The Coasts of Illusion: A Study of Travel Tales

A historical and literary analysis written in the early 20th century. The book explores the myths, legends, and half-truths woven into travel literature through the ages, focusing on how these narratives shaped humanity’s perception of the earth and its inhabitants. Rather than examining the supernatural, the work delves into the imaginative and sometimes fanciful ways in which people explained unknown lands, creatures, and phenomena before the age of modern geography and science. The opening of this study sets the tone by invoking the legendary adventures of Marco Polo, whose tales blend fact with hearsay and wonder, and uses his imagined dialogue with Venetians to illustrate how travel stories both fascinated and amused people. The preface clarifies that Firestone aims to survey the world as filtered through myths, exploring how geography, peoples, animals, and even natural phenomena like rivers or stones were distorted or imagined anew. Early chapters describe how maps once depicted both real and fantastical lands, and recount a host of beliefs about the world’s shape, the mystical properties of plants and stones, and the marvels attached to animals. The text emphasizes the power of human imagination—driven by hope, fear, or wishful thinking—in constructing a world of marvels that persisted until relatively modern times.