Patrick
Brydone, the forgotten man of the Scottish Enlightenment, was born in
1741 in our village, a son of the manse. A soldier, a pioneer in the
study of electricity and magnetism and a traveller, he wrote the
first readable travel book - A Tour through Sicily and Malta : in
a Series of Letters to William Beckford which
ran to nine editions was immensely popular and is still easily
accessible to this day.
We
set sail from Southampton to cruise through the Mediterranean
following, at least part of his route to Sicily and Mount Etna.
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| Mount Etna |
In
his book he describes,
amongst a fund of detailed observations,
such titbits as the Italian love of ice-cream and the banditti who
guarded him during his stay on the island
:
Criminal
as they are to society in general, yet to one another and to every
person who puts himself under their protection, free from every
imposition.
He
climbed Mount Etna describing woods with great oaks and chestnut
trees up to 204 feet in circumference. Here, he had discussion with a
canon, Recupero, on the time taken for soil to accumulate from lava
flows and that the calculations arising from this showed that Mt Etna
had been erupting for at least 14000 years. This flew in the face of
Bishop Ussher’s statement based on the Bible that the world began
in 4004 B.C.
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| Silvestri Crater |
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| Etna's summit beckons |
Brydone’s
account of this was censured by Samuel Johnson and his biographer
Boswell as being anti-mosiacal and he was advised to” pay more
attention to the Bible.”.
David Hume, atheist, philosopher and giant of the
Scottish Enlightenment praised Brydone for his geological expertise
in letters to Wm Strahen
James Hutton of Siccar Point fame, the father of
geology, published his Theory of the Earth in 1788. He would
almost certainly have read Brydone’s Travels and would have
been influenced by it.
While Mt Etna, Brydone noted that the Bishop of
Catania received revenues for the sale of ice and snow to all of
Sicily, Malta and part of Italy.
:
“even the peasants regale themselves with ices during the summer
heats […] and there is no entertainment given by the nobility of
which these do not always make a principal part. When he visited the
underground caves filled with ice he remarked that the peasants made
the finest ice-houses: It was the peasants of Sicily who supplied ice
to the confectioners, street sellers, and cafés of the island.
At
a later port of call, Venice, we had the finest ice cream I have ever
tasted!
We
sailed through the Straits of Messina in the footsteps or rather, the
oar-sweeps of that other wanderer in the Mediterranean – Ulysses
on his journey back to Ithaca.
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| Approaching the Straits of Messina |
The
twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis guarding the straits meant little to the power of
mighty diesel engines but the whirling eddies created by the meeting
of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas in the narrow gap would indeed have
seemed like the devouring monster Charybdis to the tiny galleys of
the Achaeans. Circe's advice to Ulysses to "hug Scylla's rock"
held true even today as we made our passage.
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| The swirling eddies of Charybdis |
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| The Rock of Scylla |
Ulysses
had encountered Polyphemus the Cyclops on the island and escaped by
cunning after blinding the giant by driving a blazing tree trunk into
his one eye.
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When
anchored at Taormina, his men displeased the Sun god Apollo by
killing the god's cattle for food. The god was so displeased that he
threatened not to shine unless they were punished by the other
Olympians. Only Ulyssses survived their vengeful shipwreck.
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| Taormina , with the bay where Ulysses men angered Apollo ? |
Brydone
recalled their fate when visiting the Craeco-Roman amphitheatre at
Taormina. After more than two thousand years in is still in use as a
concert venue.
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| Mount Etna seen from the amphitheatre |
While
Brydone sailed on to Malta in his journeys, we docked at Venice then
crossed the Adriatic to Croatia.
We
returned across Homer's
"wine-dark sea",
passing the "floating islands of Aeolus" the god of the
winds, and so
to the Pillars of Hercules at
Gibraltar.
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| The Aeolian Islands, home of the god of the winds |
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| Gibraltar and one of the Pillars of Hercules |
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| Sailing into the sunset |
A
journey in the wake of two adventurers three
thousand years apart.
