in the crystal-clear water. But we had only to smack the water with the palms of our hands for them to turn about and keep at a distance.

Where we had stranded, we had only pools of water and wet patches of coral about us; farther in lay the calm blue lagoon. The tide was going out, and we continually saw more corals sticking up out of the water round us, while the surf which thundered without interruption along the reef sank down, as it were, a floor lower. What would happen there on the narrow reef when the tide began to flow again was uncertain. We must get away.

The reef stretched like a half-submerged fortress wall up to the north and down to the south. In the extreme south was a long island densely covered with tall palm forest. And just above us to the north, only 600 or 700 yards away, lay another but considerably smaller palm island. It lay inside the reef, with palm tops rising into the sky and snow-white sandy beaches running out into the still lagoon. The whole island looked like a bulging green basket of flowers, or a little bit of concentrated paradise.

This island we chose.

Herman stood beside me beaming all over his bearded face. He did not say a word, only stretched out his hand and laughed quietly. The Kon-Tiki still lay far out on the reef with the spray flying over her. She was a wreck, but an honorable wreck. Everything above deck was smashed up, but the nine balsa logs from the Quevedo forest in Ecuador were as intact as ever. They had saved our lives. The sea had claimed but little of the cargo, and none of what we had stowed inside the cabin. We ourselves had stripped the raft of everything of real value, which now lay in safety on the top of the great sun-smitten rock inside the reef.

Since I had jumped off the raft, I had genuinely missed the sight of all the pilot fish wriggling in front of our bow. Now the great balsa logs lay up on the reef in six inches of water, and brown sea slugs lay writhing under the bows. The pilot fish were gone. The dolphins were gone. Only unknown flat fish with peacock patterns and blunt tails wriggled inquisitively in and out between the logs. We had arrived in a new world. Johannes had left his hole. He had doubtless found another lurking place here.

I took a last look round on board the wreck and caught sight of a little baby palm in a flattened basket. It projected from an eye in a coconut to a length of eighteen inches, and two roots stuck out below. I waded in toward the island with the nut in my hand. A little way ahead I saw, Knut wading happily landward with a model of the raft, which he had made with much labor on the voyage, under his arm. We soon passed Bengt. He was a splendid steward. With a lump on his forehead and sea water dripping from his beard, he was walking bent double pushing a box, which danced along before him every time the breakers outside sent a stream over into the lagoon. He lifted the lid proudly. It was the kitchen box, and in it were the primus and cooking utensils in good order.

I shall never forget that wade across the reef toward the heavenly palm island that grew larger as it came to meet us. When I reached the sunny sand beach, I slipped off my shoes and thrust my bare toes down into the warm, bone-dry sand. It was as though I enjoyed the sight of every footprint which dug itself into the virgin sand beach that led up to the palm trunks. Soon the palm tops closed over my head, and I went on, right in toward the center of the tiny island. Green coconuts hung under the palm tufts, and some luxuriant bushes were thickly covered with snow-white blossoms, which smelled so sweet and seductive that I felt quite faint. In the interior of the island two quite tame terns flew about my shoulders. They were as white and light as wisps of cloud. Small lizards shot away from my feet, and the most important inhabitants of the island were large blood-red hermit crabs which lumbered along in every direction with stolen snail shells as large as eggs adhering to their soft hinder parts.

I was completely overwhelmed. I sank down on my knees and thrust my fingers deep down into the dry warm sand.

The voyage was over. We were all alive. We had run ashore on a small uninhabited South Sea island. And what an island! Torstein came in, flung away a sack, threw himself flat on his back and looked up at the palm tops and the white birds, light as down, which circled noiselessly just above us. Soon we were all six lying there. Herman, always energetic, climbed up a small palm and pulled down a cluster of large green coconuts. We cut off their soft tops with our machete knives, as if they were eggs, and poured down our throats the most delicious refreshing drink in the world—sweet, cold milk from young and seedless palm fruit. On the reef outside resounded the monotonous drum beats from the guard at the gates of paradise. “Purgatory was a bit damp,” said Bengt, “but heaven is more or less as I’d imagined it ”

We stretched ourselves luxuriously on the ground and smiled up at the white trade-wind clouds drifting by westward up above the palm tops. Now we were no longer following them helplessly; now we lay on a fixed, motionless island, in Polynesia.

And as we lay and stretched ourselves, the breakers outside us rumbled like a train, to and fro, to and fro, all along the horizon.

Bengt was right; this was heaven.

(...)

Among Polynesians

 OUR LITTLE ISLAND WAS UNINHABITED. WE SOON GOT to know every palm clump and every beach, for the island was barely two hundred yards across. The highest point was less than six feet above the lagoon.

Over our heads, in the palm tops, there hung great clusters of green coconut husks, which insulated their contents of cold coconut milk from the tropical sun, so we should not be thirsty in the first weeks. There were also ripe coconuts, a swarm of hermit crabs, and all sorts of fish in the lagoon; we should be well off.

On the north side of the island we found the remnants of an old, unpainted wooden cross, half buried in the coral sand. Here there was the view northward along the reef to the stripped wreck, which we had first seen closer in as we drifted by on the way to our stranding. Still farther northward we saw in a bluish haze the palm tufts of another small island. The island to southward, on which the trees grew thickly, was much closer. We saw no sign of life there, either, but for the time we had other matters to think about.

Robinson Crusoe Hesselberg came limping up in his big straw hat with his arms full of crawling hermit crabs. Knut set fire to some dry wood, and soon we had crab and coconut milk with coffee for dessert.

“Feels all right being ashore, doesn’t it, boys?” Knut asked delightedly.

He had himself enjoyed this feeling once before on the voyage, at Angatau. As he spoke, he stumbled and poured half a kettle of boiling water over Bengt’s bare feet. We were all of us a bit unsteady the first day ashore, after 101 days on board the raft, and would suddenly begin reeling about among the palm trunks because we had put out a foot to counter a sea that did not come.

When Bengt handed over to us our respective mess utensils, Erik grinned broadly. I remember that, after the last meal on board, I had leaned over the side of the raft and washed up as usual, while Erik looked in across the reef, saying: “I don’t think I shall bother to wash up today.” When he found his things in the kitchen box, they were as clean as mine.

After the meal and a good stretch on the ground we set about putting together the soaked radio apparatus; we must do it quickly so that Torstein and Knut might get on the air before the man on Rarotonga sent out a report of our sad end.

Most of the radio equipment had already been brought ashore, and among the things which lay drifting on the reef Bengt found a box, on which he laid hands. He jumped high into the air from an electric shock; there was no doubt that the contents belonged to the radio section. While the operators unscrewed, coupled, and put together, we others set about pitching camp.

Out on the wreck we found the heavy waterlogged sail and dragged it ashore. We stretched it between two big palms in a little opening, looking on to the lagoon, and supported two other corners with bamboo sticks which came drifting in from the wreck. A thick hedge of wild flowering bushes forced the sail together so that we had a roof and three walls and, moreover, a clear view of the shining lagoon, while our nostrils were filled with an insinuating scent of blossoms. It was good to be here. We all laughed quietly and enjoyed our ease; we each made our beds of fresh palm leaves, pulling up loose branches of coral which stuck up inconveniently out of the sand. Before night fell we had a very pleasant rest, and over our heads we saw the big bearded face of good old Kon-Tiki. No longer did he swell out his breast with the east wind behind him. He now lay motionless on his back looking up at the stars which came twinkling out over Polynesia.

On the bushes round us hung wet flags and sleeping bags, and soaked articles lay on the sand to dry. Another day on this island of sunshine and everything would be nicely dry. Even the radio boys had to give it up until the sun had a chance of drying the inside of their apparatus next day. We took the sleeping bags down from the trees and turned in, disputing boastfully as to who had the driest bag. Bengt won, for his did not squelch when he turned over. Heavens, how good it was to be able to sleep!

When we woke next morning at sunrise, the sail was bent down and full of rain water as pure as crystal. Bengt took charge of this asset and then ambled down to the lagoon and jerked ashore some curious breakfast fish which he decoyed into channels in the sand.

That night Herman had had pains in the neck and back where he had injured himself before the start from Lima, and Erik had a return of his vanished lumbago. Otherwise we had come out of the trip over the reef astonishingly lightly, with scratches and small wounds, except for Bengt who had had a blow on the forehead when the mast fell and had a slight concussion. I myself looked most peculiar, with my arms and legs bruised blue black all over by the pressure against the rope.

But none of us was in such a bad state that the sparkling clear lagoon did not entice him to a brisk swim before breakfast. It was an immense lagoon. Far out it was blue and rippled by the trade wind, and it was so wide that we could only just see the tops of a row of misty, blue palm islands which marked the curve of the atoll on the other side. But here, in the lee of the islands, the trade wind rustled peacefully in the fringed palm tops, making them stir and sway, while the lagoon lay like a motionless mirror below and reflected all their beauty. The bitter salt water was so pure and clear that gaily colored corals in nine feet of water seemed so near the surface that we thought we should cut our toes on them in swimming. And the water abounded in beautiful varieties of colorful fish. It was a marvelous world in which to disport oneself. The water was just cold enough to be refreshing, and the air was pleasantly warm and dry from the sun. But we must get ashore again quickly today; Rarotonga would broadcast alarming news if nothing had been heard from the raft at the end of the day.

Coils and radio parts lay drying in the tropical sun on slabs of coral, and Torstein and Knut coupled and screwed. The whole day passed, and the atmosphere grew more and more hectic. The rest of us abandoned all other jobs and crowded round the radio in the hope of being able to give assistance. We must be on the air before 10 P.M. Then the thirty-six hours’ time limit would be up, and the radio amateur on Rarotonga would send out appeals for airplane and relief expeditions.

Noon came, afternoon came, and the sun set. If only the man on Rarotonga would contain himself! Seven o’clock, eight, nine. The tension was at breaking point. Not a sign of life in the transmitter, but the receiver, an NC—173, began to liven up somewhere at the bottom of the scale and we heard faint music. But not on the amateur wave length. It was eating its way up, however; perhaps it was a wet coil which was drying inward from one end. The transmitter was still stone-dead—short circuits and sparks everywhere.

There was less than an hour left. This would never do. The regular transmitter was given up, and a little sabotage transmitter from wartime was tried again. We had tested it several times before in the course of the day, but without result. Now perhaps it had become a little drier. All the batteries were completely ruined, and we got power by cranking a tiny hand generator. It was heavy, and we four who were laymen in radio matters took turns all day long sitting and turning the infernal thing.

The thirty-six hours would soon be up. I remember someone whispering “Seven minutes more,” “Five minutes more,” and then no one would look at his watch again. The transmitter was as dumb as ever, but the receiver was sputtering upward toward the right wave length. Suddenly it crackled on the Rarotonga man’s frequency, and we gathered that he was in full contact with the telegraph station in Tahiti. Soon afterward we picked up the following fragment of a message sent out from Rarotonga:

“- - - no plane this side of Samoa. I am quite sure- - -.”

Then it died away again. The tension was unbearable. What was brewing out there? Had they already begun to send out plane and rescue expeditions? Now, no doubt, messages concerning us were going over the air in every direction.

The two operators worked feverishly. The sweat trickled from their faces as freely as it did from ours who sat turning the handle. Power began slowly to come into the transmitter’s aerial, and Torstein pointed ecstatically to an arrow which swung slowly up over a scale when he held the Morse key down. Now it was coming!

We turned the handle madly while Torstein called Rarotonga. No one heard us. Once more. Now the receiver was working again, but Rarotonga did not hear us. We called Hal and Frank at Los Angeles and the Naval School at Lima, but no one heard us.

Then Torstein sent out a CQ message: that is to say, he called all the stations in the world which could hear us on our special amateur wave length.

That was of some use. Now a faint voice out in the ether began to call us slowly. We called again and said that we heard him. Then the slow voice out in the ether said:

“My name is Paul—I live in Colorado. What is your name and where do you live?”

This was a radio amateur. Torstein seized the key, while we turned the handle, and replied:

“This is the Kon-Tiki. We are stranded on a desert island in the Pacific.”

Paul did not believe the message. He thought it was a radio amateur in the next street pulling his leg, and he did not come on the air again. We tore our hair in desperation. Here were we, sitting under the palm tops on a starry night on a desert island, and no one even believed what we said.

Torstein did not give up; he was at the key again sending “All well, all well, all well” unceasingly. We must at all costs stop all this rescue machinery from starting out across the Pacific.

Then we heard, rather faintly, in the receiver:

“If all’s well, why worry?”

Then all was quiet in the ether. That was all.

We could have leaped into the air and shaken down all the coconuts for sheer desperation, and heaven knows what we should have done if both Rarotonga and good old Hal had not suddenly heard us. Hal wept for delight, he said, at hearing LI 2 B again. All the tension stopped immediately; we were once more alone and undisturbed on our South Sea island and turned in, worn out, on our beds of palm leaves.

Next day we took it easy and enjoyed life to the full. Some bathed, others fished or went out exploring on the reef in search of curious marine creatures, while the most energetic cleared up in camp and made our surroundings pleasant. Out on the point which looked toward the Kon-Tiki we dug a hole on the edge of the trees, lined it with leaves, and planted in it the sprouting coconut from Peru. A cairn of corals was erected beside it, opposite the place where the Kon-Tiki had run ashore.

The Kon-Tiki had been washed still farther in during the night and lay almost dry in a few pools of water, squeezed in among a group of big coral blocks a long way through the reef.

After a thorough baking in the warm sand Erik and Herman were in fine fettle again and were anxious to go southward along the reef in the hope of getting over to the large island which lay down there. I warned them more against eels than against sharks, and each of them stuck his long machete knife into his belt. I knew the coral reef was the habitat of a frightful eel with long poisonous teeth which could easily tear off a man’s leg. They wriggle to the attack with lightning rapidity and are the terror of the natives, who are not afraid to swim round a shark.

The two men were able to wade over long stretches of the reef to southward, but there were occasional channels of deeper water running this way and that where they had to jump in and swim. They reached the big island safely and waded ashore. The island, long and narrow and covered with palm forest, ran farther south between sunny beaches under the shelter of the reef. The two continued along the island till they came to the southern point. From here the reef, covered with white foam, ran on southward to other distant islands. They found the wreck of a big ship down there; she had four masts and lay on the shore cut in two. She was an old Spanish sailing vessel which had been loaded with rails, and rusty rails lay scattered all along the reef. They returned along the other side of the island but did not find so much as a track in the sand.

On the way back across the reef they were continually coming upon curious fish and were trying to catch some of them when they were suddenly attacked by no fewer than eight large eels. They saw them coming in the clear water and jumped up on to a large coral block, round and under which the eels writhed. The slimy brutes were as thick as a man’s calf and speckled green and black like poisonous snakes, with small heads, malignant snake eyes, and teeth an inch long and as sharp as an awl. The men hacked with their machete knives at the little swaying heads which came writhing toward them; they cut the head off one and another was injured. The blood in the sea attracted a whole flock of young blue sharks which attacked the dead and injured eels, while Erik and Herman were able to jump over to another block of coral and get away.

On the same day I was wading in toward the island when something, with a lightning movement, caught hold of my ankle on both sides and held on tight. It was a cuttlefish. It was not large, but it was a horrible feeling to have the cold gripping arms about one’s limb and to exchange looks with the evil little eyes in the bluish-red, beaked sack which constituted the body. I jerked in my foot as hard as I could, and the squid, which was barely three feet long, followed it without letting go. It must have been the bandage on my foot which attracted it. I dragged myself in jerks toward the beach with the disgusting carcass hanging on to my foot. Only when I reached the edge of the dry sand did it let go and retreat slowly through the shallow water, with arms outstretched and eyes directed shoreward, as though ready for a new attack if I wanted one. When I threw a few lumps of coral at it, it darted away.

Our various experiences out on the reef only added a spice to our heavenly existence on the island within. But we could not spend all our lives here, and we must begin to think about how we should get back to the outer world. After a week the Kon-Tiki had bumped her way in to the middle of the reef, where she lay stuck fast on dry land. The great logs had pushed away and broken off large slabs of coral in the effort to force their way forward to the lagoon, but now the wooden raft lay immovable, and all our pulling and all our pushing were equally unavailing. If we could only get the wreck into the lagoon, we could always splice the mast and rig her sufficiently to be able to sail with the wind across the friendly lagoon and see what we found on the other side. If any of the islands were inhabited, it must be some of those which lay along the horizon away in the east, where the atoll turned its façade toward the lee side.

The days passed.

Then one morning some of the fellows came tearing up and said they had seen a white sail on the lagoon. From up among the palm trunks we could see a tiny speck which was curiously white against the opal-blue lagoon. It was evidently a sail close to land on the other side. We could see that it was tacking. Soon another appeared.

They grew in size, as the morning went on, and came nearer. They came straight toward us. We hoisted the French flag on a palm tree and waved our own Norwegian flag on a pole. One of the sails was now so near that we could see that it belonged to a Polynesian outrigger canoe. The rig was of more recent type. Two brown figures stood on board gazing at us. We waved. They waved back and sailed straight in on to the shallows.

“Ia-ora-na,” we greeted them in Polynesian.

“la-ora-na,” they shouted back in chorus, and one jumped out and dragged his canoe after him as he came wading over the sandy shallows straight toward us.

The two men had white men’s clothes but brown men’s bodies. They were barelegged, well built, and wore homemade straw hats to protect them from the sun. They landed and approached us rather uncertainly, but, when we smiled and shook hands with them in turn, they beamed on us with rows of pearly teeth which said more than words.

Our Polynesian greeting had astonished and encouraged the two canoers in exactly the same way as we ourselves had been deceived when their kinsman off Angatau had called out “Good night,” and they reeled off a long rhapsody in Polynesian before they realized that their outpourings were going wide of the mark. Then they had nothing more to say but giggled amiably and pointed to the other canoe which was approaching.

There were three men in this, and, when they waded ashore and greeted us, it appeared that one of them could talk a little French. We learned that there was a native village on one of the islands across the lagoon, and from it the Polynesians had seen our fire several nights earlier. Now there was only one passage leading in through the Raroia reef to the circle of islands around the lagoon, and, as this passage ran right past the village, no one could approach these islands inside the reef without being seen by the inhabitants of the village. The old people in the village, therefore, had come to the conclusion that the light they saw on the reef to eastward could not be the work of men but must be something supernatural. This had quenched in them all desire to go across and see for themselves. But then part of a box had come drifting across the lagoon, and on it some signs were painted. Two of the natives, who had been on Tahiti and learned the alphabet, had deciphered the inscription and read TIKI in big black letters on the slab of wood. Then there was no longer any doubt that there were ghosts on the reef, for Tiki was the long-dead founder of their own race—they all knew that. But then tinned bread, cigarettes, cocoa, and a box with an old shoe in it came drifting across the lagoon. Now they all realized that there had been a shipwreck on the eastern side of the reef, and the chief sent out two canoes to search for the survivors whose fire they had seen on the island.

Urged on by the others, the brown man who spoke French asked why the slab of wood that drifted across the lagoon had “Tiki” on it. We explained that “Kon-Tiki” was on all our equipment and that it was the name of the vessel in which we had come.

Our new friends were loud in their astonishment when they heard that all on board had been saved, when the vessel stranded, and that the flattened wreck out on the reef was actually the craft in which we had come. They wanted to put us all into the canoes at once and take us across to the village. We thanked them and refused, as we wanted to stay till we had got the Kon-Tiki off the reef. They looked aghast at the flat contraption out on the reef; surely we could not dream of getting that collapsed hull afloat again! Finally the spokesman said emphatically that we must go with them; the chief had given them strict orders not to return without us.

We then decided that one of us should go with the natives as envoy to the chief and should then come back and report to us on the conditions on the other island. We would not let the raft remain on the reef and could not abandon all the equipment on our little island. Bengt went with the natives. The two canoes were pushed off from the sand and soon disappeared westward with a fair wind.

Next day the horizon swarmed with white sails. Now, it seemed, the natives were coming to fetch us with all the craft they had.

The whole convoy tacked across toward us, and, when they came near, we saw our good friend Bengt waving his hat in the first canoe, surrounded by brown figures. He shouted to us that the chief himself was with him, and the five of us formed up respectfully down on the beach where they were wading ashore.

Bengt presented us to the chief with great ceremony. The chief’s name, Bengt said, was Tepiuraiarii Teriifaatau, but he would understand whom we meant if we called him Teka. We called him Teka.

Teka was a tall, slender Polynesian with uncommonly intelligent eyes. He was an important person, a descendant of the old royal line in Tahiti, and was chief of both the Raroia and the Takume islands. He had been to school in Tahiti, so that he spoke French and could both read and write. He told me that the capital of Norway was called Christiania and asked if I knew Bing Crosby. He also told us that only three foreign vessels had called at Raroia in the last ten years, but that the village was visited several times a year by the native copra schooner from Tahiti, which brought merchandise and took away coconut kernels in exchange. They had been expecting the schooner for some weeks now, so she might come at any time.

Bengt’s report, summarized, was that there was no school, radio, or any white men on Raroia, but that the 127 Polynesians in the village had done all they could to make us comfortable there and had prepared a great reception for us when we came over.

The chief’s first request was to see the boat which had brought us ashore on the reef alive. We waded out toward the Kon-Tiki with a string of natives after us. When we drew near, the natives suddenly stopped and uttered loud exclamations, all talking at once. We could now see the logs of the Kon-Tiki plainly, and one of the natives burst out:

“That’s not a boat, it’s a pae-pae!”

“Pae-pae!” they all repeated in chorus.

They splashed out across the reef at a gallop and clambered up on to the Kon-Tiki. They scrambled about everywhere like excited children, feeling the logs, the bamboo plaiting, and the ropes. The chief was in as high spirits as the others; he came back and repeated with an inquiring expression:

“The Tiki isn’t a boat, she’s a pae-pae.”

Pae-pae is the Polynesian word for “raft” and “platform,” and on Easter Island it is also the word used for the natives’ canoes. The chief told us that such pae-pae no longer existed, but that the oldest men in the village could relate old traditions of them. The natives all outshouted one another in admiration for the great balsa logs, but they turned up their noses at the ropes. Ropes like that did not last many months in salt water and sun. They showed us with pride the lashings on their own outriggers; they had plaited them themselves of coconut hemp, and such ropes remained as good as new for five years at sea.

When we waded back to our little island, it was named Fenua Kon-Tiki, or Kon-Tiki Island. This was a name we could all pronounce, but our brown friends had a hard job trying to pronounce our short Nordic Christian names. They were delighted when I said they could call me Terai Mateata, for the great chief in Tahiti had given me that name when adopting me as his “son” the first time I was in those parts.

The natives brought out fowls and eggs and breadfruit from the canoes, while others speared big fish in the lagoon with three-pronged spears, and we had a feast round the campfire. We had to narrate all our experiences with the pae-pae at sea, and they wanted to hear about the whale shark again and again. And every time we came to the point at which Erik rammed the harpoon into its skull, they uttered the same cries of excitement. They recognized at once every single fish of which we showed them sketches and promptly gave us the names in Polynesian. But they had never seen or heard of the whale shark or the Gempylus.

Kon-Tiki

Across the Pacific by Raft

Thor Heyerdahl

The Last Days of Alexandria

Ancient books and their storage

First came oral libraries, then collections of physical books. The roots of the words “library” and “book” derive from different languages—liber is from Latin, while bece, buc, and boc are from the cluster of Germanic languages that includes Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English. Both roots, though, have similar meanings: liber is bark, bece beech wood. Both etymologies relate to forest materials for book-making. The meaning of these roots is important. As soon as people began writing things down, the properties and availability of book-making materials became intertwined with the history of books and libraries.

Around 1200 B.C., Rameses II assembled a great library of books that included all the principal book materials available in the Nile Valley. More than ten types of book were represented, among them volumes made from papyrus, palm leaves, bone, bark, ivory, linen, and stone. A single snapshot in 5,000 years of bookish experimentation, Rameses’s collection could only ever tell part of the story. In other lands and other times, books would also be made from silk, gems, plastic, silicon, bamboo, hemp, rags, glass, grass, wood, wax, rubber, enamel, iron, copper, silver, gold, turtle shell, antlers, hair, rawhide, and the intestines of elephants.

In the making of books, local availability long dictated what materials would be used, and to what extent; local abundance enabled abundant use. The banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates were heavy with clay, so Mesopotamian scribes naturally used it to make their books. In the Nile Valley, however, clay was scarce—the very first Egyptian tablets were made from bone and ivory. Later Egyptian books, in scroll format, used the plentiful pith of the Nile papyrus. In China, long before Europe, paper was made in large quantities from the abundant bamboo and the by-products of everyday life.

The ancient city of Pergamum, in what is now Turkey, lay at the center of a region of cattle, sheep, and goat grazing. Animal skins for making parchment were therefore plentiful. Experimentally at first, parchment was used to supply Pergamum’s large library. At that time, there was already a long history of people using animal parts to keep written records; animals had given much in the history of the book, and they would give much more still. Parchment is made by washing and stretching a split skin and rubbing it smooth. A single flawless sheep yields one folio sheet. As Lewis Buzbee noted in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, twenty skins might be needed to make a small book, “but you could eat the leftovers. And yes, that’s why a diploma is called a sheepskin.” In the year 1000 C.E., an average-sized book consumed the skins of dozens, even hundreds of animals. A 1,000-page Bible, for example, needed 250 sheep. In Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D’Israeli marveled that the volumes written by Zoroaster, entitled The Similitude, were said to have taken up the space of 1,260 cattle hides. The largest surviving medieval manuscript, the Codex Gigas or Devil’s Bible, is thought to have been made from the skins of 160 donkeys.

Quality issues always loom large when using animal hides, especially those of wild animals. Kangaroo skins, for example, have been used for bookbinding, but their quality is notoriously variable. Male kangaroos have long, scraping claws. Raw roo leather often arrives scratched and scored with what are known in the leather trade as “mating marks.” In the Middle Ages, scribes sometimes had to work with parchment that was similarly holed by wounds or insects. Some blemishes were repaired with silk thread, others incorporated into the illuminator’s design. At Durham there is a delightful gospel book, dating from the seventh or eighth century, in which the improvising scribe has carefully decorated the edges of several insect bites.

Vellum, the most deluxe and tragic form of parchment—made from the skin of bovine fetuses—is smooth, white, and highly workable. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, the illustrious nineteenth-century bibliographer and book kisser, regarded vellum-bound books as the pinnacle of bookish treasure. He called them “membranaceous bijoux.” Vellum is also highly durable. When Tim Munby was librarian at Cambridge University’s King’s College, he co-owned a 1925 type 40 Bugatti, “which was regularly taken to pieces by the roadside.” On one trip, when one of the car’s gaskets kept blowing, Munby had a few of his own rare manuscripts to hand. After a process of experimentation, the gasket turned out to respond to vellum. An old antiphonal that had been ruined by water was cut up and put to use,

and this, when enthusiasts asked the Bugatti’s age, enabled one to indulge in a little piece of lifemanship and reply nonchalantly, “Parts of it date back to the fifteenth century.”

Scholars have noticed a relationship between the availability of writing materials, the vibrancy of literary activity, and the growth of libraries. According to Herodotus, by 500 B.C. papyrus was the preferred writing material on the Grecian peninsula. When Athens imported large quantities of Egyptian papyrus, a flood of Athenian literary work followed and the city’s libraries prospered. Those libraries, such as the great research collection formed by Aristotle for the Lyceum (c. 335 B.C.), were the location for two important beginnings: the inception of Western scholarship, and the creation of architectural features—spaces for reading, writing, and conversing—that distinguish all subsequent academic, monastic, and public libraries through the classical era to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.

Five centuries after the Athenian library boom, the same sequence was repeated in Rome: plentiful papyrus led to a flourishing of Roman book-making and library formation. (Conversely, a second-century Ptolemaic embargo on Egyptian papyrus exports caused difficulties for writers and readers throughout the classical world.) The pattern would continue. In early Christian times, increased supplies of parchment—favored as a more reliable alternative to papyrus—made possible the monastic output of codices. Along with printing, the greater use of paper in the sixteenth century underwrote the spectacular literary output of Elizabethan England.

The library of Rameses II contained books made from papyrus but not from true paper; book-makers would not use that material until much later. But the library did contain clay tablets, which had been imported from the Fertile Crescent to the northeast. Dating from before 3100 B.C., the very first libraries of physical books are thought to have appeared in that region. The libraries were modest storerooms, containing tens of thousands of square and rectangular clay tablets, each one about half the length of a tjurunga stone, each one covered with markings. The tablets were carefully organized on shelves and in trays. Tablet rooms at Ebla, Mari, and Uruk are examples of these simple libraries. Throughout Mesopotamia, scribes used a complex script, known as “cuneiform,” to write Akkadian, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Urartian—a total of fifteen languages from the nursery of civilization, the area of modern-day Syria, Iraq, and western Iran.

To write cuneiform, Mesopotamian scribes used chevron-shaped styli to impress precise signs (representing sounds) into wet clay. Thomas Hyde, Regius Professor of Hebrew and Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford University, gave cuneiform its name; the signs brought to mind for him cuneus, the Latin word for “wedge.” The script was so complex that some of the first modern archaeologists denied it was a script at all. In Hyde’s 1700 book on Persia, for example, the double professor confessed he regretted the survival of the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis because they were a triviality, “likely to waste a lot of people’s time.” The inscriptions, he said, proved cuneiform could not be writing: the characters in the inscriptions were never repeated; they must just have been a playful experiment, an attempt to see how many different combinations the artist could create from a single element—a set of signs, in other words, as unhelpful as the mysterious Voynich manuscript or the nonsense books in Borges’s infinite library.

The doubters, however, were wrong. Today, not only can we understand the writing, we can even pronounce the words, more or less as they were spoken thousands of years ago. Apart from official records, the cuneiform tablets captured epic poems and stories—such as the tale of Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh—that had first been composed long before the arrival of writing. In the twentieth century, the earliest Albatross and Penguin paperbacks were color-coded by genre. In contrast, the first clay tablets were shape-coded: square for financial accounts, round for farming records, and so on. Some featured both text and images, making them the first illustrated books.

Tablets of special importance received special protection. Each one of a group of Assyrian tablets, now in the British Museum, was encased in a clay shell. Readers could only access the tablets by breaking the shells—the very first book covers—like walnuts. Just as the Mesopotamians did, the first Egyptian scribes made tablets, but they used different materials and a different script, namely hieroglyphics. That iconic, pictorial script was first used at around the same time as cuneiform, and seems to have been influenced by it, though the relationship between the two scripts is not at all clear. Cuneiform’s precedence over hieroglyphics was for many years a settled question in academia. Recent discoveries, though, have thrown the order of invention into contention. The debate is lively, and paleographers have begun taking sides.

Both camps can point to early stories about the invention of writing. A Sumerian legend gives that invention to Enmerkar, lord of Kulaba. He is said to have sent an emissary to another lord to ask for materials with which to rebuild the residence of the goddess Inanna. The emissary ferried back and forth between the two lords, passing on their messages, until he lost track—Enmerkar’s instructions became too difficult to memorize. According to this story, the lord of Kulaba invented writing so he could be sure his messages were getting through. The myth on the Egyptian side contains some familiar characters. According to Plato, Socrates told Phaedrus that the Egyptian god Theuth invented writing, and demonstrated it to the god Thamous (Amon) as a means to “increase the intelligence of the people of Egypt and improve their memories.” Neither story is very helpful to the debate: Enmerkar existed too late—more than four centuries after the first Mesopotamian tablet books—and Theuth probably never existed at all.

Papyrus is well suited to scrolls. The libraries of the ancient world—patrician, official, scholarly, domestic—stored their scrolls in chests, niches, and hatbox-like containers known as capsae. One of these is shown in a beautiful fresco at Herculaneum, near Pompeii. Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri is an example of the scroll libraries that were common in ancient Rome. Eighteen hundred scrolls were unearthed there in the eighteenth century—the most well-preserved library from antiquity.

Much is known about how scrolls were produced, and about who did what in the production process. The librarii copied the author’s manuscript; the librarioli ornamented the copies and supplied titles and other ancillary matter; and the bibliopegi bound the copies by evening up the margins, squaring the ends, polishing the blank sides with pumice, and attaching wooden rods (taller than the scroll was wide) to each end—these aided rolling and reading, and helped protect the scroll from damage. The rods could also be slotted into a desk to keep the scroll open.

The greatest scroll library in all history was assembled downstream from the main source of papyrus. A port city in northern Egypt, Alexandria was a key capital in the Hellenic empire established by Alexander the Great and his generals. Around 300 B.C., the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty founded the Great Library of Alexandria inside the fortified walls of the royal palace, on a spit of land between an intertidal lake and the man-made port at Pharos. The library’s bibliothekai or bookshelves were probably set in recesses along a wide covered passageway. The precise layout of the collections is uncertain, but the Italian classicist and historian Luciano Canfora surmised, “Every niche or recess must have been dedicated to a certain class of authors, each marked with an appropriate heading.” Above the bibliothekai was an inscription: “The place of the cure of the soul.’

The library adopted an admirably inclusive and international ambition: to assemble books from all the known countries and in all the languages. During the third century B.C., Ptolemy III sent messages to kings, lords, and rajas asking for books to copy. While in reality most of the texts obtained by the library were Greek, it did succeed in gathering substantial numbers of books from India, the Near and Middle East, and elsewhere in the Alexandrine world—books that represented a multitude of philosophies and creeds.

The library was also the venue for important translations, such as rendering the Torah from Biblical Hebrew into Greek—the famous Septuagint. Ptolemy II Philadelphus was behind this project. He asked seventy-two Jewish scholars to undertake the translation. According to the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud, a miracle of congruency followed.

King Ptolemy once gathered seventy-two Elders. He placed them in seventy-two chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one’s room and said: “Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.” God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.

Philo of Alexandria suggested that the number of scholars was determined by selecting six scholars from each of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The internationalism of Alexandria’s acquisitions policy had a Sumerian antecedent. Discovered in 1849 by the amateur archaeologist and adventurer Henry Layard, the royal library at Nineveh was an attempt by King Ashurbanipal to collect all available knowledge in one place. The Ptolemies picked up where Ashurbanipal left off. At its peak, Alexandria’s library held hundreds of thousands of scrolls. Some accounts have put the number at half a million, others 1 million, plus another 40,000 in a building attached to the Temple of Serapis, in the old Egyptian quarter of Rhakotis.

Despite the labels on the outside of Alexandria’s scrolls, readers struggled to find specific volumes—there were just too many books. A solution, though, was at hand. The famous poet and teacher Callimachus of Cyrene would help keep the books in order, and help scholars navigate through the collections. In other words, he would be a librarian.

From ancient writers such as Strabo, Athenaeus, Epiphanius, and the Byzantine authorities Suidas and Tzetzes, we know much about the operations of Alexandria’s library. The so-called Oxyrhynchus fragment no. 1241 is especially informative. That damaged fragment is from a group of papyri discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at a site near the modern Egyptian town of el-Bahnasa. The site was an ancient rubbish dump. Like other landfill found there, the manuscripts span the first six centuries A.D. They include thousands of Greek and Latin books and documents. Dating from the second century and written in a careful uncial script, the anonymously authored fragment 1241 is “a characteristic product of the Alexandrian erudition which exercised itself in antiquarian research and tabulation.” Along with military and mythological information, and short catalogues of famous sculptors and painters and grammarians, the document contains a priceless chronological list of the head librarians at Alexandria.

Thanks to this and other sources, we know not only the names of the first half-dozen librarians—such as Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristophanes of Byzantium—but also their duties and achieve-ments—Callimachus was responsible for the library’s catalogue, for example. We also know that, under the Ptolemies, the office of Alexandrian librarian was a high one, suitable for royal tutors and superannuated military men.

To expand the great library’s famous collections, the authorities at Alexandria adopted a famous policy. Whenever a ship arrived at the city’s port with scrolls on board, the scrolls were taken to the library for copying. When the copying was finished, the new facsimiles were returned to the ship, and the originals stayed in the library. Books obtained in this way were identified in the catalogue as “from the ships.” Alexandria’s assertive collections policy seems to have been applied in other ways, too. When the library borrowed the works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus from Athens in order to make copies, the copies rather than the originals were sent back to Greece. Once Alexandria became notorious as a book moocher, other cities and libraries refused to lend their books unless the Ptolemies staked large security deposits. According to Galen, the great library could only keep the Athenian books by forfeiting an enormous bond of fifteen talents (450 kilograms) of gold or silver.

Alexandria’s acquisitions policy was a precursor to a law passed by the King of France more than a thousand years later. Established in 1537 by the Ordonnance de Montpellier, “legal deposit” prevented printers and publishers from selling a book unless a copy was given to the royal library at the Château de Blois. The law covered all new books, regardless of their size, cost, genre, or language. (After reestablishing this right of legal deposit, the post-revolutionary Bibliothèque Nationale would also assume the power to preemptively purchase books at auction sales.) In this and other respects, Alexandria is an important waypoint in a continuum that links the collections, policies, and practices of the world’s ancient and modern libraries.

Through a private agreement with the Stationers’ Company, Sir Thomas Bodley established England’s first legal deposit scheme in 1610. The company agreed to send to the Bodleian Library “a copy of every book entered in their Register on condition that the books thus given might be borrowed if needed for reprinting, and that the books given to the Library by others might be examined, collated and copied by the Company.” Unlike the Egyptians and the French, Bodley seems to have intended the scheme to be selective rather than comprehensive. Tellingly, he reprimanded the University Librarian, Thomas James, for cataloguing many “idle bookes and riffe raffes” unworthy of the Bodleian. In 1662 the scheme was extended to the Royal Library and the Cambridge University Library, and these collections too obtained much “riffe raffe.”

With such a concentration of books and scholarship, Alexandria was naturally home to spectacular achievements in medicine, astronomy, and geometry. Eratosthenes worked out ninety-nine percent of the circumference of the Earth. Archimedes worked out 99.9 percent of pi. In the history of Western thought, the library came to rival Athens as an intellectual powerhouse. Alexandria’s collection was specifically a scholars’ library; the Ptolemies regarded men like Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and Euclid as the ideal users. A whole other class of user, though, also had a stake in the library.

Not far from Alexandria’s perilous red-light district, the city’s merchant quarter hosted a boisterous array of booksellers. “Disreputable” and “unscrupulous” were the words most often used to describe them. They survived on several rackets, one of which was to bribe the librarians to remove scrolls from the collections; the scrolls were then copied, and the booksellers sold the piratical versions locally and abroad.

The Ptolemies’ appetite for the classics was voracious. Apart from mandating the copying of texts, the king sent his agents far and wide to borrow and buy more and more books. This appetite created another opening for book-world entrepreneurs. A class of para-literary workers on the fringes of the library produced forgeries, then collaborated with the booksellers to distribute them, and, often, to sell them to the library. Apocryphal Aristotelian treatises were a favorite, and were produced to a convincingly high standard. Only after centuries of subsequent research were they proven to be bogus.

Even legitimate-seeming scholars produced fraudulent works for sale to the library. Posing as an Athenian contemporary and confidant of Thucydides, the scholar Cratippus wrote Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid, “in which he made happy use of bombast and anachronism.” The book found its way into the collection, where it was treated as a legitimate text. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch both took the manuscript seriously. This style of work, parasitically piggy-backing on the reputation of a valued author, would become a staple of fraudulent publishing in the early-modern era and well into the Enlightenment. Names as famous as Shakespeare, Johnson, and Swift would appear on books cobbled together by opportunistic and anonymous authors.

Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé is a lurid retelling of the shadowy history of Alexandria’s library. Herr Doktor Peter Kien, the novel’s main protagonist, is a middle-aged Sinologist and voracious book-buyer. In Kien’s childhood he had stowed away in a bookshop overnight—just so he could be, like Salmasius, with the books. Now in adulthood, he assembles in his apartment a personal collection of 25,000 volumes, the most important private library in Vienna. He surrounds himself with so many books that he must wall up his windows to accommodate more shelves. Kien’s world is full of dangers, especially those of social interaction and bacteriological infection. One dread, though, stands out above all others. Kien’s insatiable appetite for books is matched by a fear that they will be lost in fire.

Conned by everyone around him, Kien marries his housekeeper Therese—“a sturdy peasant type,” who has “her eye on the main chance”—with the idea that she will dust his books and help keep them safe. Within days of the marriage she begins to take charge. Kien must give up three-quarters of his library as a living space for his new wife. Then he is forced out of his apartment altogether. Homeless, he enters a nightmarish underworld of seedy bars, bungling police, apparitions, molesters, cutthroats, and con-artists.

Descending into madness, Kien employs Fischerle, an unscrupulous, chess-playing, hump-backed dwarf, to catalogue the library that exists in the bibliophile’s head. At the local pawnshop, Kien appoints himself principal book-rescuer. Whenever customers arrive with books to pawn, Kien pays for them and sends the would-be hocker away with a lecture on the proper care of books. This gives Fischerle an idea. He and his gang assemble fake parcels of worthless volumes, then take them to the pawnshop. Again Kien pays for them, and the gang members share the proceeds.

While Kien is thus engaged, Therese searches the flat for her husband’s bank book, and for a dead body or some other clue to his cumulative mania. Things come to a head when she appears at the pawnbrokers to sell a pile of his books. At the novel’s climax, Kien returns to his book-filled apartment, sets it alight, climbs to the sixth rung of a ladder, and waits, laughing. The book ends in fire and madness, with Kien’s library destroyed. The Great Library of Alexandria flourished for three centuries, or perhaps as many as nine—from around 300 B.C. to 642 A.D.—no one knows for sure. But it, too, ended in mass destruction.

Many different stories have been told about how the library came to an end. Perhaps an accidental blaze destroyed it in 47 B.C. Perhaps it was a casualty of a first-century pagan revolt against Alexandria’s Christianization. Or perhaps Roman Emperor Aurelian’s troops destroyed it in 273 A.D. when they set fire to Alexandria’s royal quarter. According to the most colorful story, the seventh-century Caliph Omar ordered the library’s books to be distributed among the city’s bathhouses, where they were burned to heat the waters. It took six months, so the story goes, to burn them all. An altogether different school of thought is that, long before Omar, the manuscripts had simply worn out. Papyrus is a terrible material for preserving texts. Without a large and unwavering commitment to conservation and copying, a library of papyrus scrolls will readily and unceremoniously disintegrate—especially in the damp conditions of a river delta. Alexandria’s library might have just faded away.

Whatever the cause, virtually every scroll in the library was destroyed. In Greek drama alone, the losses were devastating: 83 of Aeschylus’s 90 plays were lost, along with 62 of Euripides’s 80, and 113 of Sophocles’s 120. Some books, though, including those backstreet bootleg copies, found their way into collections in Greece, the Levant, and especially Constantinople. Today, the editions pirated by booksellers account for a high proportion of the surviving texts from Alexandria.

For however many centuries, Alexandria had preserved and promoted the Greek literary heritage. In turn, that tradition passed to the great libraries of Constantinople—the Imperial, Patriarcha, and University libraries—which maintained it for another thousand years. Though scholars at those libraries produced little that was new or creative, they edited, annotated, and elucidated the standard classical texts, thereby guarding them for the future.

In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. Many of the Greek scholars who’d established schools on the shores of the Bosphorus left for Italy. Italians at the same time rushed to those shores to acquire books. The Sicilian humanist, Hellenist, and manuscript collector Giovanni Aurispa went to great lengths to obtain manuscripts there: “I remember having given up my clothes to the Greeks in Constantinople in order to get codices—something for which I feel neither shame nor regret.’

By sea and by land, along trade routes and pilgrim routes, the books and texts from Constantinople fed Eastern and Western monasteries and other public and private collections such as the papal library, the Ambrosian, and the Laurentian. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire elevated Rome, Milan, and Florence as centers of classical learning. It also helped make Venice a center for trade in Greek manuscripts. Impacts were felt further afield, too, at emerging and later libraries such as the Bodleian, Königsberg, and Wolfenbüttel. Ultimately, books and texts from Constantinople nourished the world. The histories of humankind’s libraries are intricately interwoven. Occurring over millennial time frames, the interlibrary movement of books and ideas marked out nonlinear trails of study, editing, translation, exchange, innovation, and appropriation—tracks that are just as arcane and marvelous as the sacred songlines of ancient Australia.

THE LIBRARY A CATALOGUE OF WONDERS

STUART KELLS

The Brooklyn Enigma

 

My discovery of the Brooklyn Enigma was a mistake.

On one of my recent research trips to Green-Wood Cemetery, I was scouting graves and stories for my upcoming tour, Murder and Mayhem, Scandal and Spiritualism. I was using one of the cemetery-issued tourist maps, the kind you might be familiar with if you’ve ever visited on your own. I always try to steer clear of any points of interest listed on these — I call my tour “Green-Wood Off The Map” — but I rely on them while scouting, marking them up with notes and names and exes, like strange treasure maps. I have dozens of the little green things in my office, and on this particular day I must have grabbed one that was very old indeed, because I noticed something unusual on it, something I’d never seen on any of the more recent maps.* In one section of the cemetery was the grave of a person identified merely as “THE BROOKLYN ENIGMA.” And that’s how I stumbled on the story of Mollie Fancher, the fasting girl, also known as the Brooklyn Enigma:

“In 1864, sixteen-year-old Mollie Fancher was thrown from a horse while riding in Prospect Park, and her head struck against the pavement. Thereafter she was subject to fainting spells and violent headaches. A year later, on June 8th, 1865, she was dragged a block on the Fulton Street trolley car, which she had attempted to leave while it was still in motion. Her spine was injured, and her nervous system completely deranged. She was able to be about, though ill, until February 3rd, 1866. On the morning of that day… she suddenly shrieked, stood on her toes, and spun around like a top. Then she bent forward, clasped her feet in both hands, and began rolling about the kitchen floor like a hoop. She was carried to her bed, and didn’t leave it for fifty years and eight days, until she died, on February 11, 1916.” (Herbert Asbury, All Around The Town)

While spending fifty years in bed is an enviable enough feat in itself, Mollie’s story only gets even more interesting. While confined to her bed, Mollie developed highly sensitive psychical powers, and her “supernatural powers, clairvoyant gifts, and uncanny exploits” made her home on Gates Avenue a tourist attraction.

Baffling physicians, astounding spectators, and providing newspapermen with endless fodder, Mollie Fancher grew so famous that P.T. Barnum reportedly begged her to tour with him under his management (despite his offer of a swans-down mattress and gold plated bed, she refused). Some of her remarkable feats included finding mislaid articles, describing the “dress and doings” of friends and relatives fifty miles away, predicting thunderstorms several hours before they happened, and reading the contents and letters of unopened books merely by running her hands over them. She could also identify callers at the door before they entered the house. Some attributed her clairvoyant powers to repeated conversations with the dead, or with angels, and some claimed she had been to heaven and back several times.

Throughout her illness, Mollie went in and out of trances, some of which lasted only a few hours, some which continued for days, weeks, and even months. The longest trance lasted nine years:

“Throughout the nine years her eyes remained closed, and for six years her body was cold and rigid, there was no evidence of respiration, her physicians could detect only a slight pulse, and she never spoke. Occasionally she was fed by force, but for some months at a time she was given no nourishment except a little water. During the last three years of the long trance, Miss Fancher’s body relaxed to some extent, she spoke once in a while, and she was able to move her left arm with considerable freedom. In that time, she wrote 6,500 letters, a score of poems and lyric prayers [and] made a satin waist and pleated lining for her coffin,” among other feats, including crocheting and making wax flowers. (Herbert Asbury, All Around The Town)

So somehow, Mollie Fancher managed to be more productive during a prolonged trance than I have been… pretty much ever.

Three years after she woke up from her nine-year trance, she also developed five distinct personalities called Idol, Sunbeam, Ruby, Pearl, and Rosebud. My personal favorite of these is Ruby, who is described as being, “dashing and vivacious, even hoydenish, and very gifted in repartee.”

By 1894, her health was on the mend, and the public had moved on to newer and fresher sensations. She was thereafter, “nothing more than a bedridden old woman with a passion for fancy embroidery and crocheting.” (Herbert Asbury, All Around The Town)

One aspect of Mollie which Asbury’s somewhat hilarious account glosses over is the idea of “the fasting girl.” Fasting girls were a Victorian phenomena of girls who survived on little to no food and claimed to have spiritual or mystical powers. In Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, Joan Jacobs Brumberg ascribes much of their claims to fraud, “hysteria” (in 19th century parlance) or anorexia. These girls may have seen themselves as spiritual mystics in the vein of Catholic saints like Catherine of Siena. In one case, that of Sarah Jacob of Wales, these girls literally starved themselves to death (her parents were later convicted of manslaughter). Others were exposed as frauds. While Mollie Fancher was never proven conclusively to be a fraud, neither were any of her claims of culinary abstinence ever proven definitively. 

Whether fraud, anorexic, or just plain crazy, there is no doubt that Mollie Fancher was a fascinating Brooklynite, one who reminds us of a time when people were keenly interested in the spiritual and mystical, and were ready to believe than an ordinary teenage girl from Gates Avenue may have visited heaven and returned several times over. I’ll be exploring the darker and stranger sides of life in Victorian New York in this Sunday’s Murder and Mayhem, Scandal and Spiritualism tour of Green-Wood Cemetery, where you too can see Mollie’s final resting place. You can buy tickets to the tour here, and if you can’t make it this Sunday, I’ll be running it the first Sunday of every month through November 2014.

* Incidentally, though I can’t tell you exactly when they updated this map, I can tell you that it didn’t have Basquiat labeled on it. I don’t ever remember visiting the cemetery in a pre-Basquiat era, nor do I recall how or when I got this map, or ever seeing it before. Which is all part, I suppose, of the enigma.

https://boroughsofthedead.com/

The pleasure of books

 

Books, Petrarch wrote, heartily delight us, speak to us, counsel us, and are joined to us by a living and active relationship. Instructing his servants to guard his library as they would a shrine, he kept up an active acquaintance with his books, just as if they were friends capable of talking. The Ottoman poet Abdüllatif Çelebi called each of his books a true and loving friend who drives away all cares. Umberto Eco imagined his books talking among themselves, while Alberto Manguel called the writing of endpaper notes the habit of speaking of a book behind its back.

Elias Canetti’s 1935 novel, Auto-da-Fé, meditated on the precise nature of books’ genial proclivities: “What proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?”

Regard for books often goes beyond convivial attachment. Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin are three famous literary men who kissed their books. Henry Crabb Robinson once saw Coleridge kiss the engraved title page of his copy of Spinoza. Thomas à Kempis told his students to take a book “into thine hands as Simeon the Just took the Child Jesus into his arms to carry him and kiss him.” During Benedetto Croce’s youth, he kissed the pages of Pellico’s Le mie prigioni in an ecstasy of joy.

Deidre Shauna Lynch wrote an excellent book on the subject of book-love and its physical manifestations. Titled Loving Literature, Lynch’s monograph chronicles hundreds of instances in which books were kissed, caressed, and even fondled. Seventeenth-century naval administrator, politician, and diarist Samuel Pepys took this game to a whole new level, if we are to believe his account of buying Voragine’s 1521 Golden Legend on April 10, 1668: “So to piper and Duck Lane, and there kissed bookseller’s wife and bought Legend.’

Reading one book while recalling another was, according to the poet Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, one of the most delicate forms of adultery. The Folger librarian Louis Wright wrote of an English wife who parted company with her husband because he insisted upon reciting Shakespeare in the middle of the night. A perhaps less fortunate wife, from Los Angeles, had the same problem except that her husband read Emerson.

Assembling a library is a minefield of etiquette. In the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical and monastic librarians divided sacred from profane books, and were forbidden from placing “unholy” books above holy ones, even in temporary storage. Commenting on a friend’s library in the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris complained that pagan authors were separated from Christian ones, “the pagans near the gentlemen’s seats, the Christians near the ladies.” In a similar spirit, an 1863 book of etiquette and deportment instructed book owners to segregate the works of male and female authors, “unless they happen to be married.”

Though himself married, Isaac Gosset advocated the bachelor state for collectors. “Never think of marriage,” he would say to young book-lovers, “and if the thought should occur, take down a book and begin to read until it vanishes.” Bibliophiles frequently refer to themselves as “wedded” to their books; those unable to resist the charms of human marriage have been known to keep their purchases secret from their human spouses. To avoid that necessity, the author and librarian A. N. L. “Tim” Munby advised new and prospective husbands that the “education” of wives must be started early: “a visit to at least one bookshop a day throughout the honeymoon is to be recommended.” In 1917 Margaret Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, married the surgeon and bookman Geoffrey Keynes. When the honeymooners visited a bookshop, Margaret complained of feeling faint. Geoffrey “took her outside and made her comfortable, then went back to finish the shop.” A long and happy marriage followed.

(Geoffrey’s older brother was the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. A member of the liberated Bloomsbury group, Maynard married a ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Serious and introverted Geoffrey found playful and outgoing Lydia utterly baffling. At Maynard’s funeral in 1946, Geoffrey wore a black coat and striped trousers. “Oh, Geoffrey,” Lydia said, “you look so sexy.” Afterwards, Geoffrey asked several of his friends, “What can she have meant?”)

An excessive attachment to books can be dangerous. Desiderius Erasmus had clear priorities. “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” The French philologist and lawyer Salmasius asked to be locked inside the library at Heidelberg. There he remained for forty-eight hours with neither food nor drink—sustained only by his proximity to treasured books. Leigh Hunt recorded how Elizabeth West, wife of the painter Benjamin West, was so fond of books she became a martyr to them, her physician declaring “she lost the use of her limbs by sitting indoors reading.” The Greek philosopher Carneades “was so deeply plunged in an overweening desire for knowledge, so besotted with it, that he never had leisure to cut his hair, or pare his nails.” The philologist Budaeus showed his commitment in a different way. When a servant rushed into his study to warn him that the house was on fire, Budaeus replied, “Tell my wife that I never interfere with the household,” and he went on reading.

**

Books in bed

Books will sleep with you. The seventeenth-century Belgian politician and bibliophile Charles van Hulthem assembled a personal collection of 32,000 volumes, “all excellent copies,” many of them great rarities. In Great Libraries, Anthony Hobson wrote of how the books “filled to overflowing one house in Brussels and another in Ghent. Books were heaped on every table, so that there was never room to spread a tablecloth, and stood in piles in the alcove where he slept.” Van Hulthem allowed no fire in the house—that would be just too dangerous. On cold nights he kept warm in bed by spreading folios on his feet. The best book for this purpose was Barlaeus’s voluminous account of Maurice of Nassau’s expedition to Brazil. Van Hulthem would sometimes be found “contemplating with infantile pleasure an engraving of a fine female torso”—his sole contact with the opposite sex.

The Medici librarian Antonio di Marco Magliabecchi was renowned as a literary glutton who possessed a memory “like wax to receive and marble to retain.” According to Holbrook Jackson, author of Anatomy of Bibliomania, Magliabecchi “lived in a cavern of books, slept on them, wallowed in them”;

they were his bed and board, his only furniture, his chiefest need. For sleep he spread an old rug over a heap of them and so composed himself; or he would cast himself, fully clothed, among the books which covered his couch.

Jackson describes another bibliomaniac, active at the start of the nineteenth century. His collection was “choice, costly, and copious,” and no man loved more to “embed himself” among the books and documents:

his pillow-case, Columbus’s Letter of 1493, stitched to the original Challenge of Crichton; his counterpane, the large paper Hearnes, formerly in Dr Mead’s library, “still glittering in their primitive morocco attire”; his mattress, large paper Dugdales; his bed-curtains, “slips of the original Bayeux Tapestry.”

Jeanette Winterson is another bibliophile who slept on a bed of books. Her parents were strict Pentecostal evangelists. In her childhood the outside toilet was the best venue for clandestine reading. There, Winterson first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence, “and perhaps that was the best place, after all,” she remarked. A rubber torch was the only source of reading light. “I had to divide my money from a Saturday job, between buying books and buying batteries.” Winterson’s mother knew exactly how many Evereadys were needed “to illuminate the gap that separated the toilet paper from its function.”

Once I had tucked the book back down my knickers to get it indoors again, I had to find somewhere to hide it, and anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that seventy-seven can be accommodated per layer under the mattress.

As her collection grew and her bed began visibly to rise, Winterson worried that her mother might notice. When in fact she did, the books fed the fire.

The designers of the British Museum’s famous reading room have achieved the wonderful illusion that the enormous dome is suspended, like Jeanette Winterson’s mattress, on layers of books.

THE LIBRARY A CATALOGUE OF WONDERS

STUART KELLS