Trevellas Goes Forth...in mare humanitas (in a human sea).

Trevellas Goes Forth

“..in a human sea..” by

James Penhaligon

SYNOPSIS 

Life has always been a long, intermediate or short voyage of continuing discovery. Sometimes it gets confusing. Why are things like this or that, what makes individuals and groups behave or think in sometimes random, other times predictable ways? Can reason be applied to apparent un-reason? Is there a hidden formula, a never-found ‘Moral Rosetta Stone’, which will one day shed light on these elusive mysteries 

“Trevellas Goes Forth” is a lighthearted, ridiculous and preposterous odyssey describing outrageous customs in ‘far-flung places’, as discovered by an old-fashioned Cornish mariner. But in the ridicule of the strange and vexatious desires and practices he encounters, Trevellas slowly arrives at a conclusion most disquieting: far from ‘outlandish’, the thoughts and ways of these strange folk are merely homogenised, sanitized and simplified versions of the very instincts, drives and habits of many people he left behind in his sleepy Cornish village.

This short book is satire: political, social, economic, moral and philosophical; it attempts to cast a new gaze on professional people, medical, legal, civil, bureacratic...all that and more. It is purely and only fictional, and any resemblance to anyone living is purely accidental. I hope it amuses, but even more I hope it helps all of us, and some folk in particular, take our and them-selves less seriously.

THE AUTHOR

James Penhaligon was born to Cornish parents in Africa, and grew up in Tanganyika, later Tanzania, where he lived a chaotic life. ‘Speak Swahili, Dammit!’ tells that story, and has had excellent international reviews. As someone always ‘on the outside’, fluent in Swahili before English, then learning other languages, and after working as a medical doctor for many years, on different continents, as a general practitioner, a trainee and then a consultant psychiatrist, he has written the Trevellas story to highlight and ridicule the hypocrisy and ignorance of those, particularly in western bureaucracy and positions of ‘authority’, who in too many cases appear to believe they, alone in the world, are faultless, and to behave in ways which defy logic or even natural instinct.

James and his wife Ingrid live in Falmouth, Cornwall, with a beautiful Boxer dog, when not visiting their children and grand-children, or travelling, mainly in East Africa, to visit their many friends.

1.   Preparations

Balitho Trevellas is my name, and I am the sixth and youngest of the progeny born to Philemon Trevellas, once sailor, briefly farmer, twice mayor and thrice member of parliament, and his faithful long-suffering wife Matilda, for my father was known throughout Cornwall for his very many and casual infidelities. Mother’s maiden name, Curnow, proclaims Cornishness, like clotted cream, tin- mining, pasties and pilchard-fishing. My childhood was both uneventful and prosperous and I received the education of a gentleman’s son. I studied medicine at Bristol, where I graduated as physik and doctor, in which pursuit I gained much knowledge of folk and humours, in sickness and in health, whence I noted promises made with those words in church are but seldom kept. I ministered to lame and dying at home and at sea, where I journeyed long and far as ship’s surgeon.

I read widely of travellers ancient and modern. I marvelled at the detail and, some twenty centuries later accepted, accuracy of that most remarkable travelogue, the Periplus Of The Erythraen Sea, which, though anonymous, is dated to 50 AD, in the time of Emperor Claudius in Rome, and, by its style and usage of ancient Greek, known to come from the hand of an ancient Greco-Egyptian from Alexandria itself, that fabulous city established by the ambitious Ptolemy on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, and named for his benefactor, that greatest of Macedonian leaders and known world conqueror, Alexander.