Western expansion
Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela reported a story reminiscent of the roc in which shipwrecked sailors had themselves carried off desert islands by wrapping ox-hides round them and letting griffins carry them off as if they were cattle.[4] In the 13th century, Marco Polo (as quoted in Attenborough (1961: 32) stated "It was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size; so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the bird swoops down on him and eats him at leisure". Marco Polo explicitly distinguishes the bird from a griffin. Doubtless it was Marco Polo's description that inspired Antonio Pigafetta, one of Magellan's companions, who wrote or had ghost-written an embroidered account of the circumglobal voyage; in Pigafetta's account[5] the home grounds of the roc were the China Seas. Such descriptions doubtless captured the imaginations of later illustrators, such as Johannes Stradanus ca 1590[6] or Theodor de Bry in 1594 who showed an elephant being carried off in the roc's talons,[7] or showed the roc destroying entire ships in revenge for destruction of its giant egg, as recounted in the fifth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor. Tommaso Aldrovandini's Ornithologia (1599) included a woodcut of a roc with a somewhat pig-like elephant in its talons,[8] but in the rational world of the 17th century, the roc was more critically looked upon.
[edit] Eastern origins
The roc had its origins, according to Rudolph Wittkower, in the fight between the Indian solar bird Garuda[9] and the chthonic serpent Nāga, a word that A. de Gubernatis asserted signified 'elephant' as well as 'snake'.[10] The mytheme of Garuda carrying off an elephant that was battling a tortoise appears in two Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata (I.1353) and the Ramayana (III.39). The roc appears in Arabic geographies and natural history, popularized in Arabian fairy tales and sailors' folklore. Ibn Battuta (iv. 305ff) tells of a mountain hovering in air over the China Seas, which was the roc.[11]
[edit] Rationalized accounts
The scientific culture of the 19th century introduced some 'scientific' rationalizations for the myth's origins, by suggesting that the origin of the myth of the roc may lie in embellishments of the often-witnessed power of the eagle that could carry away a newborn lamb. In 1863, Bianconi suggested the roc was a raptor (Hawkins and Goodman, 2003: 1031). Recently a giant subfossil eagle in the genus Stephanoaetus identified from Madagascar was actually implicated as a top bird predator of the island, whose megafauna once included giant lemurs and pygmy hippopotami (Goodman, 1994).
One such rationalizing theory is that the existence of rocs was postulated from the sight of the African ostrich, which, because of its flightlessness and unusual appearance, was mistaken for the chick of a presumably much larger species. Still, ostriches were well-known in Biblical times already. But on the other hand, a Medieval Northern European or Indian traveller, if confronted with tales about ostriches, might very well not have recognized them for what they were (compare History of elephants in Europe).
Another possible origin of the myth originated from accounts of eggs of another Malagasy subfossil, the enormous Aepyornis elephant bird, hunted to extinction by the 16th century, that was three meters tall and flightless. There were reported elephant bird sightings at least in folklore memory as Étienne de Flacourt wrote in 1658. Its egg, live or subfossilised, was known as early as 1420, when sailors to the Cape of Good Hope found eggs of the roc, according to a caption in the 1456 Fra Mauro map of the world, which says that the roc "carries away an elephant or any other great animal".
In addition to Marco Polo's account of the rukh in 1298, Chou Ch'ű-fei (Zhōu Qùfēi ) in 1178 told of a large island off Africa with birds large enough to use their quills as water reservoirs (Pearson and Godden 2002: 121). Fronds of the raffia palm may have been brought to Kublai Khan under the guise of roc's feathers [12][13]; a stump of a roc's quill was said to have been brought to Spain by a merchant from the China seas (Abu Hamid of Spain, in Damiri, see below[citation needed]).
Considering the eggs, the "chicks", the "feathers", and any folklore recollection of the giant eagle of Madagascar (which was apparently encountered by the first humans to settle the island), it is easy to see how contemporary adventurers could get the idea that somewhere in the Indian Ocean region there lived an enormous bird
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