The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

their own. The port authorities will not let them land at once but send an officer to them with a little scroll of parchment, the excellent quality of which catches their attention. Still more surprising and reassuring is it to find that the writing on the parchment is in four languages—ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, good Latin of the school, and Spanish. The device with which the document is stamped, being of cherubims’ wings and a cross, suggests that as well as being thoroughly acquainted with European civilization the people are also Christian. This is confirmed when the officer, whose dress in stuff, colour, and cut was admired by all, at once asks whether they are Christians. They begin to feel at home with one another.

Now another public officer appears. This is a Conservator of Health, who has to be satisfied that among the seventeen sick men on board there are none with infectious diseases. As soon as it is clear that there is no risk, they come under the care of a third official, the Governor of the House of Strangers. He arranges accommodation for the fifty-one persons who make up the ship’s company. The seventeen sick go into separate cells with partitions of cedar wood in a long dormitary. The four principal men get a single room apiece. The remaining thirty are bestowed in pairs in fifteen rooms. The strangers’ House was fair and spacious, built of a bluer brick than the visitors had ever seen, and with handsome windows, some of glass, some of a kind of oiled cambric. The food for those in health was excellent, ‘better than any collegiate diet I have known in Europe’, to quote the words of the narrator. As for the sick, they were given scarlet oranges, and a pill to take before settling down for the night. So they spent the first three days allowed them, ‘during which time’, says the narrator, ‘we had every hour joy of the amendment of our sick, who thought themselves cast into some divine pool of healing, they mended so kindly and so fast’.

The reference here to the pool of Bethesda is an example of a prominent characteristic of the whole narrative. There are about thirty such references to the Bible. In so short a work they stamp it with an intentionally biblical character. But the reference to the pool of Bethesda has a deeper significance than that. In the Gospel narrative the healing is miraculous. In Bacon’s fable the

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