Edward Webbe, Chief Master Gunner, His Trauailes (1590)
Original Title: The Rare & most wonderful thinges which Edward Webbe an Englishman borne hath seene & passed in his troublesome travailes in the Citties of Jerusalem, Dammasko, Bethelem & Gallely; and in the Landes of Jewrie, Egipt, Grecia, Russia, & in the Land of Prester John. Wherein is set foorth his extreame slaverie sustained many yeres togither, in the Gallies & wars of the great Turk against the Landes of Persia, Tartaria, Spaine, and Portugall, with the manner of his releasement, and comming into Englande in May last. London. Printed by Ralph Blower, for Thomas PavierIn this embellished travel account
Edward Webbe describes, among other eastern sights, the Christian land of Prester John. Webbe's account bears a close resemblance to that of
Mandeville. It was so popular that in its first year (1590) it went through three separate publications in England.
Even as Portuguese missionaries had repeatedly visited Ethiopia and claimed to meet with Prester John, now the mortal king of that land, writers such as Webbe was delighting readers simply by revisiting the tropes of the
Letter of Prester John.
Even as late as 1590, the popularity of the original Prester John myth seemed to enduring, even considering the dozens of circulating texts that identified Prester John as the fallible monarch of Ethiopia. Webbe's book found three publishers in 1590 alone.
Still, as
Silverberg (p. 316) points out, the book had its detractors.
Richard Hakluyt leaves Webbe's story conspicuously absent in his three-volume collection of significant European voyages in 1598, and
Samuel Purchas castigates Webbe as "a mere fabler" in 1625.
In terms of the book's relation to the Prester John legend,
Edel Sample relates,
[I]t is clear that Webbe relishes the task of describing the magnificence of Prester John’s court and the strange sights in his country. Webbe writes of the customs, political relations, and strange creatures that he witnessed. Three woodcuts are included; the first depicts a bearded “wilde man”, and we learn that one of these men can be found in Prester John’s court and another can be found in Constantinople. The text explains that this savage man is a public spectacle; chained by the neck, he is covered in hair, wears a mantle, and eats the flesh of condemned criminals. The other two woodcuts show a unicorn rampant and an elephant (“three score and seventeen Unicornes and Oliphants” live as tame pets in a park of Prester John’s.) Other texts on Asia and the Middle East may have influenced Webbe’s account of this ruler and his exotic land. For instance, his account of the sixty kings that daily serve Prester John is reminiscent of the multiple tributary kings that serve Bajazeth and Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s play (c.1587); the use of skulls as culinary utensils appears in Solinus’s Polyhistor (1584); while accounts of strange beasts, ‘wild men’, and cannibals were not uncommon and appear in Solinus and in Pliny (1585).
Webbe identifies Prester John’s kingdom with the traditional worldly Paradise, following Mandeville almost completely
. However, it can also be surmised that the
Travels bears some relation to the Russian theories about Prester John that circulated among the
Old Believers, who claimed that Prester John's land was a haven for religious dissenters.
Brewer (pp. 230-31) excerpts the relevant section on the land of Prester John.
Read the full Travailes online.Read more about Webbe and his Travels. 