I began this year in recognition of the high probability that I am chasing lies. Now that's a mean little word; probably most of them are white lies or 20% grey lies or 42% black lies or somesuch. And there are, after all, lies that tell a greater truth. But at the end of the day, I must ask: what am I doing, surveying the impact of chorros' overactive imaginations?

But these aren't just lies of the kind that save someone face. These are lies that build whole histories and whole towns, perhaps even global paradigms. And I daresay that you might just be able to give me a random name or noun in the English language and I could connect you back to lake-monsters. Such is my versatility after mulling these beasts over for the last four months.

Take for example, Intersate 89. If you're going to my house in New York, when you take I-89 north up towards Canada, you want to take the exit right after St. Albans. Today, I learned that Alban was a real person. A rather good chap overall, he had the misfortune of being born in the 14th century when it was deathly unpopular not to have the right religion. Naturally he was tortured and executed and all that. A few other people were similarly treated but in a wave of sympathy to them all, a town sprung up in honor of good ol' Alban. Alban would then be Sainted (a strange irony if there ever was one) and then a rebellious little Vermont town would take the name for their own, hence my own little personal connection.

So, returning to the subject of lies and travel and monsters, I give you Sir John Mandeville, born, asitwere, in St. Albans. Haven't heard of him? Neither had I until today, but as it turns out he's a bloke you really should know. Think of it this way: how many people throughout history have been canonized into our history books because of how smart and noble they were and changed the world with some new epiphany that was reasoned out through the glory of academic rigor. You've got your Einstein and your Roosevelt and your Armstrong and your Earhardt. They all did great things for a greater world. Then you've got Mandeville, who, more likely than not, is one... big... lie.

Now, you might be wondering why a big liar should be a tenet of anyone's celebrated history of humankind. After all, there's nothing remarkable about Richard Nixon. But that's because his lies were worthless. Mandevilles lies changed the world for centuries to come!

As the story goes, Mandeville was born in the 14th century and more or less carried on until one day, in the year of 1322, when consumed with a fit of wanderlust not unlikely a Watson Fellow, he ostensibly made a pilgrimmage to Jerusalem - though some believe he did so to flee persecution from King Edward II. After several years he had still not returned and everyone more or less forgot about him. Then, after 34 years, he reappeared, stating that he had gone well past his goal, and traveled to India, China, the lands beyond, and then returned by circumnavigating the globe. Keep in mind this is over 150 years before that other guy sailed the ocean blue. As you could imagine, the whole neighborhood was incredulous, and he set about the relatively unprecedented task of handwriting his travel's memoirs. Among his pages, he describes, with great rigor and an almost inhuman thirst for red wine, the strange intoxications of the Oriental world. Constantinople and the Sinai Peninsula were among his favorites (mostly due to their wine).

Then a strange thing happened. Unlike most other pilgrimming Christians, he became entranced by the piety of Muslims, which at this time were living a golden age that made Mother England feel wholly inadequate to poor ol' John. At this, he apparently continued east into the Ottoman Empire and into India and then even into far off islands in Southeast Asia.

That's about the gist of it. If you try to dig for many more details you risk putting undue credence on the 650-year old yarn of a slobbish man who outlandishly exagerrates, never kept dates, and by this time had essentially gone insane on alcohol and arthritic gout.

But, oh the monsters he told of. In the vast reaches of Southeast Asia, where few Europeans could counter or corroborate, he fabricated the most ridiculous of monsters, including but not limited to: men with no heads - eyes on their shoulders, men with tiny mouths that resorted to hissing and gesticulating to communicate, men with testicles hanging past their knees, and men with one huge gigantic foot which was regularly used for shade from the sun.

In other words, he was a lambasting crackpot, who intellectuals of the time, and for centuries afterward, criticized for his complete and shameless lack of veracity. There were shining moments of authenticity in his work, but it was possible he stole even these from other traveler's tales. Moreso, there was speculation that he was never from St. Albans at all but a scheming Frenchman in disguise. Or a conniving runaway murderer.

But what separates Mandeville (which, I just realize now is one letter away from being French for globe-city) from the likes of Tricky Dick is that his lie changed the temper of the times. The popularity of his globetrekking yarn, faux-pas and all, took Europe by storm, almost as fast as the Bubonic Plague. There was no printing press, so diligent monks the continent over had to meticulously translate and quill every last humbugging word by hand.

And with this farce was born a realization at the darkest moment of the Dark Ages of Europe: that perhaps there was a fascinating world outside their own
petty religious feuds, perhaps a world worth exlporing. Mandeville's work succeeded predominantly because it lit the imaginations of readers and campfire listeners all over Europe. People went new places, tried new things, traded for goods from far off places. Soon, a Rennaissance would follow. Shakespeare and Swift took inspiration from him. Mandeville's monsters began to be drawn onto maps. Scholars had known for centuries that the world was round, but only with the populist recognition of Mandeville could Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, and countless other explorers justify their search for a westward route to the riches of China, fueled by the words of Sir John Mandeville. What a milestone of farce!

It is around this time that the Church began to hypothesize the existence of a "Great Southern Land" at the bottom of the globe, in every way the opposite of European civilization, full of ungodly landscapes and nightmarish creatures. Mariners looked to the horizon with a new zeal, considering places beyond even Mandeville's journeys, and eventually, almost directly opposite England's position on the globe. And eventually (I do mean eventually, since it would appear that Europeans were probably the last to "discover" Australia; the Chinese, Arabians, and possibly even the Peruvians were there first)... eventually they would find a place - where people lived with entirely different values than Europeans. They would find the platypus, which laid eggs, yet breast-fed its young like a mammal. Marsupials bounced around with joeys in pouches. Birds called out in distinctly new voices. Desert and rainforest shared one continuous stretch of earth. They would make landfall to a place that, while not as freakish fantastical as Mandeville would have described, was nonetheless a continent that seemed to run by a different set of natural laws - or at the very least, flirt between myth and reality.

It is amongst this zeitgeist the European world would first hear of the Bunyip. As I write further, I have to wonder, what would Sir John Mandeville think?