5 - The Travels and Projects of Fynes Moryson

Summary

The high summer sun blasted the route between Aleppo and Antioch and all who journeyed along it. Fynes and Henry Moryson followed the custom of their two-hundred-strong camel caravan and rode between late afternoon and the dawn's first light, pitching their tents and eating a weary breakfast before a fitful midday rest. Fynes compared it to cosying up before a coal fire on a summer's day in England. He literally feared for his sanity, but the conditions took a fatal toll on Henry Moryson. As they reached Antioch, the flux that Henry battled flared up and he made the fatal mistake of ‘stopping this naturall purge, by taking Red wine and Marmelat’. A desperate camel journey over the hills toward the English factory at Iskenderun racked Henry's constitution. So did the repeated refusals by the ‘faitheless Muccaro’ attending him to pause and let the younger Moryson purge himself. In Fynes’ regretful words, ‘mischiefe lighted upon mischief’ to end his brother's life on 4 July 1596. In his grief –‘from the remembrance whereof my mind abhorreth’ – Fynes watched as the Turks seized all of Henry's belongings for the sultan and refused him a decent burial at Iskenderun without further extortions. These were the final insult, added to the Turks’ taunts and laughter when the two brothers took their last embraces.

Despite the emotional blow of his brother's death in a hostile, alien land, Fynes Moryson remained an open, curious, inveterate traveller throughout his life. Most of Moryson's journeys connected him with continental Europe and the Ottoman Empire, though he made a short foray to Scotland and spent almost three years in Ireland as a secretary to Lord Mountjoy during the Elizabethan reconquest. Moryson encountered a remarkable variety of peoples. His travels exposed him to customs and cultural traditions that surpassed the experiences of all but a handful of his contemporaries. Moryson decided to record his experiences and insights and took up his pen in earnest in 1609. John Beale of Aldersgate published a partial account of Moryson's travels as An Itinerary Written by Fynes Moryson in 1617. Moryson readied the second volume for publication some time around 1626. Beale passed on it and Moryson never found another interested printer.