Nero's expedition

Dear JUUL Tones,

Ever since I first heard the round Nero's Expedition, I've been wondering how on earth such a strange text came to be set to music. Finding out who wrote the thing was the first step. Now comes the harder question of figuring out how those words came to be in the composer's head.

As I mentioned in an earlier email, Nero's Expedition was written by the American composer Moondog (born Louis Hardin). Moondog's Wikipedia entry tells a lot about him, but it skips a lot of stuff too. For instance, according to his authorized biography (Moondog, the Viking of 6th Avenue: the authorized biography, by Robert Scotto), Moondog lived for a year in the late 1960s with Philip Glass and his wife; once a week, Moondog, Glass, Steve Reich, and Jon Gibson would meet to talk and play music. The authorized biography comes with a CD that includes recordings of Moondog, Glass, Reich, and Gibson singing a number of Moondog's rounds. So Moondog was not just an eccentric character living on 6th Avenue; he was friends with two of the founders of American minimalism.

I obtained, via interlibrary loan, a copy of Round the World in Sound: Moondog Madrigals. This book (really a booklet) gives the words and music to 100 of Moondog's rounds; they are presented in four ‘books’ of 25 rounds each. Nero's Expedition is #12 of book 1, and the score indicates that the round was composed on June 23, 1968.

Where could the text for Nero's Expedition have come from? My guess is that Moondog must have read a book or article that mentioned Nero's expedition, or have been exposed in some other way to some reference to the expedition in popular culture. Is there any way we could find some likely choice for where he would have run across such a reference sometime before June 1968?

There are clues. First, recall the lyrics of the round:

  Nero's expedition up the Nile 
  Failed
  Because the water hyacinth
  Had clogged the river
  Denying Nero's vessels passage
  Through the Sudd of Nubia

  — Louis Hardin (a.k.a. Moondog), June 23, 1968

It turns out that the water hyacinth is native to South America. It was introduced to Africa in the 1800's, and water hyacinths were not a problem on the White Nile until the late 1950's. So while there is evidence that Nero did send an expedition up the Nile (as is mentioned by Seneca in section 8 of book 6 of the Naturales Quaestiones, and by Pliny the Elder), and while it does seem like the expedition was unable to get past the Sudd because of the masses of vegetation in this swampy area, this vegetation could not have been the water hyacinth.

(Moral: Do not learn your natural history from eccentric street musicians.)

So either Moondog was using poetic license to blame the water hyacinth for the expedition's failure, or else the source from which he learned of the expedition mentioned water hyacinths on the Nile but did not make clear that they were a recent intruder. I've been able to track down quite a number of articles about the Nile written between the late 1950's and 1968, and almost all of them either do not mention water hyacinths at all, or make it quite clear that they had arrived on the Nile only recently.

For example, in 1960 the travel writer and former war correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote a bestselling nonfiction book, The White Nile, about the 19th century explorers who traced the Nile to its sources. In the prologue to his book, Moorehead writes

The Emporer Nero sent two centurians with an expedition into the wastes of Nubia, as the Sudan was then called, but they returned unsuccessful, saying that they had been blocked in the far interior by an impenetrable swamp.

Nearly 400 pages later, in an extended description of the Sudd, Moorehead notes that even when a paddle steamer is pushing through the channels that have been opened up in the maze of papyrus,

[…] the water in the channel itself is not clear, since within the last year or so that most prolific of aquatic plants, the water hyacinth, has taken hold upon the Nile. It reaches out from the banks in long floating filaments with a pretty purple flower, and although it is savaged and cut about by the steamers' paddles, it never seems to die […]

This is somewhat promising, in that both Nero and the water hyacinth are mentioned in the same book, but the number of pages between the references, and the fact that it is made quite clear that there were no water hyacinths in the Nile during Nero's time, make it seem unlikely that this is the proximate source of Moondog's text.

However, Moorehead's book was based on articles he wrote for The New Yorker. And one of these articles — “To the beginnings of memory”, from the September 27, 1958 issue — actually seems a likely source. I've obtained a pdf copy of the article, which I've put here just for the benefit of the JUUL Tones. It's an interesting read, and it's also fun to look at the 54-year-old advertisements. On pages 140 and 141, Moorehead writes:

Samual Baker gives a fine idea of what the Sudd was like when he saw it in 1870, the stream being then completely blocked. He says, “The immense number of floating islands which are constantly passing down the stream of the White Nile had no exit; thus they were sucked under the original obstruction by the force of the stream, which passed through some mysterious channel until the subterranean passage became choked with a wondrous accumulation of vegetable matter. The entire river became a marsh, beneath which, by the great pressure of water, the stream oozed through innumerable small channels. In fact, the White Nile had disappeared.” This was the obstacle that for a good two thousand years blocked every attempt to get to the source of the river. Two centurians sent by the emporer Nero were forced to turn back, and between that time and the nineteenth century numberless unsuccessful expeditions set out.

A few short paragraphs later, on page 142, Moorehead writes:

In the Sudd, the Nile cabbages vanish—perhaps they are broken up by the rapids above Juba—but they are replaced by the water hyacinth, which is even more prolific. It is a green, fleshy creeper with a pale-purple flower, and it reaches out, floating, from the bank. Long filaments of the plant constantly break away and sail off down the river. We kept smashing into these green rafts, and although they were torn to pieces by the paddles, they always gathered themselves together again in our wake.

Nowhere in this article does Moorehead mention that the water hyacinths are a new feature in the Nile, and the reader has no reason not to believe that the “wondrous accumulation of vegetable matter” that forced Nero's centurians to turn back was not formed by the water hyacinth.

So I suspect that this 1958 article is what led to the lyrics of Nero's Expedition. One difficulty remaining with this theory: Moondog was blind. He could not have read the article himself — and as far as I can tell, there was not a Braille edition of the New Yorker. So for my theory to work, we must suppose that some acquaintance of Moondog had come across an old copy of the New Yorker — discarded on the street after sitting in someone's living room for a few years? — and read Moorehead's article about the Nile. Then this person must have either read the passage about the Sudd to Moondog, or otherwise have summarized it to him. But this does not seem too far-fetched; around 1968, the idea of an imperial expedition into a foreign land being stopped by an abundance of flowers might well have struck a countercultural chord.