Great British Nutters

John Hornby: the Slapdash Explorer

2008-10-10T09:02:00.001+01:00

“The finest man I have ever known and one who has made a foundation to build my life upon” – Edgar Christian

THERE ARE TWO WAYS of looking at Jack Hornby: lovable oddball-adventurer or hare-brained suicidal idiot. Either way, he’s a hard man to dislike. Even by the eccentric standards of British Arctic explorers, Jack’s life – and death – were spectacularly strange.

He was born in Cheshire in 1880, the son of Albert “Monkey” Hornby, a celebrated sportsman who captained England at rugby and cricket and played football for Blackburn Rovers. Like his dad, Jack was a pocket Hercules – short, wiry and strong. And like his old man, he was educated at Harrow. His was a life of pomp and privilege. And at the age of twenty-three, he threw it all in and left Britain in search of adventure.

Jack sailed to Canada and headed straight up into its extreme, frozen north – the so-called Barren Ground or Barrens. And for the next quarter-century, the tough little toff wandered aimlessly up there, embarking on some of the most fantastically ill-equipped and ill-judged expeditions of all time. He was what you might call a slapdash explorer. Unprepared and Unconcerned was his motto; surviving by the skin of his teeth his idea of fun.

The Barrens are brutal: a landscape of icy plains and lakes that stretch flat and treeless for a thousand miles along the Arctic Circle. It has a terrible beauty. Winter lasts nine months; temperatures plunge to glacial depths; snowstorms can kill a man in minutes. Yet the harder things got, the more Jack enjoyed himself. The colder and hungrier he became, the more he felt alive. “Not many men know how to starve properly,” Jack once boasted, “but I think you can be taught.”

He would be gone for months, sometimes years – heading out into the Great Unknown with little more than a rifle, a fishnet and a belly-full of British pluck. He moved around by canoe, dog sledge or on foot, dragging his gear behind him. He built his own shelters. He hunted and trapped his own food. Sometimes he travelled with Indians, sometimes with other whites – but mostly he operated alone.

When he did come in from the cold, his reappearance always caused a stir. His hair would be long and tangled, his beard bushy, his trousers ragged. Jack never washed in the Barrens and didn’t care who knew it. And once he’d stocked up on fresh supplies of tea and bullets, he was always in a tearing hurry to get back to the wilds.

Jack’s grit and stamina became the stuff of legend. They called him the Hermit of the North. He was the lone wolf, the white man who could live off the land like an Indian – even in the frozen sub-Arctic. The Edmonton Journal reported that the eccentric Englishman “could out-run any Indian on the trail, could outlast any Indian in endurance and could out-starve any Indian when there was nothing left but starvation”.

The outbreak of 1914-18 war saw Jack in France, where he fought with honour in the trenches. But within a year of that blood-bath ending he was back in the Barrens and pulling off his oddest feat yet: enduring a bitter winter living alone in an abandoned wolf’s den. He headed out to the wilds alone again the following year – one of the coldest on record – and nearly starved to death as the thermometer sank to minus 62F. The winter of 1924-25 was a similar desperate struggle for survival, this time spent holed up in a freezing cave with another adventurous Englishman, James Critchell-Bullock.

“Rather more than eccentric” was Critchell-Bullock’s verdict on Jack when the skeletal pair finally crawled back to civilization. Joining mad Jack in the Barrens had nearly cost Critchell-Bullock his life. Yet the newcomer found it impossible to dislike his reckless, gutsy little companion. Critchell-Bullock called him “the most lovable creature I ever knew”.

Jack headed to Europe again in 1926 for his famous dad’s funeral. And while he was there he picked up another fan – his young cousin Edgar Christian. Just seventeen and straight out of public school, Edgar was a trusting, ambitious kid in awe of his heroic relative. He was also tall and strong and keen to see the Canadian wilds. So Jack, now forty-five, agreed to take the lad on his next expedition – the trip, he figured, would make a man of him.

Surprisingly, Edgar’s dad, Colonel Wilfred Christian, agreed to let his son go. He wrote wishing the lad every success in his “great adventure” with Jack. “You are out to lay the foundation of your life…” the colonel told Edgar, “all your future depends on how you face the next few years.” No one warned the boy how savage the Barrens can be. And Edgar was too young to know that lovable lunatics like Jack Hornby can be dangerous men to follow.

The cousins sailed to Montreal in April, 1926, and trained it across Canada to the northern city of Edmonton, the stepping off point for expeditions into the Barrens. People they met along the way wondered what Jack thought he was doing taking a teenager with him up to the edge of the Arctic. Some tried to talk him out of it. But Jack waved them away. He was confident that this trip, like all the others, would work out just fine.

In Edmonton, the pair ran into Harold Adlard, a young shop worker from Dorking in Surrey who was also mustard-keen to see the Barrens. Jack had known and liked Harold for years – so on a whim he too was enlisted. It doesn’t seem to have bothered Jack for a moment that both his young companions were “greenhorns”. Neither had any experience of survival in the wilds. Each was putting his young life in Jack’s gnarly hands.

The unlikely trio set out on 25 May, traveling by train for a day and then, when the rail line ended, transferring to a large canoe and taking to the water. They paddled north for more than a thousand miles – along mighty rivers, across enormous lakes, past remote Indian villages and Christian missions, beyond the last isolated cabins and trading posts, then further north still till they crossed the tree-line where the Canadian forest stops suddenly and the flat, naked plains of the Barrens begin.

The going was rough. Progress was slow. The mosquitoes made mincemeat of Edgar. And the three adventurers had to keep dragging their boat out of the water and carrying it overland, together with all their equipment and supplies, around rapids and waterfalls.

The kit, although basic, still weighed about a ton: they had rifles, ammunition, axes, stoves, a tent, tea, blankets and animal traps. But oddly Jack had taken no shotgun, the best weapon for hunting small animals. And the few hardy fur trappers and frontiersmen they met on route noticed something else about Jack’s little party: their supplies of flour and dried meat looked alarmingly thin for a winter in the Barrens.

Jack and the lads traveled slowly north for more than three months. In June, Edgar turned eighteen. In July, they met a Swedish trapper going in the opposite direction – he was the last person they saw on their journey. In August, the trio watched in awe as thousands of caribou (reindeer) thundered past on their annual southward migration. And at the start of September, later than expected, they finally arrived at their destination, a wooded bend on the Thelon River, high up in the Barren Ground.

Jack had passed here the previous year and marked it down as a perfect spot to overwinter. The place was a little miracle: an oasis of trees, grass and flowers in the middle of the bald, rocky Barrens. Jack was convinced they’d find plenty of animals to eat amongst all that foliage – even in coldest months, even when most creatures had moved south or gone to ground. And the icy months would soon be on them. The river was about to freeze making travel impossible. So he ordered a halt and the men made camp.

This was Jack Hornby at his most slapdash. He had previously seen the Thelon “oasis” in high summer - there was no evidence to suggest it’d be teaming with life during winter too. Yet he felt confident that he and his young companions would be okay here. He convinced himself they’d be able to catch fish, trap birds and shoot prime caribou in these woods till spring arrived. He was sure of it. He was positive. And, not for the first time, he was spectacularly wrong.

It took a further two months for Jack, Harold and Edgar to build a log cabin and storehouse, and by the time that work was done they were already hungry. Jack’s imagined herds of caribou never arrived. The men caught next to nothing in the traps they set. And as winter started to bite the river ice got so thick, fishing became a nightmare.

On 14 October, Edgar started a diary. Jack, he notes, had already started to leave the Thelon woods and go out onto the freezing, windswept Barrens to look for caribou. But he shot nothing. Instead the hungry men had to make do with the occasional trapped bird or weasel or scrawny fox. Sometimes they ate mice. And then, at the end of October, the first blizzard of winter arrived, trapping the men in their cabin.

Things got worse in November. The days closed in, the snow underfoot became deep and treacherous. Frostbite threatened if the men spent too long outdoors hunting or chopping firewood. On 27 November, Harold marked his twenty-seventh birthday in subdued style. That same day Jack was forced to dig up an emergency stash of fish that he’d buried in the frozen earth only a few weeks earlier.

Through December the adventurers continued to scrape by on slim pickings: a hare one day, a wolverine another, a trout the next. Some days they caught nothing at all. Two long hunting trips into the Barrens proved fruitless. Harold became dull and silent from hunger – “not quite the ticket”, according to Edgar. And the teenager himself was near-paralyzed by the cold.

Only Jack remained unbowed. The caribou had failed and other smaller animals were thin on the ground - but he remained upbeat. Something would turn up, he was sure of it. There was still some flour and sugar left which would keep them going for a while. And after that, well, Jack figured they would just have to tough it out – his young companions would have to learn how to “starve properly”.

In January the thermometer fell to minus 54F. A three-day blizzard made gathering food impossible. Jack kept his companions going by collecting old bones that lay discarded in the snow outside the cabin, and then smashing and boiling them to make a nutrient-rich grease which he mixed with flour to make a meal of sorts.

At the start of February, a small miracle – Harold shot a scrawny caribou spotted wandering on the Barrens and it gave them enough meat for six days. But by 15 February, things were once again looking grave. More fish and animal scraps were found in the snow and boiled. “Hope to God, we get caribou soon as nothing seems to get in traps…” writes Edgar in his diary, “flour is nearly gone & we are grovelling round for rotten fish.”

It was now so cold Edgar could barely bring himself to step outside. Harold’s face was frostbitten so he too had to stay indoors. But as the lads slowed down, Jack went into overdrive, determined to keep his two greenhorns afloat. He gave them his share of the food scraps they’d scraped from the snow, convinced that he could run on empty. And, despite a frostbitten hand, he took up his rifle almost every day and forced himself to march out onto the frozen plains to look for caribou. Each night he returned empty-handed.

By the middle of March, Edgar was starting to worry about his cousin. Jack’s toughnut behaviour was unsustainable; he was beginning to fail. He “looks very poor”, Edgar notes in his journal, “and must feel it though he will keep a-going”. Jack did keep a-going, until 4 April. On that day he made his last desperate - and once again fruitless - trip out onto his beloved Barrens. But then Jack Hornby’s strength was spent.

All three men were now filthy, soot-covered skeletons. And for the next fortnight, not one of them trapped or shot a single animal. They were surviving solely on ground-up bones, discarded fish guts and boiled animal hides – anything that might bring them a drop of nourishment. Too weak to cut fresh wood, they began dismantling the storehouse they’d worked so hard to build and feeding the logs into their stove to keep warm. Harold was staggering round in a fog, a broken man. Edgar was so weak he could barely stand. And on 9 April, Jack collapsed in agony, pain tearing through his left leg which he’d hurt in a fall and was refusing to heal.

The next morning, Edgar’s diary has Jack “looking very bad… [he] seems to be all in”. And that evening, after six months of near-starvation, Jack finally admitted defeat and set down his will, leaving everything to his young cousin. He also wrote to Edgar’s parents, calling their boy “a perfect companion” and expressing hope for the lad’s safe return. And then, after doggedly clinging to life for another grim week, Jack Hornby, the Hermit of the North, the slapdash explorer, died of hunger at the age of forty-six.

His death knocked Edgar for six. The boy sat stunned as Harold took care of Jack’s bony body, wrapping it in a groundsheet and dragging it outside the cabin. By the next day the plucky teenager had regained his balance. “We are both very weak,” he writes in his diary, “but more cheery and determined to pull through and go out to let the world know of the last days of the finest man I have ever known and one who has made a foundation to build my life upon.” But the teenager was being hopelessly optimistic. Within days Harold too was sinking fast. On 27 April, he suffered a hunger-induced stroke. Five days later, he had another. And by the next evening Harold too was dead, leaving eighteen-year-old Edgar Christian alone in the Barrens.

The boy was now so skinny his “joints seemed to jerk in and out of position instead of smoothly”. He was suffering nose bleeds. Moving around was “a wobbly process”. But it was May - spring was close. The lad knew that soon, any day now, the caribou would come thundering north again in their thousands. If he could hang on till then and shoot one, he’d be able to regain his strength. The caribou migration would save him, just as Jack had predicted. He would escape the Barrens. He would make his cousin proud.

Despite his suffering, Edgar kept up that diary. He records fighting off fevers. He describes moving around like a zombie, his brain sluggish from lack of food. But he never panicked and he never gave up. Every day Edgar waited for the caribou’s return and for spring’s sunshine to once again fill the Thelon oasis with life. And he waited in vain: the sky above him stayed cold and grey, the clump of trees around his cabin remained dead and wintry.

Edgar made his last journal entry on 1 June, 1927. Like Jack before him, he describes feeling “all in” and “weaker than I have ever been in my Life”. Then he pulled out a separate sheet of paper and wrote farewell notes to his parents. “Bye Bye now Love & Thanks for all you have ever done for me,” he tells his dad. “Please don’t blame dear Jack,” he asks his mum. And after stashing his papers safely inside the cabin’s empty stove, he dragged himself onto his bunk, pulled a red blanket up over his hollow face, closed his eyes and waited for sleep to take him.

Just over a year later a party of mining prospectors passed along the Thelon River and discovered Edgar Christian’s body still lying on the bunk. A search of the log cabin turned up the boy’s diary and a few ounces of tea, but no other food. Outside the prospectors found the remains of Harold Adlard and Jack Hornby lying head to toe in the dirt. It was July 1928 now, high summer in the Barrens, and all around them the wooded bend on the Thelon River was teeming with life.

SOURCES
Powell-Williams, Clive, Cold Burial: A Journey into the Wilderness (London, 2001)
Waldron, Malcolm, Snow Man: John Hornby in the Barren Lands (New York, 1997 reprint)
Whalley George, The Legend of John Hornby (London, 1962)

Robert Baden-Powell: Boy’s Own Adventurer

2008-09-08T09:55:00.002+01:00

“We are having a very enjoyable game” – RSS Baden-Powell

ROBERT STEPHENSON SMYTH BADEN-POWELL was small and wiry and had receding red hair– an unlikely looking military hero. But inside he was as tough as teak. And at the bloody Siege of Mafeking the little chap proved himself a giant.

Mafeking was a remote outpost of the Empire in southern Africa, a small, defenceless, tin-roofed town that found itself on the front line of the Boer War in 1899. Within days of the conflict breaking out it was surrounded by the enemy. They’d come expecting a walkover.

The Boers were led by General Cronje, a veteran hard case known as the “old fox”. He had seven thousand troops in his command and an impressive battery of heavy artillery. Colonel Baden-Powell was in charge at Mafeking. He had just two thousand men, most untrained part-timers, plus an ancient cannon that had previously been used as a gatepost. On the face of it, Mafeking didn’t have a hope.

A more rational man might have run up the white flag. But Baden-Powell had orders to hold the town, so that’s precisely what he intended to do. And while he was at it, he planned to have himself a ripping adventure worthy of the pages of the “Boy’s Own Paper”.

Baden-Powell – “BP” to his mates – was a product of the Victorian public school system. Years of cold baths, sound thrashings and sport had made him the man’s man he was. He had no time for chaps he considered “wasters” or fellows inflicted with “girlitis”. Life, for him, was like a football match. Success was about pulling together.

Despite the long odds, BP was convinced that Mafeking had a (slim) chance if it kept its collective chin up and stood united. Team spirit was what it was all about - and fate had cast him in the role of team captain. In the famous words of the Victorian poet Sir Henry Newbolt, it was time to “Play up! play up! and play the game!”.

The Boers began their bombardment at 9am on 16 October, 1899, and the people of Mafeking braced themselves for total destruction. Dozens of missiles came whistling over a defensive ring of barbed wire and hastily dug trenches. Shells ploughed into the market square, sailed clean through flimsy mud buildings, smashed trees and destroyed telegraph poles. The pounding continued for hours.

But Baden-Powell was ahead of the game. Already the town had been honeycombed with underground bomb shelters where people were safe from shrapnel. A dummy fort with dummy soldiers and fake guns had been built to draw fire away from real targets. Hundreds of fake mines – boxes filled with sand – had been laid with great ceremony to discourage an all-out Boer charge. And the result of that first onslaught? Nobody was killed; no one was even injured.

When the dust settled, an enemy messenger came forward and asked Baden-Powell for Mafeking’s surrender - “to avoid further bloodshed”. The colonel gave him a hard look. “Certainly,” he told the man, “but when will the bloodshed begin?” British casualties thus far, he added, were one chicken dead and a donkey wounded. It was one-nil to Baden-Powell.

General Cronje response was predictable: more bombs and bullets. But Mafeking held steady and Baden-Powell refused to be shaken or cowed. After one particularly heavy bombardment, the colonel sent a runner through enemy lines with a note to reassure the outside world that Mafeking was okay. The message was telegraphed throughout the British Empire. “October 21st. All well,” it read, “Four hours’ bombardment. One dog killed.”

As the Boers continued to blaze away, the colonel’s courage and calmness under fire became legendary. “To see BP go whistling down the street… bright and confident is better than a pint of dry champagne,” wrote a newspaper man in Mafeking. Good humour and optimism came off him like heat. Major Alick Godley, thought it “splendid” to see his boss sitting in a chair surrounded by officers “dictating messages as cool as a cucumber” as shells burst around him.

During the day, BP would stand atop a wooden lookout platform above his headquarters, surveying the town’s defences like Admiral Nelson. At night, he’d crawl into no-man’s land on his belly to spy on enemy positions, amazing his men when he came wriggling back towards Mafeking’s trenches at dawn. He never seemed to sleep and he never stopped humming and whistling. He acted like he was invincible.

It was all an act of course. There were times when Baden-Powell’s heart must have been in his boots. He knew better than anyone that if the Boers were bold enough to try an all-out attack they’d crush Mafeking. And the alternative was equally dire: a grim, drawn-out siege. How long could his isolated garrison hold out under the baking African sun before disease, shells and starvation overwhelmed them?

But surrender was out of the question, and there was nothing to be gained from moping around. So BP kept smiling and whistling and looking on the bright side. If this was to be the final curtain, he was determined that he and his Mafeking team would face it with a bow.

Civilians as well as soldiers were holed up in the besieged town – about 7,500 blacks, 1,700 whites, a few Indians and some Chinese. And since it had been agreed with the Boers that there would be no fighting on Sundays, Baden-Powell turned the day of rest into a day of fun. He organised cricket and football matches. There were gymnastic displays. People promenaded around town in their Sunday best as though they were in London’s Hyde Park. Music hall shows and dances went on into the night.

The entertainment sometimes got bizarre. There were competitions to find the “best siege baby”, the best bull, the finest cow. A parade of old carriages was held. And whenever the colonel put on his “world-wide show of singing and dancing and playing the fool” all sorts of wannabes queued up to strut and grin their hour upon the stage.

One bloke turned out to be a decent conjurer. Others sang comic songs or recited poems. But the star of the show was always none other than Baden-Powell himself. The colonel would bring the house down by prancing around in a wig and ladies’ clothing or impersonating a cockney barrow boy. Then he’d wrap up his act by playing “Home, Sweet Home” on the mouth organ and exit to thunderous applause.

It was a far cry from what was happening on weekdays. At the start of the standoff, the Boers had made several attempts to overrun Mafeking’s defensive trenches. But after facing unexpectedly fierce resistance they switched tactics. Commandant Snyman took over from General Cronje. A massive siege gun arrived from Pretoria pulled by sixteen oxen. The Boers dug in and focused on trying to bomb and starve the little town into submission.

No one in Mafeking was safe as hundreds of shells and thousands of bullets rained down. A small boy was mortally wounded when a bomb dropped on him from the sky while he was playing marbles. A woman took a stray bullet in the neck and died instantly while pouring her husband a cup of coffee. The town’s makeshift hospital and cemetery quickly began to fill.

Frontline clashes claimed many more lives. One of the bloodiest incidents came ten weeks into the siege - at dawn on 26 December, 1899. BP ordered a surprise attack on a Boer position known as Game Tree Fort to try to knock out a gun. The assault was a disaster: twenty-six men were killed, twenty-three wounded, and a handful captured. The Boers lost just three soldiers. The day became known in Mafeking as Black Boxing Day.

As the New Year approached and the nineteenth century drew to a close, the future could not have looked grimmer for Baden-Powell and his team of part-time warriors. They remained outgunned and outnumbered. Rumours that British reinforcements were on their way had come to nothing. The enemy kept lobbing shells. And fever, diphtheria and dysentery had started to take a deadly grip on the town.

To make matters worse, Mafeking’s food was running out. By February 1900, the first three deaths from starvation were reported among the poorest black Africans.

Yet Baden-Powell remained chipper. He issued special postage stamps for “the independent republic of Mafeking” with his face on them in place of the queen – everyone thought that a splendid joke. He kept a special list of miraculous escapes that people marvelled at (a guy who got shot in the head was at number one: the bullet passed through his skull, just behind the forehead, and exited without causing any serious damage). And he threw his weight behind the “Mafeking Mail” newspaper (slogan: “Issued Daily, Shells Permitting”).

The Boers had long ago cut Mafeking’s rail and telegraph links. But thanks to brave African runners who risked their necks to slip past the encircling enemy with notes, some communication with the outside world was maintained. On 12 April a telegram arrived for BP from a surprising fan back in Britain – the queen. The message was short and sweet: “I continue watching with confidence and admiration the patient and resolute defence which is so gallantly maintained under your ever resourceful command. Victoria R.I.”

As the siege dragged into its seventh month, the colonel’s unflagging boyishness even seemed to rub off on the Boers. One day an enemy commander sent over a jokey note asking if his men could join in one of the garrison’s Sunday cricket matches. “Sir, I should like nothing better,” was Baden-Powell’s neatly typed reply, “after the match in which we are at present engaged is over. But just now we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days, not out, against the bowling of Cronje, Snyman, Botha… we are having a very enjoyable game.”

Around this time Baden-Powell also sent an amazingly chirpy telegram to his commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts. “After two hundred days’ siege… the patience of everybody in Mafeking in making the best of things… is a revelation to me,” it reads. “The men… have adapted themselves to their duties with the greatest zeal, readiness, and pluck, and the devotion of the women is remarkable. With such a spirit our organization runs like clockwork, and I have every hope that it will pull us successfully through.”

The men and women who were “making the best of things” and “having a very enjoyable game” were by this stage close to starvation. Horse meat and a rough porridge made from oat husks was the only food. Malnourished horses, BP notes in his diary, were “dying as fast as they can be made into sausages”.

Mafeking’s native Africans raided Boer cattle at night to bring in more meat. A soup kitchen was set up for the poorest and weakest. But a staggering seven hundred blacks still died of hunger and disease during the siege, many of them children. That’s hundreds more than the total killed by shells or in battle, black and white.

By the start of May the situation was dire. About a quarter of Mafeking’s fighting men were now dead or wounded in action. The last scraps of food would be gone within a few weeks. It looked like the game was almost up and Baden-Powell was forced to start thinking about how he might evacuate the town.

But then, finally, some good news. Word reached Mafeking that a British relief force was on its way – two thousand fresh men, artillery and machine guns. The Boers got wind of this too and made a last desperate attempt to storm the stubborn, bullet-riddled town. But again BP’s half-starved men held firm. The British reinforcements fought their way steadily closer, driving the enemy before them.

On 16 May an advance patrol of eight riders reached Mafeking to be greeted by a nonchalant passer-by. “Oh yes, I heard you were knocking about,” was his only comment. But by the time the main relief force marched in the following morning, such battle-hardened stoicism had evaporated. Gaunt faces stared at the rescuers “as though they were angels”, wrote a journalist who arrived that day. “One man tried to speak; then he swore; then he buried his face in his arms and sobbed.”

The siege was over. The game was won. The people of Mafeking had gone two hundred and seventeen days not out against the enemy’s fast bowlers. And the victory was largely down to one remarkable man – their gutsy, unflappable and always cheery team captain, Colonel RSS Baden-Powell.

When the news reached Britain of the relief of Mafeking, the country went nuts. Thousands poured onto the streets of London to celebrate. Baden-Powell became a national hero. The little colonel was quickly promoted to a bigwig major-general.

And of course Baden-Powell’s story doesn’t end there. Within a few years he’d gone on to create the world’s greatest youth movement, the Boy Scouts. The movement’s original ten-point Scout Law has Mafeking written all over it. “A Scout goes about with a smile on and whistling,” reads law number eight. “It cheers him and cheers other people, especially in time of danger.”

SOURCES
Jeal, Tim, Baden-Powell (London, 1989)
Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003)
Aitken, W Francis, Baden-Powell, The Hero of Mafeking (London, 1900)

Alexander Gordon Laing: Mission to Timbuktu

2008-08-11T13:22:00.001+01:00

“I shall show myself to be… a man of enterprise and genius” – Alexander Gordon Laing

THE FIRST EUROPEAN EXPLORER to reach Timbuktu was a dashing young Scotsman called Alexander Gordon Laing. It was a staggering feat, achieved alone against appalling odds. And it was supposed to turn Laing into a star.

Timbuktu was the ultimate prize for adventurers back in the early nineteenth century. The “lost city”, hidden somewhere in Africa’s vast unexplored interior, was believed to be dripping with gold and precious jewels. Finding the place - and putting Britain’s stamp on it before the French did – was something of a national obsession.

Laing was always confident that he would succeed where dozens before him had failed. A tall, tough, handsome bloke with wild curly hair and whopping sideburns, by the mid-1820s he’d already made a bit of a name for himself in West Africa as a brave soldier and adventurer. He had just turned thirty when he set his sights on Timbuktu.

The plan was bold and direct: Laing would sail to the north African port of Tripoli where he would brush up on his Arabic and hire some camels. From there he would head south into the furnace of the Sahara Desert. Then he’d simply keep going, travelling from well to well, oasis to oasis, till he found his city of gold.

And he wasn’t going to stop at Timbuktu. After locating the legendary city, he planned to press on and find the mysterious river Niger. No one had yet mapped that great West African waterway or worked out where it spilled into the sea. Laing, never short of self-confidence, planned to solve that puzzle too. “I shall do more than has ever been done before,” he wrote to his parents, “and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.”

Genius or not, it was never going to be easy. The adventurous Scotsman would be heading into the world’s largest and harshest desert without a clear idea of where he was going. The Sahara was home to some of the cruellest and most ruthless bandits on the planet, men who wouldn’t think twice about killing someone for their boots. And if a gang of murderous thieves didn’t get him, malaria, dysentery or some other grim tropical disease almost certainly would.

The history of British exploration in that part of the world didn’t exactly bode well. For decades, young white men with a thirst for glory had been heading into Africa’s hostile interior to try to unlock the mysteries within. Most never came back. Twenty years earlier another Scot, Mungo Park, had disappeared while also trying to trace the Niger to its mouth. Forty-six Europeans set out on that journey with Park; not one of them survived.

Now Laing was going to try something similar, only without the support of a small army of compatriots. But rather than spending time worrying about it, the young soldier of excessive optimism did something no one could have predicted – he fell madly in love. Within days of arriving in Tripoli, his heart was fixed on Emma Warrington, the “delicate, flower-like” daughter of the city’s British Consul. Within weeks, Laing was down on one knee.

Emma’s dad, Hanmer Warrington, was amazed. “Although I am aware that Major Laing is a very gentlemanly, honourable and good man still I must allow a more wild, enthusiastic and romantic attachment never before existed,” he wrote to Laing’s boss in London, the colonial secretary Lord Bathurst. But Emma didn’t care; she was swept away by her handsome suitor. The love-struck couple tied the knot on 14 July, 1825. And just two days later Laing kissed his new bride goodbye, mounted his camel and set off into the Sahara on his death or glory mission.

We’ll never know the full horror of what the adventurous Scot went through on his long, lonely trek across the desert. His private journal was lost and Laing, as we shall see, never got to tell his tale. But several letters he sent back to Tripoli in the hands of messengers do survive. And these speak of a brutal, spirit-crushing journey plagued by hunger, thirst and horrific violence.

Laing left Tripoli with a small group of brave supporters: a Caribbean-born servant called Jack le Bore who’d been with him for years; two African ship’s carpenters named Roger and Harry (they’d come in handy when he reached the Niger); a freed slave called Bongola; and a Jewish interpreter, Abraham Nahun. Outside the city’s gates, they teamed up with Sheikh Babani, a merchant from the desert who promised to guide Laing to Timbuktu in ten weeks.

The intrepid party moved steadily south under the brain-boiling sun, travelling along trade routes that have been used by desert caravans for centuries. Temperatures at midday hit 120F. Their drinking water turned hot and muddy in their goatskin pouches. Food was grim-smelling patties made of dried fish and camel’s milk. They were forced to travel hundreds of miles out of their way to avoid trails stalked by bandits.

It took Laing and his men eight weeks just to get to Ghadames, an oasis town still more than a thousand miles north of Timbuktu. Sick and exhausted, they rested there for nearly two months. When a bunch of love letters arrived from Emma, Laing decided to throw in the towel; it was time to return to his wife. But then the young explorer changed his mind again and resolved to press on after all. A large comet in the sky filled him with confidence. “I regard it as a happy omen,” he wrote, “it beckons me on & binds me to the termination of the Niger and to Timbuktu.”

Four weeks later the Scotsman and his team rolled into In Salah, another desert settlement in present-day Algeria. It was now December, 1825. Laing had been on the road for five months. But at In Salah he faced yet another long delay as the whole town dithered about whether it was safe for him to go on.

The word on the street was that the lawless Tuareg – fierce nomads who lived by plundering trade caravans – were stepping up their attacks in the desert. Dozens of Arab merchants had been sitting tight at In Salah for months, waiting for the threat to pass. Everyone suggested Laing do likewise. Only a madman would strike out into the desert now, they said. Timbuktu would have to wait.

So Laing tried waiting. Christmas came and went, New Year arrived. But the dashing young Scot wasn’t good at hanging around. Pretty soon he’d had enough. He tried to persuade some of the merchants in town to move south with him. When that didn’t work, he announced that he would go it alone.

His fearlessness gave everyone a jolt. Shamed into action by the mad Christian in their midst, the cautious Arab traders finally decided it was time to pack up their gear and move on. On 9 January, Laing left In Salah, not alone but with a caravan of forty-five men and one hundred camels. If he thought he’d found safety in numbers, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Towards the end of the month, twenty heavily armed strangers appeared out of nowhere and began riding silently alongside the caravan. They wore the blue robes of the Tuareg, their faces veiled with only a slit for the eyes. No one wanted them around – but no one dared tell them to go.

The sinister, uninvited escort accompanied Laing’s caravan through the wilderness to a filthy, mosquito-infested oasis called Wadi Ahnet. And it was there, on either 2 or 3 February 1826, that the plucky Scotsman was betrayed, savagely assaulted and left for dead.

The attack happened at night. The Tuareg waited till Laing was asleep before surrounding his tent and firing off two musket volleys. The Scotsman was hit in the hip. And before he could reach his sword the attackers were on him, hacking at his head and body with their sabres. They kept chopping until Laing stopped moving.

Laing’s servants tried to intervene. Roger the carpenter and Abraham the interpreter were killed. The second chippie, Harry, was wounded in the leg. A camel driver called Hamet was crippled by a cutlass. Laing’s long-time servant Jack le Bore and the ex-slave Bongola saved themselves by fleeing into the surrounding dunes.

After plundering Laing’s tent, the Tuareg rode off on their camels, whooping it up like Apaches on the warpath. None of the other travellers in the caravan was robbed or hurt that night; none lifted a finger to help poor Laing.

Sheikh Babani was behind the bloodshed. Babani, the very man who’d promised to guide Laing through the Sahara in safety, had struck a deal with the Tuarag, agreeing to stand aside while the bandits murdered the explorer. In return, he was to get a share of the Scotsman’s belongings. But Laing spoiled things by refusing to die - despite being left looking like the victim of a shark attack.

His wounds were gruesome in the extreme. He sustained five deep sabre cuts on his right arm which smashed the bones in his wrist, broke three fingers and almost severed the hand. His left arm was also broken and slashed in three places. There was a deep gash on the back of Laing’s neck, another on his left leg - and a musket ball was lodged in his hip. But perhaps the worst damage was about the head: three sabre cuts on the left temple had chipped away bits of bone; another blow had fractured his jawbone; his left ear was split in two and left dangling; his right temple had a gaping wound.

In total, Laing suffered twenty-four injuries in the night attack at Wadi Ahnet, eighteen of them severe. The next morning the Arab merchants in his party left without him. Only his surviving servants stuck around to help. But giving up wasn’t an option now. As soon as he was strong enough, Laing asked his men to lift him onto a camel and strap him into an upright position. Then the bloodied explorer and his bewildered comrades continued their merciless journey across the burning sands.

Somehow Laing rode on in that desperate state for 400 miles, flopping about on top of his camel, sometimes weeping in agony and despair. It was an incredible feat of endurance for such a savagely wounded man. Laing feared he would be disfigured for life. He dreaded his beloved Emma’s reaction to his scars (if, that is, she ever saw him again).

In April he arrived at the oasis town of Azaud, where he was welcomed by an Arab chief called Sheikh Mokhtar. Laing stayed here three months to try to recover. But soon there was a new disaster: a dysentery epidemic. The disease carried off his servants Jack le Bore and Harry the carpenter. Sheikh Mokhtar also succumbed. Laing got sick too, but survived. When Hamet the camel driver turned around and headed for home, Bongola was his only remaining companion.

The horror of it all started to get to Laing and he wrote a weird letter to his father-in-law, Hanmer Warrington, back in Tripoli. He alone was destined to get to Timbuktu, he claimed. “I make no vain glorious assertion when I say that it will never be visited by a Christian man after me!” he boasted. And then, brushing off warnings of more yet danger ahead, he set off on the final leg of his epic journey.

On 13 August, 1826, the battered Scotsman finally approached the city walls of Timbuktu, his “far-famed capital of Central Africa”. A journey he had expected to take a few weeks had lasted three hundred and ninety-nine days. He’d travelled two thousand miles through the most hostile and unforgiving terrain in Africa. He’d faced sandstorms, life-destroying heat, loneliness, hunger, thirst and extreme violence. And the poor bloke must have been gutted - gored by his own stupidity and naivety – when he at last clapped eyes on his legendary “city of gold”.

Timbuktu was once a place of dazzling riches, that’s a fact. In its heyday merchants from across North Africa had descended on its vast markets to trade in gemstones, ivory, gold and human beings. When Timbuktu’s greatest ruler, Mansa Musa, passed through Cairo in 1324 on his way to Mecca he was accompanied by twelve thousand silk-clad slaves and eighty camels laden with gold. Word spread to medieval Europe of Timbuktu’s unimaginable wealth and the city’s reputation was sealed.

But its glory days were long, long gone by the time Laing arrived. He found no palaces studded with gems, no market places heaving with treasures. The Timbuktu that greeted Laing was (and remains) a disappointment: a dusty, grimy, insignificant little place on the southern edge of the Sahara in what is now the Republic of Mali.

To make things worse, Laing also found that he wasn’t welcome. Sultan Bello, the region’s powerful ruler, made it clear he didn’t want uninvited Scotsmen hanging around his manor. Laing stayed in Timbuktu for thirty-five days, spending his time studying old Islamic manuscripts. But on 21 September, 1826, he wrote to Emma’s dad saying Timbuktu had become “exceedingly unsafe” and it was time to move on. That letter is the last anyone ever heard of Alexander Gordon Laing.

We know the young soldier did leave Timbuktu as planned. Fearing Sultan Bello, he abandoned his idea of finding the river Niger and instead joined a caravan of Arabs heading to Morocco. Laing travelled north with them for two days. Then he was betrayed for a second time and butchered by a man who was supposed to acting as his guide and protector.

The killer was an apparently friendly sheikh who had offered to escort the Christian explorer through the desert. His name was Ahmadu Labeida. And there are two versions of how he despatched poor Laing.

According to the first, the explorer had gone on ahead and was resting in the shade of a tree with his two servants, Bongola and an unnamed Arab boy. Labeida and three accomplices suddenly rode up and began threatening him. Labeida demanded Laing become a Muslim. The Scotsman refused. There was a fierce stand-off. Then two of the gang grabbed Laing’s arms, Labeida drove a spear into his chest – and the fourth guy cut off his head.

The attackers also murdered the Arab lad. Then they’re said to have divided Laing’s money, burnt his papers out of fear they contained magic, and abandoned the two bodies at the foot of the tree.

This story was relayed to a French army officer in Timbuktu nearly a century after the event. It was told by an old man in his eighties who claimed to be Labeida’s nephew. According to the oldster, his uncle had often boasted of how he slaughtered the “Christian infidel”. It was a dramatic story and one that would have gone down well at a time when Europeans were carving up Africa into colonies. But it’s all a bit over the top - and almost certainly untrue.

A more likely but less colourful version comes from Laing’s surviving servant, Bongola, who turned up at Tripoli two years after the explorer’s death. Bongola testified that Labeida’s gang struck at night, stabbing Laing and the Arab boy to death as they lay sleeping. Bongola was wounded in the struggle but escaped. In the morning he found his master’s body – it had been decapitated and was covered in deep sabre cuts.

The news of Laing’s grisly death broke Emma’s heart and destroyed her health. She tried to regain her balance by remarrying and moving to Italy, but nothing could stop the slide. Emma Gordon Laing died of consumption in Pisa in October 1829, aged twenty-eight – just four years after kissing her intrepid husband goodbye and watching him ride off into the African desert in search of his city of gold.

SOURCES
Bovill, Edward William, Missions to Niger: the Letters of Major Alexander Gordon Laing, 1824-26 (London, 1964)
Kryza, Frank T, The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold (New York, 2006)

Lady Hester Stanhope: Kooky Desert Queen

2008-07-24T15:07:00.002+01:00

“I have nothing to fear… I am the sun, the stars, the pearl, the lion, the light from heaven” – Lady Hester

THEY DON’T COME much madder than Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope. They don’t come much braver either.

In an age when most upper-crust women couldn’t fart without a chaperone, Lady Hester was charging around the Middle East on an Arab stallion, dressed as a bloke. She went where she wanted and did as she pleased. Her ladyship was a law unto herself.

Hester was born into money, the daughter of an eccentric earl and niece of a prime minister. In her twenties she lived at Downing Street, acting as a smart young hostess for her bachelor uncle, William Pitt the Younger. She hobnobbed with statesmen and hung out with royalty. When Pitt died in 1806, she was rewarded with a tidy little pension of £1,200 a year – she was set up for life.

But by 1810, she’d had enough of polite society. She was single and bored. At thirty-three, marriage seemed unlikely. So Hester sailed to the Mediterranean with a vague plan to travel. Three decades later she still hadn’t come home.

First stop was Gibraltar, where, scandalously, she found herself a toy boy – a handsome rich kid twelve years her junior called Michael Bruce. Hester wasn’t beautiful, but she was tall and elegant and had blazing blue eyes. Bruce was dazzled by her wit and reputation; she found his good looks and fat wallet hard to resist. The lovers sailed on together to Malta, Greece and Constantinople (Istanbul).

In the Ottoman capital Hester joined the crowds at public beheadings, a popular entertainment of the day. At one she was presented with the severed head on a silver plate. The grisly gift left her unruffled - but she thought it a shame it was being passed around “like a pineapple”.

With nothing better to do, Hester and Bruce pushed on to Cairo, surviving a shipwreck on the way in which all luggage was lost. Her ladyship replaced her stiff English dresses with an exotic new outfit – men’s boots, baggy trousers, waistcoat, turban and sword. From that day on, she dressed as a man.

And from Cairo, she rode eastwards, becoming one of the first Europeans – often the very first – to travel in the deserts of Syria and the Lebanon.

The Arabs didn’t know what had hit them. The sight of a tall, pale-skinned English lady in pantaloons and turban riding at the head of a caravan of camels was, to say the least, unusual. Some thought she was a princess, others a prince. “She was neither man nor woman, but a being apart,” says her biographer Joan Haslip.

A succession of blood-thirsty sheikhs and brigands asked to meet this strange mannish woman - characters like Emir Beshyr, who would later distinguish himself by castrating a rebel leader’s three sons, burning out their eyes, and cutting away their tongues. Hester faced them all with a fearless charm, impressing each with her guts and her horsemanship. “All Syria is in astonishment at my courage and my success,” she declared. Modesty was never her strong point.

Somewhere along the way she abandoned side-saddle and began riding her horse astride like a man (unthinkable in Britain at the time). Arab servants and bodyguards were added to her plucky entourage of lover-boy Bruce, an English maid and a private doctor, Charles Meryon. And there was one more big change: Hester began shaving her head like a Muslim man, apparently to make her turban fit more comfortably.

In August 1812, her ladyship rode through the gates of Damascus – unveiled. It was her bravest and maddest act yet. The Syrian capital was devout and fanatical. Women covered up and Christians kept their heads down. The sight of a white female in fancy dress was enough to cause a riot.

Hester’s appearance was at first greeted with a stunned silence. People gawked in disbelief. But then, bizarrely, they started to cheer, spreading coffee around her horse in a gesture of respect. The bazaar rose as she passed. A rumour spread that English royalty was in town. Before long, Hester herself was starting to believe it.

The following year she pushed things still further, plunging into the Syrian Desert to visit the ruins of Palmyra. No white woman had ever seen the ancient city, once ruled by a fiery warrior queen called Zenobia. And with good reason - it was a week’s ride from Damascus across a wasteland controlled by dangerous Bedouin tribes.

Fearless Hester threw herself at the mercy of the feared tribesmen, riding out to their desert camp alone to demand safe passage. And she got. In March 1813, she arrived at Palmyra dressed in the robes of an Arab nomad, trailed by dozens of servants and camels and surrounded by seventy Bedouin bodyguards holding lances tipped with ostrich feathers.

The people of Palmyra went berserk on seeing her. Horsemen charged her caravan in a mock attack. Arab women danced and sang. Crowds mobbed her. A beautiful girl placed a wreath of palms on her head.

“I have been crowned Queen of the Desert …” Hester wrote, getting carried away with herself, “I have nothing to fear… I am the sun, the stars, the pearl, the lion, the light from heaven.” She had become, in her overheated mind at least, the new Zenobia.

After Palmyra, things started to get really weird. Plague brought panic to Syria. Michael Bruce returned to England. Hester nearly died from a violent fever which may have permanently damaged her brain. And the woman of action began to gradually transform into a kooky, mystical hermit.

In 1814 – four years after leaving home – Hester settled in the foothills of Mount Lebanon, hiring a small convent called Mar Elias. She took up smoking a bubbly nargileh water pipe. She began studying alchemy and astrology. She became fascinated by prophets and prophecy.

A madman in London had once told her she was destined to go to Jerusalem and lead the chosen people. Now, for the first time, Hester started to believe it. She became convinced she had a sacred calling. Had she not been crowned at Palmyra? Was she not the “Queen of the Desert”?

She started acting like a medieval monarch, feeding and clothing every beggar and outcast that came to her door. She splashed cash on every sheikh and prince who called on her to pay their respects, borrowing heavily to do so. The whole Middle East seemed to be falling under her spell. She had become a woman of power and influence – a woman to be feared.

When a European traveller was murdered in the mountains, Queen Hester called for revenge – and got it. On her orders, local troops burned and pillaged fifty villages. Three hundred men were killed and their women dragged away in chains to be sold as slaves. A wild-eyed Hester rode triumphantly through the razed villages to inspect the carnage.

In 1817, a foal was born at Mar Elias with a strange deformity – a sharply curved spine. Hester declared it a miracle. A peculiar old prophecy had foretold that a horse “born saddled” would one day carry the Mahdi – an Islamic messiah figure – into Jerusalem in triumph. To her ladyship’s eye, the foal’s twisted back resembled the curve of a Turkish saddle. It had been “born saddled”. It was the sacred horse.

The deformed animal was named Layla and kept plumped and pampered and ready for the big day. It was joined by a second mare – Lulu – a milk-white beauty which Hester intended to ride alongside the Mahdi as his bride. When a crazy-haired French prophet showed up out of the blue one day, he was solemnly appointed carer to the holy horses.

And it gets weirder. In 1820, the loopy Frenchman’s son – Captain Lousteneau - turned up looking for his mad dad. Hester (forty-four now) checked her horoscope, discovered that the dashing young soldier was her perfect love match – and immediately bagged him as toy boy number two.

When Captain Lousteneau died of a fever and food poisoning just a few months later, he was buried with great ceremony in the garden. And when Hester left Mar Elias the following year, she dug up his bones and re-interred him in a tomb at her new home – a ruined monastery further up into the mountains, at a place called Djoun.

Hester lived out the rest of her days at Djoun, a strange hill-top fortress with twisting corridors, secret passages and scented gardens. Vultures swooped overhead, jackals howled outside the gates. Her only neighbours were the local peasants who looked on her as a kind of queen-cum-prophetess.

Civil war broke out in Lebanon in the mid-1820s and desperate refugees poured up the mountain path seeking her protection. Queen Hester took them all in – feeding and clothing hundreds. The one-woman relief effort nearly bankrupted her. She borrowed yet more money (at enormous interest). She never sent anyone away.

In 1825, Hester got news that her brother James had killed himself in England. It was a turning point: from that day on she never stepped outside her front door again. She spent her time sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking her water pipe or gazing at the night sky. Her temper – always fiery – became volcanic. Her eccentricities increased. All her screws seemed to have worked their way loose.

Lady Hester may have been doing drugs. A thorn apple tree in the ruins of Djoun suggests there might have been something stronger than tobacco in her pipe. Thorn apple – aka “crazy tea” - produces a hallucinogenic drug that was used by eastern mystics.

Or she might just have been nuts. Hester now divided her week between lucky and unlucky days, the latter spent exclusively in her room. Thirty cats roamed freely through the house, her staff forbidden from touching them. If anyone was caught riding one of her horses, her ladyship had the animal shot.

She was alone now apart from a handful of servants, a guard of fierce Albanian soldiers, and a young slave girl who slept on a large cushion beside her bed. Her English maid had died, Dr Meryon had gone home. The few European visitors who came to see her were left baffled by her bizarre ramblings on religion and magic and Layla and Lulu, her holy horses.

The English traveller Alexander Kinglake dropped by in 1835 and was struck by Hester’s enormous turban, skinny body and face “of the most astonishing whiteness”. Between sucks on her water pipe, she told him she no longer read books or newspapers “but trusted alone to the stars for her sublime knowledge”. Goat and sheep’s milk, she added, was her only food.

Her ladyship’s debts were now mountainous and out of control. Her creditors were pressing for repayment of their loans. Her once magnificent home had started to crumble around her. Her health was on the slide.

Dr Meryon returned to Djoun in 1837 and was shocked by how far his old boss had sunk: now in her sixties, her teeth were gone; her eyesight was going; her back was bent and her bones poked through paper-thin skin. She was also coughing up blood – a sign of TB. Hester lay on a bed covered in pipe burns in a room strewn with rubbish. “Such dust!, such confusion!, such cobwebs!” wrote the doctor.

The crisis came in 1838 when the British government cut off Hester’s “lifelong” pension to placate one of her exasperated moneylenders. The decision left her destitute. She’d hit rock bottom. The niece of Prime Minister Pitt the Younger had become a national embarrassment.

Mad old Hester wrote directly to Queen Victoria in protest - one queen to another. “I shall not allow the pension… to be stopped by force: I shall resign it,” she told the monarch. While she was at it, she renounced her British citizenship. Then she sent away her servants, bricked up the entrance to her home, and vowed to remain inside “as if I were in a tomb, till my character has been done justice to”.

Hester lived out her remaining months walled up inside her half-ruined fortress, alone and sick and surrounded by cats. There was no “justice”. No one came to help.

When a friend wrote urging her to return to England, Hester’s reply bristled with all her old fearlessness. “I cannot, will never, go there but in chains…” she told Lord Hardwicke. “Do not be unhappy about my future fate... I have no reproaches to make of myself but that I went rather too far.”

A British official arrived at Djoun a few weeks later and found Hester’s body. It lay unattended and was starting to smell.

SOURCES
Gibb, Lorna, Lady Hester: Queen of the East (London, 2005)
Haslip, Joan, Lady Hester Stanhope: the Unconventional Life of the Queen of the Desert (London, 1934)
Childs, Virginia, Lady Hester Stanhope: Queen of the Desert (London, 1990)
Kinglake, Alexander, Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (London, 1844)
Russell, Mary, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World (London, 1986)
Robinson, Jane, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford, 1990)

Edward John Eyre: the Man Who Found Nothing

2008-05-13T14:08:00.002+01:00

“The frightful, the appalling truth now burst upon me, that I was alone in this desert…”– E J Eyre

IT’S EASY TO UNDERSTAND why a smart young bloke like Edward John Eyre would want to explore Australia two centuries ago. No white man had yet ventured across the vast, mysterious island-continent. Who knew what secrets it held, what treasures lay hidden within?

Why he continued exploring once he’d seen the stark reality, however, is another matter. Eyre learned quickly what Aborigines have known for millennia: the Aussie outback can be a dead zone. He found nothing but emptiness and desolation on his travels. He endured pulverising heat and near-starvation. Yet this stubborn, dogged man was incapable of abandoning an expedition. Defeat wasn’t an option.

Edward John Eyre grew up in a vicarage, the son of a Yorkshire parson. He sailed to Sydney in 1833 as a gangly youth of seventeen. Within a couple of years he was a tough bushman, baked hard by the Australian sun.

He worked as one of the new “overlanders” who drove sheep and cattle into unknown parts of the colony. Their job was to clear trails and find fresh grazing grounds. Eyre was among the first to bring stock overland from Sydney to the new settlement at Melbourne. In 1837 he went one better and drove three hundred cattle all the way to Adelaide in South Australia, a marathon trek that took more than six months.

It was all a far cry from tea-time at the vicarage. Overlanders spent months in the wilderness, surviving on bush tucker and pushing ever deeper into the blank spots on the Australian map. Cockatoos screeched overhead, kangaroos and emus darted about, flies buzzed at their ears and eyes and mouth.

They were the original bushwhackers, often hacking their way through the dense scrub with heavy axes and machetes. Water was always scarce. Temperatures soared. And there was the constant danger of being speared like a cocktail sausage.

Aborigines didn’t always take kindly to strange white blokes appearing from nowhere with great flocks of sheep that drained their precious waterholes. In the early days, the native Australians tried waving their spears and looking fierce to scare off the intruders. When the whites responded with bullets, Aborigines learned to chuck the spears first and ask questions later.

One of Eyre’s men was attacked while bringing in some cattle. The poor guy, an American called Berry, walked back into camp one day with a twelve-foot javelin sticking out of his back. The weapon had gone up under a shoulder-blade and penetrated to just below his chin. It was vibrating torturously with every step he made.

Bush surgery was the only hope and Eyre didn’t hesitate. First he cut the spear off at the wounded man’s back. Then he got to work on trying to extract the embedded part, the barbed tip and stump, as swiftly as possible – and without anaesthetic.

“Putting two or three men to hold him I made a good large opening in the front of the neck with my penknife…” Eyre writes in his journal, “then pushing the neck back upon [the tip of the spear] until the point protruded I caught hold of it firmly with a pair of pincers.” Eyre yanked hard at the pincers. Another man pushed the spear from behind. And between them they pulled the weapon out through the front of Berry’s throat.

The American, Eyre notes, endured the operation “without a murmur”. And, incredibly, he was back at work in a fortnight. That’s how tough those pioneering bushmen were.

Eyre might have made a fortune if he’d stuck to driving stock. There was good money in it and he could have got himself a farm, found himself a wife, settled down to a comfortable life raising sheep or cattle. But the vicar’s son was incapable of staying put. By 1839 he’d quit overlanding and turned instead to all-out exploring. And two years later he’d pulled off one of the most amazing journeys in history – the first east-west crossing of Australia.

Eyre didn’t set out to walk across the Red Continent. And he certainly didn’t plan to do it on starvation rations with just an Aborigine lad for company. When he left Adelaide in the summer of 1840 he headed north, not west. His original goal was to be the first man to reach the centre of Oz.

He began with five other white blokes and two Aborigine lads. They took thirteen horses, forty sheep to eat on route and several months’ supplies piled onto two wagons. The expedition had public money behind it and cheering crowds gathered to wave the men off. Eyre was given a Union Jack to plant at the heart of Australia. Then the expedition rolled out of town, heading into two thousand miles of mystery.

The going was rougher than expected, and then it got worse. Eyre found no grasslands, no rivers, no fresh water at all – nothing but thousands of acres of thirsty country. After two month’s hard slog he reached Lake Torrens, a massive salt lake flanked by swamplands one way and parched sand-hills the other. There was no way forward for carts or horses. The route north was blocked.

Eyre climbed a mountain and looked down on the desolate landscape stretching as far as he could see. “Cheerless… indeed was the prospect before us,” he notes in his journal. He named the peak Mount Hopeless. Then he turned his back on the centre of Australia.

A more sensible man would have headed home after that. Progress was impossible. What was to be gained from exploring dead swamps, salt lakes and stony desert? But Eyre felt he owed his cheering supporters in Adelaide more than Mount Hopeless. So instead of going home, he changed tack. He decided to try to force his way overland to the new British colony of Western Australia.

It was November now, the start of the Australian summer. As his men hacked their way through the dense, tough scrub that blocked their path westward, they found not a single spring or stream. The hot winds pelted sand painfully into their faces. Three horses collapsed and died in their tracks. One man fell to the ground, crushed by the heat.

Three times the party hurled themselves at the barrier of tangled bush in their path; three times they stuttered to a halt. Trying to get wagons and thirsty men and animals across this burning land was clearly mad. But Eyre just wouldn’t give up. He refused to surrender. Instead he came up with a new plan: he’d ditch the carts, send most of his team back - and try to make a dash for it with a smaller, fast-moving party.

He kept just four men with him – three Aborigine lads called Joey, Yarry and Wylie, and John Baxter, his faithful sidekick who’d worked with him for years. Baxter was given the chance to bail out if he wanted. It was death or glory time, Eyre told him – they’d either succeed or “perish in the attempt”. He chose to stay with his stubborn boss. It was the worst decision he ever made.

The five men stocked up on flour, tea and sugar rations from a ship at Fowler’s Bay, a few hundreds miles west along the coast from Adelaide. They piled the gear on packhorses, not wagons. They kept six sheep for meat. And on 25 February 1841 the small band or adventurers fixed their eyes west once more – and strode back into the fiery hell.

Swarms of large, grey horse flies – known as kangaroo flies in Oz – stung their hands and faces. Ants tormented them at night. They were soon desperately short of water. Hot winds continually blew sand and grit into their mouths and eyes.

But by travelling light the five tough bushwhackers moved more quickly. Within a week they’d covered a hundred miles and reached an open area of sand hills called Yeer Kumban Kauwe. They found Aborigine waterholes among the dunes. They rested, ate a sheep. Then they marched onwards – up onto the vast and terrifying Nullarbor Plain.

Take down an atlas, turn to Australia and have a look for the Nullarbor. You can’t miss it. It’s an enormous desert just above that huge curved bay on the south coast known as the Great Australian Bight. They say exploring one thousand miles in Australia is equal to ten thousand miles anywhere else in the world. Make that twenty thousand around the Bight.

The Nullarbor is dead flat and bone dry. There are no trees for shade, no mountains, no hills – nothing at all apart from endless waterless horizons, the odd bit of scrub and wombat holes. It’s a vast limestone plateau running all the way to Western Australia. Where it reaches the coastline it ends abruptly in three-hundred foot cliffs that tower over shark-filled seas. Eyre and Baxter were the first white men to step onto the Nullarbor – and they knew next to nothing about the place.

Eyre, Baxter, Joey, Yarry and Wylie marched day and night across the burning plateau, just behind those dramatic cliffs. The heat was ferocious, water nowhere to be found, thirst a constant torture. Eyre got so exhausted he dozed as he walked. By 10 March the animals had gone four days without a drop. If they didn’t find a waterhole soon, the packhorses would perish. And if the horses died, the men knew they would quickly follow.

But for Eyre there was no turning back. And on the fifth day, his unshakable belief was rewarded – the parched travellers found some more Aborigine wells at a small palm-less oasis called Eucla. They rested here a week, tried to rally their strength. Then they got on the move again. Albany – the closest town in Western Australia – was still an eight-hundred mile walk away.

Another week went by. They found no water, no grass, no nothing. The horses got so weak Eyre had to throw away all the expedition’s spare clothes, medicines and ammunition to lighten their loads. The desperate explorers were reduced to pulling up scrub and sucking moisture from its roots, an old Aborigine survival trick. On 28 March the animals had walked for five days without a drink. The next evening the men squeezed the last drops from their canteens.

At dawn on 30 March, Eyre and the Aborigine lads used sponges to collect heavy dew that had collected on the leaves of desert shrubs – they got just enough for a pot of tea. But as the men broke camp that day, they knew they could be facing death from thirst. The Nullarbor Plain stretched before them as far as they could see – miles of barren country lying dead flat beneath a shimmering heat haze. It was one hundred and fifty miles back to the last waterhole.

But on they marched, the lion-hearted Eyre driving the party forward. And again their prayers were answered – the hard limestone plateau suddenly dipped down to an area of white sand dunes by the sea, a potential place to open a well. Picking a likely looking hollow, the men dug. Six feet down they found water. Eyre tasted it. Then he tasted it again in disbelief. Salvation: the water was fresh.

That spot is now called Eyre’s Sandpatch, and the nutter it’s named after spent nearly a month here with his men and animals. They did their best to recoup and recover. Attempts were made to go back and retrieve some of the gear that had been slung away - two exhausted packhorses died doing that. A third horse was so weak it was killed and eaten.

Thirst now gave way to hunger. Their stocks of flour were dwindling fast. The men tried living off the land, hunting wallabies, catching fish and roasting plant roots. Eyre shot an eagle; one of the lads speared a stingray. The two white men’s stomachs rebelled and both got badly sick.

On top of the hunger, the weakened travellers faced a new torture – the cold. Winter was approaching. Days were still volcanically hot but the desert nights had become freezing. And they had to be endured without coats or warm clothing.

Soon even tough old Baxter had had enough. He tried to persuade Eyre to turn back – no chance. Joey and Wylie voted with their feet and deserted, disappearing for forty-eight hours. But on 25 April, the lads returned, half-starved and wholly sorry. And two days later all five men were once again walking side by side towards Albany, still more than six hundred miles away.

The new-found unity didn’t last long. Just three nights later, Eyre was watching over the horses when he heard a gunshot and saw Wylie running towards him in terror. Rushing back to camp he found the expedition’s supplies strewn around and Baxter lying in a pool of blood. He’d been shot in the chest.

Either Joey or Yarry had done it – probably because Baxter had caught them stealing meat. Now both lads were missing along with most of the food and water and all but one of the firearms. Eyre watched Baxter die without a word. Then he stood on guard till sunrise, his gun over his arm, wondering if the murderers would return for him and the rest of the supplies.

It must have been a long night. With most of the food gone, Eyre was now facing starvation. He’d last seen water three days ago and had no idea when he’d find more. His only companion was an Aborigine boy who had already deserted him once. And his oldest friend in Australia was lying dead at his feet.

“The frightful, the appalling truth now burst upon me, that I was alone in this desert…” Eyre writes. “The horrors of my situation glared upon me in such startling reality as for an instant almost to paralyze the mind.”

The next morning Eyre found he couldn’t bury his friend – the ground was solid rock for miles in every direction. So he wrapped Baxter in a blanket and left him where he’d fallen. Then he rallied his strength, saddled up what little food and water remained and resumed his gruelling walk across no-man’s land.

Wylie came too. And for the next month the pair trudged on together into the burning wind and merciless sun, their jaded horses staggering along beside them, barely alive. It was seven days before they found their first waterhole. Heat and exhaustion threatened to overwhelm them like a drug. Eyre had to fight the urge to surrender – to lie down and, in his words, “let the glass of life glide away to its last sand”.

There’s a famous old engraving showing the Englishman and the Aborigine plodding along during those terrible four weeks. Wylie is shirtless, hunched and carrying a small pale of water. A bearded Eyre places a fatherly hand on the boy’s bony shoulder. Both figures are gaunt and in rags. They look like Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, only skinnier.

But little flashes of luck kept them alive. They found waterholes at crucial moments. They shot a kangaroo which Wylie stripped to the bone, eating not only its meat but its entrails, paunch and, after singeing off the hair, even its skin. They lad also roasted witchety grubs and scoffed a penguin he found dead on the shore. Another dying horse was slaughtered and shared.

The landscape started to improve, slightly. In mid-May they reached an area of rough grass where their surviving packhorses grazed. At the end of the month they came upon pools in the rocky ground – the first water that they hadn’t had to dig for in seven hundred miles. And then, on 2 June, a miracle: looking out to sea, they spotted a ship.

Eyre could barely believe it. The vessel - a French whaler – was anchored just offshore. The ragged wanderers got its attention by yelling, waving their tattered shirts above their heads and jumping around on the cliffs like maniacs. And soon they were aboard, enjoying what Eyre describes as “a change in our circumstances so great, so sudden, and so unexpected, that it seemed more like a dream than a reality”.

The Mississippi was under the command of an Englishman, Captain Rossiter. And Rossiter proved to be a lifesaver. For nearly a fortnight he looked after the piteously weak travellers, feeding them, sheltering them and giving them new clothes.

Another explorer might have counted his blessings and stayed on the Mississippi till it sailed back to civilisation. Not Eyre. After just twelve days’ rest, he and Wylie set off again on foot. They still had three hundred miles to walk.

And then, bizarrely, it started lashing down. Winter was upon them. It rained day and night, turning the hard-baked land into a giant puddle. The two wanderers were permanently soaked, permanently cold; their teeth chattered so hard they could barely speak. Unable to sleep in wet clothes, they quickly became exhausted. They’d survived thirst and starvation – now they feared dying of pneumonia.

But their appalling trial was coming near the end. Wylie had grown up in Western Australia and he knew his home turf when he saw it. The hoof-marks of a horse told them other humans were nearby. They waded chest-high across a swollen river – their final obstacle. Then they splashed onwards more quickly, ankle-deep in water.

The next day they met an Aborigine man. He instantly recognised Wylie, who’d been given up for dead by his tribe, and an impromptu knees-up ensued. Then the two shattered travellers found themselves on a hill overlooking a tiny, rain-sodden town, the first human settlement they’d seen in more than four months: Albany, Western Australia.

Four months and one thousand miles: Eyre and Wylie had just walked across Australia. They’d discovered nothing of promise on the way – nothing but heat and suffering and disappointment. But through sheer dogged determination and a stubborn refusal to admit defeat, they’d made it. They were alive. And Edward John Eyre – veteran overlander and twenty-five-year-old hard man of the Australian bush – quietly began to weep.

Two decades after Eyre and Wylie’s epic walk, Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills attempted to match the feat by crossing the continent from south to north. The explorers left Melbourne with dozens of camels and horses and enough food to last two years. They pulled it off, reaching the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north on 9 February, 1861. But both men starved to death on the return journey.

SOURCES
Dutton, Geoffrey, Edward John Eyre: the Hero as Murderer (Sydney, 1967)
Hogg, Gary, Overlanders (London, 1961)
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, Australian Explorers (London, 1958)
Uren, Malcolm and Stephens, Robert, Waterless Horizons (Melbourne, 1945)
Kerr, Colin and Margaret, Australian Explorers (Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, 1978)

Mary Kingsley: Friend of Cannibals

2008-04-07T09:43:00.002+01:00

“Being human, she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they were” – Rudyard Kipling

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a more unlikely looking explorer than Mary Henrietta Kingsley. Forget pith helmets and safari jackets, the redoubtable Miss Kingsley trooped across Africa dressed like she was off to a Victorian tea party.

Appearances were important, even in the sweltering jungle. It was her firm opinion that a lady had “no right to go about in Africa in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home”. So she dressed in the tropics as she did in London – impeccably.

Her tall, slim frame was always covered from neck to toe by a prim cotton blouse, black shawl and long, black woollen skirt. She wore a corset. And her fair hair was always pinned back and covered by a neat black bonnet tied under her chin with a bow. Feminists suggested Mary try wearing men’s trousers, a more practical alternative in the African rainforest. “I would rather,” she said, “[have] perished on a public scaffold.”

Mary Kingsley was born in 1862 in Islington, north London, just four days after the shotgun wedding of her parents. Her dad was a doctor, her mum a cockney servant. Within a month of the marriage, Dr Kingsley had left the country for the first of many long journeys overseas. Mary would see little of him growing up.

Hers was a lonely, imprisoned upbringing. While Dr Kingsley roamed the world, Mrs Kingsley sank into chronic ill-health and depression. Mary was expected to play the role of dutiful daughter, nursing her mum round the clock, rarely going outside. While still very young, she took charge of running the household. “I knew nothing of play and such things,” she later wrote.

She was a bright girl, Mary, but was given no formal education. The only thing her mum seems to have taught her was how to talk cockney. All her life, Mary would drop her hs like an East End flower girl – a habit that always amazed her middle-class peers.

But when she wasn’t helping her mum, Mary educated herself. She spent hours in her absent dad’s library lost in his books. She studied physics, chemistry, biology and maths. She learned Latin and German. She even taught herself how to fix the plumbing in her home by subscribing to a trade magazine.

Then in 1891, the wandering Dr Kingsley returned after picking up rheumatic fever on his travels. Within months, he was dead. His invalid wife, who’d had a stroke, followed him to the grave a few weeks later. Mary’s grey, slavish existence was suddenly over. She was twenty-nine and, for the first time in her life, she was free.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that she should want to cut loose. But what the newly liberated Miss Kingsley did next was so bizarre, so unimaginable for a Victorian lady, so out of keeping with her life up to that point, it’s barely believable - she went to West Africa to study tropical fish and cannibals.

Women simply didn’t go it alone in Africa back then - and certainly not in malaria-ridden West Africa, the White Man’s Grave. A few brave married ladies ventured out, the wives of missionaries and colonial officials. But single female explorers were not only unheard of, they were unthinkable.

Mary made two long African journeys – in 1893 and 1895 - roaming up and down the West Coast and pushing deep into the rainforests of the interior. Unlike so many male explorers of her time, she travelled light with only a handful of hired Africans for company. There was no army of porters, no arsenal of rifles, no tin bath, not even a tent.

She made her way without any fuss by trading tobacco, cloth and gin. She hacked her own way through the bush with a machete and she paddled her own canoe. People downed tools and stared in astonishment as she marched unheralded into their remote villages, pale-faced, straight-backed, formally dressed in black. Children fled in terror. Africa had never seen anything like her.

Before she left Britain, a friend recommended a West African phrase book. This cheery language guide opened with the exclamation, “Help, I’m drowning!”. There was also, “Get up you lazy scamps!”. And it included the memorable question, “Why has this man not been buried?” to which the answer was, “It is fetish [magic] that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed… until only the bones remain.”

Mary didn’t bother with it. Nor did she take a hot water bottle sent to her by another well-meaning but clearly bemused acquaintance. Instead she stuffed her waterproof bag with blankets, boots, a bowie knife, a revolver, anti-malarial medicine and an old book of Latin poetry. She also found room for one little luxury: tea. Then she made out her will, headed to Liverpool and joined a cargo ship bound for Africa.

Ominously, shipping agents refused to sell Mary a return ticket (so few people came back from West Africa in those days it wasn’t considered worth it). The only two other women on board both got off at the Canary Islands. Baffled male passengers thought Mary was a mad missionary with a death wish. But for her, it all made perfect sense. She’d been reading about Africa – its exotic people, its strange animals – for years. Arriving in Angola in August 1893 felt like coming home.

The intrepid Miss Kingsley didn’t do anything too suicidal on that first African journey. This was something of a trial run, the first, she hoped, of many such voyages. But it was still a thousand times more adventurous than anything attempted by other white travellers of her day.

She spent six months moving north through Congo, Cameroon and Nigeria. She lived with local people in their thatched huts, eating the African “chop” of palm oil stew, smashed snails, plantain and yam. She spent hours “puddling about” swamps in dugout canoes, catching rare fish and insects which she pickled in jars and brought back to the British Museum. And she had endless scrapes and narrow escapes – “knockabout farces before King Death” she liked to call them.

One night Mary was woken by a savage growling outside her hut and emerged to see a black leopard attacking a dog a few yards off. The sensible option would have been to retreat back inside, pulling the hut door firmly behind her. Instead Mary went to the rescue with a chair, hurling it at the deadly cat.

The counterattack worked; the dog broke free. But now the leopard turned on her, crouching to spring, its eyes “green balls of fire”. Mary picked up an earthen water jug and chucked it with all her strength at the wild animal. Bull’s-eye! The jug exploded like a shell on the cat’s head. “This discouraged the creature,” she writes to a friend. And the startled beast fled back into the darkness all around.

More knockabout farces followed on Mary’s second African adventure in 1895. This time she really went for it, pushing deep into the bush, going boldly where no white man – and certainly no white woman – had gone before. She was there a year. She ran into gorillas, scorpions and poisonous snakes, some of which she ate for lunch. She saw a man savaged to death by another leopard. When dozy hippos blocked her path Mary used her umbrella to prod them out of the way.

The hairiest moment came when a crocodile clambered onto the back of her canoe and, in her words, “endeavoured to improve our acquaintance”. Mary shuffled to the front of the unsteady little dugout, took aim, and gave the monster an almighty whack on the snout with her paddle. It did the trick. The reptile retreated. And Mary brushed off the incident: at just eight feet long, she says, the animal was “only a pushing young creature who had not learnt manners”.

But it was Africa’s people, not animals, who really excited her. She was fascinated by local rituals and customs. She was enthralled by African witchcraft and magic, what she called “fetish”. And above all she was drawn to the Fang, a fierce tribe who lived in the forest and were renowned for their cannibal feasts.

Despite the Fang’s spine-chilling reputation for dining on passers-by, Mary had her heart set on meeting them. So she took a steamboat as far as it was possible to go up the Ogooue River, deep into Fang territory in what was then the French Congo. And from there she continued alone on foot and by canoe, pickling interesting fish as she went and getting to know the locals.

They didn’t eat her of course. Far from it. The Fang proved a surprisingly friendly bunch. Instead of putting her in the pot, they showed her the best way to cook snake. She taught them a few English phrases, enjoying hearing them say “Dear me, now” and “Who’d have thought it?”. A dozen white ladies’ blouses were traded for ivory and rubber. And all in all, the prim Victorian spinster found her cannibal hosts a bright lot “full of fire, temper, intelligence and go”.

Mary’s adventures in Fang country continued with a brutal trek across the dangerous, slimy swamplands to the north of the Ogooue River. No European had ever set foot here before. It was what Mary liked to call a “choice spot”. She took four Fang “gentlemen” and six other African guys with her. And pretty soon the lot of them were, in a very literal sense, up to their necks in shit.

The worst stretch of swamp took more than two hours to cross. Plucky old Mary plunged in and waded through without fuss, the filthy, stinking water coming up to her chin. When she finally clambered out at the other side her exposed hands and neck were completely covered in leeches. She nearly fainted from loss of blood.

Another time she was walking through the forest when she stepped on a camouflaged animal trap. Its cover of leaves and branches gave way beneath her. She plunged fifteen foot into a pit. And she landed, in a most unladylike heap, on a bed of spikes. “It is at these times you realised the blessing of a good thick skirt,” she writes. “Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England… and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done for.”

Mary was lucky. “Save for a good many bruises,” she continues, “here I was with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out.” Her African companions gathered at the rim of the hole and peered down. “You kill?” asked one. “Not much,” responded Mary. They pulled her out with a bush rope and the party marched resolutely onwards.

Just a few minutes later, however, one of her men – a quiet chap she nicknamed Silence - also disappeared through the forest floor into another spiked animal pit. Silence was less fortunate than his boss. He survived. But since he didn’t have the benefit of a good thick skirt, he emerged, Mary reports, “a good deal frayed at the edges”. His wounds had to be bound up with large jungle leaves.

One night the eleven exhausted travellers arrived at a Fang village called Efoua. Mary was given a hut to sleep in and she crashed out as once, fully dressed and still wearing her wet boots. But a few hours later she was woken by a gruesome smell. It had, she says, “an unmistakable organic origin”. And it was coming from an odd collection of bags hanging from the roof.

She pulled the biggest one down, untied it and carefully poured its contents into her hat. No wonder things were wiffy. Mary found herself staring at a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other bits and bobs that clearly belonged underground. “The hand was fresh,” says Mary, “the others only so so and shrivelled.” Not wishing to pry further, she popped the human parts back in the bag, carefully re-fastened it, and stepped outside for spot of fresh air.

After leaving the Fang, Mary returned to the coast and rounded off her epic adventure by climbing Mount Cameroon. She was, she says, “the third Englishman” to scale the 13,760-foot peak (the first was Sir Richard Burton). She was also the first white woman to do it (perhaps the first woman full-stop, white or black). And she reached the wind-battered, rain-soaked summit completely alone, her five male companions having abandoned the tough climb halfway up.

News quickly spread of the mountain-climbing, fish-collecting, cannibal-studying spinster. And by the time Mary got back to Liverpool in November 1895 she was already an unlikely celebrity. For the next three years she would travel up and down the country, lecturing to thousands. She wrote two rollicking bestsellers, modestly titled “Travels in West Africa” and “West African Studies”. And she waded into controversy with the same guts and gusto that she had marched through fetid swamps.

She accused Christian missionaries of trying to “murder” African culture. She attacked do-gooders who would ban booze exports to Africa. She defended the African man’s right to have more than one wife. And she took regular pot-shots at ignorant Brits who saw black people as savages in need of salvation.

“I do not believe the African to be brutal or degraded or cruel,” Mary writes in a letter to the Spectator magazine. “I know from wide experience… that he is… by no means the drunken idiot his so-called friends, the Protestant missionaries are anxious… to make him out.” The Spectator called her views “cynical”.*

When Mary wasn’t off lecturing round the country she kept her small London flat heated at tropical temperatures. She filled it with African souvenirs: wooden masks, ivory carvings, musical instruments. She spent all her free time planning her next big trip, her next chance to “skylark and enjoy myself in Africa”. The so-called Dark Continent had put light and joy and hope back into her lonely life; she couldn’t wait to get back there.

But this story ends on an unhappy note. When the Boer War broke out Mary volunteered as a nurse and sailed not to her beloved West Africa but to war-ravaged South Africa. She was posted to an overcrowded prisoner of war hospital on the Cape. And she endured two terrible months there, a time of misery and horror and death.

Mary had more than a hundred Boer prisoners under her care, farm boys mostly; young men brought in with festering bayonet and bullet wounds and appalling blast injuries. Typhoid fever was rife. Bugs and lice were everywhere. Mary would see five or six men die on the wards every shift. “Killing work,” is how she describes it.

In the evenings she would call on her friend Rudyard Kipling who lived nearby. The poet listened to her speak about her work with calm dignity and admired her bravery. “Being human,” he said “she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they were.” Then one morning in late May 1900 Mary woke in pain and knew that she too had the fever.

It didn’t take long. On 1 June a doctor confirmed the worst. By the following day it was clear Mary was in a losing battle. And that afternoon, before delirium took hold, this fearless and funny young woman did a curious thing: she asked her colleagues to withdraw from her room and allow her to face death as she had faced life, alone.

Mary Kingsley died in the early hours of 3 June, aged thirty-seven. She was buried at sea, her final wish. Enemy Boers were among those who paid their respects as soldiers carried her casket onto a torpedo boat. The vessel steamed out into the Atlantic. And Mary’s body was lowered overboard a few miles off the coast of her beloved Africa.

And that would have been that were it not for one final twist in the tale of the magnificent Miss Kingsley, a last little joke that would certainly have made her smile: instead of sinking like a stone, her coffin floated. It popped back up to the ocean’s surface and sat bobbing about cheerily on the waves. No one, it seems, had thought to weight it.

Mourners on the deck of the torpedo boat watched in disbelief as Mary’s mortal remains floated gently away on the sea current. “Dear me,” you can imagine her saying, “what a knockabout farce.” Then a lifeboat rushed out to catch the runaway coffin, a sailor hooked a spare anchor to its brass fittings, and the wooden box with Mary inside (still no doubt impeccably dressed) was sent hurtling to the ocean floor.

* Footnote: It wasn’t just Africa that got contrary Mary fired up. She disapproved of bicycles, disliked London’s omnibuses, and was against votes for women because “women are unfit for Parliament and Parliament is unfit for them”.

SOURCES
Frank, Katherine, A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (London, 2005)
Simpson, Helen, A Woman Among Wild Men (London, 1938)
Kingsley, Mary, The Congo & the Cameroons (extracts from Travels in West Africa) (London, 2007)
Russell, Mary, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World (London, 1986)
Robinson, Jane, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford, 1990)
Robinson, Jane, Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (Oxford 1994)

James Holman: the Blind Traveller

2008-04-07T09:35:00.005+01:00

“He had eyes in his mouth, eyes in his nose, eyes in his ears, and eyes in his mind” – William Jerdan

JAMES HOLMAN TRAVELLED a whopping quarter of a million miles in his lifetime - further than anyone had ever travelled before. It was a record that stood well into the twentieth century. And he did it, incredibly, despite being totally blind.

And not just blind. Holman also suffered from an acute form of rheumatism. The pain was often so bad he couldn’t get out of bed. But when the worst agonies had passed, he would always pick himself up, grab his battered walking stick and carry on globetrotting. The man was awesome. He was unstoppable.

James Holman was a Devonian, born in Exeter in 1786. A healthy boy with perfect vision, he dreamed of seeing the world. At the age of twelve, he joined the Royal Navy and set sail for the Atlantic. He served there for a dozen years, patrolling the freezing waters off Canada and New England, rising to the rank of lieutenant.

But life at sea was brutal and the Exeter lad was unlucky. The constant cold and wet started to get to him. Mysterious pains began to shoot through his bones. His feet and ankles became inflamed. Soon he was barely able to walk. No use to the navy, Lieutenant Holman was sent back to England in 1810, an invalid.

And it got worse. While recuperating in the spa city of Bath, his eyesight too began to fail. It’s not clear why; perhaps there was some link to the rheumatism. But the deterioration was rapid and catastrophic. In a matter of weeks, poor Holman was left not only crippled, but completely blind. He was just twenty-five years old.

Lesser men might have jacked it all in right there. In the early nineteenth century blind people were viewed, at best, as creatures to pity. No one would dream of hiring a man who couldn’t see – even a bright one like Holman. The blind were expected to settle for a life of begging in the street, a rag tied round their damaged eyes to avoid upsetting sensitive passers-by.

But from the start Holman had other ideas. He wasn’t going to be treated as a charity case. As soon as he was able, he began venturing out alone, learning how to navigate city streets with his metal-tipped walking stick. He wore his blue Royal Navy uniform wherever he went. He refused to wear a blindfold.

He secured a small income by getting accepted as a Naval Knight, an honorary position for disabled sailors which came with a yearly allowance and free lodging at Windsor Castle. He worked hard at sharpening his wits, honing his sense of touch, hearing and smell to make up for being sightless. He got used to people mysteriously raising their voices when speaking to him as if he must also be hard of hearing. And then he got himself an education.

Studying medicine at Edinburgh University was a mad idea. Holman had left school at twelve. He was a decade older than most students. And braille hadn’t been invented so he couldn’t read text books. It’s a testament to his doggedness that he completed his studies by repeatedly attending lectures – once, twice, three times – till all the information stuck. Then, on the advice of his doctor, he left Scotland and set off to Mediterranean for its healing sunshine.

A leisurely cruise to the South of France accompanied by a nurse and servants is what the doc had in mind. But Holman’s modest budget didn’t stretch to that. So instead he hobbled aboard a bog-standard ferry to Calais and went south overland, travelling entirely alone. It was the best decision of his life.

The journey that followed would have been hell for a healthy man. France’s roads were a muddy, pot-holed mess after years of war. Coach journeys were spine-jolting, soul-destroying ordeals that rumbled on painfully through the night. Passengers were crammed in on top of one another. Holman couldn’t speak a word of French.

But the Exeter lad who’d once dreamed of seeing the world loved it. “Behold me, then, in France!” he writes joyously, “Surrounded by a people, to me, strange, invisible, and incomprehensible.”

His health improved. His spirits lifted. Sometimes, on slow stretches of road, he’d hop out of his coach, tie a bit of string to its wooden frame – then jog along behind holding the cord. The exercise invigorated him. He was becoming a man of adventure.

Holman trundled steadily through France like that for a year, pausing in Paris, Toulouse and Montpellier. He must have been a curious sight: a tall, thin, sightless Englishman, still wearing his navy uniform. And now he wore a big straw sunhat too.

He became expert at making his way around strange cities, tap-tap-tapping with his walking stick, soaking up the sounds and smells of town squares and market places, feeling his way around new buildings. Always the perfect gentleman, women quickly warmed to him and would let him explore their faces with his hands. Holman loved that. Blind or not, he had quite an eye for the ladies.

People asked him how a sightless man could enjoy sightseeing. He told them that his blindness heightened the pleasures of travel. It gave him what he called “a stronger zest to curiosity”, forced him to pause and examine everything deeply. The journalist William Jerdan, who knew Holman, grasped what he meant. “[Holman] had eyes in his mouth, eyes in his nose, eyes in his ears,” he writes, “and eyes in his mind, never blinking.”

After France, Holman should have headed home. Naval Knights had obligations as well as privileges. He’d been given a year’s leave from Windsor Castle, no more. Now he was expected to return and fulfil the main duty of a knight: attending chapel twice daily. But Holman couldn’t do it. He was on a roll. He had the bug. Instead of turning around, he kept on going down the boot of Italy.

In Rome, the blind adventurer climbed up inside the dome of St Peter’s Basilica and tried (unsuccessfully) to get out a window and scale the cross on its roof. Fired up, he then hiked to the top of Mount Vesuvius – while the volcano was active. He was the first blind person to reach the summit. He tapped his way gingerly round the crater, singeing his walking stick in the process and filling his boots with ash.

In nearby Naples, Holman hooked up with an old navy pal, a guy he calls Mr C. The anonymous Mr C had gone deaf since the pair served together in the Atlantic. But he too had developed a passion for travel. So the blind man and the deaf man teamed up and went north together through Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. It was the one and only time that Holman chose to travel with a companion.

The friends parted in Amsterdam. Then, when he was good and ready, Holman took a ferry back to Britain. It was now 1821. He’d been gone more than seven hundred days. He’d overstayed his leave from Windsor Castle by almost a year.

Yet six months later he was off again. He stuck around in England just long enough to dictate a book about his adventures in Europe*. By the time it hit the bookshelves, he was gone. Wandering around Europe had been a warm-up. Now he was going to attempt the mother of all journeys: a complete circuit of the world.

Circumnavigating the globe in the 1820s was the stuff of fantasy. A few sailors and merchants had done it. But independent travellers didn’t go there – the seas were too dangerous, berths on sailing ships too expensive, and the trip would take forever. Only a nutcase would even consider it; a nutcase like the half-crippled, totally blind Royal Navy Lieutenant James Holman.

Holman had a plan: he’d cut down the cost of sea voyages by travelling as far as possible overland in public transport, sleeping in cheap hostels and eating local food. That meant he had only one route open to him, a path no circumnavigator had tried before. Instead of sailing west to the New World, he would have to start by going east into the vast Russian Empire. He was going to try to cross Siberia.

The journey began okay. Holman took a boat to St Petersburg, then a public sledge to Moscow. But when he told people there he was going to continue east, Muscovite jaws dropped in amazement. They called him insane. “The name of Siberia seemed connected in their minds only with horror,” he reports.

But Holman was fixed on getting to Russia’s far eastern coast where he hoped to find a whaling ship to take him across the Pacific. His determination was unshakeable. He bought a rickety old wagon, hired a driver, packed a good supply of tea, medicine and brandy – and trundled off into the frozen wilderness with “a feeling of happy confidence” in his heart.

The journey, as predicted, was a horror show. Passenger and driver went for days eating nothing but bread. One week they faced subzero temperatures; the next they were in a swamp with gnats and mosquitoes feasting on their faces. When Holman heard the rattle of chains he knew his cart was passing another column of convicts being force-marched into Siberian exile.

The bone-rattling ride went on for 3,500 miles across some of the harshest, bleakest wilderness on the planet. Three months after leaving Moscow the bruised and frozen travellers arrived in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. And there, after initially being given a warm welcome, Holman was suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a spy - and whisked right back the way he’d just come.

It was a kind of nineteenth century extraordinary rendition. A shady character from the Tsar’s secret police appeared with orders to escort Holman out of Russia. The Englishman was plonked on a sledge and driven thousands of miles westwards at breakneck speed. It was no sleep till Poland. He was dumped at the border and told to cross it.

A baffled and bewildered Lieutenant Holman made his way home across Europe, arriving in Hull in June 1824. He’d been away two years and one day. His round-the-world jaunt had failed. But there was good news awaiting him: his European travel book was selling well. He was famous. He’d become the celebrated Blind Traveller.

After producing a second best seller about his Siberian adventure*, he was on the move again. And with royalties in the bank, he could now afford to attempt a round-the-world trip by sailing ship. He told the bigwigs at Windsor Castle he had to travel to the sun again for health reasons. Then, without a trace of irony, he sailed for West Africa – the white man’s grave.

He left on the HMS Eden, a Royal Navy frigate sent to establish a British settlement on the island of Fernando Po, just off Africa’s west coast. Unlike the mainland, Fernando Po was thought to be free of malaria, cleansed by a brisk sea breeze. The crew of HMS Eden expected to find a little tropical heaven. Instead they found hell.

Fever quickly ripped through the European settlement. Of the one hundred and thirty-five men who sailed on the Eden, just twelve would survive the expedition. Yet despite the appalling death toll, Holman stuck it out on that toxic little island for a year, helping his friend Captain Owen get a base up and running. And for once he had luck with his health: he made it out alive.

It was on Fernando Po that Holman grew a whopping great beard that he kept for the rest of his life. According to William Jerdan, it “would have done credit to the Chief Rabbi of the Jews”. And it was there that he met a young African woman who, unlike the ladies of Europe, let him touch more than just her face. “Perceiving that I did not immediately recognise her… [she] placed my hand on her bosom,” he tells us happily. “Her relatives and countrymen all laughed heartily and appeared to enjoy my astonishment much.”

Hitching a ride in a Dutch ship, he moved on to Brazil. And from there he began an astonishing series of sea voyages that would finally realise his round-the-world dream. South Africa, Zanzibar and Mauritius came first. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Calcutta and Canton (now Guangzhou) followed. From China he headed to Australia. Then it was across the Pacific, round the tip of South America, back to Brazil, and home.

On boarding a new boat Holman would sometimes treat the crew to his little party trick: he’d clamber up the rigging, right to the very top, then shout and wave to the gobsmacked men below. If anyone was tempted to treat him like an invalid that usually put a stop to it. And when he went exploring on land he made a point of behaving exactly like a man who’d never lost his sight.

In Brazil he accepted an invitation to inspect a gold mine (he didn’t bother bringing a lantern). In South Africa he taught himself to ride a horse and went off into the wilds with a young African sidekick who didn’t speak English. In Ceylon he took part in an elephant hunt. He crossed Zanzibar and Tasmania on foot. And in China he toked on an opium pipe.

It wasn’t all plain sailing: he was assaulted by a swarm of wasps, he was thrown from a horse, and his rheumatism sometimes crippled him. But he always pressed on, patiently and tenaciously, still wearing his old naval uniform and carrying his stick. He relied, he says, on “divine protection and on the sympathies of mankind”. And they didn’t let him down: in five years circling the globe he was never once ripped off or robbed.

The Blind Traveller got back to England in 1832 and set to work on his third book, “A Voyage round the World, including Travels in Africa, Asia, Australasia, America &, from 1827 to 1832”. But it was less well received than his previous efforts. The novelty of a sightless sightseer was wearing thin. The inspirational adventurer had somehow become a bit of a joke.

It was eight years before he got to travel again. In 1840, Holman (now fifty-four) once again set out alone and on a shoestring, this time for the Mediterranean and Middle East. He visited Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Syria and the Holy Land. He passed through Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. He went up into Bosnia, Montenegro and Hungary. He was gone six years. And by the time he got back, he was pretty much forgotten. No one was interested in even publishing his account of that last epic journey, the swansong of the most travelled man of all time.

This is bizarre. According to his biographer, Jason Roberts, Holman had now clocked up a staggering quarter of a million miles. “None could even approach the achievements of the Blind Traveller…” writes Roberts in “A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveller”. “Alone, sightless, with no prior command of native languages and with only a wisp of funds, he had forged a path equivalent to wandering to the moon.”

James Holman lived out his remaining years in east London, down by the docks. It was a dodgy part of town, full of sailors’ pubs and brothels. No place for a gentleman. But it was the ideal spot for a sick, old, white-bearded wanderer who now needed the sounds and smells of the world to come to him.

The Blind Traveller died on 28 July, 1857, aged seventy. A week before his death he finished work on his autobiography. No one was interested in publishing that either. The manuscript has now been lost.

*FOOTNOTE 1: Holman’s first book was snappily entitled, “The Narrative of a Journey, Undertaken in the Years 1819, 1820 & 1821, Through France, Italy, Savoy, Switzerland, Parts of Germany Bordering the Rhine, Holland, and The Netherlands”.

*FOOTNOTE 2: Another memorable title: “Travels through Russia, Siberia, Poland, Austria, Saxony, Prussia, Hanover & & Undertaken During the Years 1822, 1823 and 1824, While Suffering from Total Blindness and Comprising an Account of the Author being Conducted a State Prisoner from the Eastern Parts of Siberia”.

SOURCES
Books
Roberts, Jason, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveller (London, 2006)
Jerdan, William, Men I Have Known (1866)
Keay, John, Eccentric Travellers (London, 1982)

Websites
www.jasonroberts.net/holman

Sir Richard Burton: Gone to the Devil

2008-03-18T17:16:00.002Z

“I have been here 3 days and am generally disappointed. Not a man killed or a fellow tortured…” – Ruffian Dick

RICHARD BURTON – THE EXPLORER, NOT THE ACTOR – has got to be the most up-for-anything bloke this country’s produced. The man’s a legend. His entire life was a mad adventure filled with danger, sex, scandal and drugs.

He was a Victorian rolling stone, always on the move, always searching for new experience. He hated what he called the “slavery of civilisation” and rejoiced in shocking polite society. A young vicar once asked if it was true that he’d killed a man in the Arabian desert. “Sir,” he replied coolly, “I’m proud to say that I have committed every sin in the Decalogue.”

Burton was exceptional from the start. Raised in France and Italy by roaming Anglo-Irish parents, he was an unruly and angry schoolboy who smashed his violin over one teacher’s head. At fifteen, he was caught writing passionate letters to prostitutes. By his late teens, he was experimenting with opium. He went to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840, already sporting an impressive moustache – and within an hour of arriving had challenged another student to a duel for laughing at it

Nicknamed Ruffian Dick at university, Burton was an impressive-looking bloke: six foot in his socks with a big head and fierce facial features. He had an air of smouldering ferocity about him. His eyes were dark and burning - “panther eyes” one guy called them. The prize-fighter look would later be crowned by a huge, grisly scar on his cheek earned while fighting for his life in Africa, but all that was yet to come for the youthful Ruffian Dick.

Burton could have had a brilliant academic career at Oxford. He had a stunning talent for languages – by the end of his life he would speak twenty-five of them. He was a gifted writer and translator. And he would also go on to make his mark as an explorer, soldier, diplomat, archaeologist and swordsman - not to mention amateur doctor, hypnotist and heroic boozer and brawler.

But dusty old Oxford was no place for Dick. He hated it and felt like an outsider, in his words “a waif, a stray… a blaze of light, without a focus”. So he deliberately got himself chucked out for breaking petty rules, joined the infantry and sailed to India instead.

Dick’s first army job was as a spy in the Sindh, a newly conquered area in the north that’s now part of Pakistan. His role was to collect information on the region’s people and geography. And he really went for it, disguising himself as an Indian and bravely wandering around the streets chatting to unsuspecting locals in flawless Sindhi.

Nothing was taboo for Captain Burton: he smoked opium with addicts, supped bhang (a cannabis drink) with holy men, shagged local women. He took lessons from a snake charmer, tried riding alligators. Then he dived into the homosexual brothels of Karachi.

Dick was ordered into the brothels by General Charles Napier who was worried they were corrupting his troops and wanted to find out more. His enthusiastic young captain didn’t disappoint: Burton filed a shockingly explicit report that must have made military whiskers stand on end.

After many nights hanging out with prostitutes, Dick concluded there were three brothels in Karachi “in which not women but boys and eunuchs… lay for hire”. He listed the prices and services on offer. And he noted that the lads cost twice as much as the eunuchs because – brace yourself for this - “the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movement of the animal”.

Napier took the report at face value and used it to shut down the dodgy meat markets. But others weren’t so pragmatic. Gay sex was for many Victorians a grave sin. And the idea that Burton could write about it so coolly and clinically, without judgment or moralizing… well, what the deuce did he think he was up to?

Many were convinced Dick must have mixed business with pleasure during his undercover operation. Knowing him, he probably did (some historians suspect he was bisexual). Fellow officers already called him “the white nigger” because he hung out with “natives”. Now he was seen as something worse still: a sexual deviant.

So the reward for Dick’s bravery and honesty was humiliation. His army reputation was in tatters. Sick from cholera and fed up with the lot of them, he quit India, returned to Europe and began planning his next dramatic move: a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Non-Muslims have always been barred from entering Mecca and over the centuries many curious Christians and Jews who tried to penetrate the sacred city have been impaled, crucified or sold into slavery. It didn’t bother Burton. With his language skills, he was sure he could pull it off. It was just a question of holding his nerve.

In the spring of 1853, disguised as an Afghan pilgrim, his skin stained with walnut juice, his penis recently circumcised, he sailed to the Middle East and travelled first to Medina, the second holiest city in Islam, before crossing the desert to Mecca itself.

He took with him a small tent, a goatskin water bag, and a bright yellow umbrella to keep off the sun. Hidden beneath his robes were a pistol, a dagger and a secret journal. Hanging from his belt was a large rosary which, if things got hairy, could be “converted into a weapon of offence”.

The journey was a brutal and violent affair. Bedouin bandits attacked the caravan he was travelling with, killing 12 men and several camels. A quarrel between a Turkish pilgrim and an Arab ended with the Turk being stabbed in the gut and left by the roadside for the jackals to finish off. Every day the desert wind blew like the “breath of a volcano”.

Yet here’s the great thing about Burton: despite the hardships and dangers and the constant deadly risk of being exposed as an infidel, he found he was having a rare old time. Life in the desert, he reports, is exhilarating: “Your morale improves… the hypocritical politeness and the slavery of civilisation are left behind you in the city.”

Once inside Mecca, Burton was in heaven. He met pilgrims from every nation. He visited and measured every shrine. He prayed every prayer, performed every ritual. He even had the balls to sketch Islam’s holiest building - the Kaaba – onto his white pilgrim’s robe, putting himself at huge risk of being rumbled. And after six euphoric days he turned around and headed for home.

Burton wasn’t the first non-Muslim to see Mecca and survive; a few plucky Europeans had managed it before him. But none produced such a rip-roaring account of their travels as Ruffian Dick. His “Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca” is part adventure story, part beginner’s guide to Islam. No one in Britain had seen the like of it; it sold like Harry Potter.

Fired up, Burton now turned to Africa. His next goal: to become the first European to visit the forbidden city of Harar in present-day Ethiopia.

Like Mecca, Harar promised death to infidels. Legend held that if an unbeliever penetrated its walls the city would fall within a generation. At first Burton toyed with the idea of trying to enter in disguise. But in Africa he could never pass for a local, so instead he brazenly rode up to its gates alone wearing his British army uniform and simply asked to come in. To his amazement, they said okay.

Harar was a disappointment – a drab, dusty old place, not a patch on Mecca. But there was soon to be action a-plenty. Back at the coast he teamed up with three other British explorers, William Stroyan, G E Herne and John Hanning Speke. And at 2am one morning the men were attacked in their tents by Somalis armed with spears, daggers and war-clubs.

Stroyan was killed in the unexpected raid. Speke was taken prisoner and tortured (he later escaped, bleeding from eleven wounds). Herne got away lightly. But a Somali threw a spear directly into Burton’s face, the weapon entering his left cheek, smashing out his back teeth and part of his palate, and re-emerging from the right side.

Despite having a bloody great javelin sticking out of his head, Burton too managed to get away. He made it to a friendly ship berthed nearby. And there the weapon was removed, his face sewn up and Dick was sent home with a souvenir of Africa – a massive, ugly scar that gave his fierce image an even more sinister edge.

Back in England, Burton’s mind turned to marriage and he proposed to a young Catholic aristocrat called Isabel Arundell. But no sooner had she said yes than he was off back to Africa with Speke, this time to try to find the source of the world’s greatest river, the Nile. Isabel would not see her husband-to-be again for three years.

The Nile was the big one, the greatest prize a nineteenth century explorer could hope for. People had been dreaming of unravelling its mystery since ancient times. Many had tried and died. But so far every expedition sent up the mighty river had foundered in scorching deserts or the vast swamplands of southern Sudan.

Some believed the Nile sprang from great fountains in central Africa. Others thought it flowed from two enormous lakes. Arab stories placed the source among mysterious snow-covered mountains. Basically, no one had a clue.

Burton and Speke would try a fresh approach. Instead of following the river all the way upstream from Egypt in the north, they would march inland from Africa’s east coast. Their route would take them through an enormous unmapped wilderness, across what’s now Tanzania. It was an area ravaged by the Arab slave trade. There would be hostile tribes and tropical diseases. They were going into hell.

The pair were on the march for more than a year and faced appalling suffering in Africa. Both men’s eyes became swollen and infected, Speke’s so badly there were times when he couldn’t see at all. Burton’s legs were paralysed by malaria and he had to be carried by his African porters for months. They endured ulcers, depression, insomnia and repeated bouts of fever and delirium. On his return, Isabel would describe Dick as “a mere skeleton, with brown-yellow skin hanging in bags, his eyes protruding, and his lips drawn away from his teeth…”

Speke, meanwhile, suffered a bizarre injury when a beetle burrowed into his ear and he tried to root it out with a penknife, cutting himself in the process and causing an infection. “It was the most painful thing I ever remember…” he writes, “For many months the tumour made me almost deaf, and ate a hole between the orifice and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed.”

Tsetse fly killed their mules, ants with jaws like bull dogs drove them crazy, their bearers deserted in droves – and still the two Englishmen trudged on until, after seven hard months, they found themselves standing beside the mighty Lake Tanganyika.

Burton and Speke were the first Europeans to set eyes on Tanganyika, a whopping fresh-water lake in central Africa, the longest in the world. Surely this was the prize they were after. Surely it only remained for them to canoe round its shore and find a river flowing out to the north. This had to be the Nile’s source.

But it wasn’t. There is no river going north. The Nile doesn’t begin here and the mystery remained unsolved; Burton and Speke had failed.

The two explorers fell out spectacularly after that. On the return journey, Speke left Dick and struck out northwards alone, discovering – almost as an afterthought - another great lake, which he patriotically named Victoria after his hard-to-amuse queen.

Lake Victoria of course is the Nile source – and although Speke had no proof, he knew in his heart he’d cracked it. Burton, however, wasn’t convinced. Their row escalated into a vicious public feud. And several years later Speke was mysteriously killed the day before he was to face Dick in a head-to-head debate on the controversy. Cause of death: self-inflicted shotgun wound.

A court ruled the tragedy was a hunting accident. But Burton was convinced it was suicide and that he was to blame. “The charitable say that he shot himself,” he wrote to a friend, “the uncharitable say that I shot him.”

Burton’s personality was certainly at the heart of the row. Speke was a teetotaller and a prude, a Christian who would get himself in a flap at the sight of a half-naked African woman. He couldn’t handle his wild companion who revelled in the nudity he saw around him and was up for trying anything, the more shocking the better.

Burton sampled every intoxicant on offer in Africa. He discovered first-hand that its women were “well disposed towards strangers of fair complexion, apparently with the permission of their husbands”. He was fascinated by African phallic worship. And he had that weird old-school racist obsession with the size of black guys’ knobs, even going so far as to measure several obliging fellows.

When the warring explorers got home, Speke put it about that Burton was a sicko; that he had gone to the devil in Africa. Good old Isabel didn’t care though. She stuck by her untamed fiancée and the couple were secretly married in January 1861, the groom turning up to the ceremony in a rough shooting coat with a cigar between his teeth.

The newlyweds were together seven months and then Dick was off again, this time taking a job as British consul on Fernando Po, a disease-ridden island off the west coast of Africa. Isabel stayed put: the so-called White Man’s Grave was no place for a lady. But for Burton, it was a perfect springboard for more mad African adventures.

Any excuse to leave official duties and he was away. During his three years in Fernando Po he made countless trips to the mainland where he climbed mountains, hung out with cannibals and searched for gorillas (which some Europeans still believed were a fictitious creature).

He produced five books while he was there covering everything from juju and facial scarring to ritual murder, female circumcision and peculiar sexual practises. By the time he was finished there was probably not a colleague left in the Foreign Office who didn’t consider him weird, if not downright dangerous.

Burton also made two trips to Dahomey, a kingdom famous for human sacrifices and its army of Amazon warrior women. Victorian newspapers were obsessed with the place. But on first seeing the country for himself, Burton suspected half of what had been written was “bunk”.

“I have been here 3 days and am generally disappointed. Not a man killed or a fellow tortured…” he writes with gallows humour. “At Benin… they crucified a fellow in honour of my coming – here nothing! And this is the blood-stained land of Dahome!!”

Things were different on his second visit. Eighty prisoners were killed that time, the king himself decapitating the first victim. But Dick still wasn’t impressed with the Amazon army, concluding that “an equal number of British charwomen, armed with the British broomstick, would… clear them off in a very few hours.”

After Africa, Burton was transferred to Santos, then a swampy backwater on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Isabel joined him. But he hated it, spending four unhappy years there, drinking hard, writing little and travelling only rarely. “He reminded me of a black leopard, caged, but unforgiving,” wrote a British traveller who met him at this time.

A dream job followed: British consul for Damascus in Syria. This was a chance to recapture his glory days in the East. But Burton made a hash of it, upsetting half the city’s Christians, Jews and Muslims with his flamboyant, my-way-or-the-highway style. After just two years, he was recalled in disgrace.

And that might have been the sum of it for Ruffian Dick. He was now in his fifties. His career was a mess. His next posting was a demotion: consul in the sleepy Adriatic port city of Trieste. He took to pottering around his house in a fez and pointed-toe slippers like an eccentric old gent, bored out of his restless brain.

One afternoon he marched into a room where Isabel was entertaining her chattering lady friends, slapped his latest manuscript down on the coffee table and stomped from the room without a word. It was entitled “A History of Farting”.

But Burton wasn’t at the end of the road just yet. He still had one last great journey in him, a climactic adventure that would be his parting two-finger salute to British “civilisation”. This final journey was different - it was a literary one. With the same fearlessness he’d shown at Mecca and Harar, he now plunged into the forbidden world of Eastern erotica.

It’s a miracle anyone was born at all during the Victorian Age. Sex wasn’t the done thing. Publishers were prosecuted for producing “obscene” books. Oscar Wilde got two years hard labour for “gross indecency”. Even doctors believed masturbation caused heart disease and insanity.

But Dick found prudery offensive. He loved sex and he loved to upset people by talking about it. His friends included decadent poets, pornography collectors and a sadist called Fred Hankey who once asked him to bring a human skin back from Dahomey (even Burton drew the line at that one).

So, in one last great act of defiance, Dick set about publishing a series of sex guides to open British eyes to the joys of shagging. These were translations of the “pillow books” used by lovers in Asia for hundreds of years, including India’s famous “Kama Sutra”. Any of them could have landed him in jail.

As every schoolboy knows, the Kama Sutra contains more acrobatics than Billy Smart’s Circus. Burton’s translation has illustrations of all that stuff plus tips on aphrodisiacs, spanking, oral sex, you name it. Nothing’s cut from the explicit original. It was the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day 1884.

Burton avoided prosecution by publishing his sex guides anonymously. The Kama Sutra became one of the most pirated books in the English language. On a roll, he then decided to produce a no-holds-barred translation of the “Arabian Nights”.

Earlier English versions of the “Nights” had cut out its cruder, earthier tales and concentrated on the family-friendly stuff - Ali Baba, Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor. Not Burton. His massive 16-volume edition of the ancient collection restored all the saucy stories to their original glory.

Dick also daringly added essays outlining his thoughts on homosexuality, pornography and the sexual education of women. He spiced up his text with hundreds of footnotes on everything from lesbianism and harems to incest and hashish. And to cap it all, this time he put his name on the front cover.

It’s mad stuff for the 1880s and the Pall Mall Gazette was appalled, calling the book a “revolting obscenity”. The Echo declared it “morally filthy”. The Boston Daily Advertiser memorably found it “offensive and not only offensive, but grossly and needlessly offensive”.

But to Dick’s surprise, other newspapers praised his “Arabian Nights”, saluting his courage, skill and impressive knowledge. Thirty years after his “Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca”, he found himself with another hit on his hands. The vice squad didn’t come knocking. And when a knighthood followed, the lifelong rebel thought someone must be pulling his leg.

Sir Richard Burton died shortly after that, in 1890, aged sixty-nine. And as with so much about his life, the story of how it came to an end is a bizarre one.

Dick woke gasping for breath at 4am one October morning at his home in Trieste. Isabel summoned a doctor who diagnosed a heart attack but could do nothing to save him. She sent for a Catholic priest and by the time he arrived it looked like Burton was dead.

But Isabel wouldn’t accept it. She insisted her husband was only unconscious. Then she told the priest he was a secret convert to Rome (which seems about as likely Dick bumping into the Pope at Mecca). And she persuaded the clergyman to administer the Catholic Last Rites to the dying over Burton’s clearly lifeless body.

It wasn’t till 7pm that night – more than twelve hours later - that she finally accepted he was gone and that she was “alone and desolate for ever”.

If Isabel’s behaviour that day was odd, what she did next was unforgivable. Within a fortnight of Burton’s death, she had burned nearly all his papers: intimate diaries, notebooks, letters and manuscripts. Forty years of work by a brilliant man up in flames.

She did it, she said, to protect public morality. She saw her husband’s interest in sexuality as purely scientific, but feared others would read his journals “for filth’s sake”. Her God might take a dim view of that and be reluctant to let Dick through the Pearly Gates.

Determined to save his immortal soul, Isabel requested a series of masses for Burton. Two Catholic funeral services were held. Then the scandalous old ruffian, the wild wanderer who spent his life shocking the pious and offending the saints was tamely laid to rest in a Catholic cemetery in the suburbs of west London. Burton’s friends and family were outraged; some never spoke to Isabel again.

SOURCES
Books:
Brodie, Fawn, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (London, 2002)
Kennedy, Dane, The Highly Civilised Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Harvard, 2005)
Burton, Sir Richard, To the Holy Shrines (extracts from Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah) (London, 2007)

Films:
Mountains of the Moon, Momentum Pictures, 1989

Tom Crean: the Wild Man of Borneo

2008-03-18T16:59:00.006Z

"A man who wouldn’t have cared if he’d got to the Pole and God Almighty was standing there, or the Devil" – Tryggve Gran

YOU DON’T HAVE TO DIE like Captain Scott to be a polar hero. The endlessly cheerful, quietly unflappable, hard-as-nails Tom Crean proved that in rare style.

Crean was a colossus. A big, strong, outgoing man, he joined three Antarctic expeditions and on each he suffered appalling ordeals and responded with spectacular acts of bravery. He never weakened, never lost heart – nothing the deadly continent threw at him even made a dent.

He was unfailingly upbeat, always joking, always singing away to himself in an eccentric jumble of bum notes. He called himself “the wild man of Borneo”. His biographer, Michael Smith, dubs him a “serial hero”. The man was virtually indestructible.

Crean enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1893, aged 15, and his first two trips South were with Captain Scott – on the Discovery in 1901 and the Terra Nova in 1910.

The Discovery trip was a journey into the unknown. Antarctica was a mystery at the time, the last unexplored continent on earth. But Crean took to polar exploration like a drake to water. Blizzards, frostbite, snow-blindness – he just sucked it all up.

By the time his second expedition on the Terra Nova came round he was an old-timer. And that’s when he began pulling off his wild heroics; when he started saving lives.

Birdie Bowers and the splendidly named Apsley Cherry-Garrard were the first men to owe him everything. One night the three explorers unwittingly camped on unstable sea ice – and were woken a few hours later by the sickening sound of the floor breaking up beneath them.

They found themselves trapped on a small floe, surrounded by loose ice and drifting out to sea. To add to the drama, killer whales were circling, looking for breakfast. “We had been in a few tight places,” recalled Bowers, “but this was the limit.”

Crean assessed the situation, calmly announced he was going for help – then he leapt off the floe onto another piece of ice floating past, and from there made slow but dogged progress back to solid ground, jumping from floe to floe, using the slippery, bobbing ice sheets as stepping stones, killer whales all around him.

It was a mad gamble. One slip and he’d be dead. But after several hours he was back with ropes and a rescue party to save his colleagues. “Oh, I just kept going pretty lively…” he said later, brushing off any talk of heroics, “them killers wasn’t too healthy company.”

A year later, Crean notched up heroic rescue number two. And this time he accomplished it with nothing less than the greatest solo polar march ever made.

Crean and two other colleagues – Teddy Evans and Bill Lashly – were returning to base after taking part in Scott’s fateful push to the South Pole in 1912. They’d been among eight men who got within 150 miles of the prize. Then Scott had split the group, sending the trio back and pushing on with the four other men who were to die at his side.

Some say Scott would have survived if he’d brought the indomitable Crean with him that day. Maybe, maybe not. But what is certain is that by sending Crean back, the captain saved Teddy Evans’s life instead.

Evans, Crean and Lashly’s grim 750-miles trudge homewards was a race for survival. From the start, things went awry. The temperature dropped alarmingly. They got lost. They suffered snow-blindness. Then something happened that would have ended lesser men – Evans’s legs began to swell, his teeth became loose and he began to haemorrhage. He had scurvy.

Evans was soon too weak to walk. So Crean and Lashly lay him on the sledge and pulled him, two men doing the work of three, silently plodding through the snow at a rate of just one mile an hour.

It was a hopeless situation. The pace was too slow and their food was running out. At this speed they would all starve and freeze to death. Evans told his companions to leave him on the ice and save themselves; they refused.

The pair towed the dying Evans like that for almost a week through the icy wilderness, two brave men fighting a losing battle. On the sixth day, hungry and exhausted, they could pull no more: they were shattered. Only a miracle could save them now.

Thankfully, the wild man of Borneo had one up his sleeve. Leaving Lashly to nurse Evans, he volunteered to walk on alone to the expedition base at Hut Point and fetch help. Hut Point was 35 miles away – 35 miles across the most hostile terrain on the planet.

Crean had no skis, no tent, no means of navigation, no hot food. If there was a blizzard or if he got lost, he was dead. If he fell and injured himself, he was dead. And if he failed, all three men would perish.

He folded his arms across his face as a shield against the bitter wind and subzero temperatures, and strode off into the white wilderness. In his pocket he had three biscuits and two sticks of chocolate, his only food.

The wild man trudged for 16 miles before taking his first break. He stopped for five minutes, ate two biscuits and the chocolate and then marched on. He halted again after another 14 miles, sitting down on the ice this time. He had another “meal”: the last biscuit and a lump of snow. Then, with storm clouds pressing in, he got up and moved on once more.

You can imagine Crean quietly singing away to himself as he fought his way forward, sometimes slipping on the ice underfoot or sinking up to his thighs in soft snow. He walked for 18 hours through that hell, alone. It was an astonishing display of mental and physical toughness; an almost superhuman effort.

And of course he made it. At 3.30am on 19 February, 1912, he stumbled into Hut Point and fell to his knees. The alarm was raised, a rescue party dispatched and Evans and Lashly were saved.

A young Norwegian explorer, Tryggve Gran, saw Crean stagger through the door that day and never forgot him. Many years later, he recalled: “[Crean was] a man who wouldn’t have cared if he’d got to the Pole and God Almighty was standing there, or the Devil. He called himself the “Wild Man from Borneo” and he was”.

Crean, typically, downplayed his great march. “Well Sir, I was very weak when I reached the hut,” he wrote to a friend in another classic of understatement.

The wild man of Borneo was born and raised in Kerry, a farm boy, one of ten kids. He wasn’t British at all; he was as Irish as stout. But like that other wild Irishman Lucknow Kavanagh before him, he made a massive contribution to Britain’s reputation for grit and backbone, serving in the Royal Navy and taking part in British expeditions. So off the back of that, he’s included here: a kind of honorary great “British” nutter.

The honorary nutter pulled off heroic rescue number three on his final journey South in 1914 – and this time it was a team effort. Crean sailed on the Endurance with Ernest Shackleton, another tough Irishman known to his men as the Boss. Together the pair made a formidable team.

The Endurance expedition was a glorious failure. Shackleton’s mad plan had been to walk straight across the Antarctic continent – 1,800 miles coast to coast – with six men, Crean among them. No one had ever done it before. He called it the “last great journey on earth”.

But Endurance never even made it to the dropping off point. As she approached the Antarctic coast, the ship got stuck fast in heavy pack and sat trapped in the ice for an incredible 10 months, all the time slowly drifting north on the sea current – away from their destination.

Finally, after being crunched and crushed for almost a year, her stern rose dramatically into the air and she sank. The ice had swallowed her. And the adventurers who had sailed in her were left marooned on a floe, adrift on a floating ice-sheet 1,000 miles from the nearest human settlement.

That fragile ice floe was to be their home for nearly six months, 28 men crammed into five tents and surviving on a relentless diet of penguin and seal meat that soon had them all farting like thunder. They had enough fuel for one cup of hot tea each a day. And they had three small open boats that had been salvaged from the Endurance – their only slim hope for survival.

By April, 1916, the castaways had drifted nearly 2,000 miles north and were rapidly heading for open water. The ice beneath them started to crumble. Breakout was imminent. At last, the men clambered into the three tiny vessels and cast off in search of land.

The voyage that followed was torture. Waves crashed over the men day and night. Killer whales jostled the boat. Their clothes froze solid on their backs. Salt spray constantly slashed at their faces, leaving their mouths raw and bloody.

After five days afloat, the exhausted, terrified men began to crack. One guy had a nervous breakdown; others became delirious from thirst; a hardened sailor covered his face with his hands and wept in despair. The little flotilla was turning into a drifting asylum.

Not Crean though. He took the tiller of the smallest of the three boats, the Stancomb Wills, and steered her through the lumpy, frozen sea with a calm determination. As all around him lost their heads, he remained resolute. Occasionally he sang a tuneless little song to himself. And after a week of misery he successfully landed his desperate companions on Elephant Island, a grim, uninhabited chunk of rock in the middle of the South Atlantic.

All three boats made it safely ashore, spilling their loads of half-crazed sailors onto the beach. One guy was so unhinged he started slaughtering seals with an axe; another had a heart attack. It was the first time they’d set foot on solid ground since 5 December, 1914 – 497 days before.

But they couldn’t stay on Elephant Island. Every man knew they would never be found on that isolated rock. So Shackleton announced his next ludicrous plan: he would take five men and sail 800 miles to the nearest inhabited island, South Georgia, and there he’d get help, find a ship, and return to save his stranded companions.

Eight hundred miles – that was ten times the distance they’d just travelled. They’d have to sail an open boat across the most fearsome ocean on the planet, in winter. They’d face gales and mountainous waves. If they got their navigation even slightly off, they’d be swept past their goal into 3,000 miles of ocean and lost forever. It was virtually a suicide mission. Crean volunteered to go with the Boss.

The six men set off on Easter Monday, 1916, in the James Caird, a 22-foot whaler, the largest of the three boats. Their voyage made the journey to Elephant Island look like a Caribbean cruise.

Permanently wet and frozen to the marrow, the men’s feet and legs turned a ghostly white. Frostbite and filth made their faces black. Their throats became so swollen it was almost impossible to eat or speak.

The James Caird became encased in ice and almost sunk from the weight. One night a gigantic freak wave came out of nowhere and nearly finished them. They battled a hurricane and only just survived. By the end of the voyage, two of the six on board were broken men and close to death.

And Crean? Here’s Shackleton: “One of the memories that comes to me from those days is of Crean singing at the tiller and nobody ever discovered what the song was. It was devoid of tune and as monotonous as the chanting of a Buddhist monk at his prayers; yet somehow it was cheerful.”

The six desperate men were barely able to walk up the beach when they finally landed on South Georgia after 17 days of hell at sea. Yet, incredibly, still their ordeal wasn’t over. Now they were going to have to march right across the island to reach the Stromness whaling station where they hoped to find help.

South Georgia is a barren wilderness in the middle of the ocean, its interior a chaos of mountains, glaciers and crevasses. No one had ever crossed it before; no one was even sure if it was possible. But three of the James Caird's crew – Shackleton, Crean and another stalwart, Frank Worsley - were about to give it a crack. The fate of the entire Endurance expedition now lay in this trio’s hands.

Leaving their shipmates, the men headed up into the unnamed mountains with a 90-foot rope, two compasses and a carpenter’s adze to use as an ice axe. Each carried his rations in a sock. They had neither a tent nor sleeping bags.

On the first night of the crossing, they found themselves stuck on a high peak in the middle of the island. Thick fog was closing in behind, ahead lay a dangerous icy slope that would take hours to negotiate – and if they didn’t get down fast they would die of exposure.

“We’ll slide,” said the ever-optimistic Shackleton – and that’s exactly what they did. Sitting on the coiled rope, their legs and arms wrapped around the man in front, they went flying off down the mountain on their makeshift toboggan – amazed to find themselves oblivious to the danger and yelling like schoolboys at the sudden and unexpected burst of joy.

Brought to a sudden halt by a snowbank, Crean, Worsley and the Boss dusted themselves down, shook hands rather solemnly, and strode firmly onwards, their trousers now in tatters.

As they approached Stromness they tried to smarten themselves up a bit in case there were women at the base. This was a task beyond even these three. They’d been wearing the same ragged clothes for more than a year, they hadn’t washed for three months, and they’d been on the march for 36 hours. Two children were the first to see them approach - they fled in fear.

The Endurance had berthed at South Georgia on her way South 18 months earlier. But nobody at the quayside recognised the three long-haired, wild-eyed wanderers who arrived out of nowhere that day.

They were taken to the station manager who gaped in disbelief before speaking. A Norwegian worker recalled, in broken English, what happened next: “Manager say: ‘Who the hell are you?’ and terrible bearded man in the centre of the three say very quietly: ‘My name is Shackleton.’ Me – I turn away and weep.”

Even Tom Crean admitted things had been a bit hairy on that third and final expedition to the bottom of the world. “We had a hot time of it the last 12 months when we lost Endurance and I must say the Boss is a splendid gentleman,” he wrote to his old mate Cherry-Garrard when he got home.

But once again his guts and pluck had helped turn a disaster into victory. Crean didn’t die and nor did his colleagues: amazingly, not a single man on the Endurance expedition was lost.

Crean hung up his mitts and snow boots after that and settled into a quiet life back in Ireland. He married, raised a family and opened a pub called the South Pole Inn. The stories he had to tell could have made that pub – any pub – fall silent in awe. But he preferred not to talk about it. As modest as ever, he politely changed the subject if anyone asked him about Antarctica.

He never gave a single interview, never published his memoirs, never even spoke to his family about his adventures. Only his ears hinted at what he’d been through: they were stiff from the effects of frostbite. And his feet, hidden beneath specially made boots, had turned black.

The indestructible Tom Crean died on 27 July, 1938, in a Cork hospital. The man who rescued Teddy Evans and could have saved Scott, the backbone of the Endurance miracle, the wild man of Borneo was felled by, of all things, a burst appendix. Infection set in and he was dead in a week. He’d just turned 61.

SOURCES
Smith, Michael, An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean – Antarctic Survivor (Cork, 2000)
Alexander, Caroline, The Endurance, Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (London, 1998)
Fiennes, Ranulph, Captain Scott (London, 2003)
Lane, Anthony, Nobody’s Perfect (New York, 2002)

Alexander Kinglake: the Travelling Gent

2008-02-22T13:49:00.013Z

“I could not think of anything particular that I had
to say to him” – Alexander Kinglake

WHAT’S A CHAP TO DO if he runs into another British fellow out in the wilds of some far-off foreign land? Should he stop to speak? Or would that look frightfully pushy, not having been introduced to the gentleman in question?

It’s a tricky one. And, by Jove, it got poor old Alexander Kinglake in a right pickle back in 1835.

Kinglake was crossing the Sinai desert, heading to Cairo in a small caravan of four camels: two for his servants, one for baggage, and one for his good self. Four Arabs who had rented them the animals walked alongside.

The journey was long and hot and lonely. They went for days without meeting any other people, trudging along in silence under the fierce sun. Kinglake nodded off atop his camel. He records seeing little else but “sand, sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and sand again”.

Then one day the small party came alive with excitement. There was a moving speck on the horizon, it looked like another group of travellers - and it was heading their way.

Drawing closer, they could make out three laden camels. Closer still and they saw that two of the beasts carried riders. Then, to Kinglake’s astonishment, he noticed one of the travellers wore a shooting-jacket… an English shooting-jacket. It must be another British fellow and his servant! What the devil was he doing here?

You’d think Kinglake’s first impulse might be to ask him. But no, the old Etonian and Cambridge graduate had other concerns. “As we approached each other, it became with me a question whether we should speak,” he writes. “I could not think of anything particular that I had to say to him.”

Coming over all “shy and indolent”, Kinglake says he “felt no great wish to stop, and talk like a morning visitor, in the midst of those broad solitudes”. So he didn’t. He just tipped his cap, waved solemnly at his sunburned countryman, and rode on without a word.

Amazingly, the other guy, clearly of similar mind, did the same. And the super-repressed, super-reserved pair passed each other in the desert, in Kinglake’s words, “quite as distantly as if we had passed in Pall Mall”.

And that would have been that, not so much as a “How do you do?”, were it not for the travellers’ more gregarious foreign companions who were having none of such nonsense. They of course paused to chat, delighted to hear new voices. Then even Kinglake’s camel “caught the social feeling” and refused to budge.

Our man was left twiddling his thumbs a few yards beyond the excited huddle, sitting upright on his stationary animal, conspicuously alone and feeling like a bit of a lemon. Looking back, he saw the other Englishman in the same predicament thirty yards away. “I felt the absurdity of the situation,” he writes gravely. So, keen to avoid any further awkwardness, he threw off etiquette and rode back “to accost the stranger”.

What happened next is a classic of old-school gentlemanly nonchalance, even by the mind-boggling standards of the nineteenth century. The stranger thought it rude to assume Kinglake’s approach was out of “mere sociability”, so instead he pretended there must be some urgent matter of business to be dealt with. And this is what he came out with: “I dare say you wish to know how the Plague is going in Cairo?”

What a gambit. No “Hello”, no “What the dickens brings you here?”, not even a remark on the hot weather. Just straight in there with the bubonic plague, followed by a very English apology that he regretted not having the latest death toll figures to hand.

After mulling over the plague for a bit, the two travelling gents talked briefly about more pleasant matters. The stranger, it transpired, was an army officer returning to Britain from India via Palestine, and Kinglake found him “manly and intelligent”. Then, with the chit-chat soon exhausted, they turned their camels to face opposite horizons and once again plodded on their way.

That strange meeting in the Sinai is one of the highlights of Kinglake’s classic travelogue, “Eothen”, a cracking little read even today. The book is an account of his youthful adventures in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. It took him nine years to write. When it came out in 1844 it was an instant and massive hit.

Kinglake comes across as a gutsy and good-humoured young chap, full of beans and up for anything. He tackles the dangers of the desert, braves the plague in Cairo, defies a local pasha who tries to halt his progress, and generally marches around like he owns the place.

He’s never afraid to tell it as he sees it, sometimes with unintentionally comical results. The sacred Sea of Galilee isn’t as nice as Windermere, he informs us, but still has “the winning ways of an English lake”. The best way to ride a camel is to attach English stirrups. And Arabs must be ignored if they suggest travelling at night and sleeping during the hottest part of the day: “I tried their plan once, and found it very harassing and unwholesome.”

Bedouin women, meanwhile, are a bore. After making the extraordinary statement that they have no religion (they’re Muslims of course), he declares them plain and clumsy and concludes they have “so grossly neglected the prime duty of looking pretty in this transitory life that I could not at all forgive them”.

Yet despite Kinglake’s mad assumption of God-given English superiority and his tendency to treat all foreigners as children, his book is a good one. It’s fresh and funny and original, a far cry from the dull, fact-packed travellers’ account that had come before. “As I have felt, so I have written,” he writes in the preface. The Victorians loved it.

None more so than a young journalist who was to become one of the greatest explorers of the Victorian Age. Henry Morton Stanley grew up in a Welsh poorhouse but always admired and tried to emulate the stiff-upper-lip style of the English gentry. According to his biographer, Tim Jeal, he was particularly struck by Kinglake’s laconic encounter in the Sinai, no doubt considering it a jolly good show.

And Jeal makes a fascinating link between the Kinglake episode and a far more famous meeting that took place decades later near Lake Tanganyika in east Africa: the moment Stanley found David Livingstone.

Everyone knows what Stanley was supposed to have said that day when, after months of searching, he finally stood face to face with the missing explorer. “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” It’s got to be one of the most famous one-liners of all time.

But did he really say it? Jeal’s not so sure. Livingstone never made any mention of it in his journal. The page in Stanley’s diary for that day has been torn out. And Stanley destroyed his earliest description of the dramatic meeting.

More likely, the insecure journalist who grew up in poverty thought long and hard after the meeting before deciding what memorable words to give himself. “Dr Livingston, I presume?” He invented it. Made it up to make himself sound more dignified, more gentlemanly, more like Alexander Kinglake.

SOURCES
Kinglake, Alexander, Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (London, 1844)
Jeal, Tim, Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London, 2007)
De Gaury, Gerald, Travelling Gent: the Life of Alexander Kinglake (1809-91) (London, 1972)

Lucknow Kavanagh: Carry on Civil Servant

2008-02-04T07:30:00.000Z

“Man was born for turmoil and trouble, and is sometimes glad to be rid of the restraints of civilisation”
– T Henry Kavanagh

HERE’S THE GREAT THING about Thomas Henry Kavanagh: not only did he pull off a stunt of astonishing pluck and courage, he did it dressed up like an extra from Carry on Up the Khyber.

We’re talking turban, baggy trousers, sword and blacked-up face here - the works. It makes you wonder why more of our mad heroes and heroines don’t go in for fancy dress.

Kavanagh’s big moment came during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, not a great year to find yourself on the subcontinent if you were European.

He was living in the northern city of Lucknow with his wife and nine kids when it all kicked off. He was, in his words, a “plain man”. He had a dull job with the Bengal Civil Service. At 36, he was resigned to a life of “miserable drudgery”. The Mutiny would change everything, change it utterly.

Kavanagh’s grey world was suddenly filled with more action and violence than a Sam Peckinpah film. And instead of crumbling, instead of cowering in horror, he came alive. The bureaucrat roared. He stared death in the face and he gave her a wink. He turned into Superman.

I wouldn’t recommend fear, suffering and insanity for everyone, but they certainly worked for T Henry Kavanagh.

The Indian Mutiny began in peculiar fashion when native troops refused to accept new cartridges that were rumoured to be greased with animal fat. Since soldiers back then had to bite open cartridges to load their weapons, they risked defilement – Hindus if the grease was from cows, Muslims if it came from pigs. Instead of accepting the new ammunition, they turned their guns on the British.

Fuelled by widespread anger at colonial rule, the uprising spread rapidly. The rebels seemed to go berserk. Europeans were massacred all over the shop. Delhi and Allahabad fell. In Cawnpore, British women and children were hacked to death after being promised safe passage from the city – definitely not cricket.

Lucknow’s small and frightened European community barricaded themselves behind the walls of the British Residency compound and waited for the fury to descend on them too. Guns were rolled into place, weapons distributed, schoolboys and civilians joined soldiers at the defences.

Kavanagh knew right away this would be his finest hour. He would fight on the ramparts, he would fight in the streets, he would never surrender. “I resolved to die in the struggle,” he writes, “rather than survive it with no better fame than I took into it.”

The Residency was soon surrounded by thousands of rebels. It faced daily attacks and constant sniper fire. Assault after assault was repelled. And as the siege dragged on, hunger and disease spread through the compound.

Kavanagh nearly lost his head, in the most literal way, when a cannon ball flew over his shoulder, burning his ear. His youngest daughter fell ill and died. His wife was shot in the leg. But to his surprise he found he was in his element - “glad to be rid of the restraints of civilisation” is how he put it.

Four months into the desperate struggle, word arrived that a relief force under Sir Colin Campbell had reached the outskirts of Lucknow. But there it had stalled. Campbell faced a problem: how to punch through the ring of rebels surrounding the British Residency without losing half his men.

Fired up like Henry V at Agincourt, Kavanagh decided he had the answer – despite having bright red hair and standing more than 6ft tall, he would disguise himself as an Indian, slip out of the Residency at night, cross enemy lines, make contact with Campbell, then using his local knowledge he would guide the relieving force through the city to the besieged garrison by the swiftest and safest route. Simple. Kavanagh would save the day.

It looked like a suicide mission of course - and he knew it. The rebels would have his guts for garters if they caught him. But to hell with the risk; it was time to pack a whole lifetime of adventure into a single night. “I sat amazed by my boldness,” reports the hitherto quiet civil servant.

To be fair, there was a method in his madness. An earlier relief effort under General Havelock had failed precisely because there’d been no one to guide him through Lucknow’s heavily defended narrow lanes. Hundreds had died but the siege wasn’t broken. It was a mistake that couldn’t be allowed to happen again.

Kavanagh went to his superiors with his bold plan. Colonel Robert Napier was amused but judged it “most absurd”. Sir James Outram, the commander in chief, although also dubious, was more willing to be persuaded. He told Kavanagh he could give it a shot on one condition: he came up with a convincing disguise.

The would-be hero immediately dashed off and began assembling the best “native” costume he could muster. And that evening he returned to Outram’s quarters looking like a cross between Ali Babar and that blacked-up white guy in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

He wore a cream turban on his head, a yellow chintz sheet round his shoulders and tight turned-up-toe shoes on his big feet. He carried a traditional Indian sword and a shield. His face and hands were darkened with dye.

It’s ridiculous, unbelievable really, but this ludicrous pantomime get-up did the trick. Kavanagh waltzed in uninvited, pulled up a seat, plonked himself down – and was immediately rebuked by several officers who took him for an impertinent “native”. He had fooled them; they thought he was an Indian.

Outram was impressed. Mission impossible was perhaps not so unthinkable after all.

A map was hidden in Kavanagh’s turban. A double-barrelled pistol was tucked into his waistband, to use on himself if he was captured. And another layer of dye was slapped on his face for good measure. “There was extraordinary hilarity in the whole proceeding,” Kavanagh writes, “which was most beneficial to my nerves.”

Then at 8.30pm on 9 November, 1857, Kavanagh set off with a brave Indian courier called Kunoujee Lal. No one expected to see either of them alive again.

It was to prove quite a night for the plucky pair. They were repeatedly questioned by suspicious rebels – a hair-raising test not only for Kavanagh’s dodgy disguise but also his even dodgier grasp of what he called “Hindoostanee”. But each time they put on a bold front, tried to stay in the shadows – and somehow were allowed to continue.

They got lost, fell in a canal, had to walk through a swamp for two hours. And Kavanagh’s tight-fitting shoes were a nightmare, cutting his feet to ribbons and causing him to mince and slide almost every step of the way.

As dawn approached it looked like their luck might run out. Kavanagh’s face and hands were now streaked, his panto costume in tatters. When the sun came up he’d be rumbled; he’d have no chance. Then, at 5am, they heard another voice challenging them - and this time it was in English: “Who goes there?” By God, they’d done it! They’d reached the British lines.

After being given a drop of brandy and some nice dry socks, Kavanagh was taken to Sir Colin Campbell who stared in disbelief at the tall, dishevelled nutter standing in front of him. But he was impressed by the mad messenger’s tale. And even more interested in what he had to say about the safest routes into Lucknow.

Off the back of that intelligence, Campbell’s relief force of Highlanders and loyal Sikhs launched a surprise assault on the rebels. “Cawnpore, boys! Remember our women and children!” was the cry as the Scotsmen charged, bayonets flashing and kilts flying. The city was secured, the besieged Europeans evacuated to safety - and Thomas Henry Kavanagh was a hero.

The following year, with the Indian Mutiny petering out, our man was ordered to put down his sword, discharge his revolver, and return to his humdrum life of civil service. “I did not like the change,” he writes.

But his bizarre night of adventure didn’t go unrecognised. In January 1860, he was presented with the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest gallantry award. He was only the third civilian to be given the medal.

He also earned himself a new nickname. “Lucknow Kavanagh” they called him. The name filled him with pride for the remainder of his days.

One final thing about our ginger hero, something important, something that technically disqualifies him from this blog about British nutters: he wasn’t British.

It’s true that he was a loyal servant of the British crown. He accepted his VC from Queen Victoria. He performed his heroics, in his words, “under the Banner of England”. But this “plain man” was born in the plain town of Mullingar, County Westmeath. He wasn’t British at all; he was Irish.

With apologies to Irish readers and the Kavanagh clan, I’ve shamelessly shoehorned him in for two reasons:

a) I love his swashbuckling story and couldn’t resist

b) I want to recognise that Britain’s mighty reputation for pluck and fearlessness sometimes rested on the heroics of foreign-born adventurers. They did the work, but we got the benefit – a bit like Polish builders today.

The defence of Lucknow gave Britain some desperately needed heroes during the shocking upheaval of the Indian Mutiny. Here was a heroic British stand made against appalling odds. Yet, not for the first time or the last, the biggest hero of the lot was an Irishman.

Military historians Richard Doherty and David Truesdale have established that more than 200 winners of the Victoria Cross were Irish – that’s 16.5 percent of all VC winners, a remarkable statistic for a small country.

And it’s not just the Irish: the success of countless British expeditions, wars and adventures have hinged on the antics of courageous characters from Jamaica, New Zealand, Africa and beyond. Britain’s record of producing half-mad action heroes is second to none – but let’s not forget, we’ve also had more than a little help from our friends.

If a red-haired civil servant from Mullingar can get away with disguising himself as an Indian rebel then anything is possible. So let the hero of Lucknow be the first on our list of honorary Great “British” Nutters from overseas. Let’s say he qualifies under a new criterion - call it the Kavanagh rule.

SOURCES
Kavanagh, T Henry, How I won the Victoria Cross (1860)
Doherty, Richard & Truesdale, David, Irish Winners of the Victoria Cross (Dublin, 2000)
David, Saul, Victoria’s Wars: the Rise of Empire (London, 2006)
Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003)

John Evans: In Search of the Welsh Indians

2008-01-25T09:53:00.000Z

“Either the Madogion or death”– John Evans

JOHN EVANS WAS A STRANGE YOUNG MAN who went on a bizarre journey to find a tribe of Welsh-speaking American Indians. It was a daring trip, and a foolish one. And it ultimately cost him his life.

Born in the village of Waunfawr near Caernarfon in 1770, the son of a Methodist preacher, Evans was a pious lad – pious and patriotic. At 21, he moved to London. And there he fell in with a group of radical Welshmen with some pretty odd ideas.

The Welsh crew were fascinated by the legend of Madoc, the prince who was said to have discovered America three hundred years before Columbus. The story goes that Madoc sailed west in 1170 after the death of his father, King Owain of Gwynedd. After finding new land, he returned to Wales and persuaded a boat-load of brave men and women to head back over the ocean with him to settle in the new world.

The intrepid pioneers were never heard of again. But their descendants still lived in the land that became known as America, and they still spoke Welsh. At least, according to the story they did.

As America opened up in the eighteenth century, the Prince Madoc legend gained fresh currency. Travellers and missionaries pushed into unmapped territories and returned with peculiar tales of Indians who spoke a language that sounded Welsh, or at least Welsh-ish. Some even carried back reports of a fair-skinned tribe – “white Indians” – who were believed to live out west.

Could there be something in the Madoc story after all? Did a Welshman really discover America? Patriotic young bucks like John Evans dearly wanted to believe it.

Things came to a climax in 1791 when an eccentric poet called Iolo Morganwg came down from one of his regular opium highs and announced he was off to America to settle the issue once and for all. The people of Madoc – the Madogions – were out there, he said. And he was the man to find them.

Impressed, Evans volunteered to go with him. Somewhat less impressively, the poet then changed his mind and backed out. But his young disciple was made of sterner stuff: he decided to go it alone.

Evans landed in Baltimore in October 1792 and was welcomed by the city’s Welsh community. He found work. He began planning his adventure. And he was offered the same words of advice by everyone who heard his mad plan: don’t go.

Even today you need to know what you’re doing if you head off into the American wilderness. Bears, snakes, savage weather - it’s not like going for a stroll on the South Downs. But back then Evans faced an additional, more frightening hazard: hostile Indians.

Native Americans and settlers had been at war over territory for decades. If you were white and valued your scalp, not to mention your life, it wasn’t a great idea to go wandering off into Indian lands that you knew nothing about.

But Evans wouldn’t listen. He was a man on a mission. “Either the Madogion or death,” he wrote to Morganwg back in London.

In the spring of 1793 – just after St David’s Day – friends in Baltimore shook their heads in disbelief as the boy from north Wales set out into the west alone. “God is my shield,” he told them. He had $1.75c in his pocket.

Evans crossed the Allegheny Mountains and arrived at a spot where Pittsburgh now stands. From there, he travelled 700 miles down the Ohio in a river boat – through Indian territory - till he reached the Mississippi. Then he followed that great waterway north to St Louis, where it meets the Missouri.

St Louis was a small frontier town at the time. Its people spoke French but it was controlled by the king of Spain who still had a large American empire and was hostile to Britain. When Evans bowled up, they thought he was an English spy and threw him in jail. Evans tried to explain that he was in fact on an innocent quest to find a lost tribe of Welsh Indians. For some reason, they didn’t buy it.

The Welshman was eventually released when it dawned on his captors he would be more useful to them as a free man. At the time, Spain was trying to push west from St Louis and find a route across the Rocky Mountains to its territories in California. If Evans was daft enough to want to go in that direction, why not let him, and maybe give him some backing?

Indians might kill him of course. But on the other hand, he might find that elusive passage through the Rockies and claim it for Spain.

So at a stroke, Evans went from being a prisoner of King Charles IV to an agent of the Spanish crown. An expedition up the Missouri was organised. Evans was made second in command under a Scot called James McKay. In the summer of 1795 the party set off – 30 well-armed men with four large boats loaded with goods for trading.

By November, they’d reached the Omaha Indians, whose chief Black Bird was one of the most powerful rulers in the region. You didn’t mess with Black Bird. He’d once murdered sixty of his own warriors by putting poison in their soup (dog soup as it happens, with the Omaha a dog wasn’t just for Christmas).

But the Europeans won him over with gifts of blankets, tobacco and muskets. And with winter starting to bite, they got permission to build a fort on the riverbank where they could hole up till spring.

John Evans wasn’t going to hang around though. First he spent almost a month out on the frozen plains with an Omaha hunting party, tracking buffalo and sleeping out in subzero temperatures. Then in the new year it was time to get back to the main business of searching for Welsh Indians. He said goodbye to McKay at the fort, took a handful of men with him and rode off on horseback into the unknown.

Before they left, McKay gave the small party strict instructions to claim all lands they passed for the king of Spain and to make detailed notes of every new tribe, plant and animal they saw (including keeping special watch for a weird one-eyed beast said to live in the Rockies).

“Appear always on guard and never be fearful or timid,” McKay warned, “for the savages are not generally bold, but will act in a manner to make you afraid of them.”

Evans and his companions were made afraid all right. After about three hundred miles, they ran into a party of Sioux on the warpath. The Sioux were a terrifying lot, a people constantly at war with other tribes as well as whites. They attacked the Europeans, pursuing them for dozens of miles. Evans and his companions escaped. But the incident put the wind up them big style. They decided to head back to McKay to have a little rethink.

When the weather improved, the indefatigable Evans was off again. This time he traveled right up the Missouri into the Badlands of South Dakota, a barren place where wind and water has eroded the landscape into fantastic shapes: gorges, gullies and tall, thin spires of rock known as hoodoos.

After nine weeks he reached the Arikara tribe, a surprisingly friendly bunch who nevertheless cheerfully relieved him of most of his trade goods. Then it was time to move on again - time to find the mysterious Mandan people.

Evans had high hopes of the Mandan. A French explorer had already made contact with the tribe and reported that their skin was whiter than other Indians. He’d found them living in fixed settlements, not roaming the plains like their nomadic neighbours. They had huts, not wigwams. They raised crops instead of tracking buffalo. If there were “white Indians” out there, they must surely be these people.

Reaching the Mandan was a moment of triumph for Evans. He’d travelled 8,000 miles from his home in north Wales for this. He’d sailed an ocean, trekked across a continent, crossed Sioux territory and survived. Legend was about to be proved fact. John Evans was on the brink of becoming a hero.

So were the Mandan really white? Did they look Welsh? Erm, not really, no. Some seemed quite fair-skinned, Evans thought. A few even had blue eyes. But Native Americans’ complexions vary as much as Europeans. Evans desperately wanted to see white people standing before him, but he couldn’t. There was no getting away from it - the Mandan were, well, Indians.

And what about the language? Did they speak Welsh? Anything even resembling Welsh? Na, as they say in the land of Evans’s fathers. No, they did not.

They were a jolly, hospitable crowd mind. Evans met their chiefs, Big White Man and Black Cat. He handed over flags and medals as gifts. Then he basically made himself at home, spending winter with them, huddling round their fires in the little earth huts they shared with their horses.

He stayed six months, learning about their culture and their land, occasionally entertaining his hosts on his flute. It must have been quite an experience for the lad. But there was no escaping the bitter disappointment: these people were about as Welsh as a haggis.

To add to Evans’s worries, he was permanently hungry and the extreme cold was starting to get to him. That brutal winter with the Mandan broke his health. He never really recovered.

Evans wasn’t even the first European to reach the Mandan that year. Just before he showed up, a Canadian fur trader called Rene Jessaume had arrived via a different route. Jessaume had established a small trading post, raised the Union Jack and then left.

Evans lowered the British flag and replaced it with the standard of his own paymaster, Spain (which the Mandan found highly entertaining). And when a few other Canadians showed up some weeks later, he boldly sent them packing.

But in the spring Jessaume himself returned with a group of tough frontiersmen weighed down with gear to trade. Evans tried to stop them doing deals with the Indians. But by now he was a sick and isolated man and no match for Jessaume, a hard nut who had spent his whole life in the wilderness.

A furious row erupted. Evans said Jessaume tried to kill him; the Canadians said it was the Indians who turned on him. Either way, the Welshman was way out of his depth and he fled back down the Missouri, his dreams of finding the Madogion in shreds.

Back in St Louis, he wrote to friends with the bad news. “Thus having explored and charted the Missurie for 1,800 miles,” he told one compatriot, “and by my Communications with the Indians this side of the Pacific Ocean… I am able to inform you that there is no such People as the Welsh Indians.”

Evans’s life fizzled out after that. Perhaps he should have gone home to Wales. But he chose to stick it out in America, where the defeats and disappointments kept on coming. He was promised a stretch of land but it never materialized; his health deteriorated rapidly; he was robbed; he lost almost everything in a flood.

John Evans hit the bottle hard. A broken man, he wound up in New Orleans, alcoholic and unemployable. And there he drank himself to death before his thirtieth birthday.

The Mandan, incidentally, fared little better than Evans. Contact with Europeans brought smallpox and thousands perished. By 1837, fewer than 150 remained. The survivors merged with neighbouring tribes, including the Arikara. The last full-blooded Mandan was believed to have died in 1975. Her name was Mattie Grinnell.

SOURCES
Williams, David, John Evans and the Legend of Madoc, 1770-1799 (Cardiff, 1963)
Williams, Gwyn A, Madoc: the making of a myth (London, 1979)

Frederick Burnaby: the Bravest Man in England

2008-01-23T12:08:00.000Z

"I have, unfortunately for my own interests, from my earlier childhood had what my old nurse used to call a most ‘contradictorious’ spirit” - Fred Burnaby

BY JINGO, THEY DON’T MAKE CHAPS like Colonel Frederick Gustavus Burnaby any more. Which is a shame, or possibly a relief, I can’t quite make up my mind.

In the Victorian age of larger-than-life heroes, the wildly eccentric colonel towered above the lot of them. He stood 6ft 4ins tall, weighed 15 stone, boasted a 47-inch chest - and had balls to match his enormous frame.

The son of a clergyman, Fred joined the army in 1859 – aged 17 – and quickly became recognised as the strongest man in its ranks. A first-rate boxer, swordsman, rider and runner, his party tricks included vaulting over billiard tables and twisting pokers into knots with his bare hands. He once carried two ponies downstairs at Windsor Castle for a prank, picking one up under each arm like they were cats.

You didn’t want to mess with Fred Burnaby, that was true. But he was more than just a meathead of mountainous proportions. Far more.

Fred was bright, friendly and jovial, always smiling by every account. He could speak seven languages, including Russian and Turkish. He was an insatiable traveller who wrote rip-roaring bestsellers about his adventures. And he was into hot-air ballooning – not exactly a normal hobby for a Victorian cavalry officer.

In 1882, our man packed some roast-beef sandwiches, climbed into his wicker basket at Dover gas works and flew off alone in the direction of the Channel. He landed in a field in Normandy later that day, terrifying some local chickens, and becoming the first person to make a hot-air balloon trip from England to France.

Fred was also into politics. An old-school Tory, he stood for Parliament in 1880 – pitching himself against Joseph Chamberlain in the latter’s Birmingham stronghold.

Chamberlain was one of the bigwigs of the day; Fred never really had a hope. But courage is when you know you’re beaten before you start and you throw yourself into it anyway. Fred was nothing if not courageous – courageous to the point of lunacy most of the time. He lost of course. But by God he gave Chamberlain a run for his money and no one who followed the campaigning in Birmingham that year ever forget Fred Burnaby.

At one meeting in Wolverhampton, for instance, Fred had his stewards bring two persistent hecklers up to the front. He went to the edge of the stage, leaned over and picked them both up by their collars, one in each hand. He then lifted them high for all to see and carried them at arm’s length to the back of the platform where he plonked them in two chairs.

“Sit there, little man. And you, little man, sit there,” he told them in his booming cavalry voice. The crowd was impressed. The heckling stopped. No one was left in any doubt that Colonel Burnaby was not an easy man to intimidate.

By this stage in his short life, Fred was already something of a popular hero in Britain, famous for a bizarre 1,000-mile journey he’d made into Central Asia several years earlier, accompanied by a dwarf. The mad trip was seen as a kind of one-man victory over the mighty Russian empire, which had tried to block his progress. And here’s how he did it.

Fred was attached to the Royal Horse Guards, the Blues, an elite regiment whose officers lived the life of riley and got no less than five months leave a year. Tempting though it must have been for Fred to spend that time carousing, leaping over pool tables and lugging ponies up and down the stairs, he had bigger ideas. Instead, he used those long holidays to travel the world and write about his adventures.

First he went to Moscow, in winter. Next he set off for war-torn Spain. Then it was Sudan, where on a roasting February day he found himself flicking through an old English newspaper in a Khartoum café, absently chatting to some mates about where they all fancied going next time their leave came around.

“At that moment my eye fell upon a paragraph in the paper,” Fred wrote later. “It was to the effect that the [Russian] government at St Petersburg had given an order that no foreigner was to be allowed to travel in Russian Asia, and that an Englishman who had recently attempted a journey in that direction had been turned back…”

As a stout-hearted patriot, Fred wasn’t at all keen on Russians at the best of times. For years the Tsarist empire had been expanding rapidly south, swallowing up vast areas of central Asia – today’s “Stan” lands: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan. India lies just below the Stans, and Britain was getting twitchy. Was the jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown next on Russia’s hit-list?

Now those pesky Russians were trying to ban Englishmen from travelling in the region, too. Englishmen! You can imagine what Burnaby of the Blues thought of that. You can see him working himself up into a Basil Fawlty-style fit. How dare they! What was that rotten Tsar up to? More importantly, who was going to stop him?

Before he’d finished his coffee, Fred’s mind was made up. He would ignore the ban, travel to the heart of central Asia (somehow), and find out for himself exactly what was going on there. He saw it as his personal duty to open Britain’s eyes to the menace of the Russian bear. And, you never know, he might get a bestseller out of it too.

Fred’s friends in the café told him he’d never make it, that he might as well try for the moon. But he returned home to England determined and began making plans for the greatest adventure of his life

By the time he left London’s Victoria Station on 30 November, 1875, he had a bold plan. He’d simply go straight to St Petersburg, travel south-east to frontier city of Orenburg, and from there strike out over the steppes and deserts of Russian-controlled Central Asia. His goal was the mysterious caravan city of Khiva, closed to all travellers since the Tsar’s army seized it two years earlier.

It wasn’t going to be easy of course. Apart from the possibility of being arrested, Fred’s army leave inconveniently fell during winter – so it would be blizzards, snowdrifts and killer temperatures every step of the way. If the Russians didn’t get him, frostbite or exposure probably would.

He wasn’t exactly guaranteed a warm welcome if he made it to Khiva either. The Khivans were a fierce and independent lot who had been fighting Russian invaders for centuries, slaughtering the men and enslaving the women in harems. Their leader, the Khan of Khiva, had a reputation for cruelty. He will “very likely order his executioner to gouge out your eyes”, a friendly Russian warned Fred. Not that that put him off of course.

Fred’s account of his wild journey – “A Ride to Khiva” – turned him into a celebrity. The novelist Henry James enjoyed the book, calling its author a “jovial and enterprising officer”. It sold out. Queen Victoria invited Fred to dinner on the strength of it. Even today it’s a smashing, swashbuckling read.

Wrapped up like the Michelin man in a smelly sheepskin suit, his military moustache frozen stiff on his face, Fred writes with boyish enthusiasm of how he pressed on through the frozen wastelands of Central Asia in the face of the most savage winter in living memory.

He hires a “faithful little Tartar” servant, Nazar, who stands less than five foot tall and sticks with Fred through thick and thin. Later, the Little and Large pair are joined by a third man, a local guide who wears an enormous black sheepskin hat, a bright yellow “dressing gown”, exotic boots with upturned toes, and a scimitar tucked into his belt.

At one remote settlement, the unlikely trio find all the horses have either died or are starving to death. This one-horse town is rapidly becoming a no-horse town. So they hire three gigantic, shaggy camels instead, harnessing the unruly beasts to their tiny sleigh and pushing on through the snowdrifts in bizarre fashion.

On another occasion, the motley team run into six armed Khivans who insult the exotically attired guide, abusing him for working for “dogs and unbelievers” from abroad (ie Fred). The guide lashes out with his whip; a Khivan hits back with a camel-stick. Knives are drawn; Fred pulls out his pistol.

Then something odd happens. The guide “blew his nose with his fingers as a sign of contempt for his adversary, and squatted on his haunches on the ground,” reports the bemused Englishman. “His foe, not to be outdone, performed the same feat with his nasal organ, and sat down opposite him. Then they began a verbal battle, in which the reputations of their respective female relatives were much aspersed.”

On one typically freezing day Fred forgets to put on his gloves and then falls asleep on the sleigh. Forty below and he forgets to put on his gloves - quite a feat in itself when you think about it. It was a mistake that almost cost him his hands.

“In a few minutes I awoke;” he writes, “a feeling of intense pain had seized my extremities. It seemed as if they had been plunged in some corrosive acid which was gradually eating the flesh from the bones.” He was frostbitten. And it was only thanks to the efforts of some rough and ready Cossacks, who rubbed a spirit on his limbs and plunged them into icy water, that circulation was restored and his fingers saved.

Yet despite these hardships, Fred’s pluck and bravery wins the day. He avoids the Russian soldiers and passport officials who would turn him back. And after two months of hard travelling he rocks up outside the ancient city walls of Khiva. First things first, he needs a shave. It simply won’t do for an English gentleman to be seen walking round town like a homeless. So he goes off to find a barber’s, attracting a crowd of three to four hundred fascinated onlookers in the process.

Staring through the window of the barber’s shop, the throng is further amazed when Fred asks for his beard to be removed - it’s heads, not chins, that are traditionally kept clean-shaven in these parts (men’s scalps, our man notes, are “as devoid of hair as a block of marble”). Everyone is then heartily amused when the nervous and bewildered barber accidentally takes a divot out of the Englishman’s face with his blunt razor.

With characteristic optimism, Fred had already sent a messenger ahead to request an audience with the mighty Khan of Khiva, old eye-gouger himself, enslaver of Russian woman, enemy of the Tsar. To his surprise, this is granted. So, after the spruce-up, Fred finds himself being led into the ruler’s palace under the gaze of 40 guards in long silk robes and a curious group of “good-looking boys of an effeminate appearance, with long hair streaming down their shoulders”.

A curtain is pulled back and Fred is face to face with a powerfully built guy in his late twenties, with irregular teeth and a coal-black beard and moustache: the Khan. The main man is seated on a handsome Persian carpet, propped up by cushions. He raises his hand to his forehead in greeting; Fred touches his cap.

And what does our dashing adventurer make of this most feared of Asian rulers? Well, he rather likes him. “[The Khan] had a pleasant, genial smile, and a merry twinkle in his eye…” writes Fred. “I must say I was greatly surprised… to find him such a cheery sort of fellow.”

Fred had gone to Khiva without the permission of his army superiors – there was no point even asking for it, refusal being a certainty. So when word reached Britain via telegraph of Burnaby’s daring one-man bid to upset the Russians, not to mention his jolly chat with the Khan of Khiva, he was immediately ordered home by his commander-in-chief, the Duke of Cambridge.

The intrepid cavalry man dutifully returned to his regiment and got cracking writing his book. But the following year, when leave came round once more, he was off again on another strictly unofficial do-or-die mission.

This time Fred rode 1,000 miles from Constantinople into eastern Turkey, a wild and unstable region where the Tsar and the Sultan shared a frontier. War between the two powers was imminent. Fred wanted to see for himself what the Russians were up to there and whether the Turks could hold their own if fighting started.

Again he travelled through a savage winter. Again Russian agents tried to stop him. Again he had a bestseller on his hands when he returned – “On Horseback Through Asia Minor” – not to mention an even greater reputation for extravagant heroics.

Fred’s hot-air balloon trip across the Channel came next and only served to raise his stock further. His superiors weren’t impressed of course – once again he’d left the country without permission. But Fred just couldn’t help himself. Despite his loyalty, he had an unruly streak that no amount of army discipline could contain.

“I have, unfortunately for my own interests, from my earlier childhood had what my old nurse used to call a most “contradictorious” spirit,” he writes in “A Ride to Khiva”. It was this “contradictorious” streak – this fierce independence - that led him to an early grave in the vast, hot, emptiness of Sudan.

One of the most extraordinary men Sudan has ever seen was on the rise at the time. Muhammad Ahmad had gathered around him an army of desert tribesmen and called out for holy war. He was a nineteenth-century Osama bin Laden. He wanted to drive the Egyptians and British out of his country and convert the world to Islam. They called him the Mahdi, “the expected one”. And he wasn’t a man to argue with.

The Mahdi’s followers were a fanatical and ferocious lot. They had God on their side and a terrifyingly impressive record of massacring their enemies. In 1883, a 10,000-strong Egyptian force led by a British officer, William Hicks, was sent against them. It was completely destroyed; just a few hundred men returned alive. Hicks’s head was cut off and taken to the Mahdi.

The following year, Fred – yet again travelling without permission - was among more than 4,000 British troops who had another crack at the rebels at the second battle of El Teb. It was a brutal clash fought at close quarters. And the mighty figure of Fred Burnaby was in the thick of it, doing dire work with a characteristically unorthodox weapon: a double-barrelled shotgun.

Fred used the butt as well both barrels to fearsome effect – a tactic that got his liberal opponents in a lather (killing Arabs with a shotgun: not the done thing at all, old chap). But this time the British won. Fred was mentioned in despatches. He returned home a hero, to most.

The Mahdi army wasn’t finished though. Far from it. Now General Gordon found himself besieged at Khartoum - and, after much dithering, the British government sent a relief expedition under General Wolseley to save him (too late, as things turned out).

Fred, naturally, wanted a piece of the action and Wolseley was happy to have him on board. But bad-boy Burnaby had by now upset so many people at the top his request to go back to the Sudan was turned down.

Who needs permission when you’re Fred Burnaby though? So, true to form, he simply waited for his leave to come around again. Then off he sailed, arriving in Africa against orders and catching up with the British force as it advanced towards Khartoum.

Welcomed by Wolseley, Fred immediately pushed up to the front. When a vanguard of 1,500 British troops ran into about 12,000 Sudanese a few weeks later, he was with them. And it was here, at a dusty desert watering hole called Abu Klea, that his luck finally ran out.

The rebels charged, unexpectedly and ferociously. The British formed into their usual fighting square and fired off a volley. But it failed to check the onslaught and the Mahdists kept coming at them.

The evening before Fred had told the Daily Telegraph’s war correspondent, a Mr Burleigh, he’d left his shotgun behind because of the fuss it’d created when he last used it in battle. Fuss or no fuss, it would have come in handy now.

The Sudanese smashed into the British, piercing their lines in a wild attack. A bloody free-for-all of hacking, slashing and shooting ensued. Burleigh reports seeing Fred riding out, sword in hand, to help a handful of comrades caught stranded outside the square by the sudden charge.

A Mahdi rebel lunged at him with an 8ft spear, but he saw it coming. “Burnaby fenced smartly… and there was a smile on his features as he drove off the man’s awkward points,” writes the Telegraph reporter.

As the struggle continued, a second spearman came up behind Fred and jabbed him in the shoulder. It wasn’t a serious wound but it made him glance back, just for a second. And in that brief moment, the first guy seized his chance and ran his javelin into Fred’s throat.

The force pushed the huge soldier out of his saddle and dumped him on the ground. Burleigh saw what happened next: “Half a dozen Arabs were now about him. With the blood gushing in streams from his gashed throat, the dauntless Guardsman leapt to his feet, sword in hand, and slashed at the ferocious group. They were the wild strokes of a proud, brave man dying hard and he was quickly overborne, and left helpless and dying.”

Dying, but not yet dead. The Mahdi army’s attack ended as swiftly as it started and Fred was still clinging to life when another officer, Lord Binning, found him lying on the ground, his head in the lap of a young private. The lad was crying. “Oh sir,” he said to Binning, “here is the bravest man in England, dying and no one to help him.”

Fred tried to speak but couldn’t. By now, he had a bullet wound in the forehead as well as the hole in his throat. Part of his head had also been cut away. Despite all this, the story goes that Fred died with his familiar smile on his face. Not sure if I believe it, mind. But I want to.

You can see a painting of Colonel Frederick Burnaby in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He’s not smiling in that. But he is looking relaxed and splendid in his cavalry uniform – cocksure even - his long legs stretched out in front of him, a map of Asia and east Africa on the wall behind, a pile of books at his side.

He’s holding a cigarette aloft in his left hand in a rather grand fashion. His gleaming helmet and breastplate are at his feet. That mighty moustache, once frozen solid on the steppes of central Asia, has been waxed at the tips.

There’s enough room on the settee beside Fred to sit down for a chat, perhaps about those dastardly Russians, his faithful Tartar friend Nazar, or the joys of hot-air ballooning. “Sit there, little man,” he looks like he could be saying to us, “and you, little man, sit there.”

SOURCES
Burnaby, Frederick Gustavus, A Ride to Khiva - abridged and introduced by David Williams (London, 1972)
Burnaby, Frederick Gustavus, A Ride Across the Channel, and other adventures in the air (London, 1882)
Ware, J Redding, The Life and Times of Colonel Fred Burnaby (London, 1885)
Mann, R K, The Life, Adventures and Political Opinions of F G Burnaby (London, 1882)
Duff, Louis Blake, Burnaby (Welland, 1926)
Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003)

Great British Nutters - an introduction

2008-01-22T13:56:00.000Z

“What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life” - George Mallory, who died on Everest

DON’T GET ME WRONG, calling someone a nutter (great, British or otherwise) isn’t an insult. At least in my book it’s not.

On the contrary, most of our greatest heroes and heroines have been half-mad. Bold, brave and often brilliant, for sure - but also, quite wonderfully, barking.

It’s especially true with the best adventurers and explorers. Schlepping through jungles and crossing Arabian sands is not normal behaviour. You don’t have to be nuts to do it, but it helps.

You don’t have to be British either, but that helps too. God knows why, but over the years this little island has churned out way more than its fair share of intrepid globe-trotters. There’s not a hellish journey on the planet that some mad Brit hasn’t had a crack at at one time or another.

So this blog is a small celebration of these exceptional men and women. I’m whittling down a long list of likely candidates to a few dozen and I'll post a profile on each over the coming months. In a crowded field, these are my favourites – the A-team.

On the face of it, they have little in common. Some are famous, others forgotten. Some were near-saints, others ruthless and racist. They travelled in the name of science and discovery, or the King and Empire. They did it for their God, for glory, for money – or for a laugh.

Yet they all share something special – a surplus of pluck perhaps, an excess of courage – that sets them above the comfortable crowd. And one more thing: they are all gloriously optimistic.

You don’t go charging off to the world’s most distant, desolate and dangerous places because you’ve got some sort of death wish: the opposite. You go because there is something worth seeing; because you believe in yourself; because you know big risks bring big rewards.

There’s nothing wrong with nutters, God no. The world would be a dimmer place without them. Hope you enjoy the blog...