Peter Walker. Hard by the Cloud House. ISBN 978-1-99-101671-3. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2024. 288 pp. RRP: $39.95.
Travel writing is the least demanding of genres. You can write anything. You can write that there was nothing to write about. I could describe the croissants, of Parisian quality, on sale at the Uturoa bakery, or the Raiatean girls dancing on the backs of beflowered lorries on Bastille Day, or the strange sensation, crossing a glass-floored fale in the middle of the night and seeing coloured fish dart beneath your feet as in a diagram of the unconscious.Depending on your temperament, you may find this description of travel writing - 'You can write anything' - reassuring or a little ominous. In any case, I suspect it was wise of Peter Walker to postpone it to the last of the three sections of his book. What is this book about, anyway? It begins with a richly detailed account of the discovery and various scientific controversies surrounding Te Hokioi, or 'Haast’s Eagle' (Hieraaetus moorei). This is popular science writing of the first order: as good as anything by Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould.
We learn here of the pronounced lack of interest in this raptor when researchers thought it must have been too ungainly to fly and thus condemned to hop about scavenging any small creatures too slow to outrun it. Now that this opinion has been overturned – by most experts, at least – its remains are again in high demand. So much for scientific objectivity.
The second section is dominated by history. What begins as a discussion of one possible locale for the depredations of this monstrous eagle – now also identified with the pouākai of Māori legend – morphs into a chilling account of the brutal and rapacious acquisition of the Canterbury Plains by a series of villains headed by Governor Grey himself. Again: riveting stuff: something I certainly should have known about, but have to confess that I didn’t, certainly not in such detail.
After that, in the third section, we stray into personal history or even allegory. The contention that Haast’s eagle may be the original of the 'Roc', or 'Rukh', or 'Rukhkh' of Islamic legend – writer and explorer Richard Burton gives all three of these as possible spellings in the notes to his exhaustive sixteen-volume 1885 translation of the Arabian Nights – is a bold one, to say the least. Walker, however, not content with this, suggests that it may also have inspired the Garuda bird of Indian and South East Asian folklore.
Indeed, as he morphs into a discussion of Te Hokioi’s possible associations with the Korotangi – a mysterious serpentine-stone bird carving discovered in the roots of a mānuka tree on the shores of the Aotea Harbour, near Kawhia, in 1878 – it gradually becomes apparent that this section is not meant to be read in quite the same way as first two parts of the book.
One could see this three-part structure simply as an attempt to impose order on an unruly collection of materials, gathered over decades, and now needing to be fixed in final form between two covers. I’d prefer, however, to follow the lead of Peter Walker’s definition of 'travel writing', quoted above, and to see it instead as an exceptionally entertaining – and informative – contribution to that genre.
Te Hokioi is clearly a protean signifier for Walker. There’s a certain risk in conflating such disparate material, mind you: let’s call it the curse of the Da Vinci Code. The single source for virtually all his Islamic and pre-Islamic learning, as Walker admits, is an essay entitled “The Rukhkh, Giant Eagle of the Southern Seas,” by A. D. H. Bivar, professor of Iranian Studies at London University, an essay included in a 2009 volume called Exegisti monumenta: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas Sims-Williams. Bivar’s essay is only ten pages long, and 'it made no waves, as far as I knew ... And yet to state the whereabouts of Sinbad’s Isle, where so many had travelled in mind over the centuries … Perhaps there was some flaw in the argument which I couldn’t see.'
To summarise a long and (to my mind) somewhat fanciful yarn, Peter Walker claims Prof. Bivar’s reading of mediaeval Arab traveller “Ibn Battuta’s 42-day voyage in the late 1340s far out into the Pacific, where he thought he saw the Rukh [my emphasis], made a sighting of the New Zealand coast by earlier Arab mariners, and therefore an encounter with Harpagornis [Haast’s Eagle], seem feasible':
'It is my understanding that historians of New Zealand are generally sceptical of such visits,' Bivar writes, 'yet Arab accounts of the Rukhkh suggest that occasional visits of this kind did take place, since only there could a veritable giant eagle have been encountered'.Bivar’s contention that virtually any Middle or Far-Eastern tradition of a 'great, winged raptor … the Griffin, the Anqa, the Rukh, the Simurgh of the Persians' seems likely to encode an encounter with Haast’s eagle, does sound – on the surface, at any rate – a little like Gavin Menzies’ claim, in his best-selling book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002), that 'the fleets of Chinese Admiral Zheng He visited the Americas prior to European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that the same fleet circumnavigated the globe a century before the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan.' Bivar’s view is, after all, as Walker admits, based on a 'simple insight' as compelling as Menzies’ obsession with the great Ming treasure fleet: 'The Rukhkh always seems to have been located in the China Seas.'
He’s careful to elucidate that 'in Arab and Persian geography of the Middle Ages, "the China Seas" meant the part of the great encircling ocean which lies to the east of China: in other words the Pacific.' A pretty wide-reaching index of location, one would have to say. Consider Burton’s own comments on Sinbad the Sailor’s famous encounter with the giant Roc during his fifth voyage:
An excellent study of Marco Polo’s Rukh was made by my learned friend the late Prof. G. G. Bianconi of Bologna, 'Dell’Uccello Ruc,' Bologna, Gamberini, 1868. Prof. Bianconi predicted that other giant birds would be found in Madagascar on the East African Coast opposite; but he died before hearing of Hildebrand’s discovery.This reference to 'Hildebrand’s discovery' is to a giant bird’s egg (subsequently classified as Aepyornis hildebrandti) excavated in Madagascar. Its close relation the Aepyornis maximus, or Elephant bird, is quite possibly the largest bird ever to have lived. And the closest living relative to the Elephant bird is the New Zealand kiwi. So, while the two islands are a mere 11,742 km apart, situating the 'Rukh' in New Zealand rather than Madagascar is only a matter of a few months’ navigation of the Southern Pacific … The point I’m trying to suggest here is that the old 'no smoke without fire' adage – when applied to a thousand or so years of fanciful tale-spinning – can be used to justify virtually any hypothesis: in this case, the possible point of origin of a giant mythical bird.
There may be a reason, then, why New Zealand historians 'are generally sceptical' of visits by medieval Islamic mariners. Bivar’s contention that 'Arab accounts of the Rukhkh suggest that occasional visits of this kind did take place, since only there could a veritable giant eagle have been encountered [my emphasis]' is as circular an argument as I’ve ever come across: as good as anything in Dan Brown or Gavin Menzies.
There’s no physical evidence of such visits to the South Island of New Zealand (Bivar is very careful to specify the location of these non-visits). However – says Bivar – they must have taken place, because where else would they have seen the Rukhkh? Well, as I’ve mentioned above, Madagascar was the favourite locale for such sightings in the late 19th century, the age of Burton. But one of the reasons we don’t take such observations very seriously anymore is because every ancient culture I’ve ever heard of has at least one story of a giant bird.
Was Haast’s eagle also the original of the Native American Thunderbird? The Eagle of Zeus? Veðrfölnir, the hawk that sits on an eagle on top of the world tree, Yggdrasil? Is it possible that these mythical beings might have evolved without actual sightings of Te Hokioi?
My doubts about Prof. Bivar’s (I hope) playfully speculative essay is certainly not meant as a critique of Peter Walker’s book. I’ve described his intentions above as an excursus into 'personal history – or even allegory', since that’s how I read them. This whole section, after all, doubles as an elegy for his lost friend, Polynesian artist Jim Vivieaere, and their fateful joint visit to the ancient marae of Taputapuatea on the island of Raiatea.
In travel writing, after all, as Walker informs us, 'you can write anything.' I’m just afraid that his subtle fusion of genres may have strayed over a little into the tempting domains of pseudo-history in this last of his three sections. As long as he doesn’t insist on our taking it literally, though – as I’m sure he does not – what harm can there be in imagining Sinbad and his friends staring up at the pristine Southern Alps, and seeing hovering over them this most wondrous – and terrifying – of raptors?
(14/6-9/7/24)
Landfall Review Online (2024).
[Available at: https://landfallreview.com/the-whereabouts-of-sinbads-isle/]
[1535 wds]
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