I have placed Vartoman, as others do, among those who claim to have seen the unicorn, but although he does say that he saw the one-horned cattle of Zeila, he makes no such assertion about the two animals at Mecca and it has been inferred that he saw these only from the extreme minuteness of his description. Edward Webbe, an Elizabethan traveller whom no one has ever called trustworthy, does not wish to leave his readers in any doubt on this point. “I have scene,” says he, “in a place like a Park adjoyning unto prester Iohn’s Court, three score and seven-teene unicornes and eliphants all alive at one time, and they were so tame that I have played with them as one would play with young Lambes.”
Vincent Le Blanc, who set out on his travels through the Orient in 1567, was still more fortunate, for he declares: “I have seen a unicorn in the seraglio of the Sultan, others in India, and still others at the Escurial. That there are some persons who doubt whether this animal is to be found anywhere in the world I am well aware, but in addition to my own observation there are several serious writers who bear witness to its existence–Vartoman among others, who says that he saw some at the same place in Mecca.” In the seraglio of the King of Pegu he saw a unicorn with a tongue “very long and like a file”. (This probably means that he had read Marco Polo on the rhinoceros.) He was told that these beasts were tormented cruelly by huge serpents which were very fond of their blood because it had a delicious odour, and that when one of them was wounded in the chase the hunters always sent as much of its blood as they could collect to the king, enclosed in a little box. No one had ever seen the unicorn dip its horn in the water when drinking. A Brahmin told Le Blanc that he had been present at the capture of a very old unicorn which defended itself so fiercely that it broke off its horn on the branch of a tree and which, when it had been taken and bound, was led to the palace of the king; but this animal had been so severely beaten by the hunters for having wounded the king’s nephew that it died in a few days. The queens of India, Le Blanc reports, wear bracelets of unicorn bone, and the King of Casubi showed him a horn much lighter in hue than those he had seen elsewhere in the Orient. His remarks are a strange compound of things seen and heard and read thrown together without any attempt at criticism or sorting.
Another Oriental traveller, Dr. Leonard Rauchwolf, who saw the countries visited by Le Blanc a few years after him was told by a Persian “that the Sophi King of Persia had several Unicorns at Samarcand . . . and also in two islands . . . which lay from Samarcand nine Days journey, some Griffins which were sent him out of Africa from Prester John.”
In the same year in which Vincent Le Blanc began his travels there was published a famous book on the drugs and spices of India by Garcias ab Horto. Here we find a description of an amphibian unicorn which the author says he has had from men worthy of belief. They have told him that between the Cape of Good Hope and the promontory commonly called Currentes (Cape Corrientes, opposite the southern end of Madagascar) there are to be seen certain animals that live on the land yet take pleasure also in the sea. Although they are certainly not sea-horses, they have equine heads and manes. This beast has a horn two palms in length, and the horn is movable so that it can be turned to right or left and raised or lowered at will. The animal fights fiercely with the elephant and its horn is considered good against poison. A similar animal, called the campchurch, was reported eight years later by André Thevet. This creature, he said, was to be found near the Strait of Malacca, large as a stag and bearing on its brow a horn three feet and a half in length and mobile like the crest of the Indian cock. The horn was efficacious against poison. The campchurch had two web feet like those of a duck which it used in swimming both in fresh and salt water, but its forefeet were like those of the stag. It lived on fish.” This André Thevet, one must remember, was a man “worthy of trust.” He believed what was told him by a Turkish ambassador about the unicorns of Ethiopia and he thought also that the reindeer had only one horn. Caspar Bartholinus, who had seen reindeer, ridiculed this assertion, but John Johnston, who tried to please everyone in his Historia Naturalis, reconciled Bartholinus and Thevet by showing a picture of the reindeer with the two horns twisted together into one.
We have seen that Ambroise Pare disbelieved in the unicorn as firmly as his faith in the Bible would allow, but his fairness in controversy was such that he quoted against himself the testimony of an acquaintance of his, a physician named Louys Paradis, who said that he had actually seen the animal. This unicorn had been sent to Alexandria, where Paradis encountered it, as a gift to the Great Mogul from Prester John. It was about as large as a boar-hound, though not so slender in body, had a glossy coat like that of the beaver in colour, a slender neck, small ears, and one horn between the ears, very smooth, dark, and only one foot long. The head was short and thin, the muzzle round like a calf’s, the eyes were very large and fierce in aspect, the legs lean, the hooves divided like a deer’s. The animal was of one colour all over excepting one forefoot, which was yellow. It ate lentils and pease but lived chiefly on sugarcane. Paradis was told by the men who brought it from Prester John that there were many others of the same kind in their country, but that they were so wild that they were hard to capture and that the people feared them more than any other beasts. This account is more impressive in its minuteness and precision even than that of Vartoman, and one is surprised that Pare, who seems to have thought his informant trustworthy, could maintain his disbelief in the face of it.
In reading these accounts one cannot fail to be impressed by the number of unicorns coming from Prester John, who seems to have kept the neighbouring potentates regularly supplied with them. Vartoman’s two unicorns came from the Court of Prester John, the numerous specimens seen by Edward Webbe were in a Park adjoining that monarch’s palace, the unicorns reported by Leonard Rauchwolf as belonging to the Sophy came from there and so did the single animal seen at Alexandria by Louys Paradis. Let us turn directly to the source of supply and see what records can be found of unicorns in Ethiopia itself.
Most of these records were written by Portuguese and Spanish missionaries to Abyssinia, and they cover a period of about one hundred years. John Bermudez, who went on an embassy to Prester John in 1535, is the earliest member of the group. He says that in the province of Abyssinia, known in his time as Damute, there is found in the mountain districts a very fierce and wild unicorn shaped like a horse and as large as an ass. Marmol Caravaial (often called Marmolius), who wrote forty years later, is much more specific: “Among the Mountains of the Moon in High Ethiopia”, he says, “there is found a beast called the unicorn which is as large as a colt of two years and of the same general shape as one. Its colour is ashen and it has a mane and a large beard like that of a he-goat; on its brow it has a smooth white horn of the colour of ivory two cubits long and adorned with handsome grooves that run from base to point. This horn is used against poison, and people say that the other animals wait until this one comes and dips its horn in the water before they will drink. It is such a clever beast and so swift that there is no way of killing it, but it sheds its horns like the stag and the hunters find these in the wilderness.”
Fray Luis de Urreta, whose book on Ethiopia has already proved useful, also tells us that unicorns are found among the Mountains of the Moon. “The reason why so few men have ever seen them”, he says, “is that these mountains are almost inaccessible. They are quite different from the pictures of them to be seen in Europe, for they are only slightly smaller than elephants and their feet are like those of the elephant. Their general characteristics remind one of swine, for they love to wallow in the mire. On the brow there is one horn, heavy and large but tapering to a point and black in hue. The animal’s tongue is rough with spines that tear whatever it licks like a teasel–an excellent emblem of flatterers! . . . It is true that Saint Thomas and Saint Gregory and other holy men consider this unicorn identical with the Rhinoceros, but we must remember that they were chiefly concerned with moral matters and the welfare of the soul and that it was not their business to distinguish the species of animals.”
[Click next page to continue]