Arabia Felix
THORKILD HANSEN (1927–1989) was born in Ordrup, Denmark, and studied literature at the University of Copenhagen for two years before moving to Paris in 1947. In France, Hansen supported himself by writing dispatches for the Copenhagen-based tabloid Ekstra Bladet. He returned to Denmark in 1952 and published his first full-length novel, Resten er Stilhed (The Rest Is Silence) in 1953. Hansen would go on to write more than two dozen books, many of which drew on the historical record to interrogate Denmark’s record of imperialism, including Pausesignaler (Pause Signals, 1959); Jens Munk (1965), which won the Golden Laurel Award; a trilogy about the Danish slave trade (1967–1970), the final volume of which won the Nordic Council Prize; and Processen mod Hamsun (The Case Against Hamsun, 1978). He died aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean in 1989.
JAMES McFARLANE (1920–1999) studied modern languages at Oxford and was the first dean of the school of European studies at the University of East Anglia. Britain’s preeminent Ibsen scholar, he edited the eight-volume The Oxford Ibsen, translating a number of the books himself. He and Kathleen Crouch were married in 1944.
KATHLEEN McFARLANE (1922–2008) was a translator and a celebrated weaver and artist from Sunderland. One of her fabric sculptures hung in Norwich Castle for thirty years.
COLIN THUBRON is the president of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his books are The Lost Heart of Asia, Shadow of the Silk Road, and most recently, Night of Fire. He is also, with Artemis Cooper, the co-editor of The Broken Road, the final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Walking Trilogy.
ARABIA FELIX
The Danish Expedition of 1761–1767
THORKILD HANSEN
Translated from the Danish by
JAMES McFARLANE and
KATHLEEN McFARLANE
Introduction by
COLIN THUBRON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Note: In this translation of Det Lykkelige Arabien certain passages and references of purely Danish interest have been omitted.
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1962 by Thorkild Hansen & Gyldendal, Copenhagen
Translation copyright © 1964 by Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Colin Thubron
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Georg Wilhelm Bauernfeind, view of Jeddah, in present-day Saudi Arabia, c. 1762; color by Lucas Adams
Cover design: Katy Homans
Published by arrangement with Gyldendal Group Agency.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hansen, Thorkild, 1927-1989, author.
Title: Arabia Felix : the Danish expedition, 1761-1767 / by Thorkild Hansen ; introduction by Colin Thubron ; translated by James McFarlane and Kathleen McFarlane.
Other titles: Lykkelige Arabien. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Originally published: New York : Harper & Row, 1964.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016059783| ISBN 9781681370729 (paperback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781681370736 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Niebuhr, Carsten, 1733–1815—Travel—Arabian Peninsula. | Niebuhr, Carsten, 1733–1815—Travel—Yemen (Republic) | Arabian Peninsula—Description and travel. | Yemen (Republic)—Description and travel. | Danes—Travel—Arabian Peninsula—History—18th century. | Danes—Travel—Yemen (Republic)—History—18th century. | Scientific expeditions—Arabian Peninsula—History—18th century. | Scientific expeditions—Yemen (Republic)—History—18th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Expeditions & Discoveries. | HISTORY / Europe / Scandinavia.
Classification: LCC DS206 .H313 2017 | DDC 939.4/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059783
ISBN 978-1-68137-073-6
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
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CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
ARABIA FELIX
The Route of the Danish Expedition to Arabia
part one: the storm before the calm
1. Despite these evil times
2. The storm
3. A year in Egypt
4. No news from Mount Sinai
part two: a thousand and one days
5. Spring in Tehama
6. Why “Arabia Felix”?
7. Carsten Niebuhr’s return
Sources
Index
INTRODUCTION
During the Age of Enlightenment, in an eighteenth century filled with colonial conquest, a surge of parallel expeditions was undertaken in search of scientific knowledge. A later age has sometimes impugned these ventures, but the specimens they accumulated, and the records they left behind, are often the fruits of disinterested passion and long hardship. Their participants ranged from the obsessively curious to the lively amateur and the dull careerist, and their results were similarly uneven: magnificent, surprising, or erroneous.
One of the first such ventures was a tragically ambitious voyage destined for Arabia, and it originated not in imperial Britain or France but in the small kingdom of Denmark. Its motives were mixed. It was charged both with scientific investigation and cartography and with the discovery of such fabled phenomena as the inscriptions left by the Israelites as they fled out of Egypt and the tidal fluctuations of the Red Sea. The success of the venture, of course, would redound above all to the glory of Denmark and of Frederick V, its patron-king.
From the moment of the expedition’s departure in January 1761 the governments and universities of Europe followed its progress with fascination, but as the years went by and its intermittent dispatches dwindled, the interest of its sponsors turned to foreboding, and they at last became inured to a fateful silence. By the voyage’s end in 1767, when its only survivor stumbled home, the venture was all but forgotten. Frederick V was dead. His teenage heir was more interested in prostitutes than in culture, and the expedition’s depleted but important findings, when they at last reached Denmark, were stacked up to rot in lumber rooms.
The groundbreaking account of this extraordinary journey, published in Danish as Det lykkelige Arabien in 1962, was the work of a writer obsessed by travel and exploration. Thorkild Hansen, who died in the Caribbean at the age of sixty-two, became noted in his country for a trilogy of books on Denmark’s complicity in the West Indian slave trade. His working method combined the diligent examination of original documents with a discreet imaginative license in re-creating the episodes they recorded.
In researching his book on the Danish expedition to Arabia—a venture then little known even in his own country—he delved into the Danish State Archives to read the letters, reports, and even financial accounts of the journey’s members, and created from them and from published diaries a near-scholarly work, with a novelist’s feel for pace and character. His vivid account, Arabia Felix, was published in English in 1964 in the lucid translation of James and Kathleen McFarlane. It was only then that the full drama and strangeness of the expedition was widely revealed.
Its destination was Arabia Felix—today’s Yemen—the legendary country of spices, myrrh, and frankincense of which contemporary Europe knew almost nothing. And it was in the malarial obscurity of this so-called Happy Arabia that one by one the explorers began to perish.
From the start they met fluctuating fortunes. The man-o’-war in which they sailed from Copenhagen was driven northwards before
a ferocious gale almost to Iceland. Then the Mediterranean brought respite as they sailed east with gentle southerly winds. Their warship outfaced hostile British privateers before arriving at Tenedos off the coast of Asia Minor, where an over-rigged Turkish ship carried the travelers with painful slowness to Constantinople, and from there they made their way at last to Alexandria.
A year in Egypt followed—a year filled with successes and frustrations, with the purchase of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts, with the collection of many previously unknown flowers and seeds, the mapping of the Nile delta, the copying of ancient hieroglyphs, and even the measuring of the pyramids. But there were constant threats from robbers and a suspicious local populace, and bitter failures at sites of biblical significance. And Arabia still awaited them, virtually unknown.
•
In retrospect, the expedition seems doomed from the start. Even before they sailed, its members were bitterly divided: by class, by temperament, by nation. The voyage had been proposed to the Danish foreign minister by the German orientalist Johann David Michaelis, who suggested its objectives and even specified a hundred questions it might answer. But because of differences among the expedition’s members, no leader was appointed. They were expected to harmonize into a traveling democracy.
Of these six participants, the three most prominent were a vain and indolent Danish philologist named Friedrich Christian von Haven, the clever but belligerent Swedish natural scientist Peter Forsskål—their mutual dislike soon turned to open loathing—and Carsten Niebuhr, a modest, hardheaded German cartographer who felt insulted by both of them. The remaining three were a German artist charged with sketching the scientific finds, a Danish physician (humiliated by Forsskål from the start), and an ex-hussar orderly from Sweden.
By the time they reached Turkey the tension among the group was such that when von Haven covertly purchased parcels of arsenic, the others in the party panicked when they found out. “We can imagine only the most horrible of intentions behind his buying these two packets,” wrote three of them to the Danish ambassador in Constantinople. “We can see that in a country where plague is so often rife it would be the easiest thing in the world to lay the blame for a number of sudden and simultaneous deaths on this disease.” It was under this threat that they eked out their year in Egypt.
To the reader it may seem unlikely that von Haven contemplated murder. He appears to be a self-pampered coward. To Europeans the highlight of the expedition might have been the transcription of ancient rock carvings, believed to have been inscribed by the Israelites on a remote hill in the Sinai desert. But von Haven was too frightened, or too lazy, to remain there and copy them. (It was Niebuhr who did so, revealing no more than an early Egyptian graveyard.) Even the desert monastery of Saint Catherine, where von Haven, the party’s philologist, might have studied a unique library of 3,500 manuscripts, eluded him because he had neglected to secure a permit in Cairo. It is astonishing to think that the oldest complete New Testament in the world, the Codex Sinaiticus, lay undetected within these monastery walls for another century.
•
The party’s ultimate goal held a promise of different discoveries. No Western expedition had penetrated Arabia’s hinterland since the Roman legions of Aelius Gallus were decimated there in the first century BC. But initially Arabia Felix fulfilled its name, and the Danish expedition found its inhabitants benign, and even became reconciled to one another. Forsskål and Niebuhr, united now in mutual respect, achieved goals close to both their hearts. Niebuhr, after a series of desert excursions, constructed a map of Yemen that was by far the most detailed and accurate of its day; and Forsskål was able to send his mentor Carl Linnaeus a branch of the tree that the great botanist most coveted: the rare Mecca balsam, which Forsskål stumbled upon in the Tehama foothills.
But with the onset of summer heat, of Arab distrust, and of fatal malaria, there began the long tribulation that is the cruel climax of Hansen’s book. Only Niebuhr lived to return to Denmark, and an extended coda describes the solo journey of this astonishing man as he makes his way, still weak with malaria, via India and the Persian Gulf, through Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, and Aleppo, mapping and amassing information everywhere he goes, astrolabe in hand, even copying the cuneiform inscriptions of Persepolis (which facilitated their eventual decipherment), then moving across Ottoman Turkey to a plague-ridden Bucharest into Christian Poland, before arriving in Copenhagen in November 1767, almost seven years after his departure.
•
“To-day,” wrote Hansen of the voyage’s members, “two hundred years after their expedition, they are almost completely forgotten.” And it is true that Niebuhr returned to a distracted nation that had written off the venture. Not only was the patron-king Frederick dead but the foreign minister who had supported the voyage was soon ignominiously fired.
Almost at once Niebuhr completed a massive study of Arabia in his native German, but it made no impact. When he published his 1,500-page diary of the expedition in three volumes at his own expense, they too were met with indifference. He turned to the manuscripts of his dead friend Forsskål and paid for their publication, but they were incompetently translated from the Latin by a Swedish hack and all but ignored. Then Niebuhr published the work of the expedition’s artist in a handsome folio of forty-three color-tinted plates. This too he paid for himself.
By the time his own work was seeping into scholarly recognition, Niebuhr was an old man working as a clerk to a remote rural council. He lived to be highly honored. In Arabia Felix, Hansen sometimes doubts the expedition’s influence. But since then its reputation has burgeoned. Despite the losses and decay suffered by its findings, Niebuhr’s maps and his compendious information from a time now remote were a gift to the future, while Forsskål’s studies in zoology and botany—his herbarium is still in use—were precociously accurate and original. Today there are conferences and seminars on the expedition, a Carsten Niebuhr Centre for Multicultural Heritage, and an institute established in his name at Copenhagen University. In 2011, the 250th anniversary of the expedition’s departure was celebrated with pride.
Hansen never lived to witness this proliferation of interest. But it was in part his own book—hugely popular in Denmark—that spurred the recognition of the voyage whose heroism, brilliance, and occasional absurdity he so graphically celebrated.
—Colin Thubron
ARABIA FELIX
Maps and line-drawings
Route for Danish Expedition to Arabia 1761–67
Designs for decoration of the Greenland
The Greenland at Marseille
Peter Forsskål’s letter from Rhodes
Egyptian irrigation machinery
An Egyptian horseman
How Niebuhr calculated the height of the pyramids
Egyptian hats
Oriental musical instruments
The bill for von Haven’s purchase of arsenic
Dancing-girls
Baurenfeind’s sketch of a woman selling bread
The St. Catherine monastery
Hieroglyphs at Djebel el-Mokateb
On the voyage down the Red Sea
A fisherman at Djidda
Djidda
Map of Loheia
Views of Loheia and Beit el Fakih
Niebuhr’s map of the Yemen
A woman from the coffee mountains
Mocha
Taaes
Jerim
Niebuhr in Arab costume
Niebuhr’s litter and chairbearers
Map of the Persian Gulf
The ruins of Persepolis
Niebuhr’s reconstruction of the cuneiform alphabet
Inscriptions at Persepolis
Drawings of Meshed Ali
Niebuhr’s sketch of Jerusalem
The title-page of Niebuhr’s first book
Between chance and fate speaks the human tongue; and if it is silent, the fingers speak; and if they are crippled, the eyes speak; and if they are blinded, the
heart speaks—alone or in a loved one’s arms, in ice or in flames, to the last heart-beat . . .
Thorkild Bjornvig
part one
THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM
1. “Despite these evil times . . .”
On a calm winter morning, on 4th January, 1761, a company of five men, clad for a journey, were rowed out from the Tollbooth into the shipping roads off Copenhagen. As they stood in the boat with their back towards the sun, they could see the city lying within. The little cosmopolitan capital, with the elegant district round Eigtved’s brand-new Palace of Amalienborg, receded slowly into the distance in the thin January light. Before them in the sun lay the naval vessel Greenland. Screwing up their eyes against the glare, they could see the masts and the rigging; and perhaps one or another of them experienced a slight feeling of unease at the sight of that black silhouette. In the months to come the ship lying there was to take them on a long journey, first to the north round Skagen, then down through the Mediterranean to Constantinople. From there they were to continue their journey to Alexandria, Cairo and Suez; then on still farther through the Red Sea and down to the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, to the miraculous land of frankincense, myrrh and balsam, to that paradise on earth which the young Alexander dreamed of conquering, but where nobody had ever been, not even the young Alexander, and which—perhaps precisely because nobody had ever been there—had from very earliest times been called Arabia Felix—“Happy Arabia.”
The five men in the rowing-boat also used in their documents the terms “L’Arabie heureuse” and “Das glückliche Arabien.” Only two members of the group were Danish; two others were German and one a Swede. All were still young, the eldest being barely thirty-four and the youngest just twenty-eight. For several years they were to live exclusively in one another’s company; but at this particular time none of them had known any of the others for more than a few weeks. Probably they were silent as they stood there in the rowing-boat, looking out towards the ship. They were bound for “Happy Arabia,” but none of them seemed particularly happy at the thought. The distant and unfamiliar has its fascination; but the day one surrenders to it, one generally finds that it has also its threatening side. This is one aspect of the matter, and something about which we can only speculate. Regarding the other and possibly graver cause of their silence during the opening minutes of the expedition, there is no need to rely on conjecture. It was, unfortunately, already an established fact. For various reasons, this little group was riven by bitter dissension.