Page 70 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

70 from Italy to the Canary Islands

Da la man destra mi lasciai Sibilia,
da l’altra già m’avea lasciata Setta.
‘O frati – dissi – che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l’occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
dei nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente,
non vogliate negar l’esperienza,
diretro al Sol, del mondo senza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza’.

Now, leaving aside that Dantean sublime which is expressed in Ulyss-
es’s curiositas for learning and thirst for knowledge – in this context it is
not the proverbial cunning of the Greek hero which must stand out – we
are led to believe that in explorers in general there is, beyond the thirst
for glory and the possibility of benefits for the mother land following new
discoveries and subsequent trade, also a desire (perhaps subconscious) to
comprehend that “share of being” lying beyond the unknown. In reference
to the 26 Canto of the Inferno, Dante Scholar Manfredi Porena, states:
th
“Dante could find many elements of poetic fascination for writing of the
hero’s final grand voyage in the ancient and medieval writers he knew who
spoke about Ulysses. Outside of the Homeric tradition, his adventurous
journeys, even beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and his mysterious death
far from the homeland, was mentioned here and there. And Ulysses was
often glorified as a model for the love of knowledge. Of great note in this
regard and the closest to the spirit of the Dantean conception, is a passage
from Cicero (De finibus, V, 18), which notes how in the episode of the
Odyssey in which the Sirens try to divert Ulysses from returning to his
homeland, they promise him science, because they understand that science
can be more important than the homeland for a man thirsty for knowledge.
Dante puts together, expounds on, enhances all these elements, imagining
that Ulysses perhaps renounces forever the return to his homeland, for a
journey having the simple purpose of discovering the world, in which the
absolute disinterest in everything that is not pure knowledge culminates in
the final episode: the exploration of the “unpeopled world”.
Now, it is in our wishful imagination that Lanzarotto Malocello read
this Dantean canto, but at the same time we recognise that he could have