Classic Travel Narrative

The Sea and the Jungle – H.M. Tomlinson

In 1910, Tomlinson sailed on the English tramp steamer Capella from Swansea to Porto Velho, Brazil, near the cataracts of the Madeira River.

He was the purser with light duties on the two-thousand ton steamship, which carried supplies for the construction at Porto Velho of the eastern terminus of the new Madeira-Mamore Railway. The steamer went upriver and Tomlinson also took some jaunts into the Brazilian rain forest some distance from the ship.

This classic travel narrative was only one of the author’s 30 book-length works. Tomlinson was one of the most respected writers of the first half of the 20th century, but he is little read nowadays.

My praise cannot possibly do justice to Tomlinson’s prose, such as this, on the rewards of travel:

They are no matter. They are untranslatable from their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down to sleep on the tumulus where little people dance on midsummer night, and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets were filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the traveller cannot prove the dreams he had, showing us only pebbles when he tries.

And this:

When you sight your first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye. The mind is not deceived by what merely shows.

Whole paragraphs and pages feature this kind of writing. Sometimes I would just blink and shake my head, unable to believe a human being, not some prose god, wrote it. By the end, a certain "Nobody who's not done it can imagine what I've seen" tone creeps in, but so what, with prose like this?

Tomlinson went to Brazil on the freighter to get away from the humdrum craziness of working in the city so the reader had better try to avoid reading in the jangled mood that comes after a day at work. Tomlinson’s treatment of the aloof and indifferent jungle (“The jungle’s sheer height, confusion, and intensity were more awesome than when seen from the steamer”) is captivating, absorbing.