A shortage of Turkish delight
Among the worst aspects of modern warfare is the difficulty for non-combatants of escaping it. As we have witnessed in Kosovo, East Timor or Chechnya, the innocent civilian is either an immobilised victim, to be shot, imprisoned or at least kept under surveillance, or else a dispos- sessed wanderer, fleeing without even the dignity of a change of clothes and carrying nothing but the metaphorical baggage of a smouldering resentment which generations will never extinguish.
It wasn't always so, and history is full of conflicts which people simply walked away from, only to hurry back again when the smoke cleared and the ink on the treaty was dry. In our own mid-17th-century civil wars, for example, however much inciden- tal harm was done to property and individ- ual security, it was possible to dodge the tramp of armies and, without very much in the way of money or luggage, to place a comfortable distance between yourself and 'the bloudy, intestine broyles between His Majestie and the Parliament'. And if you were very lucky, like the young Kentish merchant Robert Bargrave, who slipped out of England in the spring of 1647, that distance might measure three empires, four kingdoms and several thousand miles.
Travelling in the company of Sir Thomas Bendish, ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Bargrave was not a good sailor, now on my head, then on my heeles, all wett & dab- bled, sick, hungry, without sleep, & in a confusion of Torments', but the voyage was unforgettable for other reasons than mal de met. When he came home again after five years in Turkey and jaunting across eastern Europe, he wrote it all down, and as we turn the pages of his manuscript in the Bodleian library we catch the sense, despite the poised elegance of his baroque hand- writing, of Bargrave still a trifle dazed and reeling from all he had seen on a journey 'commixt of Crosses and delights'.
No sooner had the ambassador arrived in Constantinople than his daughter Abigail, engaged to be married to a merchant named Modyford, was jilted and the elabo- rate wedding masque for which Bargrave had provided both poetry and music was hurriedly called off. There was an embar- rassing scene with the outgoing envoy, Sir Sac)(vine Crowe, who kept his hat on and refused to accept dismissal. In Smyrna French traders intrigued with a rogue
English diplomat, Henry Hyde, who suc- ceeded in getting Bargrave and his friends flung in jail. The experience was a Midnight Express scenario avant la lettre. With their feet shackled and bitten by 'whole regiments of Chinches' (bedbugs) they were further plagued by the stench from corpses of newly executed criminals and 'the musique of monstrous ratts'. Added to which, as a personable 19-year- old Bargrave had to fend off the jailer's advances, 'unfitt to Discourse & horrid to remember'. When at last they were set free, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to compose an ode, !the which my more Jovial] Camerades sometimes favord me to Sing'.
Finally heading for home, the merchants travelled overland through Bulgaria and Moldavia, where they stumbled on a com- munity of enterprising Scots making potash out of birch trees amid fields blanketed with locusts. Dodging the Tartars on the banks of the Dniester, they got drunk on the beer of rural Poland, 'comely bespotted with woods & bespangled with Springs', and were virtuously shocked to discover the Dominican prior of Lvov moonlighting as a pimp for local whores. The journey took them six months, and by the time they set sail for Ostend, Bargrave's head was spin- ning with impressions de voyage, the beauty of the Bulgarian women he had watched at work in the fields, the sound of ausses' singing at an Orthodox church service, the Romanian method of trapping sturgeon inside a tub and the image of the Blessed Virgin on a mechanical clock in a Hamburg church, a figure so ravishing 'I could pas- sionately have wished it had a Soule'.
For all his poetic excursions he was a writer through necessity rather than incli- nation, and the journal might easily have ended up as a 'what I did on my holidays' logbook of the sort with which scholars nosing through family papers in English country archives beguile an idle hour or two. What transfigures Bargrave's Turkish memoir and those describing his later trav- els to Italy and Spain is the irrepressibly potent idea of a young man scrambling after words to convey the ecstatic immedia- cy of his experience before memory mud- dles it for ever. In Venice, for example, entranced by the new art form known as opera, 'represented in rare musick by select Eunuchs and women' and 'intermixing most incomparable apparitions and motions', he visits the same theatre for 16 successive performances:
And so farr was 1 from being weary of it, I would ride hundreds of miles to see the same over again; and as Venice in many things sur- passes all places else where I have been, so are these Operas the most excellent of all its glorious Vanities.
Many of us know the feeling. Bargrave was one of those travellers who is never ashamed of being a tourist. Gifted with the 17th-century Englishman's insatiable curiosity, he revelled in the bizarreries and exotica of life beside the Bosphorus, the masseurs in the hammam `stroaldng and stretching the joints in many accurat pos- tures which feel very little pleasing', the Persian carpets spread on the floor where in Europe they were used as tablecloths, the Turks' fondness for gardens and foun- tains 'in memorie perhapps of theyr own advance, by wandring motions, when such Helpes as these were most gratefull' and their inexplicable penchant for dining cross-legged in the shade of cypress trees. You can hear him wallowing pleasurably in the resonance of Ottoman ranks and titles, among the Bustangees, Timarsphees, Cad- delislciers, Incheragas and Ballukgibassis.
Breathing from these pages is a spirit which modern British travel writing, what- ever its zest amid the nonchalant dazzle of myriad accomplishments, seems either to have lost or else wilfully to have forsaken. Among all the different varieties of know- ingness and skilful manipulations of style our latterday wanderers deploy, there is room for a simple element of wonder and surprise. Getting there in the first place, with all the attendant menaces of Moorish pirates, contrary winds and the odd volcano erupting, doubtless added spice to the experience and perhaps their sheer accessi- bility now makes us blasé about Pisa's 'crooked Steeple, built so out of designe, to the wonder of all beholders', or the Escori- al, 'in the Lump an Entire & glorious Fab- rick'. Now and then, however, it might profit us, let alone the sights themselves, to recover a little of Bargrave's faculty of amazement. The Hakluyt Society has just given his manuscript a sumptuous first edi- tion (£45, available from Fiona Easton, tel: 01986 788359). It deserves to become a classic.
Jonathan Keates
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