ARMCHAIR TRAVEL
I spent the day in Arabistan, a book by William Perry Fogg, a 19th Century adventurer and travel writer. The full title is Arabistan, Or The Land of the Arabian Nights. It was published in 1875 in a beautiful cloth-bound edition. I bought my copy recently from a Nevada City antiquarian bookstore. Fogg, according to some reports, was the inspiration for Phileas Fogg, the fictional hero of Jules Verne’s novel Around The World In Eighty Days. Nowadays it’s only the fictional Fogg that anyone remembers, but the factual Fogg was fascinating in his own right. He was born sometime between 1826 and 1828, in Exeter, New Hampshire. His parents were Josiah and Hannah (Pecker) Fogg. He moved to Cleveland as a child and eventually helped create the city’s first metropolitan police force. In 1868 he set out to travel around the world. He sent letters detailing his adventures back to Cleveland, where they were published in a local newspaper, the Cleveland Leader. In Salt Lake City he interviewed Brigham Young. Shortly after the opening of the Suez Canal, he became one of the first people to travel through it. His letters to the Leader were eventually published as Round The World Letters. A later voyage provided the material for Arabistan. After returning to Cleveland he tried to make a go of it in the business world. But a publishing company he purchased eventually failed, and Fogg went abroad again, hoping to resuscitate his finances by writing and publishing another book. He died in May of 1909.
In many ways, Fogg was a typical American of his era, possessed of a typical American’s prejudices. As he travels through Egypt, Arabia, and Persia, the Europeans and Americans he encounters are almost invariably described as “distinguished,” “fine-looking,” “agreeable,” or “courteous.” The natives of these lands, on the other hand, come in for constant derogation. At Alexandria, for instance, the oarsmen who ferry him from his steamship to the wharf in a small boat are described only as “half-naked.” Maybe if Fogg had to do the rowing himself, he’d understand why it is that his Egyptian boatmen prefer to dress as lightly as possible. Later he writes, “Leaving the European quarter [of Alexandria], we thread the narrow, unpaved filthy streets outside the walls, through a gate guarded by Egyptian soldiers, fat lazy-looking fellows, in zouave uniform…” Perhaps the Egyptian soldiers really were fat and lazy-looking, but Fogg’s prejudices render him a somewhat unreliable narrator. For instance, a one point he says of Egyptian tour guides, “I have learned by experience that this class are almost universally a set of thieves and swindlers, preying upon strangers, and their exactions are only limited by the ignorance or weakness of those who may fall into their hands.” Fine, he doesn’t like swindlers. But why then, a few pages later, do we read, “Most of the so-called antiques sold in Cairo, especially the scarabei, or sacred beetles, are made, as I am told, at the factory of an enterprising Yankee or Englishman named Smith, in Assouan, at the foot of the first cataract of the Nile.” In Fogg’s worldview a crooked white man is merely “enterprising,” while a crooked person with dark skin is a thief and a swindler.
Fogg’s delicate sensibilities are constantly being offended by the natives he encounters. At the railway station he notes “crowds of filthy Arabs swarming over the third-class cars.” At the site of an ancient ruin, he writes, “A crowd of Arabs surrounded us, screaming for baksheesh [spare change], and they scrambled and quarreled for the few copper coins we threw them, like a pack of half-starved dogs.” When he sees some Egyptian soldiers being abused by their superior officers, he observes, “No one seems to take offense, and they run like a flock of sheep. To submit thus to blows, shows a want of manliness and spirit, characteristic of the modern Egyptian.” His distaste for Islamic peoples extends equally to both sexes: “In my travels in Mahometan countries, I have never yet seen a really beautiful woman.” And then there is this curious comment: “Of all the languages I have ever heard among heathens or Christians, I think Arabic deserves the distinction of requiring the most words to express the fewest thoughts.” Strange that he can make this assessment when he can neither speak Arabic nor understand a word of it.
For the most part, however, Fogg’s prejudices are class-based rather than racial. Whenever he encounters a wealthy member of the native aristocracy or upper class, he tends to be generous in his description of the man (women play almost no role at all in his narrative). Of an Arab businessman named Mohamet Benaji, Fogg writes: “I doubt whether any great London or New York merchant prince could have received us with more dignified ease and grace of manner. With true Oriental politeness, he places at our disposal his house and all it contains…He is a very fine-looking old gentleman, and is evidently held in great respect by all about the place…His rich turban, long, gray beard, and loose flowing robe of a costly material, give him a patriarchal appearance, while the urbane and dignified expression of his face make him a model for a painter.”
Still, every now and then, Fogg’s less-than-precise observations about human nature can really grate on a contemporary reader’s nerves: “From our western stand-point, the Egyptians seem miserably ground down and unhappy. But I question whether that idea is correct. They are better off than were their ancestors, slaves of the Pharaohs; better fed to-day than the people of British India…They gather around us at the stations, chattering like magpies, and seemingly more happy and contented than the peasantry of Europe. It is that sort of careless happiness, enjoying only to-day, without ambition, and regardless of to-morrow, once a characteristic of the negro population of the South, but now said to be fast fading out under the stimulus of a personal responsibility and a higher standard of life. But it is happiness, nevertheless, which will probably disappear when Egypt shall have a republican and universal suffrage.”
Fogg is also far from immune to religious prejudice. He disdains not only Islam and other Eastern religions, but also Catholicism and other Christian sects that don’t adhere to a strict Protestant orthodoxy. Of the ancient Egyptians, he writes: “Strange that a people so advanced in the arts and sciences, so distinguished for wisdom, who have left behind ruins that are still the admiration of the world, should have religious ideas so low as to worship four-footed beasts, birds, and creeping reptiles.” It would probably have been fruitless to point out to Fogg that one of the major differences between birds, which the ancient Egyptians held as sacred, and angels, which Christians hold as sacred, is that birds can be proven to exist.
In Cairo, while attending a prayer service at the beautiful old mosque of Mohamet Ali, Fogg hears the chirping of birds in the rafters and notes, “How much more acceptable to the Almighty were their voices of praise, than the mummery of the ignorant and superstitious crowd beneath!” Elsewhere he writes, “One of the most convincing proofs that Mahomet was an imposter, and the doctrines he taught a human invention, is the fact that for its progress it was indebted almost entirely to the sword, while the divine origin of Christianity has enabled it to prevail against all the powers of the world, by its own inherent truth.” Apparently, Fogg had never heard of the Inquisition.
Fogg can understand lower-class Arabs and Egyptians believing in Islam, but he is puzzled as to how an upper-class Arab can fall for such nonsense. He writes, “It may seem a strange incongruity that any educated, intelligent man can be a Mahometan. But I have met several such persons, and made the acquaintance, among others at Cairo, of Ali Hassan Effendi…He was born in Egypt, and was sent when ten years old to England and educated at King’s College, London. He speaks and writes English perhaps better than myself, is well read in ancient and modern history, as well as the current literature of the day, wears a dress all European except the fez – and it is difficult to realize that such a man believes the religion of the ‘false prophet,’ about which he discoursed without the least reserve, and defended with arguments to me quite novel. But I soon found that he no more believed the absurd superstitions of the ignorant Arabs, than an educated Protestant can receive as authentic the stories of miracles performed by relics of the saints.” Thus even in religious matters, his upper-class snobbery prevails. He appears to be more sympathetic to high-church Islamic believers than to low-church Christians.
But it would be unfair to suggest that Fogg is some sort of anomalous bigot. No doubt his prejudices were typical of the American social order that produced him. Though he is nowhere near as interesting a writer, Fogg reminds me in some ways of Jack London. Nowadays it is commonplace for the cultural elite to beat up on London as a bigot and a racist for the way he portrayed Asians and Blacks and other nonwhite ethnic groups in his writings. But London was part of the advance team, the small group of daring adventurers who had to first go out and make the acquaintance of various foreign peoples and their cultures so that later, more enlightened writers could come along in his wake and write with greater sensitivity about the same peoples and cultures. Rarely do the pioneers in any field of endeavor manage to get everything right. But without them, we’d never get anything right at all. Edith Wharton is rarely criticized for the way she treats Blacks and Asians and Indians in her work, but that is because she barely acknowledges their existence. It’s easy to avoid saying something wrongheaded about an ethnic minority if you pay absolutely no attention to them at all. Jack London was interested in foreign people and their culture. In his own way, he laid the groundwork for the more sensitive portrayals of Chinese, Japanese, African-American, and Native American characters that would follow in his wake. Fogg, born about fifty years before London, was a pioneer in foreign relations. He was admirably curious about other peoples and their cultures. He got a lot of things wrong about Arabs, Egyptians, and Persians, but at least he was out there engaging with them face to face. He lived among them, dined with them, traveled with them, haggled with them, and talked with them. He went into their homes and mosques and bazaars and coffee houses and public squares. He often registered disgust with what he saw, but the first step of any journey is rarely the most surefooted.
Though not a great stylist Fogg was capable of some really evocative writing. Here is how he describes the view from the deck of a paddlewheel steamship traveling up the Tigris river: “The water is very high, and in many places has overflowed the banks and formed broad lagoons over which are hovering flocks of ducks, herons, and other wild fowls. Laborers are strengthening the dykes with mud mixed with coarse grass and reeds to save their crops of wheat and barley from destruction. The fringe of date palms, so attractive a feature of the Euphrates from the Gulf to Kernah, is no longer seen, only broad, fertile, alluvial plains, over which, when uncultivated, there waves a strong, coarse grass that reminds one of our great western prairies. Here are immense herds of cattle, and flocks of coarse-wool sheep, buffaloes, whose black smooth hides and humped shoulders seem to indicate a cross with the hippopotamus, wallowing in the mud and water close to the shore, sometimes with only their heads or nostrils above the surface. Mud villages, where the whole population, men, women, children, and dogs turn out and line the shore to gaze at the passing steamer; black Bedouin tents, always at a little distance from the river’s bank, and around them horses grazing; these are some of the characteristic scenes of our first two days.”
Here he describes a scene in the Persian town of Bushire: “All the water used in the town is brought from these wells, and we met long processions of women carrying goat skins filled with water, across the plain. They belong to the peasant class, and their life seems a hard one as they toil along in the hot sun, stooping under a burden of sixty or eighty pounds upon their heads, or strapped to their shoulders. But it is a brighter side to the picture, when we pass others returning to the wells with empty goat skins, laughing and chattering among themselves, quite indifferent to the presence of strangers.”
He also has a gift for spotting the odd details of foreign scenes:
“One peculiar feature in Bushire is the wind towers, rising like large chimneys ten or twelve feet above the flat roofs. These have openings towards the prevailing winds in summer, and conduct currents of air into the sleeping rooms below.”
“The Mesopotamia Lion is usually without the dark and shaggy mane of the African species, but some have been found on the Kairoon river with a long, black mane. The people of the country make a distinction between these, the former being Mussulmen [Muslims] and the latter Kaffirs, or infidels. By a proper remonstrance, and at the same time pronouncing the profession of faith, the former may be induced to spare one’s life, but the unbelieving lion is inexorable.”
All in all, I find Fogg an agreeable traveling companion. It is nearly midnight as I write this and I am tired. I must lay aside Fogg’s book and get some sleep. Tomorrow we will finally arrive in Baghdad, the enchanted “City of the Caliphs.” I shall need to be well-rested.