Explorers back in the day were not always the most reliable of record keepers. Famously, when faced with a seemingly unconquerably vast territory, an ocean or desert or mountain range, they would often simply add some mythical monster to their maps and head home to cash in their cartographical chips.
This is why we see an abundance of dragons, krakens or serpents decorating the edges of maps as the factual coastlines and island chains trail off. Although we now know that these were as much decorative flourishes as helpful guides to the local fauna (most readers of the maps did not seriously think we were surrounded by monsters) they certainly showed a creative streak in these explorers.
Of course, this creativity did not just extend to maps. Explorers would come home with many tall tales of their encounters. And for every story a modern reader could believe, there were ones we know for a certainty to be complete bunk.
There are no Anthropophagi, as Shakespeare’s Othello describes them: men whose heads / do grow beneath their shoulders. There are no giant sea monsters, nor were there two headed giants raging on the shorelines of Patagonia (probably).
But some stories are more plausible even to a modern listener. Some of the tall tales which came back from trips to far-off lands may be potentially believed even today, a lesson in our own limits of experience and what is familiar to us.
Monkeychains
The Jesuit priest José de Acosta was one of the pioneers bringing Christianity to South America in the 16th century, whether they wanted it or not. One would expect nothing but scrupulous honesty from a man of God, but it would seem that this priest was not above a little embellishment.
José de Acosta published the first account of his experiences in South and Central America in Latin in 1589. A translation in English was available five years later, and in this account of the unknown jungles of the Americas we find a description of monkeychains.
The monkeys, according to Acosta, “use a pretty devise, tying themselves by the tailes one of another, and by this meanes make as it were a chaine of many: then doe they launch themselves forth, and the first holpen, by the force of the rest, takes holde where hee list, and so hangs to a bough, and so helpes all the rest, till they be gotten up.”
Basically, the monkeys created a chain across dangerous rivers or other difficult passages in the landscape. Then they somehow catapult themselves over the gap “by the force of the rest” and once the front monkey has reached the other side, the others are pulled along in its wake.
Other eyewitness accounts exist. William Dampier’s navigator talked of this in 1699, Antonio de Ulloa in 1735 and Don Ramon Paez in 1862 both say they saw this behavior with their own eyes.
Or, more accurately, they didn’t, because such behavior is preposterous and has never been witnessed or recorded by any modern naturalist. Nobody today with a scrap of zoological bona-fides believes these stories.
But, to the untraveled, it doesn’t sound so far off a possibility does it? So next time your conversation turns to the wild jungles of the Americas, maybe you should try the story of monkeychains on your group, to see if anyone bites.
Top Image: Monkeychains have never been witnessed or documented, nor is it clear how they would even work. Source: We3 Animal / Adobe Stock.
By Joseph Green
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