Mexico—gringo. The word seems to have come from griego, a Spanish term for a Greek. The Diccionario Castellano (1787) defines gringo as a word used in Málaga for "anyone who spoke Spanish badly," and in Madrid for "the Irish." It implies gibberish. The many popular theories (among them, that it may be derived from hearing the disenchanted Irish soldiers who'd joined the Mexicans singing "Green Grow the Rushes Oh!" during the Mexican-American War in the mid-1840s) are fanciful and unconvincing. The earliest recorded use of gringo in print is in the Western Journal (1849–1850) of John Woodhouse Audubon (son of John James, and also an artist), who traveled by horseback through northern Mexico on his way from New York to witness the Gold Rush in California. In Cerro Gordo ("a miserable den of vagabonds") Audubon and his fellow travelers were abused: "We were hooted and shouted as we passed through, and called 'Grin-goes' etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water."
Being Frank
I HEARD THE word faranji, for foreigner, in Ethiopia when I was on my Dark Star Safari trip, and remembered farang in Thailand, ferangi in Iran, and firringhi in India and Malaysia (though orang-puteh, for white person, is more common in Malaysia). What's the connection?
When Richard Burton took his first trip to Abyssinia — recounted in First Footsteps in East Africa— he wrote, "I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term 'Faranj.'" Burton went on to say that the Bedouin in Arabia "apply this term to all but themselves." In his time, even Indian traders in Africa were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar), since trouser-wearing was associated with outsiders. In his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), he wrote, "The convert [in Arabia] is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a 'new Moslem,' especially a Frank."
In The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), Freya Stark says, "The aim of the Persian government is to have [the people of Luristan] dressed á la Ferangi in a year's time." Later on, in a valley "stood the castle of Nevisar Shah to which no Frank, so they told me, had ever climbed."
These words, all related to farang, are cognates of "Frank," though the people who use the word don't know beans about Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which "French" is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century, when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as East Africa and Southeast Asia, a Frank was any Westerner.
Even in Albania: "Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings," wrote Edward Lear about himself, in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form offaranji, the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt, though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination. In Egypt, a kabinet afrangi is a Western, sit-down toilet.
Almost the entire time I spent in Harar, Ethiopia — where the poet Rimbaud had lived — I was followed by children chanting, "Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!" Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then as I was driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of my car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.
Travel Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson
In spite of being weak and tubercular — wraith like in his John 0/ Singer Sargent portrait — Stevenson traveled widely. Mostly he traveled for his health, searching for clement weather to ease his infected lungs, but also for the romance of the experience:
I would like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow.
He rambled on the Continent, crisscrossed the United States, sailed around the Pacific, and ended up in Samoa, where he died (1894) and is buried. He was well read and undoubtedly knew Montaigne, who wrote in his essay "Of Vanity": "But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey. What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake." Stevenson seems to paraphrase this in his first quotation:
***
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life a little more nearly, to get down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
— Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)
***
A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.
— The Cévennes Journaclass="underline"
Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands (1978)
***
Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
— "Virginibus Puerisque"
***
Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humor moves them, at unfrequented stations.
— "Ordered South"
***
There lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk… It is very curious, ofcourse, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.
— "The Silverado Squatters"
***
There's nothing under heaven so blue,
That's fairly worth the traveling to.
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable
prospects and adventures by the way.
— "The Silverado Squatters"
13. It Is Solved by Walking
ALL SERIOUS PILGRIMS GO ON FOOT TO THEIR holy destination — Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims stand for so many others. Walking is a spiritual act; walking on one's own induces meditation. The Chinese characters for pilgrimage mean "paying one's respect to a mountain" (ch'ao-shan chin-hsiang). As I saw on my Riding the Iron Rooster trip, many Taoists make a point of visiting the five holy mountains they regard as pillars of China, the cardinal compass points as well as the center, separating Heaven and Earth. And there are four other mountains, sacred to Buddhism and associated with a particular bodhisattva. "Paying respect" means climbing the mountains — though this often involves walking up stairs, since steps have been cut into most of the mountainsides. Ambrose Bierce defined a pilgrim as "a traveler that is taken seriously."