The Accidental Tourist

by

Paul Clark

                   

When novelist Evan Connell was in high school, time and again he checked the same adventure novel out of the school library—The Aztec Treasure House by Thomas Janvier. The story concerned the exploits of a young American archeologist named Don Tomas and his companions, a Franciscan monk, two Otomi Indians, some soldiers of fortune, and a Mexican boy named Pablo, who join together to search for Aztec treasure.

As an adult, Connell found a copy of the novel at a flea market. He hesitated buying it, assuming that his adult self would not enjoy the book as much as his teen-aged self. But, knowing he would likely never see it again, he bought it . . . and discovered that his first instinct was correct.

Connell wrote, “If you happen to be more than [twelve] you cannot help noticing a number of implausibilities and inconsistencies floating past like ducks in a shooting gallery, so that reading what I once considered to be the world’s greatest novel becomes a fearful chore.”

Any lifelong reader probably has a similar story—a favorite book from childhood that no one else knows about, one you don’t see for decades until, under whatever circumstances, it comes back into your life, and you re-read it and find it disappointing. (In my case, one of these books is Little League Double Play by Curtis Bishop, although it never really disappeared—one of my sisters had it all along. And when I read it last summer, I enjoyed it as much as when I was twelve. But that’s another story.)

The fact that you read such a book at an impressionable age can mark you for life, especially if you are a writer. Although Connell is probably best known for his novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge and his biography of Gen. George Custer, Son of the Morning Star, in the 1960s and 70s he wrote several essays for magazines chronicling the adventures and misadventures of explorers, scientists, emperors, kings, charlatans and some fictional characters who, in one way or another, were embarking on Aztec treasure hunts of one sort or another.

The essays were eventually collected in two volumes—A Long Desire (1979) and The White Lantern (1980). I bought them when they were first published, at an impressionable post-college age, and I have never let them get away, because the stories Connell tells always bring me great pleasure. I write this as someone whose idea of traveling is to find someplace less than half a day’s journey away, and that has running water and indoor plumbing.

School textbooks present history in a linear fashion so students can get an overview of significant dates and events. Adult histories of either the academic or popular variety are often tomes of great gravity and girth—think Barbara Tuchman and Simon Schama. There is a middle ground, history as anecdote, history as snapshot. Connell is a master at this type of historical essay.

The tone of all the essays is set in “Various Tourists,” from A Long Desire which features the stories of travelers who went to uncharted places mainly by themselves, such as the Greek Pytheas, who in 400 B.C. may have traveled as far as Greenland, or Mary Kingsley, who left Victorian England in the late 1890s to travel to West Africa by herself.

Connell writes, “It is the singular person, inexplicably drawn from familiar comforts toward a nebulous goal, lured often enough to death—it is he, or she, whose peregrinations can never be thoroughly understood, who is worth noticing.”

One of the more fascinating stories, told in other places by other writers, is “Prester John.” Prester John was, depending on who told the story, a king who lived in Asia, in Africa, anywhere from the mid-12th century to the mid-16th century. Connell’s essay focuses not so much on the story/legend of Prester himself, but of all the popes, kings and explorers who exerted so much time, money and lives trying to find him, with only the flimsiest evidence that he even existed.

Exploration based on thin evidence permeates so many of the stories in these books. “Aristokles’ Atlantis” is about the seemingly never-ending search to find the mythical land. “To the Indies” concerns the innumerable journeys by European explorers to find a route to China by sailing west. The quest in “The Sea Must Have an Endynge” focuses on attempts from the time of the Vikings to the 20th century to find a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Connell highlights the numerous attempts made by explorers going from Europe west to find such a passage, but ends this tale with evidence that at least one ship inadvertently and tragically discovered the passage, in the 1770s, by traveling in the other direction.

There are several essays about the lust for gold—the enormous fortunes won and lost by explorers to Mexico, and the centuries long quest to find the “philosopher’s stone” the key for alchemists to turn lead into gold.

Most of the essays in A Long Desire relate to physical travel. The explorations written about in The White Lantern take a slightly different slant. In “Olduvai & All That” Connell writes about how naturalists, archeologists, anthropologists, and the Christian church have clashed over the centuries over the origin of the life and universe.

It is the scientist, of course, armed with some impertinent facts, who attacks first—though the maneuver may be oblique or heavily veiled. Then the ecclesiastic must counterattack, for the very good reason that he perceives a threat to his office and to his life’s work. The status quo must be protected, the heretical march of knowledge obstructed, whether it be the development of anesthetics, the experiments of Galileo, or the deductions of infamous bulb-nosed naturalists.

Both attitudes are easy to understand. Science feels obligated to inquire, whereas the Church comes armed with infallible dogma.