July 2008
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Fact and fiction combine in a rather exotic tale
We were sitting in the bar of my favourite hotel, which overlooks Positano and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Franco Sersale, who owns it with his son Antonio, has been travelling the world and taking photographs since the 1940s, and we had just been discussing a joint trip to Afghanistan. He doesn't believe in sticking to the well-trodden paths.
'I've just got back from New Guinea,' he said, as though he were talking about a quick trip to Naples. 'And Chile. Easter Island, too. In fact I went round the world.' Franco is always just back from somewhere, but this seemed a touch elaborate, even for him.
Chile I know, Easter Island I can imagine. New Guinea, though, has always been an obsession of mine, though I've never been there. Maybe it's because of the polished basalt axe-head that a British high commissioner there once gave me. Maybe it's the newspaper cutting I've pinned up, describing how a small tribe of 30 previously uncontacted people had been discovered in one of New Guinea's almost impenetrable valleys. They had no verbal language, even though their vocal chords were intact. They just communicated by signs.
Or maybe it's just that sense that there's somewhere on earth where unknown wonders still exist. Franco described the tribes he came across, and went into some detail about the different forms of penis-sheath the men wore. The two hotel guests beside us stopped discussing the merits of Chicago, and started listening. Franco explained how he'd headed into the deep river-valleys by motorboat, catching glimpses of the incomparable bird life and the extraordinary trees along the river banks. All evening long, I couldn't get these images out of my head.
New Guinea has a mythic quality to it. Its mysterious, largely untravelled, often unmapped interior is about the closest thing to a Lost World. I have the first full-scale book written about it, by a certain Captain JA Lawson. Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea was first published in 1875.
It's a tremendous read. Lawson, 'taking with me Aboo, my Lascar servant Toolo and the Australian Joe', heads off, shooting everything that moves: monkeys, deer, birds of paradise, a weird kind of ostrich, vultures. Another Australian steals their trading goods and slips treacherously away, but the natives are remarkably friendly. Lawson wanders through the jungle, spotting all sorts of extraordinary flowers, snakes, buffaloes, tigers. He finds the Yagi spider with 'the power of squirting out a highly corrosive liquor, which will cause the skin to blister'.
Lawson also discovers Mount Hercules, 32,783ft above sea level; pretty tall, considering that Mount Everest is only 29,000ft! But then the whole book is pretty tall. In fact it's obvious Captain JA Lawson made the whole thing up, without actually bothering to visit the interior of New Guinea at all. It is 283 pages of detailed, wry, sometimes fascinating description, all entirely imaginary.
The sketch map at the end of his route is so detailed ('three large watercourses, one 5ft deep and containing eels and carp') that you feel it must be true. Even today there are antiquarian booksellers who take the book at face value. 'He presents here,' says one current catalogue, 'many interesting observations of the country, flora, fauna, and native life.' You bet he does.
'Captain Lawson' may actually have been a Lt Dawson, who travelled to New Guinea in 1873 with the explorer Captain John Moresby (who gave his name to the capital). They had a falling out, and Dawson may have written this spoof with the idea of damaging Moresby's reputation. But 'Captain JA Lawson' was a serial inventor. In 1880 he wrote The Wandering Naturalists. It's the record of a plant-hunting expedition in the Himalayas, which goes to all sorts of places, which don't actually exist. Sound familiar?
Of course, plenty of travel books belong on the fiction shelves. Marco Polo supposedly went to China, yet he never got around to mentioning tea when he wrote his travel book. Sir John Mandeville discovered men in Africa who used their huge single feet to keep the sun off. Recently a well-known travel writer admitted writing a book about Brazil without actually visiting the places he mentions.
Ah well - I'm a journalist, so I can't be too censorious. Remember Wenlock Jakes, the great war correspondent in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, who was asleep when his train reached the city in the Balkans which was engulfed in a civil war? He travelled on to the next country (which was peaceful), invented a war there, and kept on writing about it until a revolution broke out. He received the Nobel Peace Prize.
That was fiction; but in the 1970s a correspondent for a big American news magazine told me he'd missed the weekly flight to a desert country in West Africa and couldn't get there in time to write about it for the next edition. He wrote about it anyway - the resulting story was so strong that the magazine put it on the cover. Money and aid flooded in from across the world, and - yes - the journalist won a big award for his moving reportage. It was only later that people realised the drought was entirely normal: at best it only rained there once every five years.
In case you ask, I've never pretended that I've been somewhere I haven't. It's one of the things the BBC would sack you for immediately. As for Franco Sersale, he certainly went to New Guinea. His photographs are now on display at his hotel to prove it. Including the ones of the penis sheaths.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected BA flights.
