Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Strange beast in an Asian river

Wednesday, 3/09/2011

Figure 1: SIL28-222-13.jpg
Early explorers and treasure seekers strayed pretty far from reality while portraying the people they were busy exploiting or exterminating in the tales and images they brought back to the inquiring public in Europe.
I ran across an odd early woodcut in the Smithsonian’s Illustrations Collection that really got me guessing. Most early ‘ethnographic’ or natural history illustration is filtered through the early European mind set. The artist need only satisfy church and king to be safely within legitimate reportage practice. This image though of a beast of some sort in a river has some threads of truth. It made me wonder if it weren’t the twisted interpretation of an actual observed scene somewhere. I started out thinking this was a portrayal of the “here there be dragons,” from the tale of places at the edge of the world. What do you think the artist was trying to portray?

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Dragon Boat Dynasties follow Big Rivers with Big Fish

Pacific Ancient Voyagers
Prehistory in Four Dimensions
Across Geography and Up through Time


Jim Felton
A true and very ancient ‘fish story’.

            Fish get to immense size in the Tonle Sap Lake and in the Mekong River. Unfortunately they are becoming rare quickly as the industrialized inhabitants of the rivers fish them out. A news spot alerted my neighbor Gene and I that one had been caught recently and fired up our conversation.
            Gene and I have both traveled some in Southeast Asia and know of the immense fish. Now the trout in North American and European lakes and rivers don’t generally get as big as a man, but in the great slow rivers either side of the Tropic of Capricorn they do. But, they are getting smaller. “The price of civilization,” seemed like a poor excuse for the disappearance of such a wonder in our front step conversation.
            Returning to my house I realized with a start that I’ve had a pressed-paper temple rubbing from Angkor Wat hanging on my wall for years. It’s hanging in front of me as I write. I noticed something interesting! This rubbing shows a dragonboat full of Khmer warriors surrounded by fish of gigantic proportion.

tourist 'temple' rubbing on my wall. [pardon the low-res eyeball-cam shot]

     These must be the actual sized river carp. So I took the temple rubbing of the wall to show my neighbor and his wife Mary. We noticed several other interesting things as we looked closer at the temple rubbing. So, I’ve gathered some supporting images to share with you what we think we observed.
     Looking at man-sized fish gathered around a Khmer period canoe I ‘naturally’ think these are conventionalized ‘regular’ fish. I mean they portray them as big as the crocodile going after the overboard sailor in the same water. That news spot reminded us that, in the world’s great rivers, “’taint necessarily so.” These probably were drawn to scale!