The holiday in America was rewarding and demanding. We (this means me and my son Timothy) drove 2,856 miles, in a Pontiac Grand Prix – a great lump of a car, but amazingly less spacious inside than my own Ford Focus. On ‘drive’, this would grind up the passes at 1,500 rpm, you had to select 3 or 2 to get any response from it – a basic incompatibility with my soft-footed driving style. On the freeways, it came into its own if you overtook past the speed limit, with a great throaty roar.
We 'did' the Rockies (over the highest paved road in America) – lots of marmots and pikas, and a breathless attempt at a walk. Then Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills, Devil’s Tower, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Dinosaur National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Arches National Park, and the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings.
Yellowstone is so big – you couldn’t fit it twice into the whole of Yorkshire. We had a day and a half. We saw Old Faithful and lots more of the geothermal stuff, and swam in the Firehole River. A wildfire prevented us from doing the full central loop, which was almost a relief.
I think that I enjoyed the Arches National Park the best. The hike up to Delicate Arch was phenomenal, but on the way to Landscape Arch subsequently, you just had to acknowledge that after this one, the heat and the altitude meant that this was your limit for the day. Instead of mountain bikes on the Slick Rock Trail, it was back to the motel for air-con and a pool.
The Mesa Verde made a thrilling visit, going up the ladders to Balcony House. I’d no idea that the people there were living so high up anyway – it’s at about 7,500 feet; or that their lasting legacy was for them a desperate expedient which they only lived in for 80-odd years before they had to abandon the Mesa completely.
On the final morning, we both loved a visit down the Mollie Kathleen gold mine at Cripple Creek (round the back of Pike's Peak). Geology is quite a theme in this holiday route. Dinosaur bones have been found all over the region, and sometimes the road will have signs naming the formations you are driving by: the drive up the Big Horn Mountains at the start of day 7 takes you through six major geological periods.
We saw humming birds, marmots, ground squirrels, a moose, prairie dogs, and a buffalo; but no bears.
My image is of Lewis Lake, going south out of Yellowstone towards the Grand Tetons. I shall now suffer from a lack of a daily overload of big scenery.
The morale of the harpooner at Early Modern Whale has been boosted by the blog here managing to make the cut in Ralph E Luker’s selection of blogs ‘without which, history education on the internet would be seriously impoverished.’ (Can he really mean me?)
My incidental reading for this week has been A survey of the world in ten books by the royal chaplain and archdeacon in Oxford, Barten Holyday(1661). I was intrigued to see by what means our pious author shrank such a large subject into 118 pages. He did it by following one of the few contemporary verse writers he admires, who happened (alas!) to be Thomas Tusser. Holyday writes his ‘survey’ in exactly 1,000 distiches, neatly dividing them hundred by hundred into the ten books, which cover these topics:
“Of inanimate Creatures; Of living Creatures; Of Nations; Of Languages and Arts; Of Philosophers and Historians; Of Physicians; Of Lawyers; Of Kings and Other Worthies; Of Politicians; Of Divines”.
The result is a series of moralised reflections (he calls them meditations) on everything that seems to him important. He can do a survey of the world because he lives within such a simple intellectual framework: the world, of course, is coeval with man; and everything in it was made for man. Everything exists in a divinely ordained order – order is life, he tells us:
Relations must be Own’d: Husband and Wife;
Father, Sonne; Master, Servant: Order’s Life.
Each section works in general from the past to the present, from Bible history, through classical, and so down to contemporaries, to the effect that the work also becomes a kind of mad bibliography, in which Holyday mentions all the writers he approves of – writers on the law and divinity mainly. Part of the out-of-the-way charm of the book is to see Holyday backing all the wrong horses: if only he could have written a couplet on Shakespeare or Donne, he’d have been quoted, and known to specialists. He does allude to two of Ben Jonson’s creations, but only for a satirical jibe at a pope and a famous cardinal:
Paul the Third and Morone (they so compact)
At Rome and Trent,Volpone and Mosca act.
There aren’t enough of these asperities, where Holyday’s distiches become epigrammatic.
Generally, he chooses to praise an array of names that could have come from Tristram Shandy.
Holyday does not always warm to new ideas: so he generally disapproves of astronomy – Copernicus having the sun stand still to escape doubts, has merely made new doubts; others dare to see spots blotting the sun itself – in the end, ‘the Art of starres who knows, but He that made them?’ (‘Copernicus does erre with great pretence / Of Art: but Galileus erres by sense’ is distich 389, returning to this general disapproval.) In each book, Holyday starts with the big things in creation, and works down. Book 1 starts with the heavenly bodies, and more or less ends with garlic. Similarly Book 2 (on animals) starts with some distiches about early modern whales, which are undeniably large in his account of them:
To see Nine hundred foote of Whale, may make
One think, Iland for Fish hee does mistake
But Holyday sometimes gets a quirkier observation than the time-honoured tale of whales being mistaken for islands:
The Whale’s Mouth’s a Portcullis, but Inverted!
Th’under jaw’s teeth into Holes above inserted.
My own little menagerie made me notice how he moralises the parrot:
A Parrot learn’d the Creed: may not such, greeve,
As can not say’t, or can not it Beleeve?
How anyone ever got the idea that camels particularly hate incest I cannot imagine, but here it is:
Much’t is the Afrique Camels Long can fast:
More, that they Incest hate, admir’dly chast!
‘Of nations’ critiques the English for love of two characteristic vanities:
Fashions and Prophesies are England’s staine:
Lets not bee Mad too, though wee have been vaine.
‘Of physicians’ shows Holyday at his most receptive to a new idea: William Harvey is another Columbus in the magnitude of his discovery:
Blood Circles from the Heart unto the Heart:
Man’s New America speakes Harvie’s Art
Elsewhere in the list of physicians, Holyday again shows his prejudices when he denounces the doctor and anti-demonologist Johan Weyer for not believing in witchcraft:
From Physique did Wierus runne to Evil?
Shall wee begin in Art, and End in Devil?
‘Kings and other worthies’ includes a couplet in appreciation of Charles V’s renunciation of his empire:
Charles the Fift scorn’d Glory, Pleasure, Pelfe:
Turn’d Court-Monke and the Emp’rour of Himselfe.
Among the English monarchs, Holyday makes only this cryptic remark about Henry VIII:
Henry, Our Eight, few Painters have well made:
Some give him too much Light, some too much shade.
I suppose that he might be implying that Henry VIII is either portrayed as better, or worse, than he actually was.
His take on Philip II is as a connoisseur and arch-plotter:
How Philip in his Gallery views his Mappes!
Consults! Intents in Mystery hee wrappes!
Among his politicians, Holyday was excited by Machiavelli, and actually pauses over him for several couplets; though his attitude is a predictable one:
In sadnesse Macchiavel thou didst not well
To helpe the World to runne faster to hell!
So, some of the 1,000 couplets are reasonably lively. Just occasionally, he can sound like an early modern version of Hilaire Belloc. Here he is on one of his theologians (I assume St Bernard):
Bernard so happily imploi’d his thought,
Hee scarce had time to thinke of what was nought.
Ah, that is so like me, also so happily employing my thought I scarce have time to think of what is nought. But next week, I disappear off on holiday, once again to America, a tour in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.
Here I am at the top of Valahnukur, a minor peak in the Thorsmork ('Thor's Forest', no less) area. Booth Junior is playing a Nintendo DS on a ridge below. He did me a cartoon, in which I am pointing up a crag and saying, 'Not much higher, Tim', while he is prone on the floor behind me with his legs on fire and his little soul departing from his body.
I was stirred by Iceland, a place of sublime scenery and sublime prices. Most of all, I liked the geothermal and volcanic stuff: the sheer randomness of a purely volcanic landscape, in which a cone or a crater will appear anywhere, lava flows will spread or stop with no other principle than chance; or collosal explosions will broadcast boulders. We stayed near Hveragerthi, where a stream warm as bath water flows down the valley north of the town ('Hot spring gardens').
A glacier close-up is a confrontation with one of Nature's great forces, somewhere utterly inimical to life. On August 3rd, two Germans went on to a dangerous part of Vatnajokull, and have never been seen again. The Icelandic daily press (Premier league results, obituaries on apparently every native citizen who has died, and weather forecasts) reported faithfully on the unceasing search for their bodies.
But the swimming pools! A community of delight, each one of them. Scrupulous rules of cleanliness before you enter that water, all that endless free heat going off into the sky.
England seems to have such dirty air and such a muddy colour palette, while Iceland is brilliant clarity, looming black cliffs of Pelagonite, then tumbling white water.
Off very soon for another holiday, this time, a week in Iceland. I thought this might give me a topic for a post, but the country itself is not much written about in 16th and 17th century English literature - allusions to 'Iceland dogs' are quite common, and the occasional mention of an 'Iceland hawk', but geographical knowledge seems scanty. 'Geyser' doesn't get recorded in English till 1763, and when the British talked of 'vulcanos', as they did from 1613 onwards, they were thinking of 'Fogo' or 'Aetna' rather than Heckla.
But in the 1621 edition of Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas ('Fourth Day of the First Week'), I found what seemed to be an allusion:
Those that, in Norway and in Finland, chase The soft-skinned Martens, for their precious Caces Those that in Ivory Sleads on Ireland Seas (Congeal'd to Crystall) slide about with ease Were witness all of his strange grief; and ghest That God, or Nature was then deep distrest...
The subject is an eclipse, with the Sun out of view over a large part of the northern hemisphere. Du Bartas imagines the locals doing their northerly things - hunting for furs, and travelling around in sledges with runners of ivory: in Norway, Finland, and Ireland. While waiting for my brother-in-law to appear on Robbie Coltrane's 'B-Road Britain' last night (which he duly did - he was the stonemason at Woodchester Mansion) I idly traced the appearance and duration of this ancient misprint (ah, Notes and Queries, I have missed you too long!). The first two English editions got it right: sledging in 'Izeland'. But the error crept into the 1611 text, and stayed there uncorrected through 1613, 1621, 1633 and 1641.
Not that this proves much, beyond the way that typesetters do not (and in general should not) think about what they are setting, also the absence of editing work even on a text the 17th century loved. There must be other allusions in early modern literature lurking under the spelling 'Island', but this was a pleasingly fanciful one. My other image is an early engraving of the original 'Geyser'. It seems to have lumps in it. Since then people have messed about with it so much as to turn its eruptions into an intermittent thing, but here it goes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy6sF_92cRI
How different my life would have been had I been called 'Uno von Troil'.
