Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon | Page 8

than either, they assert facts contrary to the
honor of God, to the visible order of the creation, to the known laws of
nature, to the histories of former ages, and to the experience of our own,
and which no man can at once understand and believe. If it should be
objected (and it can nowhere be objected better than where I now
write,[12] as there is nowhere more pomp of bigotry) that whole
nations have been firm believers in such most absurd suppositions, I
reply, the fact is not true. They have known nothing of the matter, and
have believed they knew not what. It is, indeed, with me no matter of
doubt but that the pope and his clergy might teach any of those
Christian heterodoxies, the tenets of which are the most diametrically
opposite to their own; nay, all the doctrines of Zoroaster, Confucius,

and Mahomet, not only with certain and immediate success, but
without one Catholic in a thousand knowing he had changed his
religion.
[12] At Lisbon.
What motive a man can have to sit down, and to draw forth a list of
stupid, senseless, incredible lies upon paper, would be difficult to
determine, did not Vanity present herself so immediately as the
adequate cause. The vanity of knowing more than other men is, perhaps,
besides hunger, the only inducement to writing, at least to publishing,
at all. Why then should not the voyage-writer be inflamed with the
glory of having seen what no man ever did or will see but himself? This
is the true source of the wonderful in the discourse and writings, and
sometimes, I believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault, of a
kind directly opposite to this, to which these writers are sometimes
liable, when, instead of filling their pages with monsters which nobody
hath ever seen, and with adventures which never have, nor could
possibly have, happened to them, waste their time and paper with
recording things and facts of so common a kind, that they challenge no
other right of being remembered than as they had the honor of having
happened to the author, to whom nothing seems trivial that in any
manner happens to himself.
Of such consequence do his own actions appear to one of this kind, that
he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity should he omit the
minutest thing in the detail of his journal. That the fact is true is
sufficient to give it a place there, without any consideration whether it
is capable of pleasing or surprising, of diverting or informing, the
reader. I have seen a play (if I mistake not it is one of Mrs. Behn's or of
Mrs. Centlivre's) where this vice in a voyage-writer is finely ridiculed.
An ignorant pedant, to whose government, for I know not what reason,
the conduct of a young nobleman in his travels is committed, and who
is sent abroad to show my lord the world, of which he knows nothing
himself, before his departure from a town, calls for his Journal to
record the goodness of the wine and tobacco, with other articles of the
same importance, which are to furnish the materials of a voyage at his
return home. The humor, it is true, is here carried very far; and yet,
perhaps, very little beyond what is to be found in writers who profess
no intention of dealing in humor at all. Of one or other, or both of these

kinds, are, I conceive, all that vast pile of books which pass under the
names of voyages, travels, adventures, lives, memoirs, histories, etc.,
some of which a single traveler sends into the world in many volumes,
and others are, by judicious booksellers, collected into vast bodies in
folio, and inscribed with their own names, as if they were indeed their
own travels: thus unjustly attributing to themselves the merit of others.
Now, from both these faults we have endeavored to steer clear in the
following narrative; which, however the contrary may be insinuated by
ignorant, unlearned, and fresh-water critics, who have never traveled
either in books or ships, I do solemnly declare doth, in my own
impartial opinion, deviate less from truth than any other voyage extant;
my lord Anson's alone being, perhaps, excepted. Some few
embellishments must be allowed to every historian; for we are not to
conceive that the speeches in Livy, Sallust, or Thucydides, were
literally spoken in the very words in which we now read them. It is
sufficient that every fact hath its foundation in truth, as I do seriously
aver is the ease in the ensuing pages; and when it is so, a good critic
will be so far from denying all kind of ornament of style or diction, or
even of circumstance,