James Holman: the Blind Traveller

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

James Holman: restless chap

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”.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post here but have started a new blog called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with much shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow @historynuts on Twitter or via my facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

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

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

Author of "A History of Farting"

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.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post on this blog, but have started a new one called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow me on Twitter @historynuts or at  facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks 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: Wild Man of Borneo

"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

Tom Crean, pipe and puppies

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, calls 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.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post on this blog, but have started a new one called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow me on Twitter @historynuts or at  facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

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

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

The Sinai: no place for "mere sociability"

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 University 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.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post on this blog, but have started a new one called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow me on Twitter @historynuts or at  facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!


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

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

"Extraordinary hilarity" all round

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 Baba 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 “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 Scottish 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.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post on this blog, but have started a new one called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow me on Twitter @historynuts or at  facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

SOURCES
Kavanagh, T Henry, How I Won the Victoria Cross (1860)
Doherty, Richard and 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

“Either the Madogion or death”– John Evans

Sorry, I don't speak Welsh

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 Blackbird was one of the most powerful rulers in the region. You didn’t mess with Blackbird. 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.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post here but have started a new blog called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with much shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow @historynuts on Twitter or via my facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

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)