François Rabelais - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ...that Rabelais used for his brief account of the voyage of Pantagruel to Utopia, which appears in the Second Book, and runs as follows: "In a few days, passing by Porto Santo and Madeira, they put ashore on the Canary Islands. Setting out from there, they passed by Capo Bianco, by Senegal, by Capo Verde, by Gambia, by Sagres, by Melli, by the Cape of Good Hope, and disembarked in the kingdom of Melinda." Every name in the above passage is taken from Sebastian Munster's introduction, but for the rest of the voyage we have names which on the face of them--Meden, Uti, Uden, Gela-sim, the Islands of the Fairies, and the kingdom of Achoria--denote, like Utopia, t".eir existence only in the world of fancy. M. Lefnmc, however, has ingeniously suggested that Meden and Uden (Greek words meaning "nothing") represent Medina and Aden, a suggestion which is borne out by the mention of these places in Munster's introduction. He further suggests that Gela-sim stands for Ceylon; it is, in fact, an imperfect anagram of Seyla, the form which the name takes on Fine's map. At the end of the Second Book, it will be remembered, Rabelais announced that in the continuation of the story we should hear how Pantagruel "sailed over the Atlantic Ocean, and defeated the Cannibals, and conquered the Islands of Pearls; and how he married the daughter of the King of India, called Prester John". Here again Rabelais is following The New World. The "Cannibal Islands" was the corrupt form under which the Carribal or Caribbean Islands were known in Rabelais's day, and by the "Islands of Pearls" are meant the islands off Venezuela from which Pedro Alonzo Nino "returned laden with pearls". With regard to the kingdom of Prester John, it will be noticed that Rabelais places it in Central...