Ends of the Earth
TIM history. of Panama as described in Mr David Howarth's The Golden Isthmus (Collins, 36s.) is a multi-decker saga of raids, massacres and disasters. There has always seemed to be something perverse about this part-of the world, not least the fact that you proceed from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a south-easterly direc- tion. There is also the fact that it was not `stout Cortes' at all, -but a gentleman called Vasco Nunez de Balboa. who stood silent upon a peak in Darien in these parts and 'with eagle eyes . . . star'd at the Pacific.' This happened on September 26, 1513—four centuries and oneyear before the American-built canal first linked- the two great oceans.
During this time the jungles of Darien became a graveyard of human hopes as well as 'a mass graveyard in a more literal sense. Balboa himself was executed by his cruel superior, Governor Pedrarias, 'who also exterminated, according to one calculation, some two million Indians. Small wonder that the Cuna Indians shun strangers to this day. It is an irony of history that these gentle pagans showed themselves so much more 'Christian' than the bloodthirsty subjects .of His Most Catholic Majesty.
Others who left their mark on the Isthmus were Sir Francis Drake in a notable beard- singeing excursion; Sir Henry Morgan, who sacked Panama City in 1670 at the head of a mob of howling buccaneers; and the earnest Scotsman inspired by William Patterson who' sought to found a cblony on the Isthmus about three decades later. The most grandiose folly in the area was de Lesseps's canal. He failed - in Darien after succeeding at Suez, and it was only with the extermination of yellow-fever- and malaria-bearing mosquitoes that the Ameri- cans were finally able to split the Isthmus. Now it is to be done again by nuclear explosion. This is a, fascinating story, superbly told by a master of clear and graphic narrative technique who knows the area at first hand.
De Lessens pops up again in Eugene Schuy- ler's Turkistan (Routledge, 50s.). Among the abortive fruits of the great globe-spanner's fer- tile brain was his plan to create a Calais-to- Calcutta railway by linking the Russian rail terminus at Orenburg with the Indian at Peshawur. (At over 7,000 miles, this would have outranked the Trans-Siberian.) Schuyler's work is a classic nineteenth-century study of what is now called Central Asia, here reissued in abridged form, and with an admirable introduc- tion by the editor, Colonel Geoffrey Wheeler.
Schuyler was an American diplomat who toured this area in 1873, visiting the territory newly annexed by Russia and then called the Governor-Generalship of Turkistan. He also went to the still independent Khanates of Bukhara and Kokand, which were, with Khiva, the next in line for the chopping-block. Schuy- ler shows himself an attentive and reliable observer, and his study bears out the high value put on it by scholars as the most important evi- dence on life in these regions at the time of the Russian takeover.
As colonisers, the Russians differed markedly from the British in India, one difference being that they did not instinctively tend to think of the local population as 'natives.' Whether or not this helped, history has shown them much more effective colonialists than we were. After all, they still hold their colonies. And lecture us on our colonialism to boot!
Mr George Woodcock's The Greeks in India (Faber, 42s.) takes us further afield in place and time by attempting to assess Greek influence on a whole sub-continent between roughly 500 BC and AD 400. The study seems to fall between two stools, being neither a popular work nor one which marshals evidence in accordance with the normal disciplines of scholarship.
. Tibetan Foothold, by Dervla Murphy (John Murray, 25s.), is set in India of the 1960s. It describes her work among Tibetan refugee children in the Dharamsala Nurseries in the north of the country. (She arrived there during the hot season when it was impossible for her to continue a bicycle tour of Asia because of the heat.) The children were in a sorry state under an incompetent camp administration and their tale makes a sad catalogue of needless suffering, now happily a thing of the past, as revealed in an appendix recording a second visit made in 1965. Miss Murphy also toured the in- sanitary high camps, including the aptly-named Shat, where the children's parents lived while working on road-building for the Indians. She has an exotic saga to relate and is an intrepid traveller who, having run, across a leopard on one solo bathing expedition, records her sur- prise that 'he showed no signs of being alarmed.'
Mrs Agnes Newton Keith's Children of Allah (Michael Joseph, 35s.) is an account of Libya as seen by the much-travelled wife of a UN official posted to those parts in 1955. While he sought more or less in vain to persuade the Libyans to help themselves by planting trees, she was making a special study—among many other local topics—of Libyan women's status. She found them subject to particularly severe seclusion. For instance, they may never set foot outside their houses, not even to take a child to hospital when it is bleeding to death. Mrs Newton Keith well communicates her interest and concern and obviously enjoyed living in Libya more than most Libyans.
The last two titles bring us nearer home. Mrs Ilsa Barea's Vienna : Legend and Reality (Seeker and Warburg, 55s.) gives a picture of the Austrian capital through the centuries, combining history, architecture and the influence of notable Viennese in an enthusiastic and valuable, if somewhat baroque, amalgam. The Travel Diaries of Robert Malthus (C.U.P., 45s.) contain the recently discovered description of a journey to Scandinavia made in 1799 by Thomas Robert Malthus, the renowned pioneer of the study of population. Malthus makes an equable and soothing rather than a stimulating travel com- panion. His diaries, as edited with careful scholarship by Mrs Patricia James and superbly produced by the publishers, are the most beauti- ful object among this collection of books.
RONALD HINGLEY
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