SOURCE: Haynes, Jonathan. “The Literary Character of the Relation.” In The Humanist as Traveler: George Sandys's Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986, 160 p.

[In the following excerpt, Haynes offers a detailed analysis of the literary qualities of Relation.]

It is already been said that the Relation is the most “literary” of English Renaissance travel books; the purpose of this chapter is to estimate what this means. The polish of its prose, the poetic translations with which it is studded, and the erudition with which it sometimes bristles are easy enough to notice, but they need to be understood as something more than a literary veneer, however attractive this is thought to be, let alone a layer of pedantry larded onto an original travel journal. It is the Relation's full engagement with humanist learning that is most significant about it in literary historical terms, and for interpretative purposes it is crucial to understand how it participates in a literary system, and how the experiences of Sandys the traveler are related to the purposes of Sandys the writer.

The presence of other texts in Sandys's book does not simply serve to mediate his perceptions of the eastern Mediterranean, though it certainly does that in important ways; the other texts are inherent in his subject matter, are his subject matter. Traveling in the world and reading about it are inseparable activities. Michel Foucault has explained this as a characteristic of 16th century epistemology, speaking of “a non-distinction between what is seen and what is read, between observation and relation, which results in the constitution of a single, unbroken surface in which observation and language intersect to infinity.” He continues, discussing the naturalist Aldrovandi:

When one is faced with the task of writing an animal's history, it is useless and impossible to choose between the profession of naturalist and that of compiler: one has to collect together into one and the same form of knowledge all that has been seen and heard, all that has been recounted, either by nature or by men, by the language of the world, by tradition, or by the poets. To know an animal or a plant, or any terrestrial thing whatever, is to gather together the whole dense layer of signs with which it or they may have been covered …¹

In general what places mean to Sandys is closely related to what they have always meant. Fame is as much his subject as a more factual history: his dominant theme is the contrast between ancient fame and modern desolation. The poets and the historians are his natural allies in this project. So everything that has been written about the places he visits becomes part of his subject matter, as much so as the place itself. The poets are sources and conveyors of fame; they are also evidence of it. Sandys establishes that Sicily deserves the epithet “Queene of the Mediterranean islands” by piling up passages about it from famous authors, thereby simultaneously measuring and specifying the significance Sicily has for an educated European (pp. 234-35).

He will use the literary tradition associated with a place as the surest guide to its significance as long as such a tradition is available to him. His description of Naples, for instance, may owe an unacknowledged debt to an anonymous “Relatione di Napoli”² and perhaps to other such literature as well as to Statius and Virgil and the Neo-Latin poets who are quoted, but this reliance on a local tradition of writing about Naples was surely deliberate and nothing Sandys would have apologized for. He quotes a poem in which Statius describes the varieties of beautiful stone brought from all over the Greek world to adorn Naples, which might serve as a metaphor for the way the Naples he builds with words incorporates materials which are already beautiful and multicolored and polished. A Naples made out of prose and poetry already exists, and it is as much “there” for Sandys as the physical city. The literary Naples is an emanation of the city, spoken through its writers, a collectively elaborated re-creation that has the same history as the city itself. Sandys's Naples should be, as far as possible, a translation of this language whose relation with the city is intimate and long established, giving it an authority and authenticity, a correspondence of word and thing which could never be obtained by the invention of a single foreign observer. To be sure these materials are not so firmly organized that they do not permit Sandys to rearrange and select them to serve his own purposes, to mold them in the form required by his book, and the translation into English involves some transformations which are not merely linguistic; but there is no attempt to denature the sources. A note of native pride and enthusiasm about the city is carried over into Sandys's prose.

Occasionally the ancient reputation of a place absorbs Sandys's attention to the point that the modern site is altogether displaced from his account. For example nearly everything he has to say about Sinuessa (on the coast of Campania) is concerned with a paradoxical opposition between health and depravity, illustrated by several incidents from Roman history.

These waters are said to cure women of their barrennesse, and men of their madnesse; but men rather here lose their wits with too much sensuality, as women that defect by the forfeiture of their vertues; sicknesse being but a pretence of their gadding: of old iested at by the Epigrammatist [Martial] …

[P. 303]

He does not explore the claim that the waters are medicinal, nor is it clear the baths still exist—all we are told about what was there in 1611 is that “Sinuessa shewed us her relikes.”

But Sandys's themes find their fullest expression when both terms, ancient reputation and modern desolation, are in play. The relation between them can be intricately developed, as in his description of the Roman pleasure resort of Baiae. The descrition of the ancient city is effected largely through passages from Horace, Martial, Seneca and Ovid, which are already concerned with its reputation.³ Perhaps the most crucial one is from Horace, introduced as a transition (and a connection) between the account of its physical site and an evaluation of its emblematic moral significance.

They forced the Sea to retire, and affoord a foundation for their sumptuous buildings. Scoft at in a certaine old man by the Lyric:

Thou marble putst to cut, thy end now neare,
And thoughtlesse of thy tombe, do'st houses reare:
Inforcing Baiae to vsurpe the bound
Of muttering seas; not pleasd with the dry ground.

Hor. 1.2 Od. 18

AEgyptian Canopus, mentioned before, was a schoole of vertue compared to the voluptuous liberty of this City. The Inne (saith Seneca) and receptable for vices …

[P. 291]

In 1611 there is nothing left but some ruins.

But behold an egregious example, that pronounceth the works of mens hands as fraile as the workmen. Baiae, not much inferiour vnto Rome in magnificency, equall in beautie, and superiour in healthfull situation, hath now scarce one stone left aboue another, demolished by warre, and deuoured by water. For it should seeme that the Lombards and Saracens in the destruction hereof had not onely a hand; but that the extruded sea hath againe regained his vsurped limits: made apparent by the paued streets, and traces of foundations to be seene vnder water.

[P. 292]

Time has pointed the moral of the Horace poem; Sandys's transition to the modern ruins illustrates a process whose terms and even the images by which it is expressed had already been thoroughly prepared for him. Baiae is a kind of commonplace in the moral inheritance from antiquity, and that fact is more interesting and important than archaeological details about the site: the commonplace determines the way in which the place will be considered.

By no means all of the classical quotations and references carry so much thematic weight: the majority are inserted because they contain a relevant bit of information. Sandys committed himself in the dedication to describing the ancient as well as present states of the places he visited, and this could best be done out of ancient authors. The epics in particular are filled with various kinds of historical materials in which the Renaissance was very much interested: genealogies, stories about the foundations of cities and kingdoms, migrations, customs, and so on. They could still be taken seriously as the authoritative compendia of the arts and sciences of their civilizations.

Seriously, but not uncritically—there are passages crowded with ancient authorities who have lost their authority. A story about a friendly dolphin leads Sandys to compile all the dolphin lore he can find, but one gets the impression that he is playing with his library in a mood of amused scepticism:

But beleeue who that will, the story of the Dolphin frequenting this Lake, reported by Plinie vpon the testimony of Maecenas, Flauianus, and Flauius Alsius, who insert it in their chronicles; … Appian both witnesse as much: and Solinus … Pausanias doth report himself to haue bene an eye witnesse almost of the like. And Pliny. … If these be true, why may we not credite the story of Arion the musitian … related by Herodotus and others? But because I thinke it a fable, I will rather choose the report of a Poet [Ovid] …

[Pp. 276-77]

The authority of the ancients assures that their opinion will be heard, but Sandys does not feel compelled to agree with them. This does not always advance our understanding of the object under scrutiny. Sandys's procedure in this passage and others is critical, but it does not lead to the truth—the process of inquiry ends when the sources give out. He is not committed to the truth of any one particular text, but he is committed to basing his intellectual life in a body of texts; knowledge is organized as the accretion of commentaries, a system in which the original text is never thrown away. Sandys's later masterpiece is a compendium of the Renaissance arts and sciences arranged as a commentary on Ovid—a massive illustration of this habit of mind.

Within such a system criticism of sources is necessary in order to keep ancient errors from being endlessly reproduced. Verification of inherited descriptions of the places he visited was certainly one of Sandys's major purposes. Normally it is the ancients who are used to further Sandys's descriptive purposes, but sometimes the balance is reversed and an independent interest in producing footnotes to the ancient authors emerges: the reason for visiting Troy is in order to be able to write a topographical commentary on Homer and Virgil. Here too Sandys was following his readers' interests: a great deal of what the terrain meant to them arose from its associations with the familiar classics.

There is also a handful of references and quotations that are likely to strike a modern reader as perfectly irrelevant. They are mostly the result of Sandys's habit of deriving whatever he can from a classical source. This was, of course, a habit Sandys shared with other humanists, and it usually stands him in good stead. But it occasionally results in pseudo-derivations like the following, about the Moors in Acre:

Here wrastle they in breeches of oyled leather, close to their thighs: their bodies naked and annointed according to the ancient vse, deriued, as it should seeme by Virgil, from the Trojans;

Disrob'd they wrastle in their countries guise
With gliding oyle———

[p. 205]

This peculiar use of “according to” was common among Sandys's contemporaries: it means “corresponding to”, though it suggests something more. “Derived” can refer to nothing but “the ancient use,” and Sandys knows it, but he clearly wishes it were otherwise and the grammar comes perilously close to fulfilling his desires at the expense of historical accuracy. Sandys's mind contained an enormous archive of erudite information such as this, and sometimes he succumbs to the temptation to make connections within the archive, though he cannot relate them historically to anything he sees. Similarly, he occasionally seems to imply knowledge of the classics in people (like the Turks) who cannot have known them:

With the Stoicks they attribute all accidentes to destinie, and constellations at birth, and say with the Tragedian [Seneca],

Fates guide us …

[P. 57]

If a foreigner expresses a belief similar to one which has received canonical expression in the western tradition, the two will be coupled rather unscrupulously and, we may feel, gratuitously. In this too Sandys was following a venerable tradition: one remembers Mandeville's Far Eastern polygamists quoting (in Latin) the Biblical injunction to multiply and subdue the earth. One might undertake a defense of such illogical conjunctions of the ancient and the foreign on the grounds that knowledge of the ancient world, which was held in common by the learned of Europe, contained the largest body of ethnological data the Renaissance had; references to it might constitute an attempt to establish rudimentary categories by which data could be organized and assimilated in the absence of more abstract categories. It might also be said that any attempt by a Renaissance writer to establish a continuity of moral life between himself and a foreigner should be applauded. Using classical intermediaries also created problems, but if it helped, so much the better. …

While the ancient poets and historians are proudly displayed on the surface of the text, acknowledgment of contemporary sources is minimal, erratic, and often misleading. (Other travelers are usually mentioned only when they stand in need of correction.) The attentive reader may, for instance, be disconcerted to notice that Sandys sails by Cyprus and Crete without going ashore, although he inserts full descriptions of both islands (pp. 218-25) which are almost indistinguishable from his normal manner. E. S. de Beer has written a short study of a section of Book 4 showing in some detail how Sandys used his sources for this passage; showing, in fact, that the passage is almost entirely a compilation from four Italian sources.⁴ Sandys's appropriation of these sources is thorough and critical; he takes over small units, often smaller than a sentence, rearranging them and using them to construct his own patterns and carry his own themes.

These sections of the Relation are not at all typical of the whole book, but they are revealing of the extent to which the literary tradition could become self-sustaining and self-enclosing. Admittedly, source studies is a cruel science when directed at travel literature, at least as long as one believes that romance and novelty and authenticity are at the heart of the genre. Sandys's procedures will not surprise anyone familiar with the ways of Renaissance travel writers, for whom outright plagiarism and “personal” accounts of places where they had never been were standard. Sandys is actually quite scrupulous about both matters: one can always tell whether he did or did not go to the place he is describing, though he may not emphasize the distinction, and he always reworks his materials. But source studies will help us to locate Sandys's intentions and originality. He was interested in being accurate, critical and useful, rather than romantic and novel, and used authenticity to buttress his authoritativeness rather than as an end in itself.

Although the Relation is loosely organized around Sandys's itinerary, the narrative of his personal experiences has to compete with other forms of narration which are often of greater structural importance; no meanings as important as those connected with the public moral and historical theme of “threatening instructions” are generated around these personal experiences.

There is a complete lack of personal reflection in Sandys's Relation. This is doubtless partly the result of his disinterest in writing about himself. Shortly before his death he wrote one of his very few original poems, “Deo Opt. Max.,” of which the second part is a brief autobiography.

O who hath tasted of Thy clemency
In greater measure or more oft than I!
My grateful verse Thy goodness shall display,
O Thou, Who went'st along in all my way,
To where the morning with perfumed wings
From the high mountains of Panchaea springs;
To that new-found-out world, where sober night
Takes from the antipodes her silent flight;
To those dark seas, where horrid winter reigns,
And binds the stubborn floods in icy chains;
To Lybian wastes, whose thirst no show'rs assuage,
And where swoll'n Nilus cools the lion's rage.
Thy wonders in the deep have I beheld,
Yet all by those on Judah's hills excell'd:
There where the Virgin's Son His doctrine taught,
His miracles, and our redemption wrought:
Where I, by Thee inspir'd, His praises sung,
And on His Sepulchre my off'ring hung.
Which way soe'er I turn my face or feet,
I see Thy glory, and Thy mercy meet.(5)

This passage is utterly characteristic of Sandys: his own life is presented as a commentary on God's mercies; his travels to the four corners of the world (a classical world, which still had corners) frame a central Christian experience at the center of the Christian world. His piety combines with his breadth of experience and learning to transform his life into a pattern, expressed in traditional terms, which carries a religious meaning. The personal element has largely disappeared into this pattern.

In the Relation these same experiences are not organized into any such pattern, even one so self-effacing as this. This is not to say that we do not hear about Sandys's adventures, or that each page is not permeated with his personality and his critical presence. But his trip as such, as a series of personal experiences, is not given a significant form: there is no psychological development, no religious allegory (e.g. of pilgrimage), no deepening of knowledge or poetic impressions. The world Sandys travels through is full of symbolic patterns (and these patterns are the real subject of his book) but they are not attached to his life or (except occasionally) to his passage through the landscape in which they are involved.

The element of personal narrative is so attenuated and intermittent that several conflicting conventions can be used to govern it without producing an effect of incongruity. Sandys calls his book a “Iournall” on page 1 and at various other points—doubtless he kept a journal on which he based the Relation. He refers to “this year 1610” (p. 73), the year of the trip, not of the book, and there are occasional signs of spontaneous composition (“but I had almost forgot the Nestorians,” p. 173), but there is no attempt to present the book as something written up each night. On a few rare occasions he sets up his narration in a day-to-day pattern clearly based on the journal (e.g. as he rows around Sicily), but on the whole the journal form is not adhered to. This greatly reduces the quantity of day-to-day detail given about his trip; it also keeps his book from being clogged with the mechanical recording of movements, as so many travel accounts are. At other times he seems to be reconstructing his account from memory (“as I remember,” “if I forget not”); at others he adopts a guide book style, sometimes taking it over from his source (“you are about to descend,” “Before we go to Putzole”).

Against these passages should be set some which could only have been written in a library—the discussion of the flooding of the Nile, with its crowd of learned authorities, or the pages filled with lengthy quotations from the poets. He does not introduce these quotations as lines he thought of as he stood in front of whatever is being described, although he must often have done so.⁶ We often follow his mind through patterns of association, but they are those of a scholar in a good library rather than those of an enraptured traveller.

Sandys's predominant rhetorical stance, then, locates him in a library rather than on the road. A great deal of the Relation could have been written without leaving England, whereas an account of his trip itself without learning acquired elsewhere would be an unrecognizably different work. As it is the narrative regularly lapses, sometimes for a very long time, while Sandys inserts a description of the place in which he had just arrived, in the manner of Herodotus's accounts of Egypt and Scythia. Or on a smaller scale, Sandys reduces the experiences he had while locked inside the Temple of the Sepulcher in Jerusalem during three days of Holy Week—which must have been chaotic and overwhelming—to an orderly description of the building (following the floor plan, not the order in which he saw it), and a series of ethnologies of the various exotic Christian sects (pp. 160-73).

Sometimes the descriptions are more closely linked to Sandys's experiences than this, but it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the structural role of the trip and the narrative of it functions chiefly as a means of moving from one place (with its description) to another, and that their importance is reduced, often to nothing, once he arrives. The journal/relation form as he uses it performs this minimal task efficiently, and it makes no further demands on him, though it permits him to insert material arranged with a great deal of formal artistry. It does not force him to give his own experiences any form, and in fact the book as a whole, and the individual books within it, dribble away to disappointingly inconclusive endings. The breakdown of literary form at these points is in striking contrast to the high finish of most of the book, and indicates that Sandys's artistic attention was directed towards the things he saw rather than towards himself as an observer, a matter which seemed not to be in need of discussion.

The traveler in this book is a serious man seeking public meanings through history, allegories, an antique and monumental literary tradition, and so on—he has not equipped himself to observe the accidents and random delicacies of life. Without generic conventions demanding its inclusion, each incident would have to justify its presence in the Relation. It is important to remember that many of the novelistic conventions and techniques with which later travelers give form—and therefore significance—to their experiences had not yet been invented, so that those experiences might pass with no literary record. The result is perhaps less detail than we would like, but on the other hand all the anecdotes Sandys gives us have overcome the lack of supporting conventions and are quite good. If his travel experiences are not of continuous structural importance as the containing form of the contents of the Relation, they are by no means ignored.

Here is an especially fine example, which blossoms as unexpectedly in the text as it did in Sandys's experience. He refuses to leave Malta with his ship:

But no intreatie could get me aboord; choosing rather to vndergo all hazards and hardnesse whatsoeuer, then so long a voyage by sea, to my nature so irksome. And so was I left alone on a naked promentorie right against the Citie, remote from the concourse of people, without prouision, and not knowing how to dispose of my selfe. At length a little boate made towards me, rowed by an officer appointed to attend on strangers that had not Pratticke, lest others by coming into their companie should receiue the infection: who carried me to the hollow hanging of a rocke, where I was for that night to take vp my lodging; and the day following to be conueyed by him vnto the Lazaretta, there to remaine for thirtie or fortie daies before I could be admitted into the Citie. But behold an accident, which I rather thought at first to haue bene a vision, then (as I found it) reall. My guardian being departed to fetch me some victuals, laid along, and musing on my present condition, a Phalucco arriueth at the place. Out of which there stept two old women; the one made me doubt whether she were so or no, she drew her face into so many formes, and with such anticke gestures stared vpon me. These two did spread a Turkie carpet on the rocke, and on that a table-cloth, which they furnished with varietie of the choisest viands. Anon another arriued, which set a Gallant ashore with his two Amarosaes, attired like Nymphs, with lutes in their hands, full of disport and sorcery. For little would they suffer him to eate, but what he receiued with his mouth from their fingers. Sometimes the one would play on the lute whilest the other sang, and laid his head in her lap; their false eies looking vpon him, as if their hearts were troubled with passions. The attending hags had no small part in the comedie, administring matter of mirth with their ridiculous moppings. Who indeed (as I after heard) were their mothers; borne in Greece, and by them brought hither to trade amongst the vnmarried fraternitie. At length the French Captaine (for such he was, and of much regard) came and intreated me to take a part of their banquet; which my stomacke perswaded me to accept of. He willed them to make much of the Forestier: but they were not to be taught entertainment; and grew so familiar, as was to neither of our likings. But both he and they, in pitie of my hard lodging, did offer to bring me into the Citie by night (an offence, that if knowne, is punished by death,) and backe againe in the morning. Whilest they were vrging me thereunto, my guardian returned; with him a Maltese, whose father was an English man: he made acquainted therewith, did by all meanes dehort them. At length (the Captaine hauing promised to labour my admittance into the Citie) they departed. When a good way from shore, the curtizans stript themselues, and leapt into the sea; where they violated all the prescriptions of modestie. But the Captaine the next morning was not vndmindfull of this promise; solicting the Great Maister in my behalfe, as he sate in councel; who with the assent of the great Crosses, granted me Pratticke. So I came into the Citie, and was kindly entertained in the house of the aforesaid Maltese; where for three weekes space, with much contentment I remained.

[P. 227]

This episode justifies itself as it is directly concerned with the basic plot of Sandys's travels—but he has clearly seen, and taken, the opportunity to “make something of” it. He makes a literary anecdote, loosely based on literary conventions. At the beginning of this paragraph we get an unprecedented amount of attention to Sandys's personal situation and state of mind. He has suddenly become a fictional character, the kind of forlorn pastoral solitary to whom visions occur. The unreality of this “vision” and its vaguely literary resonances allow Sandys to fictionalize it in the heightened terms of a Romance adventure (“full of disport and sorcery”). He is of course greatly aided in this project by the theatricality of the participants (“attired like Nymphs”). This adventure and the terms with which to express it are thrust upon him, and he accepts them; but it should also be clear how unByronic Sandys is. He is not given to romanticizing his experiences. Nor does he allegorize them (although this episode clearly establishes Guyon as Sandys's great original). Any Renaissance traveler was by an inevitable convention an Odysseus, but few encountered such palpable incarnations of the Homeric temptresses—it is probably to Sandys's credit that he avoided an easy allusion, and this too is typical of him. The proximity of the Romance conventions allows the narrative to burst into unusual fictional vividness for a moment, but Sandys restrains the invocation of a model which would overburden the situation and imply a continued allegory which does not exist. The effect of this anecdote is strictly local and self-contained.

Other incidents with less literary flavor serve to convey local color and national character; another sort of personal experience is described because it will be relevant to other travellers. The Relation is not primarily intended as a travel guide, but it does contain a considerable amount of information on subjects such as methods of transportation, tariffs, and especially dangerous passages. These and other incidents are related to the conditions (political, historical, economic, military, and so on) which gave rise to them. Sandys is very attentive to the web of such forces through which he moves, and when they affect his movement he uses the occasion to talk about them. The concrete immediacy of these incidents supplements the more extended and formal descriptions of institutions and historical events.

Passing remarks about the conditions of travel can be very poignant. Sandys gets his Greek sailors to put him ashore at Troy only “with much importunitie and promise of reward (it being a matter of danger)” (p. 19). The fear of pirates keeps Sandys from exploring the whole site: he has to content himself with a view of the plain from the Promontory of Sigeum. This means he must rely on Pierre Belon for a description of the ruins of Ilium (p. 22), although from where he stands he can tell that Belon has poorly described the rivers on the plain, and he will later express his contempt for Belon's powers of observation in the only other reference to him (on p. 31). Of course an accurate description of the site would require the techniques of modern archaeology, but we see here a serious attempt to apply careful classical scholarship and some archaeological sophistication, an attempt which is thwarted by conditions rendering it impossible for the observer to approach the object of his study. The implications of this are important for the form and quality of European scholarship: the East (and parts of Europe as well) was not accessible as it would be later during Western imperialist domination of the region.⁷

In 1610 piracy in the Mediterranean was at its height (Elizabeth's now unemployed sea-dogs being not the least of the problem), the political and military situation in the Lebanon was as usual chaotic and dangerous, the deserts of Arabia, Egypt and Palestine were inhabited by Bedouin who made their living by robbery and extortion, Palestine was further beset by lawless troops connected with the fighting against the Persians in Syria, the Sicilians were so hostile that travel in the interior was impossible except for large well-armed bands (Sandys cannot climb Mt. Aetna because “the countrey hereabout is daily foraged by theeues,” p. 242), and in Calabria “Ouer-land there is no trauelling without assured pillage, and hardly to be auoided murder” (p. 250). So the story goes—it is too familiar to the 17th century traveler to call for much comment. The traveler could not wander freely over the landscape: he was almost always confined to the network (ship, embassy, caravan) which assured him a tolerable degree of safety. Understandably, his narrative was also confined to a well-beaten path.

Sandys the traveler often seems like a fugitive, with only a distant and precarious view of sights too dangerous to approach; this is in contrast to the assured sense of familiarity and possession with respect to the same landscape which emanates from the poets and historians of Imperial Rome. The rising cultural power of the Renaissance had reduced these authors to a province of learning, but it had not yet attacked the East politically. So it tended to base its descriptions on these sources which were in its domain, subject to established critical methods, and available for leisurely contemplation, rather than on the actuality which was not subdued by teams of surveyors, anthropologists, travel writers or painters, and the military and political power which made this invasion possible.

The fugitive quality of Sandys's travels is not something he dwells on: we usually discover it only because he is (as has been said) unusually scrupulous about telling us exactly what he has seen with his own eyes. He supplies the deficiencies of his own observation fully and for the most part silently out of ancient or, when necessary, modern authors. The contrast between his experiences and the collective store of knowledge on which he draws is usually disguised rather than developed. One of the more remarkable exceptions to this is the description of his ride around Mount Carmel, and it is very much to the point here, because his experience was determined by the political situation—the situation in Palestine as a whole, and in the tourist network in particular. Sandys had contracted with a Muccermen (muleteer) to take him to Acre, much to the anger of a Greek named Atala whom Sandys had already mentioned as rapaciously abusing his monopoly on the conveyance of pilgrims between Jerusalem and the ports. Eight miles beyond Rama

… the Muccermen would haue stayd (which we would not suffer being then the best time of the day for trauell) that they might by night haue auoided the next village, with the paiments there due: where we were hardly intreated by the procurement of Attala, who holds correspondency with Moores of those quarters. They would not take lesse than foure dollars a man (when perhaps as many Medeins were but due) and that with much iangling. They sought occasion how to trouble vs; beating vs off our Mules, because forsooth we did not light to do homage to a sort of halfe-clad rascals; pulling the white Shash from the head of the Portugall (whereby he well hoped to haue past for a Turke) his Iannizary looking on. Here detained they vs vntil two of the clock the next morning, without meate, without sleepe, couched on the wet earth, and washed with raine; yet expecting worse, and then suffered vs to depart. After a while we entred a goodly forest, full of tall and delightful trees, intermixed with fruitfull and flowery launes. Perhaps the earth affoordeth not the like; it cannot a more pleasant. Hauing passed this part of the wood (the rest inclining to the West, and then againe extending to the North) we might discouer a number of stragling tents, some iust in our way, and neare to the skirts of the forrest. These were Spaheis belonging to the hoast of Morat Bassa, then in the confines of Persia. They will take (especially from a Christian) whatsoeuer they like; and kindly they vse him if he passe without blowes: nor are their Commanders at all times free from their insolencies. To auoid them, we strucke out of the way, and crossed the pregnant champion to the foot of the mountaines, where for that day we reposed our selues: when it grew dark, we arose, inclining on the left hand, mingling after a while with a small Caruan of Moores; enjoyned to silence, and to ride without our hats, lest discouered for Christians. The clouds fell down in streames, and the pitchie night had bereft vs of the conduct of our eyes, had not the lightning affoorded a terrible light. And when the raine intermitted, the aire appeared as if full of sparkles of fire, borne to and fro with the wind, by reason of the infinite swarmes of flies that do shine like glow-wormes, to a stranger a strange spectacles. In the next wood we outstript that Caruan, where the theeuish Arabs had made sundry fires; to which our footmen drew neare to listen, that we might passe more securely. An houre after midnight the skie began to cleare, when on the other side of the wood we fell amongst certain tents of Spaheis; by whom we past with as little noise as we could, secured by their sounder sleepings. Not farre beyond, through a large glade, betweene two hills, we leisurely descended for the space of two houres (a torrent rushing down on the left hand of vs) when not able longer to keepe the backes of our mules, we laid vs downe in the bottome vnder a plump of trees on the far side of a torrent. With the Sunne we arose, and found our selues at the East end, and North side of mount Carmel.

[Pp. 202-3]

The moment Sandys relocates himself northeast of Mount Carmel he can resume his more normal style. The ability to name the mountain restores his access to all the accumulated knowledge about it: he can provide a perspicatious general description of it, can quote Suetonius on the oracle of the god Carmelus, can give a brief history of the Carmelite Friars. The sentences regain the pomp and complexity appropriate to their freight of history and historical sensibility:

Ten miles South of this, stood that famous Caesarea (more anciently called the Tower of Strato, of a King of Aradus the builder so named who liued in the dayes of Alexander) in such sort reedified by Herod, that it little declined in magnificency from the principall cities of Asia; now leuell with the floore, the hauen lost, and situation abandoned.

[P. 203]

It does not matter that Sandys did not see this site—the paragraph about Mount Carmel which this sentence concludes contains no reference to the traveler George Sandys.

But in the earlier passage the pressures of a hostile environment interrupt Sandys's leisurely ride past the antiquities of the Holy Land, physically assaulting him and threatening worse, forcing him to be literally a fugitive. As a result the landscape draws more closely around the traveler, losing its names and its history, translating itself into a series of intense experiences. These experiences are of wildly different kinds—fear, discomfort, wonder at natural beauty, the thrill of adventures in the dark, exhaustion—and the series is as haphazard as it is hazardous. He is wandering in a dark wood with no transcendent allegory to order the sequence. Here if anywhere Sandys feels the traveler's exaltation when his experiences reach the intensity of poetry, but the mystery of the experience is left unexplicated; the exotic flavor of the passage depends on the events themselves. Sandys's prose becomes more detailed to compensate for the lost ability to generalize, to be objective and historical, but remains very simple and unobtrusive. One does not have the impression that the episode is being developed through a conscious literary style, or that Sandys had a style prepared that would do the job. The techniques he uses could not be used to impart atmosphere to a situation less full of interest.

One more long passage may be quoted to illustrate this fact—that some of the more extraordinary of his personal experiences are expressed through a breakdown of his consciously literary style, and not through some set of devices especially elaborated to deal with them. The end of Book 3 brings Sandys to Acre, where he takes ship for England, bringing the Oriental section of his travels to a close. In striking contrast to the opening of Book 4, which is the rhetorical high point of the Relation, Book 3 concludes with a chaotic influx of undigested material.

The next morning after two or three houres riding, we ascended the mountaines of Saron, high and woody; which stretch with intermitted valleys, vnto the sea of Galily; and here haue their white cliffes washt with the surges; called Capo Bianco by the mariner: frequented (though forsaken by men) with Leopards, Bores, Iaccalls, and such like sauage inhabitants. This passage is both dangerous and difficult, neighboured by the precipitating cliffe, and made by the labour of man: yet recompensing the trouble with fragrant sauours, bayes, rosemary, marioram, hysope, and the like there growing in abundance. They say, that of late a theefe pursued on all sides, and desperate of his safety, (for rarely are offences here pardoned) leapt from the top into the Sea, and swum vnto Tyrus, which is seuen miles distant; who for the strangenesse of the fact was forgiven by the Emer. A little beyond we passed by a ruinous fort, called Scandarone of Alexander the builder; here built to defend this passage: much of the foundation ouergrowne with osiers and weedes, being nourished by a Spring that falleth from thence into the Sea. A Moore not long since was here assailed by a Leopard, that sculkt in the aforesaid thicket; and iumping vpon him, ouerthrew him from his asse: but the beast hauing wet his feete, and mist of his hold, retired as ashamed without further violence. Within a day or two after he drew company together to haue hunted him, but found him dead of a wound receiued from a Bore. The higher mountaines now coming short of the Sea, do leaue a narrow leuell betweene. Vpon the left hand on a high round hill, we saw two solitary pillars, to which some of vs rid, in hope to have seene something of antiquitie; where we found diuers others laid along, with the halfe buried foundation of an ample building. A mile beyond we came to a fort maintained by a small garrison of Moores, to prohibite that passage if need should require, and to secure the traueller from theeues; a place heretofore vnpassable by reason of their out-rages. The souldiers acquainted with our merchants, freely entertained vs, and made vs good cheare according to their manner of diet: requited with a present of a little Tobacco, by them greedily affected. They also remitted our Caphar, vsing to take foure dollars apeece of the stranger Christians. From hence ascending the more eminent part of the rocky and naked mountaines, which here again thrust into the Sea, (called in times past the Tyrian ladder) by a long and steepe descent we descended into the valley of Acre. Diuerse little hills beeing here and there dispersed, crowned with ruines (the couerts for theeues) and many villages on the skirts of the bordering mountaines. Eare yet night, we reentred Acre.

[P. 217]

Sandys's usual formality gives way here, allowing us to see the raw materials on which he works (one imagines that the original journal read much like this). In this surrender to the haphazardousness of experience, this temporary uncertainty about the standards which determine what is to be included and excluded, this lack of coherence and order, Sandys resembles his medieval predecessors and his unlettered contemporaries—or even a learned figure like Belon who had no sense of literary form. Low-grade marvels and random descriptions are allowed to claim his attention, which is usually restricted to more consequential matters.

It should be noted that the breakdown is not really one of stylistic surface, though the amount of attention given to style perhaps declines after the first sentences. Nor is a rapid sequence of powerful experiences responsible (as in the Mount Carmel episode) for the jumbled effect of this passage. The jumble is on another level, an epistemological one. There is a good deal of information here, historical and miscellaneous, but its lack of organization makes it seem random. One can feel Sandys groping towards the patterns which were basic to his mind (and typical of his culture): patterns of historical decline and displacement, of compensation, of appropriateness, of unique human achievement. The stories about the Leopard point to a nature which for Sandys is full of moral meaning, of wonderful balances and hidden correspondences, but in this case he seems not to know what they mean. The patterns do not articulate the facts with enough clarity to be intelligible or to shape them into an encompassing form.

We see Sandys ride off the track “in hope to haue seene something of antiquitie,” but the ruins remain unnamed for once, and therefore mysterious. As a movement toward historical identification, toward the terms which dominate the Relation, it is thwarted and produces no antiquarian interest; but its very inconclusiveness and mysteriousness capture an aspect of travel which, as I have been saying, Sandys does not dwell on and perhaps had no vocabulary to express. Likewise the rather acute rendering of the landscape coupled with arrested movements toward intelligible patterning might be taken as an expression of his final experiences in the Levant. How deliberate this expression is would be very difficult to say. It might be claimed that Sandys has simply become careless for a moment, that the disorganization is meaningless, and that to claim anything more is to overread. But one can perhaps still say that the generic complexity (or confusion) of this work contains a recognition that personal experience goes on after and between the large structures (the formal descriptions of countries and the political/historical/etc. reality they express) which organize life and meaning, especially public meanings of the kind Sandys is concerned with; that although these edifices of organized perception may swallow up the individual for long periods at a time, he is left with a residue of materials and experiences which seem to demand some kind of expression. Perhaps he was simply confused by this demand; certainly it is too much to claim that he used it to liberate himself from the very strict if complex definitions and patterns he had imposed on the Levant; but it is here, in this temporary release from them, that we may look for a gesture toward including kinds of meanings which he does not develop, based on a more generous and personal attitude towards the various and chaotic nature of the traveler's experience.

The negligence with which Sandys throws away the image of thieves lurking in ruins which comes at the very end of Book 3—an image that could serve as an emblem for the whole Relation and is very closely related to the emblematic transformation elaborated with deliberate rhetorical care in the dedication—demonstrates again, as in the Malta episode, his reluctance to direct his apparatus of symbolic interpretation at his own experiences. There is little in Sandys that corresponds to what we might call the impressionism of later travelers—that is, a set of techniques which develop the writer's impressions into personal poetic experience and/or a key to the spirit of the place.

It should be said at once that the sharpness of Sandys's eye is one of the real pleasures of this book. He is very observant of his surroundings, has a sense for significant detail, and can render visual effects with simplicity and acuity. He can also create elaborate and sustained effects, as his description of Constantinople shows (p. 31).

But Sandys's impressions are subordinated to descriptive intent: they are almost never indulged for their own sake, and the absence of picturesque or romantic values prevents their being accumulated in great quantities and organized into autonomous patterns of meaning. The details he records refer to facts or categories of more general interest, and this more or less direct reference justifies their inclusion. As in the confused passage from the end of Book 3, there is a level of generalization hovering above descriptive passages, or an ulterior descriptive intention running through them, pulling them away from the realm of direct personal experience, of sensory or emotional or aesthetic involvement. These ulterior motives are exactly what the literature of advice for travelers sought to inculcate. The modern reader may have the depressing feeling that this insures that Renaissance travelers will always be bound by the stereotypes they brought with them, that at most they will bring a little freshness and personal immediacy to the repetition of commonplaces and the collection of information under predictable heads. This is true of a great number of Renaissance travel writers, but it does not do justice to the vigor of Sandys's descriptions or the suavity with which he handles his materials. Here is Messina:

The Citie is garnished with beautifull buildings, both publicke and priuate. Venus, Neptune, Castor and Pollux had here their Temples, whose ruines are now the foundations of Christian Churches. Diuers ancient statues are here yet to be seene. Throughout the Citie there are fountaines of fresh water: and towards the North end, the ruines of an old Aquaduct. In that end which turnes to the East, about the bottome of the bay, where the Citie is slender, and free from concourse of people, stands the Vice-roys Pallace, of no meane building, surrounded with delightfull gardens and orchards, to which the Arsenall adioyneth. … Here liue they in all abundance and delicacy, hauing more then enough of food, and fruites of all kinds; excellent wines, and snow in the summer to qualifie the heate therof, at a contemptible rate. The better sort are Spanish in attire, and the meanest artificers wife is clothed in silke: whereof an infinite quantity is made by the worme, and a part thereof wrought into stuffes (but rudely) by the workman. Eight thousand bailes of raw silke are yearely made in the Iland; and fiue thousand thereof fetcht from them (for, as hath bene said before, they will not trouble themselues to transport it) at the publicke Mart here kept, which lasteth all August, by the gallies of Naples, Ostia, Ligorne, and Genoa: during which time they are quitted from customes. The Gentlemen put their monies into the common table, (for which the Citie stands bound) and receiue it againe vpon their bills, according to their vses. For they dare not venture to keepe it in their houses, so ordinarily broken open by theeues (as are the shops and warehouses) for all their crosse-bard windowes, iron doores, locks, bolts, and barres on the inside: wherein, and in their priuate reuenges, no night doth passe without murder. Euery euening they solace themselues along the Marine (a place left throughout betweene the Citie wall and the hauen) the men on horsebacke, and the women in large Carosses, being drawne with the slowest procession. There is to be seene the pride and beauties of the Citie. There haue they their play-houses, where the parts of women are acted by women, and too naturally passionated; which they forbeare not to frequent vpon Sundayes.

[Pp. 245-46]

This passage is full of facts, virtually all of which are of the sort demanded by the writers of manuals for travelers, but they are so skillfully handled that even the economic data seems less like information for merchants than another side of the public life of the city, of its character. The beauty and color and passion and violence and indolence of Messina all emerge from this description and blend to create a whole which is not at all stereotyped or mechanical. The character of Messina as Sandys gives it seems to arise simply out of what he sees, and what he sees are the most salient, most visible and typical aspects of the town. He has not seen a mystical vision, or anything like it, and he seems to be describing a real place, not a transcendental entity.

But Sandys must have thought of cities as having something like a metaphysical soul. Barely four pages before he had quoted a poem by J. C. Scaliger in which a personified Syracusa meditates on her historical fate (p. 241)—this kind of prosopopeia is a persistent motif in humanist poetry. Just what is being personified cannot perhaps be defined with much conceptual precision, but the personification is a highly significant element in humanist thought about history. It suggests a mystical essence and destiny, a soul apart from the material body. The soul of a city (or country) is something which unfolds itself in history, builds itself monuments, is perhaps most clearly expressed through religious and mythological associations; it leaves its records in writing, in books. It is not something to be encountered in any street, or to be discovered by talking to the natives. (Which is why the reader meets so few people in Sandys's pages, though Sandys met so many on his trip.) This soul apparently constituted the primary significance of a place for Sandys; therefore he turns immediately to his learned materials when faced with a new place to be described. Sometimes the existing city can be shown to be a continued expression of this essence; more often there is a tragic recognition of difference.

In any case—and this is the point to be made here—one cannot arrive at this higher significance by contemplating one's own experiences and impressions. This language of public spiritual, historical and mythological symbols seems to be the only one in which reflection of the highest order can occur, and Sandys never employs it in his own person, without mediation—he expresses his meanings through a critical handling of the tradition he had mastered.

One could look for an explanation of this in Sandys's personality and talents, arguing that he simply lacked the poetic power, the belief in a transcendent principle within himself which would allow him to answer the inherited tradition and the complexities of the world with myths of his own. One could also argue that original mythmaking becomes progressively harder as a tradition grows older, and that Sandys comes at the very end of a very old one. Poems such as the one by Scaliger referred to above prove that it is not just a function of his being a modern rather than an ancient; but Sandys is late even with respect to Scaliger, and his Englishness is even more important than the intervening years in insulating him from the emotions which gave rise to such poems. Historical loss is his major theme, and we should not underestimate the seriousness with which he took it, but it does not touch him as it did the earlier, southern humanists; he has accepted it, the gestures he performs towards it are more restrained, he does not desperately try to force visions out of the ruins. Sandys is closer to the literature which embodies these attitudes than to any other (the most concentrated and developed expressions of the theme of historical loss outside of the dedication are in his translations of poems by Scaliger and Sannazaro), but he is just distant enough that he can work from it, incorporating it without needing to repeat it. The heightened rhetorical style used to express this facet of humanism is present as one of the many forms of knowledge and expression Sandys collects: it has become part of the content of his own style, which is set in a lower key and is designed to be flexible and comprehensive.

Whatever the truth or relevance of these suggestions, Sandys clearly chose a rhetorical stance which set him apart from the poets, the mythmakers. Although he wanted to be associated with them he did not want to be confused with them. The negative connotations of “fabling” were too present to his mind; his own authority was based in the credibility of his prose. His project was fundamentally one of mythmaking, but his myths are rationalized, and naturally expressed in prose. The poets have a major role to play in this project, which is really an elaboration of theirs, but in order to maintain the proper and profitable relation between poetry and prose the identity of the prose term must be kept intact, as factual and reliable. If Sandys were to indulge in conceits and fantasies of his own it would only confuse matters.

For the same reason Sandys shows remarkable restraint in assimilating his own experiences or present conditions to the inherited myths associated with a place. The passage about Baiae discussed above is an example of such restraint; he implies his point rather than enforces it. In other places he lets slip by obvious opportunities to achieve spectacular connections. Mythological material is usually introduced early on in Sandys's descriptions, along with etymologies and capsule histories, and often it is not invoked again. But the fact that it is separated from the rest of the account does not necessarily mean that it is disconnected; and the fact that it is not developed does not necessarily mean that it is dead learning. A writer of a later period, when mythological thinking was dead, would have to do something with such a reference in order to infuse some life into it. For Sandys the mythological significances are still very much present—they are not merely the product of his rhetoric. He could rely on his readers to bring a rich body of associations to such references, and he may also be relying on them to make for themselves the connections among the materials he assembles. The assemblages are so careful and the connections so obvious, that it is impossible to believe that Sandys was not planning them.

It is typical of Sandys to suggest relationships without defining them too precisely. He thought relationships of that kind were both indefinite and infinite; in the preface to the Ovid he explains that:

In the Muthologie I haue rather followed (as fuller of delight and more vsefull) the varietie of mens seuerall conceptions, where they are not ouerstrained, then curiously examined their exact proprietie; which is to be borne-with in Fables and Allegories so as the principall parts of application resemble the grounde-worke.

His silences are often pregnant: he omits the process of interpretation entirely because once begun it could only be brought to an end arbitrarily, creating an illusion of completeness.

A good deal of what has been said about the mythological element is also true of a great number of the poetic passages Sandys quotes, even purely descriptive passages which have no mythological content. It has already been suggested that the authority of these passages makes them an inevitable part of Sandys's subject matter; they are also intimately connected with his procedures as extensions of his voice and sensibility, and are on the whole better integrated with his prose than the myths are. As instruments for description the Latin and Neo-Latin poetry Sandys uses exceeds anything possible in his prose in its formality, its pomp, its heightened imagery and diction, as well as its closer connections with the mythological tradition. The genuinely poetic effect of the Relation as a whole would be impossible without frequent recourse to this higher rhetorical mode. Given the conventions of the Relation it would seem unnatural for him to insert poetry of his own (he does so only once, the hymn composed at Christ's Sepulcher mentioned in “Deo Opt. Max.”). What we get repeatedly is a rising motion in his prose which then gives way to someone else's poetry. This is the eruption of the New Mountain north of Naples:

In the yeare of our Lord 1538, and on the nine-and-twentieth of September, when for certaine daies fore-going the countrey hereabout was so vexed with perpetuall earthquakes, as no one house was left so entire, as not to expect an immediat ruine: after that the sea had retired two hundred paces from the shore (leauing abundance of fish, and springs of fresh water rising in the bottome) this Mountaine visibly ascended about the second houre of the night with an hideous roring, horribly vomiting stones, and such store of cinders, as ouer-whelmed all the buildings hereabout, and the salubrious baths of Tripergula for so many ages celebrated, consumed the vines to ashes, killing birds and beasts: the fearefull inhabitants of Putzol, flying through the darke with their wiues and children; naked, defiled, crying out, and detesting their calamities. Manifold mischiefes haue they suffered by the barbarous, yet none like this which Nature inflicted. But heare we it described by Borgius:

What gloomy fumes dayes glorious eye obscure!
The pitchy lake effused through sulphury caues,
Higher than AEtnas fires throwes flaming waues.
Hath Phlegeton broke into Auerne, with grones
Whirling the horrid flouds, and rumbling stones!
The Baian waues resound …

[P. 278]

The quotation is followed by a scientific explanation of the eruption, very much in the style of the commentary on the first book of the Metamorphoses. Sandys's prose is flexible enough to perform a number of tasks around this eruption, vividly preparing for it and objectively analyzing it: it is only the sublime moment of the eruption itself from which it backs away. (There is a similar passage on p. 243 in which Virgil and Lucretius describe the eruption of Aetna.)

Or here is a quieter example from Sandys's initial description of Sicily:

Vines, sugar-canes, hony, saffron, and fruites of all kinds it produceth: mulberry trees to nourish their silke-wormes, whereof they make a great income: quarries of porphyre, and serpentine. Hot bathes, riuers, and lakes replenished with fish: amongst which there is one called Lago de Goridan; formerly the nauell of Sicilia, for that in the midst of the Iland; but more anciently Pergus: famous for the fabulous rape of Proserpina,

          Caysters slowly gliding waters beare
Farre fewer singing swannes, then are heard here.
Woods crowne the lake, and clothe the bankes about
With leauy veiles, which Phoebus fiers keepe out:
The boughs coole shade, the moist earth yeelds rare flowers:
Here heate, nor cold, the death-lesse Spring deuours.

Ouid. M. 1.5

In this Iland is the farre-seene mountaine of AEtna: the shady Eryx sacred to Venus, that gaue vnto her the name of Erycine: Hybla, clothed with thyme, and so praised for hony.

[P. 235]

The lines from Ovid are anything but a random association. They work in the first place as a literal description of what Sicily looks like (still looks like) in places. It also quietly introduces the familiar topos of the locus amoenus, one of the archetypal forms in which landscapes can be perceived, and suggests that that way of looking at Sicily is relevant to Sandys; especially relevant, of course, because this is the very place where the archetype is anchored through mythological and literary associations. It is easy to understand the significance of the overwhelming wealth described in Sandys's first two sentences in the light of this literary ideal—it becomes something much more dignified and important than a list of trade items. And we can accept the elevation of the final sentence quoted here because Sandys has demonstrated repeatedly on this page that we are moving over an epic landscape, to which epic style is merely appropriate.

Ovid is good for intimate landscapes such as this one, and of course myths and customs; Virgil for all the epic effects in their largest and most prestigious form (though Homer is the true source and should be referred to when possible); Horace for public moralizing; Lucan had written geographical descriptions of many places Sandys went in a high style which obviously appealed to him. Sandys had an eye for social detail and a biting wit which must not be unrelated to his reading of Martial; he found it difficult not to write satires, and one can sometimes feel him becoming Juvenalian half a page in advance of his citation of “the Satyr.” These authors could serve as surrogate sensibilities because Sandys's sensibility—at least his literary one—had been developed under their influence. Sandys's awareness moves in counterpoint to theirs, sometimes in direct imitation, sometimes in opposition. As he travelled across their native ground it was inevitable that he would turn to their words to express sentiments common to both of them; and he may use them to express shared sentiments even where this immediate justification is missing.

But his relationship with the classical poets is not simply one of imitation and slavish deferral. He subjects them to criticism; at times (especially in Book 4) he has very harsh things to say about their civilization (“ignorant Antiquitie” etc.), and the poets can get drawn into the general condemnation. (For instance, Martial, whom he is using to construct a description of a Roman amphitheater and what went on in it—which horrifies him—, is called “that grosse flatterer” [p. 270].)

So Sandys uses the poets for a variety of purposes: as a source of information; as a repository of higher meanings not available to him through his personal experiences; as a means for achieving heightened effects impossible in the cooler medium of prose; as models for, and reinforcements of, his own attitudes; as the impetus and support for his own literary effects. Although their power exceeds his in various ways, nevertheless he is not overwhelmed by them, and manages not only to handle them critically but also to establish his own positions through opposition to them.

Some more general remarks can now be made about Sandys's use of literary materials and their relation to his role in the book. It should be clear that the classical references are neither merely ornamental nor the debris of a humanistic education, but are an absolutely central element in the understanding developed by the Relation. They are the nerves of its learnedness, not just external signs of it; they make the Relation the public and authoritative book it is. The representation of the eastern Mediterranean it contains is a collective one, in the production of which vast ranges of the cultural history of the West are brought into play. The plurality of Sandys's points of reference gives the world he describes a degree of clarity and solidity and spaciousness which was very unusual in its day and is in great contrast to the necessarily small and flickering circle of light his unlearned contemporaries could cast about them as they moved through a world in which everything was new to them, all relations uncertain.

The clarity of Sandys's representation is produced not so much by fixing a concrete object in a steady light, as by a smooth and careful and accurate movement from one view to another, an integration of perspectives creating depth of field. (So Purchas called him “a Learned Argus, seeing with the Eyes of many Authors”.) And the solidity is the result, rather paradoxically, of watching the object in question—a city, an island, a custom—as it undergoes constant metamorphoses in the flux of history. The Relation is permeated throughout by the resonances of a profound cultural memory, with its traumas and continuities.

In a landscape so spacious and densely detailed the figure of the traveler is necessarily small and fleeting. To impose his own image on such materials would have seemed preposterous to Sandys, to organize all the themes contained in them around his brief passage equally hopeless, and to pretend to be re-creating the landscape out of his own imagination impertinent. Consequently the creative role of his subjectivity and hence the interest taken in Sandys the traveler is limited, and his presence intermittent.

But if the traveler keeps a low profile the author infuses his personal style and presence into everything; there is no dominant figure, no visible hero, but a strong sense of the mind (very personal, but whose personality is not an important issue) which is organizing the diverse materials of the book. The Relation has many sources and the world speaks to Sandys with many voices, but they are all translated into his very distinctive English. That the language is all Sandys's insures the continuity between his own prose and the poetry he is appropriating.

Sandys is always present as the center—in part to be defined in personal terms, in part in historical ones—towards which events, places, objects, and texts are drawn. As they approach this center they are translated, interpreted, criticized, coordinated with each other, commented upon, arranged in patterns. Within this process there is a constant mediation being performed between important sets of opposed terms: past and present, Latin and English, poetry and prose, public and personal. It is through this translation and mediation that the Relation generates its most important meanings. In the course of re-creating the past and the foreign a modern English identity is established, defined through hundreds of characteristic acts of assimilation, adjustment or rejection. The self-portrait gradually emerges from the arrangement of foreign materials and the stances taken toward them. The traveler and the author are both involved: if the traveler is often the more vivid, still he more often seems to be an extension of the author than the other way around. He is very consciously playing the role of field representative for the learned classes in England (as, in a comic mode, Tom Coryat went east with credentials drawn up in the Mermaid Tavern certifying him as the “Traveller for the English wits”); he always has their interests in mind, and his principal function is one of verification or modification of what is already known. His presence on the spot gives him special authority as the mouthpiece of the “threatening instructions” history presents to the English reader, but it would have been possible to draw the moral (though less interestingly) without leaving England.⁸ Sandys's most important attitudes are taken up on a deeper basis than the reactions of a mere traveler—they are informed by the whole of his culture's stance towards the East and antiquity, a stance directly related to its most fundamental notions about itself and inextricably bound up with a canon of inherited literature. Sandys's unique value to his contemporaries was that his knowledge of this literature was as sharp and familiar as his knowledge of the East; he could maintain the same critical stance towards both and could slip effortlessly and almost without a change in tone from one realm to the other.

Notes

1. References to Sandys' Relation are from the original 1615 edition reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1973. The Order of Things (1966; Eng. trans., New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 39-40.

2. E. S. de Beer, “George Sandys' Account of Campania”, The Library, 4th ser. 17 (March 1937):460.

3. Such as this from Seneca: “Thinkest thou that Cato would euer haue dwelt at Mica, to haue numbered the by-sailing harlots, and to behold so many diuers fashioned boates, bepainted with diuersity of colours; the Lake strewed ouer with roses, and to haue heard the night-noises of singers?” (p. 291).

4. de Beer, “Account.”

5. In The Poetical Works of George Sandys, edited with an introduction and notes by R. Hooper (London: J. R. Smith, 1872), 2:405.

6. A rare exception as he is caught in a storm on the coast of Palestine: “I then thought with application, of that description of the Poets, “The bitter storme augments … !” [Ovid, Met. 1.11] But the distemperature and horror is more then the danger, where mariners be English, who are the absolutest vnder heauen in their profession; and are by forreiners compared vnto fishes” (p. 207). The superiority of modern navigation was of course one of the major topoi of the quarrel of ancients and moderns.

7. See Edward Said's Orientalism [New York: Partheon, 1978]. Jean Zuallart, who claims in his preface “Au lecteur” to be providing the first illustrations of Jerusalem and its environs (which Sandys lifts from him), tells us about them that he has “(durant nostre seiour en Tripoli, & la Nauigation, pour euiter oisiuité) mis aucunement en ordre les petits pourtraicts, que i'auois simplement marquez par poincts & raiettes, (car il n'est licite ny permis entre les Turcs, de faire aucuns dessaings) …” Le Tres-devot Voyage de Ierusalem … (1626). Sandys used the first, shorter, Italian version of this book, Il Devotissimo Viaggio (1587). An egregious failure to take such practical considerations into account is offered by Warner G. Rice, “Early Travellers in Greece and the Levant,” University of Michigan Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature 10 (1933):205-60.

8. Compare Peter Heylyn's preface to his Cosmographie: “And though I cannot tell what effect the reading of this following Book may produce in others, yet I can warrantably say thus much of my self, that the observation of the fall of so many great and puissant Empires, the extirpation of so many, and renowned Families, the desolation of so many flourishing Christian Churches, as the composing of this Book did present me with (though formerly no strangers to me in the course of my studies) did more conduce to the full humbling of my soul under the mighty hand of God, than either the sense of my misfortune, or any other morall consideration which had come before me.”