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Title: The Book of Gallant Vagabonds
Author: Beston, Henry
Language: English
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_The_ BOOK _of_
GALLANT VAGABONDS
HENRY BESTON
[Illustration: SHIP BONETTA SALEM DEPARTING FROM LEGHORN
_Courtesy Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts._
THE HARBOR OF LEGHORN IN SHELLEY’S DAY SHOWING THE AMERICAN SHIP
“BONETTA” OF SALEM LEAVING PORT.]
_The_ BOOK _of_
GALLANT VAGABONDS
_By_
HENRY BESTON
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_Copyright, 1925,
By George H. Doran Company_
[Illustration]
THE BOOK OF GALLANT VAGABONDS
—A—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To_
COLONEL THEODORE ROOSEVELT
_and_
MRS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT
IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION OF
MANY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP
AND ENCOURAGEMENT
FOREWORD
“The wide seas and the mountains called to him,
And grey dawn saw his camp-fires in the rain.”
There are times when everyone wants to be a vagabond, and go down the
road to adventure, strange peoples, the mountains, and the sea. The bonds
of convention, however, are many and strong, and only a few ever break
them and go.
In this book I have gathered together the strange and romantic lives of
actual wanderers who did what so many have wished to do; here are some
who gave up all to go and see the world. The booming of temple gongs over
the rice fields sounded in their ears, they tasted strange food cooked
on charcoal fires in the twilight quiet of midocean isles, they knew the
mountain wind keen with the smell of snow, the mystery of roads along
great rivers, and the broad path of ships on lonely seas. Whatever was to
be seen, they went to see; they did things the world thought could not
be done.
Life is a kind of book which is put into our hands with many pages still
uncut; some are content with the open leaves, others cut a few pages, the
vagabond reads the whole book if he can.
I have called these wanderers “Gallant Vagabonds” to separate them from
both the professional travellers and the vagabond ne’er-do-wells. The
gallant vagabond is not the man with the sun helmet and the file of
native bearers; nor is he the wastrel who drifts down-stream and sees
the world as he goes; the real prince of vagabonds is the wayfarer with
scarce a penny in his pocket who fights his way upstream to see where the
river rises, and crosses the dark mountains to find the fabled town. His
curiosity is never purely geographical, it lies in the whole fantastic
mystery of life.
The true gallant vagabond is one of the heroes of humanity, and history
owes him many of her great discoveries, many of her most spirited and
romantic episodes.
Here you will find, gathered in their own vagabond company, John Ledyard
the runaway college sophomore who thought of walking round the world,
Belzoni the monk who became an acrobat and then an archæologist, Edward
John Trelawny, the deserter, pirate, and country gentleman who came
so mysteriously into the life of Shelley; Thomas Morton, the jovial
Elizabethan who scandalized the New England Puritans with a Mayday revel,
Arthur Rimbaud the poet who became an African trader, and James Bruce the
sturdy Scot who rose to be a great lord in Abyssinia. The accounts are
authentic, and if they seem like fiction, the reader must call to mind
the old adage about the strangeness of the truth.
I wish to thank Mr. John Farrar, Editor of _The Bookman_, for the kindest
of help and encouragement, and I welcome this same opportunity to thank
Mr. Warren Butler of Salem, Massachusetts, who found me the old print of
the ship _Bonetta_.
H. B.
New York City.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
_One_ JOHN LEDYARD 19
_Two_ BELZONI 57
_Three_ EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 95
_Four_ THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT 137
_Five_ JAMES BRUCE 175
_Six_ ARTHUR RIMBAUD 211
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE HARBOR OF LEGHORN IN SHELLEY’S DAY SHOWING THE
AMERICAN SHIP _BONETTA_ OF SALEM LEAVING PORT _Frontispiece_
PAGE
JOHN LEDYARD 21
BELZONI 59
TRELAWNY AS THE OLD SEAMAN IN SIR JOHN E. MILLAIS’S
PAINTING _THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE_ 97
JAMES BRUCE 177
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 213
_One_: JOHN LEDYARD
_One_: JOHN LEDYARD
I
Here was a man who was born with two great gifts, one the most precious
in the world, the other the most perilous. The first was an abounding
physical vitality which made the casual business of being alive a
divine adventure, the second, an imagination of the sort which refuses
discipline and runs away with the whole mind.
The adventure begins in the spring of the year 1772 with the farmers
of the Connecticut Valley halting their ploughs in the furrow, and
straightening up to stare at a certain extraordinary vehicle going north
on the river road. This vehicle was nothing less than a two-wheeled
sulky, then a rig almost unheard of outside the towns, and one never
known to be used by travellers. A sulky with bundle baggage lashed
behind, surely the driver must be an odd kind of rogue! Stopping at
nightfall at a farm, the stranger met with close scrutiny by rural
candle light. He was a fair-haired youth an inch or so under six feet
tall, and of that “rangy” and powerful build which is as characteristic
of American soil as Indian corn. His eyes, which were well spaced in a
wide forehead, were grey-blue in color, he had a good chin to face the
world with, and something of a lean and eagle-ish nose. His name, he
said, was John Ledyard, and he was on his way to become a missionary to
the Indians.
This youth, John Ledyard, third of his name, had seen the light of day in
the village of Groton, Connecticut; his father, a sea captain, had died
young; legal mischance or a descent of harpy relatives had deprived the
young mother of her property, and John had been brought up in the house
of his grandfather at Hartford. Then had come years at grammar school,
the death of his grandfather, his virtual adoption by an uncle and
aunt, and the attempt of these good folk to make a lawyer of him, which
experiment had not been a success.
At twenty-one years of age, John presented something of a problem to his
kinsmen. What was to be done with this great fair-haired youth who had
neither money nor influential friends? Suddenly Destiny came down the
Connecticut Valley with a letter.
[Illustration: JOHN LEDYARD
_Courtesy Judge John A. Aiken._]
The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth, wrote to John
inviting him to the college. The passion of this good man’s life was the
evangelization of the dispossessed and incorrigible redskins; he visited
them in their forlorn and dwindling encampments; he took their young
men to be his pupils, and he had founded his college largely for the
sake of training the sons of colonists to be Indian missionaries. Good
Doctor Wheelock had been a friend of grandfather Ledyard’s, and something
or other had recalled to his mind the fair-haired boy who he had seen
playing about the old man’s house at Hartford. He would make a missionary
of the lad, and send him forth to comfort the copper-skinned of the
elect. A letter arrived offering John the status of a free pupil destined
to the Indian field. Sulky and ancient nag were presently produced from
somewhere, perhaps from John’s own pocket, for he had just inherited a
tiny legacy; the uncle and aunt waved farewell, a whip cracked in the
air, and John and his sulky vanished over the hills and far away.
At Dartmouth College, he liked to act in plays, and clad in robes
of Yankee calico, strutted about as the Numidian Prince, Syphax, in
Mr. Addison’s “Tragedy of Cato.” A savour of old-fashioned rhetoric
and magniloquence made its way from these plays into John’s mind,
and coloured his letters and his language all his life. He liked the
out-of-doors, and on one occasion induced a group of comrades to climb
with him to the top of a neighboring height, and spend the night on
evergreen boughs strewn on the floor of deep holes dug in the snow.
Doctor Wheelock nodded an enthusiastic consent; he saw in John’s
adventure fine training in hardship for his future missionaries! Letters
of classmates paint Ledyard as restless, impatient of the dry bones
of discipline, authoritative on occasion, and more a man with devoted
cronies than one largely and carelessly popular. All other Dartmouth
memories have faded in the epic glow of the adventurer’s flight from his
Alma Mater.
He came to college in a sulky, he left it an even more adventurous way.
In the spring of 1773, the sound of the axe rings in the Dartmouth woods.
Presently comes a shout, a great, crackling crash, and the sound and
tremor of a heavy blow upon the earth. John Ledyard and his cronies have
just felled a giant pine standing close by the bank of the Connecticut
River. From this log, the homespun undergraduates fashion a dug-out
canoe, fifty feet long and three feet wide, a veritable barge of a canoe,
and once the digging and hacking is done with, John himself weaves at the
stern of the craft a kind of shelter-bower of willow wands. Word passes
among the lads to be at the river early in the morning.
The spring in northern New England is no gracious and gradual awakening,
it is shy, even timid, of approach, and there are times when the new
leaves and petals have quite the air of children who have run out of
the house on a winter’s day. Then comes a sudden night of warmth and
southwest wind, smells of wet earth and the sound of flooded streams fill
all the dark, a rushing spirit of fertility shakes the land, and the
rising sun reveals a world hurrying on to June. A dangerous spring in a
Puritan land, for flesh and spirit are taken unawares, and swept off to
the shrines of gods who have never made a covenant with man.
Such a spring it was, as the forest undergraduates gathered at the huge
dug-out under the slanting light of early day, and watched their friend
carry supplies to his canoe. John first put aboard a provender of dried
venison and cornmeal, then a huge bearskin for a coverlet, and last of
all two strangely assorted books, a Greek New Testament and the poems of
Ovid. The truant Yankee sophomore steps into his canoe. A long halloo,
a push all together, and the craft has slid off into the river, which,
clear of ice and swollen by a thousand mountain streams, is rushing past
their little college and on into the world. The current seizes the canoe;
the wet paddle blade flashes in the cool sun; John masters the swirl
with his strength and woodsman skill, and the future vagabond disappears
on the way to his fantastic destiny. Little does the truant know that
in January and February, 1787, a forlorn, penniless but indomitable
traveller will accomplish one of the most amazing feats ever performed by
mortal man, a fifteen hundred mile trudge through an unknown country deep
in arctic snow and cold, and that the vagabond will be John Ledyard.
The mystery of his truancy remains to puzzle the world. For after all,
why had he run away? In abandoning Dartmouth, he had locked behind him
the one door to an education which had opened to him in his obscurity.
John Ledyard’s contemporaries said simply that the spring was racing
in his blood, and that the born vagabond had been unable to control a
vagabond urge. There is a world of truth in the reply, but not quite
all the truth. The present day, with greater historical perspective,
will have it that this fair-haired lad was not really a scion of the
seaboard generations of transplanted Englishmen, but a son of the new,
native-born, and native-minded culture which was springing up in the
hearts of Americans during the last half of the eighteenth century. This
lad is no spiritual kinsman of harsh and merciless Endecott; his place
is with Daniel Boone and the lords of the frontier. But at Dartmouth,
the seventeenth century sat in the seat of power, for, intellectually,
Wheelock was a contemporary of Cotton Mather; the two dominies would have
talked the same Canaanitish jargon, and shared an identical attitude to
life. But young John was of different stuff, and, moreover, he was in
certain ways, curiously modern. His flight from Dartmouth thus becomes
a bit of vagabondage hiding an instinctive recoil, for had he accepted
a missionary career, the seventeenth century would have claimed him
forever for its own.
Down the Connecticut River floats the log canoe, carrying a young New
Englander from theology under Oliver Cromwell to adventure under George
the Third.
II
Now came difficulties and explanations, and John cut the knot by going to
sea. Four years later, at the end of a voyage, a young American seaman
walks the narrow streets of London’s “Sailortown.” John Ledyard is now
twenty-five years old, life has done little with him, and he has done
little with life; his friends at home are beginning to regard him as
something of a ne’er-do-well, and the pockets of his sailor breeches are
emptier than ever.
In “Sailortown” an April sun is shining, the dank smell of the Thames
mingles with wood smoke from the hearths, and there is a sound of men’s
voices and a clink of glasses at the doors of mariner’s inns. John steps
into a tavern, and hears news which fires his imagination, and sets his
blood to racing. Captain James Cook, the great navigator and explorer,
is about to make a third voyage to the South Seas, and ships are being
prepared and loaded for the expedition. With characteristic audacity,
John hurries directly to the Captain at his lodgings in Chelsea Hospital,
and boldly requests to be allowed to go. His colonial directness pleases,
and John Ledyard walks back to London, no longer an obscure American
seaman, but a corporal of His Majesty’s Marines attached to Cook’s own
vessel, the _Discovery_.
The two ships of the expedition, the old _Resolution_ and the new
_Discovery_, sailed from England on July 12th, 1776, bound for the South
Pacific by the Cape of Good Hope.
He was a marine, now, on a British naval vessel; a roving Yankee caught
up in the old navy’s conventionalised routine. A bugle or a drum tattoo
woke him at early dawn as he slept in the low ’tween deck caves where the
timbers groaned when the wind freshened in the night, and the lanterns
and the hammocks swung to the listing of the ship; he escaped from the
darkness below, the warm, human smell, and the sight of sleepy men and
nakedness to the humid deck, the lilac morning, and the vast splendour of
the awakening sea; the drill drum beat for him, he heard the shuffle and
the tramp of feet, the peremptory order, and, in the silences, the wind
in the rigging and the endless, dissolving whisper of alongside foam.
This _Discovery_ was the more interesting of the ships. Captain Cook
himself was aboard, a man over six feet in height, with brown eyes, a
pleasant countenance, and brown hair tied behind. Ledyard often saw the
tall figure in great cloak and three-cornered hat standing at the other
end of the deck. Perhaps of even greater interest to the ship’s company
was the Noah’s ark farmyard aboard of cattle, sheep, goats, ducks, dogs,
horses, cats, pigs, and rabbits, all intended as gifts to estimable
savages who had no such allies, for the eighteenth century was nothing if
not benevolent. When in port for any length of time, the sea-going bull
and the other grazing animals were put ashore for pasturage; at the Cape
of Good Hope, a rascally Hottentot delayed the expedition by stealing
a salty and intrepid cow. During a stay in the east, this animal world
was strengthened by a vast contingent of cockroaches who fell in showers
to the deck when the sails were unfurled before getting under way; not
a romantic picture, this, but one with a genuine flavor of old sailing
ship days. And when all other things wearied, there was a battle to
watch, that battle with never a truce which is the sailing of a sailing
ship in open sea.
After a pause by the barren rocks of Kerguelen Land in the Antarctic, and
after revisiting Tasmania and New Zealand, the expedition sounded its way
through the archipelagos of the South Pacific, and anchored in the bay of
Tongataboo in the Friendly Islands. The ships remained there twenty-six
days gathering stores.
Tongataboo—the name has a ring of the Bab Ballads; but it hides the
memory of a Paradise. John found himself among a people who were
beautiful, courteous, and friendly, for no whites had yet poisoned them
either with their maladies or their civilization, and there was no
tiresome angel with a flaming sword. First of a line of roaring Yankee
whalemen and sailors, Corporal John walks the island night under the
giant moon, watching the smooth, incoming seas burst and scatter into
a churning wash that might be a liquid and greener moonlight; first of
American adventurers in the South Seas, John Ledyard hears the endless
clatter and dry rustling of the island palms. He lives in a tent ashore,
refers to the natives as “the Indians,” eats fish baked in plantain
leaves, and drinks water from a coconut shell. Late in the golden night,
he hears over the faint monotone of the breaking sea, “a number of
flutes, beginning almost at the same time, burst from every quarter of
the surrounding grove.” Not to be outdone in the matter of entertainment,
Cook delights the innocent natives with a display of fireworks, a form
of entertainment then regarded as the height of the ingenious and the
civilized. Surely it was pleasant to be alive when Paradise was young.
From the Friendly Islands, the _Discovery_ carried John to Hawaii, and
thence to the coast whose memory was to shape the greater adventures of
his life.
By the last half of the eighteenth century, the one accessible coast of
North America which lingered unvisited and unexplored, was the coast
of the Pacific North Northwest,—or to be more definite, the shores
of northern British Columbia and the great peninsula of Alaska. The
geographers of the day were aware that Bering had sighted such a coast,
and that the Russians had crossed to it from northeastern Siberia and
claimed it for their empire, but with these two facts their knowledge
came to an end. The character and the conformation of the land remained
unknown. Cook was to be the first to make a scientific survey of the
region, for the Admiralty had instructed him to explore any rivers or
inlets that might lead eastward to Hudson’s or Baffin’s bay through the
“Northwest Passage” of romance. The ships turned north in December, 1777,
and arrived off the coast of what is now the state of Oregon on March
7th, 1778. The weather was cold and stormy, but summer came upon them
as they worked their way to the north, the splendid summer of the cool,
northwestern land.
John Ledyard was once more on American soil, and what an America it
was, this great unknown land of bold, indented coasts, evergreens and
alders, snow-capped inland mountains, and great rivers moving unsullied
to the sea! The beauty and living quality of the new country conquered
the Connecticut explorer even as it conquered those who followed him.
Carefully charting the way, Cook’s expedition sailed along the coast to
Alaska, past the towering cliffs of vast glaciers rising pale-green from
the darker surges washing at their base; into this great fjord and into
that went the ships, waking the deep arctic silence with the plunge
of their anchors and the hurrying rattle of chain. At the Island of
Unalaska, John offered to go with native guides in search of some “white
strangers,” and thus had a unique opportunity to spy out the land.
“I took with me some presents adapted to the taste of the Indians, brandy
in bottles, and bread, but no other provisions. I went entirely unarmed
by the advice of Captain Cook.... The country was rough and hilly; and
the weather wet and cold. At about three hours before dark we came to
a large bay, ... and saw a canoe approaching us from the opposite side
of the bay, in which were two Indians. It was beginning to be dark when
the canoe came to us. It was a skin canoe after the Esquimaux plan (a
kayak) with two holes to accommodate two sitters. The Indians that came
in the canoe talked a little with my two guides and desired I would get
into the canoe. This I did not very readily agree to, however, as there
was no other place for me but to be thrust into the space between the
holes, extended at length upon my back, and wholly excluded from seeing
the way I went, or the power of extricating myself on any emergency. But
as there was no alternative I submitted thus to be stowed away in bulk,
and went head foremost very swift through the water about an hour, when
I felt the canoe strike a beach, and afterwards lifted up and carried
some distance, and then sat down again, after which I was drawn up by the
shoulders by three or four men, for it was now so dark that I could not
tell who they were, though I was conscious that I heard a language that
was new.
“I was conducted by two of these persons, who appeared to be strangers,
about forty rods, when I saw lights and a number of huts.... As we
approached one of them, a door opened, and discovered a lamp by which, to
my joy and surprise, I discovered that the two men who held me by each
arm were Europeans, fair and comely, and concluded from their appearance
that they were Russians, which I soon after found to be true.... We had
supper which consisted of boiled whale, halibut fried in oil, and broiled
salmon.... I had a very comfortable bed composed of different fur skins,
both under and over me.... After I had lain down, the Russians assembled
the Indians in a very silent manner, and said prayers after the manner
of the Greek church which is much like the Roman.”
The meeting of the New England marine and certain Russian fur traders
visiting Alaska to buy skins for the Chinese trade, is not without
significance to the philosophic reader of history, for it is the first
contact of a white civilisation advancing across America from the east
with another and a belated white civilisation approaching the continent
from the west. Had Columbus failed, what strange results might not have
sprung from this Russian enterprise! But Yankee John rises to end the
reverie. A notion of advancing his fortune by joining in the Alaskan fur
trade is getting into his head, and he enters in his journal that skins
which were purchased in Alaska for six pence were sold later in China for
a hundred dollars.
Save for the tragic death of Captain Cook, who was attacked by natives at
Hawaii, and “fell into the water and spoke no more,” there is little in
the further history of the ships to halt the chronicle of Corporal John.
The ships revisited the Bering Sea and the Russian Asiatic coast, cruised
to China, and returned to England round the same Cape of Good Hope. The
expedition had been at sea exactly four years and three months.
For two troubled years, John Ledyard walks the flagstones of a British
barrack yard, for the war of the Revolution is being fought in America,
and he can neither escape nor bring himself to take naval service against
his countrymen. Barrack life, however, ends by exhausting his patience,
he seeks a transfer to the American station, and the December of 1782
finds him aboard a British man of war lying in Huntington Bay, Long
Island. As the island was then in the hands of the British, John obtains
seven days’ leave, but patriotically forgets to report aboard. From a
stay with friends at Huntington, he hastens to Southold, where his mother
keeps a boarding house, then frequented chiefly by British officers.
He rode up to the door, alighted, went in, and asked if he could be
accommodated in her house as a lodger. She replied that he could, and
showed him a room into which his baggage was conveyed. After having
adjusted his dress, he came out, and took a seat by the fire in company
with several other officers, without making himself known to his mother,
or entering into conversation with any person. She frequently passed and
repassed through the room, and her eye was observed to be attracted to
him with more than usual attention. At last after looking at him steadily
for some minutes, she deliberately put on her spectacles, approached
nearer to him, begging his pardon for her rudeness, and telling him that
he so much resembled a son of hers, who had been absent eight years,
that she could not resist her inclination to view him more closely. “The
scene that followed,” adds the old chronicler, “may be imagined, but not
described.”
Travelling by night down the Long Island shore, John found a way to reach
Hartford, and took refuge there at the house of his Uncle Seymour. He
remained with him four months, writing an account of his voyage with
Cook. The book was published, and is now exceedingly rare. “I am now at
Mr. Seymour’s,” wrote John, “and as happy as need be. I have a little
cash, two coats, three waistcoats, six pair stockings, and half a dozen
ruffled shirts.... I eat and drink when I am asked, and visit when
invited, in short, I generally do as I am bid. All I want of my friends
is friendship, possessed of that, I am happy.”
The long and cruel struggle of the American Revolution was drawing to
an end. Peace was at hand. John Ledyard, now thirty-two years of age,
found himself a personage in his own country. He was John Ledyard, “the
American traveller.” And he had lost his corporal’s chevrons—popular
imagination had seen to that; John was now Captain Ledyard; Major
Ledyard, and even Colonel Ledyard to the eloquent. The American
traveller! The great, fair-haired, “rangy” lad had grown into a tall
energetic man whose countenance told of hardship and adventure; there
were lines, such as sailors have, about his eyes, his nose was thinner
and more than ever eagle-like, and the grey eyes had a look in them
the world but rarely sees. The man stands at the window of the house
in Hartford, looking down the still, New England street, but the inner
eye sees only the northwest coast, the waterfalls on the sides of the
sea ravines, the dark trees, and the crests of snow. He alone, of all
the American world, has seen the unknown land; he alone can guide his
fellow-adventurers of the young republic to the wealth that waits the
gathering of the bold.
III
He went first to New York, and walked up dusty stairs into counting
houses and shipping offices. “Send a vessel to the northwest coast,” he
said to those who would listen; “I have been to it with Captain Cook,
it is a glorious, new land, and you may buy furs there for a song, and
sell them in China at a great profit.” Shrewd eyes watched him as he sat
talking, leaning forward on the edge of his chair; and the papers on
which he had written his plans for an expedition crinkled between wary
and unsympathetic hands. So this rolling stone wished to guide them to
the beds of moss! One after another, his interviews ended in a scraping
of chairs, a polite return of his papers, and the formality of bows at an
opening door.
He had a better reception at Philadelphia, whither someone had sent
him with a letter to the great banker, Robert Morris. “I have had two
interviews with him at the Finance Office, and tomorrow I expect a
conclusive one. What a noble hold he instantly took of the enterprise!”
And later in the same letter, “Send me some money for Heaven’s sake, lest
the laurel now suspended over the brows of your friend, should fall
irrecoverably into the dust. Adieu.” John’s heart beats high, the dawn
of fortune seems at hand, the eastern sky is gay. He goes to Boston, to
New London, and to New York in search of a suitable ship, but all in
vain, and as he searches, the season becomes too far advanced to think of
prosecuting the northwest voyage; and presently the false dawn fades, Mr.
Morris withdraws from the venture, and John finds himself in New London
once again.
It was clear that he could hope for nothing from the merchants of the
United States. “The flame of enterprise I kindled in America,” he wrote,
“terminated in a flash.... Perseverance was an effort of understanding
which twelve rich merchants were incapable of making.” His exasperation
was natural enough, yet in justice to the American ship owner of the
time, the economic disorder and poverty of the country should be noted,
as well as the fact the owners were being asked to send a long and costly
expedition round the Horn on the word of a solitary enthusiast. Would
European merchants listen? The winter of 1784-85 found John at the great
French port of L’Orient, living on a subsidy granted him by merchants
interested in his scheme, but once again hope rose and perished like the
seed upon thin ground.
From L’Orient he went to Paris, the Paris of 1785, the Paris of the
Bastile, the great nobles, the philosophers of universal benevolence,
and the usual Parisian miscellany of the world’s most artful and
distinguished knaves. Into this picturesque world, so soon and so
terribly to be rent apart, stepped the new adventurer, Mr. Ledyard the
American traveller! He was practically penniless, yet he managed to
subsist in a modest manner. “You wonder by what means I exist, having
brought with me to Paris, this time twelve months, only three louis
d’ors. Ask vice-consuls, consuls, ministers, and plenipotentiaries, all
of whom have been tributary to me. You think I joke. No, upon my honour,
and however irreconcilable to my temper, disposition and education, it
is nevertheless strictly true.” He lived in a room in the village of
St. Germain, and went to Paris afoot, a distance of some twelve miles.
Other American adventurers were there, of the type that have long haunted
Paris. John had no illusions about them. “Such a set of moneyless
villains,” he remarked, “have never appeared since the epoch of the happy
villain Falstaff. I have but five French crowns in the world, Franks has
not a sol, and the Fitz Hughs cannot get their tobacco money.”
While in Paris, his dream of a trading voyage collapsed for the last
time. Captain John Paul Jones listened to him, and fell in eagerly with
his plans, but the necessary money could not be raised, and so ended the
tale.
Poor as he is, Ledyard is still a personage, and walks boldly with the
great. Lafayette befriends him. “If I find in my travels a mountain,”
said John, “as much elevated above other mountains as he is above
ordinary men, I will name it _Lafayette_.” He goes to breakfast at the
house of the first American minister to France, and sees at the head
of the table a tall angular man neatly and soberly dressed in black, a
tall man with a bony but strong frame, angular features, light hazel
eyes and sandy-reddish hair, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. What a table
it is,—French abbés and philosopher nobles, learned bigwigs of the day,
visiting Americans, diplomats, and John Ledyard with the backs of both
hands tattooed with the scrolls of Polynesia! John finds a sympathetic
hearer in his host, for the great Virginian has a civilized man’s
interest in scientific exploration and a patriotic American’s interest
in American discovery. They stroll after breakfast, the statesman and the
vagabond, and presently the minister suggests to his companion a voyage
that fires his guest’s imagination even as the name of Captain Cook had
kindled it just ten years before.
“I suggested to him,” runs the Virginian’s letter, “the enterprise of
exploring the western part of our continent, by passing through St.
Petersburg to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the
Russian vessels to Nootka Sound,[1] whence he might make his way across
the continent, and I undertook to have the permission of the Empress of
Russia solicited.”
John listens, and listening, becomes once more the vagabond who ran away
to see the world; then and there, the man flings off the disappointed
trader. “He eagerly embraced the proposition,” wrote Jefferson. Yes, he
will attempt just this thing, cross Europe and Asia, take ship to the
northwest coast, and cross the wide American continent to Virginia. Did
ever a man make such a resolve, and that man a penniless vagabond? Is it
not genuinely so mad as to be magnificent?
“I die with anxiety,” he now wrote to a brother, “to be on the back of
the American States, after having either come from or penetrated to the
Pacific Ocean. There is an extensive field for the acquirement of honest
fame.... It was necessary that a European should discover the existence
of that continent, but in the name of _Amor Patriae_, let a native
explore its resources and boundaries. It is my wish to be the man!”
Now came a false start from London, his last delay. “The great American
traveller” sits writing at a table in his humble London lodging, perhaps
again a room in Sailor Town. “I am still the slave of fortune and the
son of care,” he writes later to his brother. “I think my last letter
informed you that I was absolutely embarked on a ship in the Thames,
bound to the northwest coast of America. This will inform you that I
have disembarked from the said ship, on account of her having been
unfortunately seized by the custom house ... and that I am obliged in
consequence to alter my route, and, in short, everything, all my little
baggage, shield, buckler, lance, dogs, squire, and all gone. I only am
left, left to what?”
He counts his money, a familiar trick with him, shakes the clinking coins
in his palm, arranges them in a row on the table, and finds he still has
a few guineas left of the sum generously given him by Sir Joseph Banks,
President of the Royal Society, and certain other English gentlemen
interested in the advance of geographic knowledge. He adds two final
phrases to his letter before he seals it, and sends it off across the sea.
“I will only add that I am going in a few days to make a tour of the
globe from London east on foot. Farewell. Fortitude! Adieu.”
It is the month of December, 1786, and from London, lost in smoky winter
mist, the tall Yankee vagabond passes unperceived to dull Hamburg on the
muddy Elbe, and thence to Copenhagen, and Stockholm of the Swedes. The
fair-haired Northmen stare at a thin stranger with outlandish marks on
his hands, who asks the way to Russian St. Petersburg. The winter route
to Russia, they tell him, lies across the frozen gulf of Bothnia, the
sledges strike off from Stockholm, and speed east over the ice to Abo,
only fifty miles on the opposite shore; but this year the gulf is not
solidly frozen, the ice is broken in midchannel; the horses cannot pass,
and tremble, and turn about, and overturn their sleighs;—the traveller
will have to wait till the spring frees the gulf of ice, and allows a
boat to pass.
The words fall on the ear of a wanderer who will not wait. John Ledyard
knows that he must reach St. Petersburg early in the spring, if he is
to cross the Siberian wastes in the summer of this same year. A small
delay means a year’s delay. Rather than wait or return, he will walk
the fifteen hundred miles round the frozen sea. It is the very heart of
winter, and the vagabond’s path will lead him north through Sweden into
arctic Lapland, and south and east through the vast forests of Finland,
now trackless in the depth of the snows. John Ledyard has no maps, no
money, and no knowledge of the languages along his road.
Late in the month of January, 1787, a tall man wrapped in an English
great coat trudges north from Stockholm into the grim wilderness of
snow. To his right lies the great snow-covered plain of the frozen gulf,
sweeping as far as eye can see to the level rim of the world; to the left
is a broken country of hills and valleys covered with thick forests of
birch and pine and fir, and channelled with frozen rivers running from
the mountains to the frozen gulf. The winter wind howls north along the
ice, gathering together great dunes of snow; there are crackings and
boomings of the ice in the fitful silences. So thick lies the snow upon
the pines, that not even one green twig protrudes from the huge, sagging
pyramids. John Ledyard trudges on under the short-lived and sullen day
of these high latitudes; the low sun casts his long shadow behind him on
his broken footprints in the snow. In the clear green twilight, guided,
perhaps, by the distant barking of a dog, he wanders from the way to some
peasant’s snow-topped hut, and sups on bread, milk and salt herring with
kind hosts gathered at the fire. He reaches Tornea in Lapland, turns
south and east through the lakes and woods of Finland, and presently the
giant sentries at St. Petersburg see John Ledyard trudging into town.
He reaches St. Petersburg before the twentieth of March. This
unparalleled journey had taken him seven weeks, and he had managed to
cover during each week a distance of some two hundred miles. He left no
record of how he accomplished the journey—save to write in a letter these
words “Upon the whole, mankind have used me well.”
“I had a letter from Ledyard lately dated at St. Petersburg,” said
Jefferson. “He had but two shirts, and still more shirts than shillings.
Still he was determined to obtain the palm of being the first
circumnambulator of the earth. He says that having no money they kick him
from place to place, and thus he expects to be kicked about the globe.”
The rest of the story is soon told. He obtained some kind of a passport
from the Russian authorities, and began his journey to Siberia in the
train of one Dr. William Brown, a Scotch physician in the employment
of the Empress Catharine. With Brown he went three thousand miles to
Barnaoul in the province of Kolyvan. From this city he made his way to
Irkutsk—“going with the courier,” he wrote, “and driving with wild Tartar
horses, at a most rapid rate, over a wild and ragged country, breaking
and upsetting kibitkas[2], beswarmed with mosquitoes, all the way hard
rains, and when I arrived in Irkutsk I was, and had been for the last
forty-eight hours, wet through and through, and covered with one complete
mass of mud.” From Irkutsk he joined an expedition going down the Lena,
and alighted at Yakutsk, only some six hundred miles from the Pacific
coast he sought. It was the eighteenth of September. Imagine his dismay
when the Governor informed him that the winter was so close at hand,
that he must not expect to gain Ohkotsk that year. “Fortune,” exclaimed
John, with his trick of play book style, “thou hast humbled me at last,
for I am at this moment the slave of cowardly solicitude lest in the
heart of this dread winter, there lurk the seeds of disappointment to my
ardent desire of gaining the opposite continent.” Not knowing what to do
he joined a scientific expedition in charge of one “Captain” Billings,
a fellow veteran of Cook’s third voyage, and returned with his former
shipmate to Irkutsk.
Suddenly—terrible news! He is to be arrested on the absurd charge of
being “a French spy,” and sent back to the frontier thousands of miles
behind. The details of Ledyard’s arrest remain a mystery to this day,
but there is little doubt that the underlying cause of it was Russian
unwillingness to have a citizen of the United States prowling about the
Russian American claims. Something had happened; perhaps the imperial
authorities had suddenly heard of Ledyard’s attempt to begin a rival
fur-trade. Whatever the answer may be, John was handed over to the
custody of a sergeant, and dragged back across Siberia and Russia with
lunatic speed.
“I had penetrated,” said the poor fellow, “through Europe and Asia almost
to the Pacific Ocean, but in the midst of my career I was arrested as a
prisoner to the Empress of Russia.... I was banished from the empire, and
conveyed to the frontiers of Poland, six thousand versts from the place
where I was arrested. I know not how I passed through the kingdoms of
Poland and Prussia or thence to London where I arrived in the beginning
of May, disappointed, ragged, penniless....”
He arrives in London just as the African Society is casting about
for a man to explore the interior of Africa. John calls on good Sir
Joseph Banks who has so often been his kind and generous friend. Will
Mr. Ledyard go to Africa? Yes. And when will he be ready to set out?
“Tomorrow morning.” He reaches Cairo in August, and joins a caravan
about to journey to Sennaar. “From Cairo I am to travel southwest about
three hundred leagues to a black king.” Presently he is attacked by
illness, he takes some fearful medicine of the time, shakes his head,
and closes his eyes. The fair-haired lad in the sulky, the runaway
undergraduate in the great canoe, the sailor, the corporal of marines and
“the Great American Traveller” had gone on the longest of his travels.
Because the last years of John Ledyard’s life found him fighting on
towards a goal he almost, yet never quite, attained, there are those who
see him as a mere picturesque vagabond whose life had no genuine success.
What a misinterpretation! The runaway Yankee lad had set out to see the
world, and he had done so; indeed, John Ledyard had probably seen more of
the vast world than any other being of his time. The vast loneliness of
the sea which comes when twilight fades and night begins, blue, cloudy
islands seen at dawn, the sounds of rushing brooks in the quiet of green
valleys, strange folk making strange music under the moon,—all this he
had hungered to see, all this he had seen. He had achieved his ambition
in spite of every barrier, he had girdled the earth on a sixpence and a
ha’penny.
Even love itself had not held him from his road. In his letters, there
is just one little phrase ... “domestic life ... matters I have thought
nothing about since I was in love with R. E. of Stonington.” Mysterious
R. E., by her Connecticut fireside, did she think of John trudging on,
face to the wind and snow, resolutely shaping a reality out of his
ambition and his dream?
When Mr. Jefferson became president, he often thought of the man he had
met in Paris,—the first American to see the northwest coast, the man who
had talked to him of the pine-crowded islets, and the inland mountains
white with snow. John Ledyard the forerunner. And Mr. Jefferson,
bending to his desk, continues to write his precise and careful letter
of guidance for Messrs. Lewis and Clark whom he is sending to explore
the west. Ledyard. Yes, indeed! I knew him well. A valiant fellow,
gentlemen.
_Two_: BELZONI
_Two_: BELZONI
I
A little over a hundred years ago the learned world of fashionable London
was profoundly moved by the arrival of eventful news. After having been
sealed to Europeans for some four thousand years, one of the great
pyramids of Egypt had at length been opened, and torch in hand, a modern
man had walked the untrodden dust of the oven-hot and silent galleries.
Now that all three pyramids stand open to the world, and tourists with
green sun-goggles and parasols hesitate and giggle at the forbidding
entrances, it is difficult to believe that the interiors should have been
so recently a mystery. Save for a few measurements, however, the first
years of the nineteenth century knew no more about the great Pyramids
than the Renaissance had known; all was tradition, legend and conjecture.
Of the familiar giants at Gizeh, only one, the Great Pyramid of Cheops,
was open, and this but very partially so, for the famous well and the
lower galleries were clogged with rubbish and débris. The second pyramid,
that of Chephren, and the third, that of Mycerinus, were apparently solid
mountains of limestone blocks with no sign whatsoever of an opening or a
door.
It is scarce possible to exaggerate the hold which these locked giants
had maintained on the imagination of mankind. The pilgrim of the middle
ages thought them the granaries of Joseph, and stared at them with
reverence; the conquering Arab called them the palaces of kings, sleeping
enchanted in moated halls whose lamps were hollow emeralds.
All tales, however, agreed upon one point,—that the pyramids concealed
a treasure. The Arabic conquerors of Egypt had already sought it, and
one of them, the tenth century caliph, Al Mamun, baffled by the masonry
of the third pyramid, had actually made a vain and lunatic attempt to
destroy the entire edifice. So kings passed, and emperors and sultans and
great ages of historic time, but the sunrise still rolled up the veiling
mist from the great plain of Egypt, revealing the vast, solemn geometry
of the masters of the Nile. What treasure, what strange secret lay within
these stones? Who would be the first to enter them? What would he find?
[Illustration: BELZONI]
In the year 1778, Jacopo Belzoni, a worthy barber of Padua, and Teresa
his wife, were rejoicing at the arrival of a son. They had christened
him Giovanni Battista, or “Gianbattista” for short. Had a soothsayer of
ancient Egypt appeared by the cradle, and revealed the infant’s destiny,
the good _tonsore_ would have surely opened his mouth and dropped his
shears. For the soothsayer would have said something like this:
“This child will be a juggler at theatres and village fairs, a scholar,
an author, and a traveller. For thirty-seven years, life will toss him
about as a juggler tosses a ball in the air, but then his opportunity
will come, he will win fame in a strange land, and solve the most
romantic of all mysteries.”
The adventurous tale begins, strangely enough, in a monastery. The worthy
Jacopo had fathered a brood of fourteen,—something had to be found for
each and every one of them, and in the distribution young Giovanni
Battista was handed over to the church. He was to find a place in the
world for himself as a monk. From the parental dwelling on a by-street
in Padua, the boy, still in his teens, walked the ancient highways of
Umbria to the house of a monastic order in Rome. Somewhere in the old
papal city, behind an encircling wall, his days of boyhood and youth
began before the dawn with the clangour of a monastery bell, and ended
with the echoing cave of a darkened church, the golden, pin-point flames
of altar lamps, and the solemn chanting of the offices.
Years pass, years of quiet and withdrawal from the world. Of a sudden
comes alarming news, the pot of the Revolution has boiled over, the
French are crossing the frontiers and invading Italy. Presently there are
disorders in Rome and a descent of French troops upon the city; the bells
are silenced, the monasteries closed or seized for barracks, and the
monks harried out into the street.
Among the monks thus compelled to abandon the religious life was
Gianbattista Belzoni. The Paduan novice had grown up into a giant, a
colossus even, for he now stood six feet seven inches in height, and
was broadly and solidly built in the same proportion. And not only did
Gianbattista have a giant’s strength, he had also the pride and the
sense of decorum which accompany a giant stature. Those who are born of
average height little know how huge is the influence of great stature on
its possessor’s conduct and character! He who is born a Titan must act
the Titan; a frolicsome colossus is an outrage to Nature. Gianbattista,
moreover, though of Paduan birth, was of Roman stock, and Romans have to
this day an eye for dignity. Brown eyed, and black-brown of hair, with a
giant’s mildness, a giant’s decorum, and an Italian’s grace of address,
young Gianbattista was a figure for Michelangelo.
Walking with a giant’s disdain through the rabble of soldiers and
revolutionists jeering by the monastery gate, the young monk passed forth
into the world.
The homeless young Titan, he was only 22, may well have wondered what
was now to become of him. At the monastery school he had chanced to make
a special study of the science of hydraulics, but that was hardly a
knowledge to be peddled about in those uncertain times. Having no choice,
therefore, he fell back on his physical strength, and set about earning
his living as a juggler and a Hercules of village fairs. From Italy the
showman monk made his way through Germany, and then through Holland
to the various kingdoms of the British Isles. Finding life pleasant in
England, he settled down there, and spent the Napoleonic years amusing
his hosts and becoming something of an Englishman.
For the next ten years, his life is that of an Italian mountebank in
England. The English knew the huge, serious, well-mannered foreigner as
“Signor” Belzoni; they saw him in their pantomimes and at Bartholomew
Fair. He had a booth at the fair, and amid the smell of black puddings
sizzling on the fire, and the shouts and cries of barrow vendors and
showmen, our Signor delighted the London rabble with feats of strength
and dexterity. His favorite show was a spectacle called “Samson,” an
edifying Biblical affair in whose course Belzoni pulled down the pillars
of a stage temple with the most blood-curdling roars, crash, dust and
general uproar. At Sadlers Wells Theatre, to quote an old play bill, his
performance consisted “in carrying from seven to ten men in a manner
never attempted by any but himself. He clasps round him a belt to which
are affixed ledges to support the men who cling about him.... When thus
encumbered, he moves as easy and as graceful as if about to walk a
minuet, and displays a flag in as flippant a manner as a dancer on the
rope.” Another visitor became poetic. “Signor Belzoni,” he wrote, “moved
about the stage under this enormous pressure with as much steadiness
and stateliness as the elephant does when his howdah is full of Indian
warriors.”
Ellar the comedian knew him well, and saw him perform; the giant was
getting two pounds a week, and Edmund Kean was watching delighted in the
stalls.
In England came Romance: there Gianbattista found his Sarah. This
resolute spouse was an Englishwoman of a stature almost as magnificent
as her lord’s, and with a character and a mind as British as the dome of
St. Paul’s. Indomitable Sarah Belzoni! Writing of the Turks, she set down
in her journal, “though I may be condemned for my opinion, there is no
religion would suit them so well as the Protestant church of England.”
She called her husband “Mr. B.,” and accompanied him on his expeditions,
never once losing her nerve or her practical grasp of life. The gigantic
pair now set about the serious business of earning a living.
After exhibiting “Samson” through Portugal and Spain, the Belzonis
drifted to Malta, then a dependency of Egypt, and there Belzoni attracted
the friendly attention of the Mohammedan governor. The adventurer’s old
interest in hydraulics was becoming practical; he had devised certain
irrigating machines intended for agricultural use, and the governor
advised him to go to Cairo, and bring these contrivances to the attention
of Mehmet Ali, the quasi-independent governor of Egypt.
It is the month of August in the year 1815; the heat in Egypt is the heat
of a dry oven; a little wind blows, but merely serves to pour the heat
upon the flesh. There is no sun in the cloudless sky, only an inundation
of tremendous light whose source is no more to be looked at than a god.
Circling higher and higher, vultures ride the furnace of the air, eyeing
the broad, low-lying plain, the winding Nile, the shrunken marshes, the
cornelian sands, and the broken tops of the Memphian pyramids. At a
landing in Cairo, three Europeans are disembarking from a Nile boat,—they
are Gianbattista and Sarah Belzoni and James Curtain, their little Irish
serving lad.
The monk whom Destiny had turned into a bohemian was now thirty-seven
years old, and the many influences he had undergone had moulded an
exceptional mind and character. On the one hand, he was a strolling
mountebank; on the other, an educated man with churchly learning and a
genuine respect for scholarship. He was an Italian with an Italian’s
suppleness, ingenuity, and Latin sense of making the best of what life
affords; he was an Englishman as well, with the English language on his
lips, and ten years’ experience of life in the English way. He wrote
English extraordinarily well; he could draw passably, and from his years
as a stroller he had gained a knack of getting along with men of all
conditions and kinds. A stroller, a scholar, a Roman, an Englishman—was
there ever such another Hercules? Through the streets of Cairo he rides,
with a giant’s aloof peaceableness and a giant’s propriety.
He was weary now, it would seem, of Samson’s roars and tuggings. He had
accepted the cards which life had dealt him and done his best to play
them well,—what else was there to do? Here in this new land, the game
should begin again, and the showman vanish into the vagrant engineer.
In the dark underworld of vanished deities, the animal-headed gods of
Egypt, the cow Hathor, the cat Pasht, and the jackal Anubis stir in their
ancient dreams, for the first of the awakeners of their civilization is
setting foot beside the Nile.
II
Negotiations with Mehmet Ali and the building and the test of Belzoni’s
water-lifting wheel consumed the greater part of a year; it was wasted
time, for the Pasha decided against the use of the device.
From the uncertainty which followed, the adventurer was rescued by his
old friend, John Lewis Burckhardt, the traveller, who now persuaded
the British Consul General, Henry Salt, to send Belzoni on a special
expedition up the Nile. A colossal head of “Memnon” (in reality a head of
Ramses II) was lying in the sands at Thebes, and Salt wished to have it
carried down the river, and shipped off to the British Museum. Belzoni
accepted the charge gladly, and going to Thebes, surmounted a thousand
difficulties, and carried off the prize. It was anything but an easy
task, for the giant head, or more properly the bust, measured some six by
eight feet and weighed over seven tons. Belzoni handled it with home-made
machinery. The engineer side of him was real; it is a quality often found
just below the surface in Italians.
Mrs. Belzoni was with him, and shared with her “Mr. B.” a hut built of
stones in the portico of the Memnonium. All the long hot summer, the
giant lady cooked her Titan’s rice and mutton, and kept a practical
eye on everything. The British matron was the terror of rival French
explorers,—“Madame Belzoni, Amazone formidable,” they wrote in their
accounts.
Other voyages followed which can not here be set down in detail. The
first voyage saw the removal of the head and an exploring trip up the
river to Abu Simbel and the cataracts. At Abu Simbel, it was “Ypsambul”
to Belzoni, that greatest of rock temples was clogged with a vast
fanslope of fallen stones and sand in which the colossi sat up to
their necks. A second journey carried the explorer back to Thebes. The
labyrinth of mountain tombs was still full of the ancient dead, some
lying on the floors of their cave sepulchres, some standing, some on
their heads,—all surfaced with a very fine and choking dust.
Mrs. Belzoni having lingered in Cairo, the explorer now and then accepted
the hospitality of natives dwelling in the outer tombs. “I was sure of
a supper of milk served in a wooden bowl,” he wrote, “but whenever they
supposed I should stay all night they killed a couple of fowls for me
which were baked in a small oven heated with pieces of mummy cases, and
sometimes with the bones and rags of the mummies themselves.” It is a
far cry from the sun-helmeted professors, the great officials, and the
electric lights of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
On this second journey, the explorer began the clearing of Abu Simbel,
and discovered the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, still
the most beautifully decorated sepulchre in Egypt. Old usage called it
Belzoni’s tomb; new days have forgotten the explorer. Then followed
expeditions to Philæ, to the site of the Roman city of Berenike on the
Red Sea, and a journey to the oasis of Elwah which Belzoni mistook
for the historic oasis of Jupiter Ammon. The fever of exploration now
descended on Mrs. B., and the intrepid lady, disguised as a man, went
off by herself on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem,—a feat of extraordinary
fortitude and daring.
At the close of his second journey, Belzoni had cleared and opened Abu
Simbel, discovered the tomb of Seti I, and explored Philæ, the Theban
necropolis and the Valley of the Kings. He had shown himself venturesome,
courageous, and resolute. He had a way of getting things done, not by
shouts and the whip, but by a certain steadiness of pressure, as if he
were putting his giant shoulders to a door and slowly forcing it inward
from its frame. There are passages in his account of his work which
seem to reveal a quality of suspicion in the giant’s mind; he could see
the hand of rival gatherers of antiquities in every check and delay.
Twenty-five years ago the trait would have required a moral explanation;
the wiser and more travelled present simply points to the thermometer.
By an ironic turn of the wheel of fate, it chanced that the rival
collector to whom Belzoni attributed his vexations was himself an
Italian. Bernardino Drouetti, agent of France and gatherer of antiquities
for the Louvre, had been born in Leghorn. The competition between this
Frenchman from Leghorn and this Briton from Padua had thus a certain
raciness and emotional quality. Keen as it was, the amenities were
outwardly preserved, and Drouetti even went so far as to present Belzoni
with the “rights” to a sarcophagus it was impossible to extricate. At
Philæ, however, the duel became a battle, for Drouetti’s henchmen rushed
Belzoni and his party as the giant was making off with an obelisk.
If Drouetti’s indignant lament is to be believed, Belzoni snatched a
shrieking, jabbering “Arab” out of the mob swarming about him, swung him
up by the ankles, and used him _à la Samson_ on the heads and shoulders
of his fellow country men. The novel weapon, it is said, won a headlong
victory, and the giant carried off his obelisk in peace.
Returning to Cairo during the inundation, Belzoni paused by night at the
pyramids. So vividly were the stars of the Egyptian sky mirrored in the
flood, that there seemed to be two heavens, one above and below. Awesome,
even a little terrible, the vast and ancient shapes of the pyramids rose
seemingly from the starry water to the splendour overhead.
The Pyramids. Mystery of ancient mystery! Belzoni resolved to match his
knowledge and skill with this riddle of the years.
III
He went first to Gizeh, and wandered about the three pyramids, studying
and observing.
From the sands of the Egyptian desert, which are cornelian in hue and
strewn with colored pebbles much like fragments of ancient pottery, the
pyramids rise as masses of old ivory stone suffused with a certain golden
rust; the description is laboured, but the effect is not to be given in a
word. Belzoni, trudging the sand, watched the late afternoon light bring
out the grey. The second great pyramid, the pyramid of Chephren, had
taken his eye, and round it and about he went, now gazing up to the cap
of reddish surfacing still in place about the peak, now pausing to study
the huge confusion of sand and wreckage washed up about the base like a
wave of shattered stone. Was there an opening, and if so, where? Or was
the pyramid a solid hill of stone as the Egyptians had told Herodotus
twenty-five hundred years before? The French scholars attached to
Napoleon’s expedition had sought an entrance in vain, and the Europeans
resident in Cairo were meditating a scheme of collecting 20,000 pounds
“at various European courts,” and “forcing their way into the centre of
this pyramid by explosions.”
“It seems little short of madness,” wrote Belzoni, “to renew the
enterprise.” The giant had now grown a fine black beard, and taken to
wearing Eastern dress, huge white turban and all. It was the proper thing
to do then when travelling in the East.
The entrance to the Great Pyramid being on the north, Belzoni studied
with particular care the northern face of the second pyramid, and
presently discovered there “three marks” which seemed to offer a clue.
Just under the centre of the north face of the pyramid, the bordering
wave of débris was high, as if it might possibly lie piled atop some
entrance way; the accumulation of stone at the mound seemed less compact
than the mass to either side, and the débris had apparently gathered
since the removal of the surfacing. There was the place, there would he
begin.
Somewhat to his surprise, he got his permission to dig quite easily, the
authorities merely insisting that he must not disturb “ploughed ground.”
The capital on which he hoped to accomplish his undertaking consisted of
a scant two hundred pounds, some of it a gift from Burckhardt, some of it
a profit from the sale of “antiquities.”
Early in February, 1818, the adventurer left Cairo quietly, and took up
his quarters in a tent by the second pyramid. Alone in his tent he sits,
this huge bearded man who has lived so fantastic a life; it is night,
and he smokes his long Turkish pipe, and watches the giant Egyptian moon
cast the pointed shadow of his pyramid upon sands traced with the paths
of naked feet. That monastery in Rome, the bells of other convents heard
over the wall as one walked the garden in the cool of the afternoon, the
rumble and galopade of a cardinal’s coach over the stones,—how far away
and old it all is in that still splendour of the Egyptian night!
At the pyramid all begins well, eighty natives have been secured, and
Belzoni has put forty to clearing the ground between the temple and
the pyramid, and forty more to clearing the débris at the rise by the
northern rim. The plates which accompany his text show the workmen to
have worn the short, rolled white drawers and turbans of this earlier
day, a costume far more picturesque than the long-skirted nightgown
affair and red felt “fez” of modern Egypt. A nimble folk these brown
Egyptians; they scramble about the pyramids today with the agility of
boys in an easy tree; even so they must have scrambled and chattered for
Belzoni. He paid them sixpence English a day, and hired boys and girls to
carry away the earth.
The giant sagely explained to his corps that it would be to their
advantage to find the entrance to the pyramid, for they would then have
another marvel to show to visitors, and thus get more bakshish[3] than
ever. The natives began with a will, but for several days their labors
promised no indication of success. It was particularly difficult work.
The fringe of wreckage had become solidly jammed, and the only tools to
be had were spades meant for the cutting of soft ground. There were times
when it seemed as if the workmen could scarcely proceed. At the end of a
fortnight’s digging, the party working on the ground between the temple
and the pyramid had cut through some forty feet of rubbish to a broad
pavement which seemed to encircle the pyramid; but the workmen at the
north side had uncovered only deeper and deeper layers of débris.
After some sixteen days of this, the workmen began to weary of the
task. “The Arabs,” said Belzoni, “continued, but with less zeal. Still
I observed that the stones on that spot were not so consolidated as
those on the sides of them, and I determined to proceed till I should be
persuaded that I was wrong in my conjecture.”
On the morning of February 18th, an overseer of the workmen came across
the sand dunes with promising news. A workman of the northern party had
perceived “a small chink” between two stones of the newly uncovered lower
side of the pyramid. Belzoni returned with the messenger, and found the
workers gathered in a talkative group awaiting his coming. Yes, there was
a small open slit between two of the great stones, into which the giant
was able “to thrust a palm stick to the length of two yards.” The workmen
took heart; their night of foolish labour for this incomprehensible
European infidel was seemingly ending in a dawn.
The loose stone, torn from its place, revealed a mystery,—a passage
some three feet wide choked with smaller stones and sand. Belzoni, in
his turban and loose white eastern dress, peered within, while his
half naked, dusky workers pushed and peeped and whispered behind that
Titan back. Was the mystery of the ages about to be unveiled? Would
they presently behold the legendary spirit of the pyramid—an old man
with a censer? This attendant guardian was still to be seen at sundown,
making the tour of his pyramid at about half way up the sides,—a solemn,
priestly figure who swung his censer as he walked. Trickles of sand
fell noiselessly from the roof of the opening; they heard the drop of
little stones; about them the quiet of the desert seemed to have become
intensified.
On being excavated, this passage proved to be wider within, and after
five days of clearing, the excavators arrived at an open tunnel leading
inward.
“Having made it wide enough,” said Belzoni, “I took a candle in my hand,
and looking in, perceived a spacious cavity ... bending its course to the
centre. It is evidently a forced passage executed by a powerful hand, and
appears intended to find a way to the centre of the pyramid.”
It was less a passage he had discovered than a wound. In ancient times
some ruler of the land had attempted to force the pyramid, but the deed
and the man had perished from the memory of the world, and the pyramid
itself had hidden the deep wound within its side. To make the entrance,
huge stones of the outer casing had been cut and sawed; then a ragged
tunnel had been pierced directly into the heart of the masonry. The task
had certainly taken toll of many lives. It was an awesome place, and
exceedingly dangerous. Huge stones, which the piercing of the tunnel had
left hanging by a thread, fell down, and every time that Belzoni crawled
down its length of a hundred feet, he never knew but what a cry and a
muffled crash might announce his living entombment in the dark of the
edifice.
Europeans from Cairo now got wind of the giant’s enterprise, and came
riding over the sands to see Belzoni at his task. The discovery of the
forced passage seems to have impressed them as an interesting failure, an
attitude which struck at the giant’s dignity and pride. He paused to mull
things over in his mind, and gave the workmen a special holiday.
The false passage ended in a pocket of fallen stone. He would abandon
his exploration of it, and continue his search for the real entrance.
Staff in hand, the huge figure, now resumes its trudge about the pyramid.
The workmen have gone, the wind over the desert lifts the dust out of the
hollows of the dunes, and brings no human sound; sand and ruin prevail.
The adventurer wanders over the waste to the great pyramid.
It was then open, and somewhere in the hot, repellent heart of it, rank
with the sour-foul odour of multitudes upon multitudes of bats, a typical
European adventurer was working simply because the pyramids were his
hobby. The name of this enthusiast was Caviglia, and he was the Italian
master of a Mediterranean trading vessel flying the British flag. The
good sailor had little education, and needed little, for his work was
primarily a matter of removing rubbish, and discovering what lay beneath.
In later years Colonel Howard Vyse had dealings with him, and found him
temperamental. Captain Caviglia, dear excitable Latin, rushed out of his
pyramid one morning and hurled on the Colonel’s breakfast table a subsidy
of forty pounds done up in an old sock. It appears that he considered the
sum quite unworthy of his efforts. The Colonel, however, was equal to
the occasion, and after taking out the money, returned the sock with his
“best compliments.” Such was the dawn of archæology!
Belzoni returned from his visit to his neighbour and countryman with a
new notion in his head. Prompted by certain indications, he had been
digging away the rubbish gathered before the centre of the northern face
of the second pyramid, whilst the entrance into the Great Pyramid was
not in line with the centre of that edifice, but some thirty feet to the
east of centre, for the tomb chamber lay in the centre, and the passage
entered at the chamber’s eastern end. He would abandon his excavation at
the forced passage, and begin again thirty feet to the east.
He went to the spot, and saw, or thought he saw, that the coating of
rubbish was there not so thickly piled. Moreover, it appeared sunken as
if an entrance below it might have fallen in. “This gave me no little
delight,” wrote the giant later, “and hope returned to cherish my
pyramidical brains.”
Again work began merrily, for the natives had grown to appreciate the
giant’s sixpence a day. But they thought their employer quite mad, and
Belzoni heard them whispering it to each other. “_Magnoon_,” they said as
he passed, and again “_magnoon_,”—the madman! More days of sunlight and
scurrying and digging of a tribe of black-brown _fellahin_. On February
28th, a world of excitement and heart-quickening anticipation; something
which looks like an entrance has been reached, for now appears a large
granite stone set into the pyramid at the same angle as the passage into
the Great Pyramid. The shovels flew that day. On the day following, they
have uncovered three great blocks of granite, one on each side and one on
top, all “lying in an inclined direction towards the centre.”
It was the entrance at last. By the second of March, the débris in front
of the three stones having been cleared away, the long-sought opening was
seen. It proved to be a passage, four feet high and three feet six inches
wide, which descended at a steep incline into the pyramid. Its granite
walls were undisturbed, but the passage itself was full of wreckage which
had slid down the incline and piled up to form a barrier.
Provided with torches and candles, Belzoni and a few workmen now
followed the passage for a hundred and four feet down into the dark.
Whither was it leading them? The giant bulk of Belzoni nearly filled up
the passage, as he came crouching almost double and holding a dripping
candle light. Suddenly, to their great dismay, the passage came to a
blind end at three solid granite walls.
Discouragement fell upon them as heavy as a pyramid. “At first sight,”
said Belzoni, “it seemed a fixed block of stone which stared me in the
face and said _ne plus ultra_, putting an end to all my projects as I
thought.” Suddenly, a discovery, a catch of the breath; the stone at the
end of the passage is not fixed solidly in place; it is a portcullis
which can be raised; the barrier stone is already eight inches above the
true floor, and rests on surface rubbish. There followed a hurrying back
and forth through the passage, a coming of workmen with levers, and a
time of hard work in the tiny cubicle of the passageway. The portcullis
stone was one foot three inches thick, and rose slowly because the
low ceiling permitted only a little play of the levers. At the outer
entrance, the workmen had gathered in a chattering and excited crowd;
they questioned those who came and went—what of wonders within, and how
vast was the treasure?
When the aperture had grown wide enough for a man to pass through, a
native squirmed under carrying a candle, and “returned saying that the
place within was very fine.” Belzoni, poor Titan, had to wait.
It had chanced that on the day before a fellow countryman of Belzoni’s,
the Chevalier Frediani, had come to visit Gizeh; he had proved a pleasant
guest, and the giant had invited him to remain for the opening of the
pyramid. This second Italian now joined the little group lifting the
portcullis. It was now high enough for Belzoni to crawl under, and he did
so, followed by the Chevalier.
Over a thousand years, perhaps more, had passed since the tunnels into
which they crawled had echoed to the sound of human voices. Belzoni led
the way, carrying a light; Frediani, too, had a torch. The huge shadow of
Belzoni followed along the walls; the granite twinkled in the first light
of ten long centuries. At the end of the passage was an open pit which
they descended along a rope, and at the depth of the pit were passages
thick with dark and silence. Ghostlike arborisations of nitre hung on
these lower walls, some projecting in fantastic ropes. Belzoni went off
on one trail, Frediani on another. Presently the giant arrived at the
door of the chamber of the tomb.
“I walked slowly two or three paces, and then stood still to contemplate
the place where I was. Whatever it might be, I certainly considered
myself in the centre of that pyramid which from time immemorial had been
the subject of the obscure conjecture of many hundred travellers, ancient
and modern. My Torch, formed of a few wax candles, gave but a faint
light.”
He heard a sound of footsteps, and Frediani entered with his candles.
But the treasure of the pyramid? The sarcophagus of Khaf-ra, King of
Egypt, was cut in the floor, the lid was awry, and the stone coffin “full
of a great quantity of earth and stones.” Who had violated it in the long
course of history’s four thousand years? No one knows. There is evidence
that the Caliph Al Mamun had forced the pyramid, but there is no evidence
that he found the mummy in its place. There are old Arabic tales of kings
encased in figures of gold, with magical golden snakes on their crowns
which spread their hoods in anger, hissed, and struck at the intruders.
All is legend and myth. The forced tunnel, however, had certainly once
entered the original passages, but later on the violated masonry had
fallen in, and barred the way.
Europe of the Dark Ages had never known of the attempt; the East had
forgotten. The musing mind sees Al Mamun at the pyramid, mounted on a
nervous Arab horse which paws the ancient sand; his mounted attendants
and bodyguard have reined up behind him—Arabs with thin dark faces fierce
as desert hawks. Captives, Christians for the most part, are digging
away at the side of the great mass,—men of Byzantium, fair-haired Norman
sailors blown on the African coast by a storm, little Spaniards from the
mountain kingdoms which are so valiantly battling the Moors. And King
Khaf-ra, whom the Greeks called Chephren, sleeps he within in “the dark
house of the counting of the years?”
There were Arabic inscriptions on the walls, written with charcoal, but
the characters were nearly imperceptible, and rubbed off into dust at
the slightest touch. Belzoni thought he discerned an inscription which
may be thus translated, “The Master Mohamed Ahmed has opened them, and
the Master Othman attended this, and the King Ali Mohamed at first ...
to the closing up.” Sir Richard Burton, however, perhaps the greatest of
all Arabic scholars, will have it that the Arabic characters as Belzoni
transcribed them are for the most part unintelligible. And there the
matter rests.
The Belzonis spent two more years in Egypt, and returned to London in
September, 1819.
IV
Oh, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Benin
One comes out where three goes in.
—_Old British Navy Song._
Green pleasant England again, the white cliffs of Dover, and the autumn
fog drifting down on London and the ships. Belzoni’s fame had gone before
him to the capital. His popular title of “Signor,” which both Italianised
him and linked him with his mountebank past, now fell into disuse, and it
was as “Mr.” Belzoni that he faced a new life of dignity and prestige.
Winter found the traveller and his Sarah living happily in London
lodgings, visited and consulted by the learned and the great. Belzoni
kept his head. With his usual commonsense he was busily at work arranging
an exhibition.
“Belzoni’s Exhibition,”—the words were magical a hundred years ago.
All London came to the hall on Piccadilly when the doors opened in the
spring of 1821. The old red-faced generals who had fought Napoleon
came to stare at Pasht and Osiris, egad, the port-sipping gentlemen of
substance, the fine ladies, and the sober citizens linking arms with
their bonneted wives. To please them, Belzoni had reproduced two of the
principal chambers in the tomb of Seti I, painting, sculptures and all,
and displayed “idols, coins, mummies, scarabœi, articles of dress and
adornment, lachrymatories, and a splendid mass of papyrus.” The tomb
of Seti was “lit within by lamps,” and made a tremendous impression.
And there was a poem by Horace Smith, “Address to a Mummy in Belzoni’s
Exhibition” which all the world was reading. Now and then the giant
moved towering through the throng, and mothers would bid their little
flaxen-haired boys and girls to look at the man who had opened the
pyramid.
A season in Paris followed the year in London, and then came the last
great adventure.
The fever of exploring woke again within his veins, and he determined to
cross the great African desert, and make his way to the almost fabulous
city of Timbuctoo. He would land in Morocco, go south through the
Moroccan possessions, and then join a caravan bound for the fateful city.
The plan seemed practical enough, and on an autumn morning in 1822, the
roving Titan bade farewell to his faithful amazon, and followed his boxes
and baggages aboard a vessel for Gibraltar.
In Fez, the Moroccan capital, they seem to have played with him for a
while, for the Emperor first gave him a permission to go through the
country, and then withdrew consent. The failure may have been due to
intrigue, as Belzoni imagined, or to the deep-rooted native distrust of
Europeans; it was probably a combination of the two. Much chagrined, the
explorer now returned to Gibraltar, and there determined on a course
which did honor to his courage and perseverance. The way south to
Timbuctoo being barred, he would make his way along the African coast to
the city of Great Benin, and then struggle northward to his goal. It was
a route to daunt any explorer, for it led into one of the darkest and
most dangerous areas of unknown Africa.
Sailing in trading ships and little vessels of one sort or another, the
adventurer slowly made his way south along the west African shore to
the English station of Cape Castle on the Guinea Coast. There Sir R.
Mends, commanding the British naval squadron on the African west coast,
befriended him and sent him to Benin in His Majesty’s Gunbrig _Swinger_.
On the 20th of October, 1823, the brig arrived off the bar of Benin River.
The brig _Providence_ was lying off Obobi, and Belzoni boarded her at the
invitation of her master, Captain John Hodgson. A month later, a “Fantee
canoe” belonging to the ship is lowered overside; it contains Hodgson and
Belzoni. The poor giant seemed “a little agitated,” particularly when the
crew, to each of whom he had made a present, gave him three loud cheers
on his stepping out of his vessel. “God bless you, my fine fellows,”
cried the explorer, “and send you a happy sight of your country and
friends.” He was clad in his eastern dress and turban, and still wore his
great, black beard.
A few days later word comes to the sailors that the guest whom they had
so cherished, loved, even, as a shipmate, is lying ill at Benin. Good
Hodgson hurried inland, and found the giant dying of African dysentery
in Benin city. In a palanquin, they hurry him down the river to Gwato,
hoping to get him to the coast and the sea air. But the end is at hand,
an end calmly envisaged; the last of his strength he spends trying to
write a letter to his wife; he entrusts Hodgson with a ring for her and a
message full of the most touching affection, then yields the ghost. They
buried him at Gwato under a great tree, and there he lies in the dark of
Africa.
So ends the tale of the monk who passed from the peace of a monastery to
an acrobat’s stage in a village square. The young Italian had accepted
his destiny calmly, and made the best of it, yet never bowed his head.
Thrust violently from the most retired of lives into the most bohemian,
he had remained,—_Belzoni_. There is something amusing, something rather
fine as well, in the way that he sailed through life like a fine ship
sent by the fates of the sea on dubious voyages. And what a sense of
achievement and honest adventure he had won from it all; it had all been
so well worth while.
History will remember him as the first of modern explorer-archæologists.
“One of the most remarkable men in the whole history of Egyptology,” says
Mr. Howard Carter, who found the Tutankhamen tomb.
Belzoni the giant! What sounds run through his life—the sniping of a
barber’s shears, the ringing of convent bells, the talk and endless
brook-like chatter of crowds at a fair, the songs of laborers along the
Nile, the shuffle of camels in the sand, and the squeak and grind of
levers raising the portcullis of Chephren’s pyramid!
_Three_: EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY
_Three_: EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY
I
About a hundred years ago, on a pleasant summer morning, two young
Englishmen came down to the water front of the Italian port of Leghorn,
got into a boat, and rowed off to look at the shipping in the bay. The
two venturers made an odd pair, for the oarsman was a tall, powerfully
built fellow with piercing blue eyes, thick black hair, and the features
of an Arab, whilst the other was slender, boyish and yellow-haired, and
had innocent blue eyes, and a schoolboy’s innocence of beard.
The first vessel round which they rowed, a Greek trader, displeased
them, for she was dirty of deck and sail, but beyond her lay a graceful
full-rigged ship flying the Stars and Stripes. At the sight of this fine
vessel, the following conversation took place. It has been set down word
by word, for one does not take liberties with the phrases of the great.
“It is but a step,” said the oarsman, “from these ruins of worn-out
Greece to the New World; let’s board the American clipper.”
“I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad
realities,” protested his companion with a smile.
“You must allow,” returned the other, “that that graceful craft was
designed by a man who had a poet’s feeling for things beautiful. Come,
let us go aboard; the Americans are a free and easy people, and will not
consider our visit an intrusion.”
A turn, a few strokes, and the boat approached the American ship. By
the gangway, an American salt with a quid of tobacco squirrelled in his
cheek, was busy at something or other, and every now and then this honest
fellow walked to the rail to spit calmly overside into the historic
Mediterranean. While thus pleasantly engaged, he caught sight of the
small boat coming alongside, and shouted, “Boat ahoy!” A mate came to the
rail.
“May we go aboard?” said the dark, Arab-looking man.
[Illustration: TRELAWNY AS THE OLD SEAMAN IN SIR JOHN E. MILLAIS’S
PAINTING “THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.”]
“Wal, I don’t see why not,” answered the American mate, cheerfully and
without ceremony.
“You have a beautiful vessel,” said the first speaker, once he had gained
the deck. “We have been rowing about looking at the ships, and admiring
yours.”
“I do expect now we have our new copper on, she has a look of the brass
sarpent,” agreed the American.
“She seems so beautiful,” said the first speaker, “that we have been
wishing we might have a vessel like her.”
“Then I calculate you must go to Boston or Baltimore to git one,” replied
the ship’s officer. “There’s no one this side the water can do the job.
We have our freight all ready and are homeward bound; we have elegant
accommodation, and you will be across before your young friend’s beard is
ripe for a razor. Come down and take an observation of the state cabin.”
The hospitable seaman now led his guests to the state cabin, and would
not let them go till they had drunk a toast under the Star-Spangled
Banner to the memory of Washington and the prosperity of the American
commonwealth. Peach brandy was the drink. The toast concluded, the mate
rummaged for a moment in a locker, and then offered his visitors a gift
right from an old time sailor’s heart.
“There, gentlemen,” said the sailor. “Guess you don’t see nuthin’ like
this in these parts!”
“Plug tobacco,” said the dark man.
“Yes sirree, Mister,” replied the mate. “And real old Virginia cake. Jest
you set your teeth in that, Mister,” he continued offering the plug to
the fair-haired guest, “and tell me if you’ve tasted anything so good
since the big wind.”
The fair-haired visitor, however, refused both the brandy and “the chaw,”
but managed to quaff a glass of weak grog to the memory of the first of
presidents. The blue eyes gathered a strange fire.
“Washington,” said this other visitor, “as a warrior and a statesman
he was righteous in all he did, and unlike all who have lived before
or since, he never used his power but for the benefit of his fellow
creatures.
He fought
For truth and freedom, foremost of the brave,
Him glory’s idle glances dazzled not;
’Twas his ambition generous and great.
A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”
“Stranger,” said the American, studying the speaker, his shrewd eye
bright with honest pleasure, “truer words were never spoken. There is dry
rot in all the timbers of the old world, and none of you will do any good
till you are docked, refitted and annexed to the new. You must log that
song you sang; there ain’t many Britishers will say as much of the man
that whipped them, so just set down those lines in the log or it won’t go
for nothing.”
A little shy, perhaps, yet glad that his words had given pleasure, the
youth with the yellow hair sat down to write. The quill pen made almost
no sound; and the faint noises of the harbor,—the voices of sailors
heard across the water from other ships, the chuckling of little waves
alongside, and the passing of bare feet on the deck overhead,—filled the
polite quiet. Yielding to some fancy or inspiration, the visitor did
not enter the lines he had quoted, but some others which pleased him
even more. This done, the Englishmen parted from their Yankee host, and
regained the dust, the street cries, the uniforms, and the hot yellow sun
of the old Italian town.
A musing mind pauses to wonder as to what might have been the name
of this Yankee ship anchored in Leghorn bay sometime in 1822. The
hospitable mate, “a smart specimen of a Yankee,” who was he? And above
all, what became of the ship’s log? Did it vanish from earthly eyes in
the stormy tumult and breaking timbers of a wreck, was it tossed away as
old rubbish, or does it still lie at the bottom of a sea chest in the
piney dark of some attic in New England, an attic whose roof is brushed
by elm boughs on windy summer days? Will the little mystery ever be
solved? What a log book it would be to possess! For the young man with
the crown of mutinous fair hair who wrote the lines and refused the
plug tobacco was Shelley, and the Arab-looking oarsman his friend and
companion, Edward John Trelawny.
A mysterious fellow, this “good friend Tre” of the piercing eyes. A word
from Shelley’s comrade and admirer, Edward Elliker Williams, had served
him as an introduction to the Shelley group, and his first visit to them
had taken place late one evening while the family was at Pisa. One sees
the Italian room in lamplight, a room to which sensible Mary Shelley
must have given something of an English air; one hears the English
voices through the quiet of provincial Italy. Trelawny enters, and the
surprised Shelleys see a personage who is not at all English-looking;
their visitor is a character out of Byronic romance, blazing eyes,
pirate brows, bronzed skin and all. He looked like “a young Othello.”
The newcomer, for his part, saw a rather bookish family gathered about
a bookish young man “habited like a boy in a black jacket and trousers
which he seemed to have outgrown”; it is Shelley he sees, reading as
always, slender, bent a little, and “extraordinarily juvenile.”
“Is it possible that this mild, beardless boy can be the monster at war
with all the world?” thought the young Othello.
While Shelley, as was his custom, went in and out of the room, as
silently and strangely as a spirit, Mrs. Shelley asked Trelawny of news
from London and Paris,—the new books and the operas, the new bonnets and
the new styles, the marriages and the murders. A domestic scene. When
Trelawny had gone, they spoke of him. Where had Mr. Williams encountered
this remarkable person? In Switzerland. And was he not a sailor? Yes, he
had been a sailor, and some said a pirate. A pirate, indeed! He could
tell the most wonderful stories of gory battles on the Java seas, and
expeditions to native strongholds in the jungles of Malaysia. Quite a
remarkable person, “our friend Tre.”
“Trelawny,” says a distinguished biographer of Byron, “was a liar and a
cad.” The judgment is prejudiced and severe. Whatever his faults, the
man acted a leading rôle in one of the most romantic episodes in English
literary history, and was well liked and respected by the great figures
of the play. The world recalls his association with Shelley and Byron,
his recovery of Shelley’s body after the storm, and the cremation in
classical style he arranged on the sands of Villareggio; it remembers his
flight with Byron to the aid of rebellious Greece. A marvellous chapter,
but only one of a life romance which is still something of an enigma.
Sailor? Pirate? Byronic stage-player? Let us see.
II
The known, the traceable, history of Edward John Trelawny begins with
his birth in London in 1792, and comes to an abrupt end some seventeen
years afterward. His father, Lt. Colonel Charles Trelawny, was a middle
aged army officer who had retired to economise his wife’s fortune, the
relics of his own, and play the rôle of stern, Roman father on the stage
of family life. Both family and family name were Cornish, and the boy
began life with the heritage of those of Cornish blood, the heritage of
an ancient and separate race whose antiquity runs past the pillars of
Stonehenge into the dawn of time. There was a Celtic streak in Trelawny;
the joy of battle was his, the quickening fire, the strange madness, and
even the Celt’s power over the souls of words.
Something darker and far more ancient, however, had fought its way back
to life in Trelawny’s veins. The boy was born a warrior, but not a
warrior of Celtic Arthur’s kind. The true comrades of his spirit were the
heroes of the primitive Gaels, the mighty men whose blood seemed to “run
up into their fiery hair,” during the exultation of killing and war.
Fanny Kemble saw Trelawny in his later years during his visit to the
United States, and divined the dark side of his inheritance. “Mr.
Trelawny’s countenance,” she wrote, “was habitually serene, occasionally
sweet in its expression, but sometimes savage with the fierceness of a
wild beast.”
When a young savage comes into the world, the problem of how to civilize
him usually commands attention, but no one bothered his head about Edward
John Trelawny. The savagery of neglected boyhood was allowed to grow wild
in the congenial soil of the boy’s obscure and primitive inheritance.
It was not a pretty childhood, and the following anecdote preserves its
quality.
The Trelawny urchins had an enemy, a tame raven “with ragged wings and
a grave antique aspect,” who used to drive them away from some fruits
they coveted. This old demon had a trick of rushing at the children with
outstretched wings, and though they threw stones, he carried the day.
Little Edward John, however, having courage and the warrior instinct,
kept up the fight, and presently managed to wound the enemy. Shouting
and yelling, the children raced to the gruesome execution, and a final
curtain descended on Edward John hanging the horrible blood-stained old
mass of feathers in a noose made of a sash borrowed from his little
sister!
Spelling lessons were battles. “Spell your name, you young savage,”
shouts the Roman father. “Spell, sir?” The boy, becoming confused,
misplaces the vowels. At this, the Roman father “arose in wrath,
overturned the table, and bruised his shins in an attempt to kick me as I
dodged him, and rushed out of the room.”
From the bosom of this peppery homelife, the great, bony, awkward boy
was kicked into a school. There he encountered floggings, canings, and
hideous practical jokes. The young Cornish Celt with the black hair and
the wild blue eyes fought the savagery with savagery. His Roman father
countered by handing him over to the Royal Navy. The new life was the
school all over again, save that the sea-hazing was more brutal and the
practical jokes even more atrocious. A strange trait, that English liking
for practical jokes! Then followed a season at Dr. Burney’s Naval Academy
at Greenwich, a voyage on a frigate during whose course “Tre” revenged
himself on a persecutor by jabbing him with a pen knife, and then a long
world cruise on a sloop of war.
Brutalised at home, brutalised at school, brutalised in the Navy, it is a
wonder that the young savage remained reasonably human. With the arrival
of adolescence a sense of injustice and an urge to rebellion struck root
in his mind. Rebellion was his only outlet, and in rebelling, he was
most his primitive self. For the boy was only primitive, not vicious.
Presently he decided that he had had enough, and made up his mind to
desert.
The neglected sailor whelp, whom no one had received with affection or
troubled to civilise, was now seventeen years old, he stood six feet
tall, and was strongly built, though of a certain adolescent gauntness.
“My face was bronzed, my hair black, my features perfectly Arab.” The
loneliness of adolescence troubled him, his parents’ “hard usage and
abandonment” gnawed at his heart; he felt “alienated” from his “family
and kindred.” He would follow a new trail, and “seek the love of
strangers in the wide world.”
The phrases are almost sentimental, and doubtless reflect genuine
feeling, but the young savage was still the young savage in his way of
life. Having determined to jump ship, the demon midshipman prepared to
pay off an old score. A lieutenant of his ship, a Scotchman, had been
nagging him, and “Tre” fell upon the man with the supreme strength which
is born of anger. The ship being at Bombay, the encounter took place in
a billiard room ashore frequented by naval officers. It was a ferocious
business of blows, kicks, bruises, blood, cries and broken teeth. The
lieutenant attempted to beg off. Tre’s narrative then continues,—
“‘What,—you white-livered scoundrel? Can no words move you? Then blows
shall!’ And I struck him with the hilt of my sword in the mouth, and
kicked him, and trampled on him. I tore his coat off and rent it to
fragments...” Thus the young savage spoke and fought.
So ends that chapter of Trelawny’s early life which is traceable. A
certain use, to be sure, has here been made of his thinly disguised
autobiography, but the use has been scrupulous, and the borrowings
confined to an incident or two which are accepted as historic. Now comes
mystery. After his desertion in Bombay, all trace of him disappears for
some seven or eight years. What was he doing all this while, and what
regions of the earth and sea were filled with his adventures?
The bronzed young man in his middle twenties, who drifted back to England
either in 1815 or ’16, had little to say to his questioners, though there
were hints of a lurid career. As always, the mystery fed on mystery. The
man’s fine presence, his Oriental features, and his piercing eyes were
enough in themselves to inspire interest; little by little the moonlight
of romantic imagination gathered him into its beam. His intimate friends,
it was whispered, heard blood-curdling tales of piracies as they sat in
the chimney corner. Ah,—if “Tre” would only tell the whole story! They
waited for it fifteen years.
The account must now anticipate a little, and leap the years to 1830.
The summer months are at hand, and Mary Shelley, the poet’s widow, is
arranging and correcting an extraordinary manuscript from “our friend
Tre.” Sensible Mary Shelley, with fair complexion, her light hair and
calm grey eyes,—what did she make of the wild tale in those numberless
pages? One sees her at a desk, remedying Trelawny’s frequent deficiencies
of spelling, writing “postponed” for “posponed,” and inserting “gs” in
all words such as “strength” and “length.” Trelawny treated the letter
with a Cornish disdain. The manuscript in the widow’s hands was a novel
of adventure which Trelawny insisted was really an account of his own
career. First purposing to call the book “A Man’s Life,” he later changed
it to “The Adventures of a Younger Son.”
The scene now returns to the billiard room in Bombay, with the Scotch
lieutenant lying on the floor, barely alive. The young savage brandishes
the heavy end of a billiard cue he has just broken over his enemy and
in true Berseker fashion is about to finish his man, when a voice calms
him, and forbids the murder. The speaker who has thus intervened is one
De Ruyter, a mysterious adventurer who has made friends with the young
savage. In spite of his Dutch name, he is an American, and even claims
Boston as his beloved birthplace. The young deserter and this incredible
Bostonian now escape to De Ruyter’s ship, an Arab craft almost openly
engaged in piracy.
The years that follow find the savage in his element; the tale is one
of piracies, pursuits, boardings, battles, pistol shots, stab-wounds
and slicings, and blood running bright and stickily through scuppers
into waters alive with gathering sharks. There are tiger hunts, fevers,
corpses, despairing yells, and sudden deaths numberless as sands of the
sea. Having no definite base of operations, the precious pair indulge
in grand and petty larceny all through the eastern seas; the scene is
now the Indian ocean, now the coast of Celebes, now the inlets of the
Philippines. What there is of “love interest” is very slight, and centres
about the corsair’s Arabian child-wife, Zela, a Byronic heroine who
perishes opportunely, and is then cremated on a funeral pyre.
There are three volumes of this fee-fi-fo-fum and manslaughter, the
last ending with the return of De Ruyter and his acolyte to Europe,
their separation, De Ruyter’s death at sea while in the service of
Napoleon, and the resolve of the hero to struggle on for the liberty of
“the pallid slaves of Europe.” Cutting a throat, it appeared, was but
a whimsey when compared to the guilt of those who continued to consort
with the “sycophantic wretches who crouch and crawl and fawn on kings and
priests.”...
“Romance can go no farther,” said a contemporary critic in the _Military
Review_, “than the actual adventures of the homicidal renegade and
corsair, the ‘Younger Son.’”
Time has confirmed this sensible opinion. A more brutal, a more ruthless,
a more utterly unfeeling book does not exist in English literature. Save
for the rhetoric about the “pallid slaves,” and some Byronic transports
over the body of Zela, the story knows less of sympathy than a crocodile.
Moreover, it is nowhere amusing. What carries it along, what made it
a success in its own time, and has won it a reprint in our own, is its
superlative vividness. The picture may be that of a man, shot in the
heart, spinning about; it may be the impression of thick resistance which
human flesh offers to the hand that stabs;—whatever it may be, image or
sensation, it is real, it is true, and it is the unconscious artist who
affects us and no mere business of superlative photography. Overlong,
chaotic, and ruffianly as it is, the book is no lifeless curiosity of
literature.
Such was the existence from which the deserter and adventurer returned
to Europe. Were one to swallow the book whole, it might well be
imagined that the Trelawny who arrived in London was a proper subject
for a gallows. Yet the adventurer who in England took the place that
was his by birth as a gentleman’s son was no skull and bones ruffian.
There are no stories, no rumours that tell of ruffianism or ruffianly
qualities; when this young Arab-featured man called on his neighbours,
there were no blanched faces at the windows, or wild whispers to send
the ladies upstairs and hide the spoons. Sometimes a good family will
unaccountably produce a ruffianly type; the incident is rare, but it is
encountered,—but Trelawny was not of these.
The Younger Son who had been born with something dark and ancient in his
blood, who had endured a savage and neglected boyhood and adolescence,
had returned to England reasonably civilised at least. Such was not the
customary result of seven years of piracy!
The explanation is probably a very simple one; the boy savage, the demon
midshipman, had grown up. With the arrival of manhood, the fundamental
qualities of the man’s character and original mind had broken through the
barbarism of his early life.
The streak of Celtic battle savagery he had inherited was still in his
veins; he never lost it. Seven years later, while accompanying Byron
to the revolt in Greece, he spoke of “the best of all excitement.” The
poet showed curiosity. “Fighting,” added Trelawny, and was not guilty of
a pose. There were times when he showed a certain cold-blooded streak;
the pirate was not touchily fastidious. He had a mind, he was a born
observer, and he was nobody’s fool. There is no evidence that he had
much imaginative quality. The ideas he had, he clung to emotionally,
for they were really emotions in borrowed clothes. His enthusiasm for
“Europe’s pallid slaves,” for instance;—what is it but his own transmuted
resentment for his own loveless and cruel boyhood,—what was his hatred of
“sycophants, priests and kings” but his own hatred of those in authority
who had oppressed his youth? He does not appear ever to have arrived at
any intellectual understanding of his attitude.
The young man of mystery returned to England with a little money, and
presently carried out an anchor to windward. He married, and in a
sentence of matchless pathos, lamented his rose-decked chain. He had
become “a shackled, care-worn and spirit-broken married man of the
civilised west.” There are those who say that the lady was frivolous and
wasteful. It probably mattered little, for the adventurer’s relations
with his various wives were astoundingly casual; they have something of
the kiss and good-bye of the legendary sailor.
The roses of matrimony beginning to lose their petals, the younger
son took to escaping on vagabond adventures. The incredible snobbery
of contemporary British life, “its mystic castes, coteries, sets and
sects, its ... purseproud tuft-hunting and toadying” got on the nerves of
this man who had seen life in the raw. Fleeing to Switzerland, he made
friends with another wandering Briton, one Mr. Edward Elliker Williams,
a half-pay lieutenant of the Eighth Dragoons. Mr. Williams chattered for
hours of his marvellous friend, Mr. Percy Shelley, the poet, who had so
splendidly defied the ideas and conventions of contemporary Britain.
There was a man and a rebel! Expelled from Oxford for atheism, the hero
of a romantic elopement at eighteen, the hero of a defiant free union at
twenty-one, the contemner and accuser of every dastardly sycophant, king
and priest in the solar system. And a poet, sir!
Mr. Shelley the exile,—here was a man for Trelawny of his own
unconventional mould. Shelley the rebel. Shelley the Lucifer! He would
go to him; the sycophants, kings and so forths had better take care. “I
swore to dedicate myself,” said the pirate later, “hand and heart to war,
even to the knife, against the triple alliance of hoary headed impostors,
their ministers and priests!” How the rhetoric brings before one’s eyes
the liberal anger at the Tory reaction following the wild revolutionary
years!
Mr. Williams arranged the meeting, and took “our friend Tre” to Pisa. Was
“Tre” a little disappointed at the appearance of the exiled Lucifer and
poetic arch-scandaliser; had he prepared himself for something robust,
defiant and rhetorical, someone quite in his own style? There are times
when this emotion seems visible between the lines of Trelawny’s account
of the meeting. Whatever the expectation may have been, Shelley won his
piratic visitor heart and soul. A young man with an Arab’s thin nose and
bronzed cheeks and a young man with great open eyes, a boy’s fresh face
and a crown of yellow hair,—the pirate and the scholar rebel—a fantastic
alliance!
No wild outcries from British throats, however, disturbed the stout and
comfortable Italian padres who stopped in the streets of Pisa to take
snuff, and wandered off brushing the specklets of brown dust from their
soutanes. Incomprehensible _Ingleses_! The exiles were all under thirty,
they had all made their lives something of an adventure, they were all
glad to be alive.
Destiny was preparing strange things.
III
The younger son, having decided to throw in his lot with the poet’s,
remained in Pisa. He liked the group and the environment, though the
bookish intellectualism of the Shelleys swept him often enough beyond his
depth. Byron, also living in exile, was a familiar figure, and there were
rides together out into the country and pauses by the roadside to indulge
in the noisy sport of pistol practice.
Shelley read, and hidden away in a little pine wood, wrote poetry; Byron
lurked in his huge palace guarded by a growling English bulldog and a
squad of chattering retainers captained by a giant Venetian gondolier.
The poets liked the younger son. He was a rebel too, in his way, his
piratic career made him interesting, he had good stories to tell, and
above all, he was a man of action who could be trusted to do practical
things for the impractical. A boat is to be built, Tre will attend to
it; a boat is to be sailed, Tre will do that; household goods are to be
moved, we must talk with Tre. Affection forms quickly in such an isolated
group, and there seems to have been a certain affection for piratic Tre,
perhaps the first the man had ever known.
As the weather grew hot, Tre advised the Shelleys to go north, and found
them a house at Lerici on the Gulf of Shezzia. The place was but a shabby
barrack, but it was on the sea, and Shelley rejoiced. In the evenings,
the whole population of men, women and children took to the water like
ducks, and their shouts of joy filled the house. Shelley and Tre joined
in the frolic, but Mary Shelley looked grave, and said it was “improper.”
“Hush, Mary,” said the poet, “that insidious word has never been echoed
by these woods and rocks; don’t teach it to them.”
The late spring ripened into summer, and with July came the historic
tragedy.
Early in the spring a kind of yachtsman’s fever had descended upon
the little group. Byron had arranged for the building of a yacht, and
Williams had designed a boat for Shelley and the friends at Lerici. In
designing the hull, Williams had probably attempted an imitation of the
fast American vessels he had seen along the coast; it was a model he did
not understand. One Captain Roberts, a sometime British naval officer
then living in Italy, had the boat built under his eye at Genoa; she was
twenty-four feet long and eight in the beam; she drew four feet of water
and was schooner rigged with gaff topsails. Not a boat, this, to fire a
sailor’s heart, for the rig needs a crew to run it, and is difficult to
handle quickly, especially in a small space. Two English sailors and a
ship’s boy had sailed the vessel from Genoa to Lerici. When asked how she
sailed, the tars had replied that she was a “ticklish boat to manage,”
and that they had “cautioned the gents accordingly.”
Originally christened the “_Don Juan_,” the fateful vessel was now
re-christened the “_Ariel_.” To give her more stability, Williams filled
her with ballast,—a dangerous business, for the vessel was undecked. The
designer would hear no criticism of his craft.
“Williams is as touchy about the reputation of his boat as if she were
his wife,” grumbled Tre.
Such was the yacht in which Shelley, Williams and the English sailor lad,
Charles Vivian, sailed from the port of Leghorn on July the eighth, 1822.
The poet had sailed down from Lerici to welcome Leigh Hunt and his family
to Italy, and this friendly office done, was returning home again by sea.
Two o’clock in the afternoon, haze, July dulness, and almost no wind in
the Gulf of Spezzia. Trelawny, busy doing something aboard Byron’s yacht,
the _Bolivar_, watched his friends sail away. He had hoped to escort them
to sea in Byron’s vessel, but at a last moment difficulty over sailing
papers had arisen with the port authorities. The haze was thickening
and growing dark, a menacing thunder was rolling nearer; presently the
_Ariel_ vanished from Trelawny’s sight into the leaden gloom.
A squall, needless to say, is a swift business anywhere, but the
Mediterranean variety has a certain thunderbolt burst and a drenching
vengefulness all its own. On the ships anchored about the _Bolivar_,
barefooted seamen were running along the decks preparing their vessels
for the squall which moment by moment assumed a more threatening look.
Suddenly came rain, and in the rain the wind; the storm blustered through
the night.
Trelawny went ashore, and listened all night long to the wind and the
beat of the rain. He was restless with anxiety. Everything that there
was of sailor in the man distrusted the _Ariel_, and he knew only too
well that Shelley would be of little use in an emergency. The poet would
be dreaming or reading a book at the very moment the wind leaped at
the sails. The dawn revealed the shipping in the harbour rolling and
pitching about under pouring rain; the anxious day ended without news.
The following days found Tre searching among the vessels which had been
at sea during the storm, questioning sailors, patrolling the coast with
the coast guards, and offering rewards.
Presently comes a messenger in some shabby-showy uniform, and an official
letter written in Italian. The bodies have been found on the sands, poor,
broken bodies of men lost at sea.
“Oh, bitter, bitter gifts of the lord Poseidon,” said the Greeks,
remembering the bruised flesh turning in the waves. What was to be done?
Tre says that it was decided by “all concerned,” that Shelley should be
buried in Rome beside his little son. Before this might be done, however,
there were laws and a thousand regulations to be fought through, for
Italy was then divided in separate jurisdictions, and, moreover, bodies
washed ashore were regarded by the law as possible victims of the
plague. This, of course, was not Shelley’s case, but the law was the law.
It was Tre who found a way out of the difficulty. Was his notion possibly
a memory of something he had witnessed in the East? He would cremate the
bodies, and send Shelley’s ashes to Rome. It is no injustice to Tre to
say that he made his preparations and gathered the funerary material with
the business-like directness of an undertaker. He was the man of action
as ever, the practical friend who could be trusted to get things done.
He attended to Williams first, and then gathered the forlorn little world
of the exiles to see the last of Shelley.
It was a hot August day, and the whitish sands of Villareggio were
tremulous with heat. A dead calm lay upon the sea, and save for Byron’s
schooner anchored close off shore, the vast gulf revealed no sign of
human life. Behind the beach lay a wood of tall, branchless pines, “their
dark blue tops packed so close together that no sun could penetrate,” and
far away, over the wood rose the marble-crested Apennines. The pyre stood
in the open between the wood and the sea. Byron was there and Leigh
Hunt, a detail of soldiers, a few coast guards, and some Italian great
folk who had ridden out in their carriages to watch so unaccountable a
proceeding. Following ancient ritual, the exiles poured salt, oil and
wine upon the pyre; the little first flames rose yellow towards their
hands. A lonely sea bird came circling near, the pyre burnt with little
smoke, and thus the body of Shelley dissolved into the air.
Only the heart refused to burn, though in the hottest of the flame. Tre
snatched it forth, and burnt his hand so doing. When all was done, and
the pyre burnt out, he gathered the ashes together, put them in an oaken
box, paid his soldiers, and went off to Rome with his parcel.
A chapter of his life had come to an end. The little group dispersed,
Byron remained to quarrel on with the Hunts, the widows went to England.
Tre had been a staunch and helpful friend, and Mary Shelley never forgot
the debt. She could write later that Trelawny’s conduct “impressed us
all with an affectionate regard and a perfect faith in the unalterable
goodness of his heart.” She knew that it was good to have a friend. _The
Gentleman’s Magazine_, on hearing of the drowning, had remarked, “Mr.
Percy Shelley is a fitter subject for the penitentiary dying speech than
a lauding elegy, for a muse of the rope rather than that of the cypress.”
Italy in the autumn, and an empty world. Tre lingered on a year, and
found diversion in riding about the countryside. An American-born
negro followed him as a groom; the peasants stared at the strange pair
galloping by.
Then came a letter from Byron, and life began again with adventure and
war.
IV
The Greeks had risen against their Turkish masters, a committee of
enthusiastic lovers of liberty had been formed in London to advance the
cause, and this committee had persuaded Byron to act as their agent
in Greece. From the point of view of what the cant of the day calls
publicity, the choice was an excellent one; considered with a harsh and
practical eye, it was absurd. This nervous, temperamental artist with
the habits and posing mannerisms of a regency beau, this traveller who
scarce could walk a hundred yards on his shrunken and deformed feet,
yet hid his pain and weakness in a cloak of attitudes,—surely here was
no man to manage a horde of wily Levantines all trying to advance their
own fortunes, and snatch what they could for themselves of the English
subsidy.
Having accepted the task, Byron turned at once to the practical friend.
“My dear T,” he wrote, “you must have heard that I am going to Greece.
Why do you not come to me? I want your aid, and am exceedingly anxious to
see you.”
War and adventure! Trelawny wasted no time in exchanging the vineyards of
Italy for Grecian mountain slopes and olive trees. Then came a mistake.
He abandoned Byron, and went off to adventure by himself.
Tre had never really liked the noble lord, perhaps because Byron, being
a man of the world, had a clearer understanding than Shelley of Trelawny
the man and his place in life. A stray letter of Claire Clairmont’s,
Byron’s sometime mistress, suggests that Tre secretly cherished
resentment for some sharp remark. Whatever the explanation may be of
Tre’s hidden attitude, the practical man had no intention of wasting his
time with the poet, but left him to his fate. He seems to have forgotten
that he had come to Greece with Byron and at Byron’s invitation and
suggestion.
“I well knew that once on shore, Byron would fall back on his old routine
of dawdling habits, plotting, planning, shilly-shallying and doing
nothing,” he complained. And again, “Could I then longer waste my life
in union with such imbecility, amid such scenes as there are here, when
there is excitement enough to move the dead?”
The angry phrases make the adventurer’s motives clear and perfectly
comprehensible, yet leave the abandonment of the poet a matter for
controversy. Byron had called Tre to his side, Tre had accepted with
alacrity; there was no solemn engagement, no cant about duties and so
on; Trelawny was free to do as he pleased. A meticulous sense of honor
might have detained him, but then the finer shades of honor never plagued
Trelawny.
Crossing from the island of Cephalonia to the mainland, the free-lance
now made his way through the grey mountains and the ravaged country
side to the camp of Odysseus, chieftain of Eastern Greece. Tre thought
him a man after his own heart, and wrote enthusiastically of his new
friend. Of all the feudal leaders of rebellious Greece, this was
the man! The adventurer’s life began to be worth living, there were
ambuscades, descents on villages, attacks on Turkish cavalry, and looting
expeditions. He was fighting for liberty, as Shelley would have wished
him, but he had no illusions about those “pallid slaves,” the newly
liberated Greeks. He quite agreed with Colonel Napier’s famous remark,
“My dear Mr. Trelawny, no one should assume any direction in Greek
affairs ... without the help of a portable gallows.”
Meanwhile in the mud and malaria of Missolonghi, lived the man whom every
feudal chieftain hoped to coax into his hands, the noble Lord Byron,
agent in chief of the Greek committee. At Odysseus’ suggestion, Trelawny
set out for Missolonghi to plead the chieftain’s cause. He arrived there
in the rain, and met dejected stragglers riding away,—the English milord
was dead. The fretful, bewildered satirist had perished like a bird
caught in a net of dirty twine.
On receipt of this news, Tre gathered together the wreckage of Byron’s
entourage of adventurers who had drifted in to fight for the Greeks, and
led those who were worth leading to Odysseus. He had now married Tarsitza
Kamenou, the chieftain’s sister, and had thus become a member of the
family. Presently Odysseus made a kind of truce with the Turks, and
Trelawny retired to hold the chieftain’s stronghold, a romantic cave high
in the crags of Mount Parnassus. It was while he was in this cave that
an English adventurer whom he had befriended tried to assassinate him.
Trelawny was dangerously wounded. “Two musket balls,” he wrote, “fired
at the distance of two paces, struck me and passed through my frame work
and damn near finished me.” With truest chivalry, Tre spared his cowardly
assailant, and rescued him from his Greek associates, who wished to do
unpleasant things.
Events moved fast. Odysseus, falling into the hands of the Greek
loyalists, was adjudged a traitor, and thrown from the Acropolis.
Tarsitza bore a daughter, and, this accomplished, disappeared from the
scene; some say into a convent. With the help of friends in the British
Navy, Tre then escaped from Parnassus to a refuge in the Ionian Isles,
and lingered there two or three years watching events. “I do not wish to
visit England in my present state of poverty,” he wrote.
Then came the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in ’27, and a
breathing spell of success for the Greeks. In the July of the following
year, the adventurer reached Southampton with his little half-Greek
daughter in his arms.
V
With the return from Greece, the great days of adventure are at an end,
the rest of Trelawny’s long life is the story of the kind of man the
world calls a “character.”
The pause in England was brief, and in 1829 he returned to Italy, took
a house in Florence, and busied himself bringing up his little daughter
Zela, born to him of his Greek wife, and writing his autobiographical
romance. It seems reasonably sure that sometime during these Italian
years he proposed to Mary Shelley, but without success; the lady was
not exactly a person to be an incident in anybody’s life. The pirate,
now a man of forty, then translated his affections to Claire (Jane)
Clairmont whom he had met at Lerici in the romantic days. This love
affair by letter lasted for long years. Tre was still Tre the corsair
and Byronic lover. “Yes, Jane,” he wrote, in a letter full of rhetoric
and misspelling,—“much as endurance has hardened me, I must give you
the consolation of knowing that you have inflicted on me indiscribable
tortures.”...
This friendship had one unfortunate result; the lady hated Byron and his
memory with an all consuming hate, and this poison spread to Trelawny’s
mind, making him cruelly hostile to a man he had never understood.
England again, and then a voyage to the United States, the purchase of
the freedom of a slave, and a swim in the Niagara River. At Niagara
a ferryman muttered that he was all “tuckered out.” “How old are
you?” cried Tre as he scrambled up the bank after his wild swim.
“Thirty-eight,” replied the ferryman. “Then you are not worth a damn,”
shouted the adventurer rudely. “You had better look out for the alms
house!”
English society welcomed him back; Shelley was coming into his own, the
Byron legend had taken root, the “Adventures of a Younger Son” had been a
striking success, and all the English world was anxious to see the last
of the great company. Picturesque, dark and Arabic as ever, and possessed
of great physical strength, Tre moved among the mirrors, the teacups and
the talk, spinning his wild yarns and blazing out in fine rhetorical
damnations of all poppycock and snobbery. After 1846, he retired to Usk
in Monmouthshire, married, and busied himself planting, building and
teaching scientific husbandry.
The seventies found him the last survivor of the past though Byron’s
giant gondolier, the romantic “Tita,” had grown old along with him. The
Hercules had come to England, found a place with the Disraelis, and
married Mrs. Disraeli’s maid.
Trelawny had now become venerable, grown a white beard, and brought up
two sons and a daughter. The little Greek girl had married very happily.
“Our friend Tre” was now a fierce, venerable, wild-eyed, magnificent
old man full of opinionated notions on many subjects. He had taken to
preaching natural living, the virtues of abstemiousness, and the folly of
wearing heavy underwear. To the generation of Rossetti and Burne Jones,
he was “Captain” Trelawny, the fiery ancient who had been a comrade and
friend of the gods.
Joaquin Miller saw him at the Savage Club in London. “On one occasion,”
wrote the Californian, “he came in while a winter storm was raging, and
he must have been wet all through. But he would not drink with us. His
collar was open after the fashion of Walt Whitman, and he had neither
overcoat nor umbrella. He stood with his back to the fire, straight and
strong as a mast, looked about over us in quiet disdain for a while, then
took off his coat, hung it over the back of a chair by the fire, and sat
by and watched it drying till the storm abated.” When Miller went to
visit him, old Tre “insisted in a most mysterious tone of voice that he
had blood from some extinct race of kings in his veins, and that he had
in early days been a famous pirate.” At eighty-one, he met undaunted the
unconquerable enemy. He rests beside Shelley in Rome.
What a life the great, bony, awkward boy had made for himself, what
a quality of courage and defiance it has! The man would have fought
the stars in the courses. Being what he was, he had to see life as a
struggle, and the best of him lies in the way that he accepted every
challenge with a singing joy. The fighting type of human being very often
finds a certain robust satisfaction in life, and so it was with Trelawny.
Whatever he had done, whatever he had been, life had been gloriously
worth living under the sun. And is it not strange that the great
adventure of this life of struggle and strange lands should have centred
about a lamp-lit room in a villa in Italy, and a friendship with the most
fragile and the unworldly being of his time?
_Four_: THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT
_Four_: THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT
I
In a little room built of brown logs, and with casement windows open to
the sun and the sounds of early summer, the pilgrim elders of Plymouth
sat at table discussing a scandal on the coast. The abomination was
amongst them, the sighing after strange flesh, yea, the very Calf of
Horeb! At a plantation on the sylvan shores of the Great Bay of the
Massachusees (for so was Boston Harbor anciently known) there had been
held a scandalous carousal, much “quaffing and drinking of wine and
strong liquors” and “friskings” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians.”
So Morton of Merry-Mount, the Lord of Misrule, was still at his tricks!
This vagabond lawyer from London, this poet whose verses “tended to
lasciviousness,” this scholar who hurled Latin puns at the saints of the
elect, had gone far enough. “A feast of the Romans goddess Flora” in
their unprofaned and sanctified wilderness! Captain Standish shall bring
this scoffer to the rod, and his immoral merriment shall be stamped upon
and quenched as men quench the embers of a fire. Presently a drum sounds
its note of authority in the Plymouth street, and Standish marches away
on an expedition which is still echoing down New England history.
It is not difficult to imagine the scene in the log-built room, the
sombre elders with their lips drawn thin and judgment in their eyes,
the old, angry phrases of punishment and vengeance coined thousands of
years before under the desert’s pitiless sky, the narrator of the events
leaning forward to tell his unseemly news of the impious merriment, and
in the lulls of quiet and shocked meditation, the trills of a New England
cricket and the neighbourly talk of birds.
Morton of Merry-Mount, first of American defenders of cakes and ale,
song, music and the dance! The tale of how this man from Shakespeare’s
London scandalised the righteous of Massachusetts Bay, fought their
tyrannous abuse of power, and set them by the ears with a defiant
jollification is the first of American comedies. It begins with a
prologue in old England, a manor house in a wooded English park, and the
lamentations of a lady in distress.
II
Dame Alice Miller, widow of a well-to-do gentleman of Swallowfield in
Berkshire, was in trouble and distress of mind,—she was at odds with her
own son. This son, co-executor with his mother of his father’s will,
was cruel, violent, and ungovernable; he had been summoned to court for
throwing a neighbour’s wife out of her pew during a church service; he
was now attempting to brutalise his mother into giving him full control
of all inherited property. As the poor woman had the interest of five
little daughters and a posthumous son to protect from this ruffian, her
days were anything but happy ones. Driven to the very last wall, she
engaged an attorney to protect her and her minor children. His name was
Thomas Morton, and he had been bred to the law in London at Cliffords Inn.
In the year 1617, James I being on the British throne, this advocate,
Thomas Morton, was a man a little over forty, of robust body, and of
fair height and agreeable presence. He was a man to know something of
the properties in the case, for he was himself of the landed gentry;
his father had been a soldier of the old queen, and he had been brought
up in the country in the style befitting the son of an English country
gentleman. With his great boots rising to flaring tops, his Stuart dress,
long hair, and hat with a plume, this advocate from London must have had
somewhat the air of a Cavalier.
Actually, however, the Stuart dress misdated him, for Master Thomas
Morton of Cliffords Inn was like his client, Dame Alice, an Elizabethan
born and bred.
An Elizabethan, the fact explains both the man and his adventures. The
boyhood of this advocate with the plumed hat had been spent in an England
which was still the Merry England of Shakespeare’s artisans and Oberon
and Titania. Brought up as the son of an English country gentleman, he
had known and spoken to Bottom and Peter Quince at the doors of their
thatched cottages; he had shared in the field sports, the hunting and
the falconry which were the pleasures of rural gentlefolk. From this
Shakesperian countryside, the youth had passed to the little, glorious
London of Elizabeth.
Outwardly, the London of the old Queen was still largely mediæval. The
libraries were ancient and churchly, the taverns vast as the Tabard Inn
of Chaucer’s pilgrimage, and the streets through which the bedizened old
Queen moved in the pageantry she loved were narrow and puddly. The story
of Raleigh’s cloak preserves no empty courtesy. Dwelling as a student
of law in this city of the poets and the theatres, the spirit of the
great yet vanishing age had possessed the young man from the country; he
had its zest of life, its eagerness to find and make use of beauty, its
adventurousness of the spirit and the flesh, its honest, earthly good
humour, its literary conventions, and even its delightful pedantry. He
read Don Quixote, the plays of Ben Jonson, and a quaint world of Latin
writers whose names only scholars nowadays remember, and he may well have
seen the Man from Stratford in the street.
One imagines the picture, the ancient, oaken room in the red brick manor,
the quiet of England, and the drowsy murmur of the trees, the brocaded
chairs, the distressed lady, and the lawyer from London gathering the
case together with shrewdness and intelligence.
Now follow other conferences, time ripens, the courts are slow and the
years are long. The case of Dame Alice Miller and her little children
against their ruffianly kinsman becomes a thing of writs and counter
writs, processes, summons, visitations and suits and counter suits.
Presently George Miller, the ruffian, hears news which causes him to
burst into a rage of foul-mouthed oaths,—his mother has married the
London advocate!
As the case had now been dragging on for some five years, the advocate
can hardly be accused of artfully hurrying a distressed lady into
marriage. Morton and his wife now moved to the manor-house, the case
became a matter of “Thomas Morton et Ux” against George Miller, and the
hatred which the ruffian had borne to his mother’s protector blazed up
into fresh malignity. The point is important, for in this blackguard
Morton’s relentless and cruel foes of the Puritan bay were to find an
unexpected and valuable ally.
Matters now become more complicated than ever; there is talk of riots and
assaults, the year 1623 arrives, and then, ... silence.
What had happened? No certain answer can be made, but everything seems
to point to the death of Dame Alice Morton as having occurred in either
1623 or ’24. There were other complications as well. Certain decisions in
the case had gone against Morton, and he had been slow to follow their
decrees. The attitude is a not unnatural one for a man who has fought a
long battle with a scoundrel, and loathes giving the smallest advantage
to a vindictive and unchivalrous foe. Morton cannot be held guilty of
having committed any serious breach of the law. Indeed in all this rather
ugly and unnatural business, Thomas Morton’s conduct as an attorney and
as a man of honour appears above reproach. His management of the case
had been alert and aggressive, and he had shown a sound knowledge of
seventeenth century law.
Now comes a second mystery,—Morton himself disappears. George Miller,
succeeding to his mother’s inheritance, takes over the manor house in the
ancient wood by Swallowfield, and finds his stepfather gone no one knows
where. Nothing remains to tell of the advocate of Cliffords who stepped
so strangely into this tangle of lives and wills; even his hunting dog
has disappeared. Silence in the old house. One hears George Miller shout
some dull-tongued foulness in a tone that is blend of anger and relief,
and then away he rides, this prince of cads, wondering how he may best
defraud the minor heirs.
Where was the man of Cliffords Inn? The Elizabethan adventurer in him had
led him travelling. Did he seek forgetfulness? His wife dead, the long,
turbulent dispute settled in a kind of way, had he sought to close a
door on the makers of strife and the memories of disorder? He had surely
vagabonded to the south, for he once set down this, “I am not of opinion
with Aristotle, that the landes under _Torrida Zona_ are altogether
uninhabited, I myself having been so neare to the equinoctiall line that
I have had the sun for my Zenith.”
Suddenly he emerges again into the light of history. Something brings him
in touch with one Captain Wollaston, an English trader who is fitting out
a ship for a trading expedition to America. This Wollaston has gathered
thirty young and youngish Englishmen, “his servants,” and with their
labour he will establish a trading post on the still uninhabited coast of
New England.
It is a day in the early spring of 1625, and Wollaston’s ship is going
to sea. Upon the upper deck of the _Mayflower_-like vessel, stands the
vagabond advocate, muffled in the great cloak of the period. A hunting
dog stands near.
Surely Thomas Morton “of Cliffords Inn, Gent.” thus bidding farewell
to England, must have remembered the manor at Swallowfield,—the woodsy
afternoons and the long, long twilights, the hunts with dog and gun, the
falcons leaping to the blue, and the call of the hunter’s horn far away
in the forest,—the most beautiful, the most melancholy-golden music in
the world. And because it was the early spring, perhaps he recalled to
mind the May day revels of the village, the dance about the garlanded
pole, the merry, rustic clowneries, and the shouts and laughter. Alas!
something was happening to his Merry England. Bottom and Peter Quince
had taken to reading the theology of St. Paul, and cracking each other’s
pates over its precise interpretation. Whither might it not lead? Perhaps
even to civil war.
Thomas Morton was accompanying Wollaston as an investor in the trading
enterprise. He was now a man of robust middle age, nearer fifty than
forty, and mellowed by years, books, and a genial philosophy of life.
Unless all signs fail, there was a copy of Don Quixote in his baggage.
Little did he know that he was soon to have his own battle with the
windmills!
III
“The Great Bay of the Massachusees,” for so was Boston Harbor anciently
known, is a pleasant place with its long, whaleback islands, its
countrified, hillocky shores, drumlin mounds, and inland glimpse of the
little mountains known as the Blue Hills; it still retains something
of a sylvan air; in 1625 it was a sylvan wilderness. Until very recent
years, the most conspicuous feature of the bay was a vast field, almost
a domain, sloping from a thicket of inland trees to the curving beach
of the pleasant Quincy shore. In July, when the grass of the field had
ripened to yellow hay, this pleasant open land poured down to the sea
like a river mouth of gold. Cleared and cultivated, by the Indians long
before the arrival of the whites, the old domain had that mellow quality
which Nature sometimes assumes when long allied with man.
A pleasant field, for the presence of the sea dwelt there and was not
terrible and alien,—a field in which the hot, earthy odours distilled by
an August sun mingled pleasantly with the fragrance of salt meadows.
The sea birds of the North knew it, and ran along the edge of the ebbing
tide, shadows of gulls passed swiftly over its bending grass, the plover
rose piping from the reeds, and there were pondlets in it, in tiny round
hollows, by whose shores yellow-speckled turtles sunned their backs. The
Indians called the field Passonagessit.
Such was the domain of open land which Wollaston, the English trader, saw
upon the greenwood shore of the “Bay of Massachusees” on a morning in
early summer in the year 1625. The wilderness was his alone. Save for a
small and declining trading station established at Wessagusset on what is
now the Weymouth shore, the sylvan bay was an uninhabited land. The great
Puritan migration of 1630-31, which was to found the town of Boston, was
still six years away, and only at Plymouth, some forty miles south along
the coast, did the New England forest echo to the day-long sermon soon to
thunder through the land.
The imagination rebuilds the scene of the landing, Wollaston’s vessel
anchored off the field, the shallop and her little boats plying between
her and the shore, the ferrying over of the indentured bondmen, all well
sunburnt from their long voyage and longing for a smell of fresh victuals
on their wooden plates, the unloading of the stores, “the implaments,”
the ancient muzzle loading muskets and fowling pieces, and the bags of
powder and ball. One sees Thomas Morton, in great-boots, cape and plume,
coax his hunting dog into the boat, one hears the scrape of the keel upon
the gravelly beach, and an excited barking—the advocate of Cliffords Inn
and his cherished “dogge” have arrived in the new world.
Presently a brave ring of the axe,—a sound that echoes through American
history,—floats down the field to the bay; houses and chimneys rise, and
the little plantation takes shape in the Massachusetts wilderness.
The vagabond advocate, beholding the vast, unsullied greenwood, loved
it with a devotion few have equalled. He wandered everywhere north and
south, he visited Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, he went
north beyond the beaches of New Hampshire to the surf and the ledges of
Maine. It was in truth a noble wilderness, and to Thomas Morton it became
a veritable promised land, a “New English Canaan.” His own “Bay of
Massachusees” he thought “the paradise of those parts,” and meditating
on its virtues, his mellow spirit broke into a fine, old-fashioned
Elizabethan panegyric.
“The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously
considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I
did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel’d, for
so many goodly groves of trees, dainty, fine, round, rising hillucks,
delicate, faire, large plaines, sweet cristall fountaines, and cleare
running streams that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so
sweete a murmuring noise to hear as lull the senses with delight asleepe,
so pleasantly do they glide upon the pebble stones....”
The very words, “the bewty of the place,” reveal the man; the style
of the passage his Elizabethan attitudes. In later years, he was to
celebrate his love of the American landscape in the rich, full-flowered
English of an Elizabethan marriage song.
“If Art and Industry should doe as much
As Nature hath for Canaan not such,
Another place, for benefit and rest,
In all the universe can be possest.
The more we proove it by discovery,
The more delight each object to the eye
Procures as if the elements had here,
Bin reconciled, and pleased it should appeare
Like a faire virgin longing to be sped
And meete her lover....”
There were others at the plantation, however, who did not share these
poetic raptures. As the summer wore away, furs proved scarce, and the
severe New England winter enclosed the silent land, Wollaston began to
lose faith in his venture. At the return of spring, he had made his
decision; he would hold on to the trading post, leave a few men there to
care for it, and sell to planters in Virginia the time still due him from
his bondsmen. A spring morning sees the two groups of “servants” bid each
other farewell, and Wollaston’s ship pass from view of the trading post
behind the wooded isles. And with his ship, Wollaston himself disappears,
for there is no evidence that he ever returned to the shores of Boston
Bay.
Thomas Morton, left behind in his beloved Canaan with five or six young
English exiles, now assumed command of the trading post by the old Indian
field; there was joy in Olympus, and the golden reign began.
IV
“There is a time for reaping and a time for sowing,” and for Thomas
Morton a time for drinking the wine of life’s good pleasure. It is clear
that the poet vagabond decided to enjoy life and, like Ecclesiastes,
“prove his heart with mirth.” He had come to his years of philosophy,
his path of life had led him to a glorious land, and a world of new
adventures and impressions had cleansed from memory a past of tumult and
bitterness. Master Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden was now his very own,
and there was no enemy to be seen but winter and rough weather. This
ripened desire to have joy of the good green earth took a characteristic
and pleasant form,—the London advocate began to imagine himself as a
genial host bidding his guests be merry, and sip their ale under the
greenwood tree. This idea of himself presently took such a hold of the
poet that he began to refer to himself as “Mine Host of Merry-Mount.”
For “Merry-Mount” it was; the name “Mount Wollaston” had gone by the
board. Morton had christened the knoll at the head of the field “_Ma-re
Mount_,” from the Latin noun meaning the sea, and he took an enormous
pleasure in this ridiculous pun.
The golden reign on the Great Bay of the Massachusees! There was never
a scarcity of food at the great log house on the knoll, for Morton was
a keen sportsman, and soon taught his companions how to follow game.
The country abounded in “turkies, which at divers times came in great
flocks,” in venison and wild pigeons; the swift shadows of trout moved in
every pool. “It was a noted custom at my House,” wrote my host, “to have
every man’s duck upon a trencher.” There was wine to be had, probably
purchased from trading vessels or distilled from the pagan New England
wild grape, “good _Rosa Solis_,” the Rose of the Sun, a blessed name for
an old wine with the day’s glory in the grape. “Mine Host” even began the
old sport of falconry. “At my first arrival in these parts,” said he,
“I practiced to take a lanneret, which I reclaimed, trained, and made
flying in a fortnight, the same being a passenger at Michaelmas.” An odd
fragment of history, this young New England hawk sent over seas to fly
some English field!
Rarest touch of all, none need remain sad at the Merry-Mount. At the
field “there was a water, by mee discovered, most excellent for the cure
of melancholly.”
Trade flourished. The Elizabethan spirit, for all its poetic quality,
was practical enough, and Morton was no middle-aged carousing ass, or
befuddled idler. He found the furs he wanted because he sought them out,
and because he had a country-born instinct for the ways of the natural
world, an English sportsman’s training, and a genial humanity wide enough
to include the Indians as members of the human race.
Unhappy Indians of the Great Bay of the Massachusees! Some terrible and
unknown plague had descended upon them in the winter of 1616-17, and
almost destroyed them from off the earth. They were a broken people,
wandering about the lands of the ancestors like the ghosts of their race.
In April, 1623, on very slight provocation, Standish had “massacred”
seven of their men in cold blood; the word is that used by Charles
Francis Adams. As Cotton Mather observed with charity eighty years later,
“the woods were almost cleared of these pernicious creatures to make room
for a better growth.”
Such were the forlorn, quiet, and broken people who found an
understanding friend in the poet host of Merry-Mount. Like any good
scholar of his day, he thought them possibly the relics of the scattered
Trojans! “I am bold to conclude,” begins Mine Host, “that the original
of the natives of New England may well be conjectured to be from the
scattered Trojans after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”
He would not sell them drink, for he pitied them, and, moreover, he
was no man to want a drunken savage shattering the pleasant notes of
an old English pipe with a primitive strain. He told them that wine
was among the English “a sachem’s drink.” He could not discern the
religious-mindedness others had noted in the redskins. “For my part,”
declared Mine Host, “I am more willing to beleeve that the Elephants
(which are reported to be the most intelligible of all beasts) doe
worship the moon.” “Poor, silly lambes,” he called the dispossessed and
unfortunate creatures when they came to lament over their old benefactor
sitting ignominiously in the Puritan stocks.
Presently rumours arrive from Plymouth; the brethren look with anger at
the Mount. Morton’s five young exiled Englishmen are in their eyes,
“a drunken and deboste crew”; Morton himself is the “lord of Misrule”
maintaining a “school of atheism.” This last is patently a gibe at
Morton’s religious affiliations. A stout churchman by temperament and
conviction, Morton still held to the typical Elizabethan attitude that
matters of religion were best decided by the great and the learned of the
realm. In the good old Merry England days, for instance, Parliament had
on several occasions re-defined the Deity and nobody had been a penny the
worse.
Anger at Plymouth, where men are forbidden to rejoice at the ancient
and beloved festival of Christmas, anger at Plymouth because there is
merriment in the land as well as fear and stern repression, anger at
Plymouth because the diligence and business shrewdness of the lawyer
from Merry England has cut into their trade in furs. The shoe pinches,
the shoe spiritual and the shoe worldly. Clouds begins to gather on the
bright waters of the woodland bay.
The intense New England autumn comes with the first swift frost, the long
winter follows, snow lies deep on the great field, and beyond the field,
ice flats cover the bay to open water of the bitterest, coldest green.
“The aire doth begett good stomacks,” said Mine Host of Merry-Mount. In
the log house on the knoll, so many worlds apart in spirit from the log
house by shallow Plymouth Bay, fires leap merrily, ducks turn on the
spits, pannikins of wine grow warm on the embers’ edge; Morton sits with
his hand over the arm of his chair, and strokes the head of his “dogge.”
The Forest of Arden it is, and winter no such dread enemy after all.
Then, with its strange passion and violence, arrives the New England
spring. The country gentleman from England will show the “precise
separatists” how in Merry England of Church and King, is freely kept an
honest holiday. The first of May is approaching; he will go to the wood
and find a tree worthy to be the first Maypole in New England! Such a one
shall brew a barrel of ale, and such one shall roll out the latest barrel
of “good _Rosa Solis_” to the new born splendour of the sun!
The first of May in the year 1627, a fresh New England morning with the
sky still cool and silvery blue, and the trees thrusting out little,
cautious leaf tips “the size of a mouse’s ear.” Music in the greenwood,
merry music with an honest tune, the old, sweet, human music one might
hear in Master William Shakespeare’s comedies in London over the sea.
As the light ripens over the tawny eastern marsh now interwoven with
the faint emerald green of the new growth, and his good majesty the sun
climbs into the bright New England air, “Mine Host” steps from his house
of logs to proclaim an English holiday! Heigho, be jolly, under the
greenwood tree, for icicles shall no more hang by the wall; it is the
first of May!
The New England robins pipe, and cock their heads to one side as Mine
Host reads his proclamation, and their piping dies in a great shout as
the merry advocate completes the mock solemnity. Guests have already
arrived, more are coming across the bay in their little boats, some are
hastening to the Merry-Mount along the brambly woodland trails. The ever
hungry crew from Wessagusset is at hand, stray planters arrived within
the year, and perhaps the captain of a trading ship and his chorusing,
sunburnt tars. One hears the music, the wholesome, natural gaiety, the
knock of pewter mugs on wooden table tops, and men singing. To these
exiles, the festival meant the first touch of home they had in the
wilderness. That tall, soldier-like lad of Morton’s company, Tom Gibbons,
will “get religion,” and end his days as a pillar of the Puritan state;
little does he foresee such a change as he waves his pewter mug about!
A health to Master Thomas Morton of the Merry-Mount, and a fig for all
who doubt that laughter is the truest distinguishing mark twixt man and
beast! “Mine Host” was well prepared, he had brewed a huge barrel of
“excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other
good cheare for all comers of the day.”
Higher climbs the spring tide sun, lower sinks the good liquor in
“barrell and botel”; it is time to sweep together up the knoll to the
Maypole of New England!
The pole lay upon the ground, on the height of a knoll commanding the
field and the sea. It was a noble pine mast, some eighty feet high,
wreathed about with flowers and garlands of the New England spring, and
somewhere near the top of it, a fine pair of garlanded antlers served as
a rustic crown. Amid a thousand, noisy, contradictory counsels the pole
is raised, the gods alone know how, and now comes a young lad of Morton’s
company to sing the song the merry advocate has composed in honor of the
day.
“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes!
Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s ioyes;
Io to Hymen, now the day is come
About the merry Maypole take a Roome.
Make greene garlons; bring bottles out
And fill sweet nectar freely about.
Uncover thy head and feare no harme,
For hers good liquor to keepe it warme.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Nectar is a thing assign’d
By the Deities owne minde
To cure the hart opprest with greif,
And of good liquors is the chiefe.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Give to the mellancolly man
A cup or two of’t now and than;
This physic soone revive his bloud
And make him be of a merrier moode.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,
No Irish stuff nor Scotch o’er worne,
Lasses in beaver coats come away
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.”
There is a stir in the greenwood at the close of the song, and through
the bushes come trooping the last of the Massachusees. Morton had not
forgotten his Indian neighbors. Tall, naked, coppery warriors, and Indian
lasses in beaverskin coats have arrived to share in the merriment of
Merry-Mount. English planter and Indian brave join hands, Morton seizes
the brown fingers of two tawny princesses; all join hands, and round
and about the pole dance the fantastic company mid the wild uproar of
a drunkenly beaten drum, shouts, the thunderous roar of old-fashioned
muskets, and the faint silvery piping of an English melody. Is there
a stranger picture in all American history than this revel at the
Merry-Mount, this glimpse of tawny bodies, beaver coats, English sailors
in great Dutch breeches, and Morton, in his London best?
Nailed to the Maypole itself was a festival poem which “being
Enigmattically composed pusselled the Separatists most pittifully to
expound it.”
At nightfall there must have been many a befuddled head, and on the
following morn, a sizeable crew at the spring so efficacious against the
“melancholly.” But serious business was in the air, for the scandalised
brethren of Plymouth had resolved on action, and Miles Standish was soon
to descend on the disturber of Israel. The merry advocate knew where the
wind lay. “The setting up of this Maypole,” he wrote in later years,
“was a lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists who lived at New
Plimmouth. They termed it an Idoll, yea, the Calfe of Horeb, and stood at
defiance with the place naming it Mount Dagon, threatning to make it a
woeful mount and not a merry-mount.”
It was Morton’s custom to go to Wessagusset once in a while, as he says,
“to have the benefit of company,” and there Standish found and secured
him. That he did not secure the poet well enough is apparent from the
fact that Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn escaped that night from his
captors, and made his way through a wild thunderstorm to his beloved
Merry-Mount.
There was a tremendous to-do on finding that the “Lord of Misrule” had
“flowne.” In “Mine Host’s” own words....
“The word which was given with an alarme, was,—o he’s gon!—he’s gon!—What
shell wee doe, he’s gon!—the rest (halfe asleepe) start up in a maze,
and, like rames, ran their heads one at another at full butt in the
darke. Theire grand leader, Captaine Shrimpe, took on most furiosly to
see the empty nest and the bird gon. The rest were eager to have torne
theire haire from theire heads; but it was so short that it would give
them no hold.”
Standish, however, returned to the Merry-Mount for his prisoner. Some
kind of judicial legerdemain took place at Plymouth, and Morton was
sent to England as prisoner. The specific charge against him was the
sale of firearms to the Indians. The arrest was illegal, the whole
process and the imprisonment an outrageous injustice, and there is not
a scrap of real evidence to show that there was a word of truth in the
specific charge. On Morton’s arrival in England, the English authorities
recognised the true state of affairs, and instantly released the prisoner.
It had been wisely observed that Puritanism is not so much a form of
religion as an attitude to life, and that there are Puritan sects in
Islam as well as in eastern and western Christianity. A meeting of the
mind which comes into the world already “Puritan,” and the mind which
is liberal by temperament has always meant a struggle, and the first
named has never troubled to make a declaration of war, but has offered
instant battle to his soul’s antagonist. Once victorious, the repressive
type has shown no mercy to victims of its aggression. The story of the
merry man of the Merry-Mount is the tale of such a challenge and such a
defeat. His May day revel was no orgy of “beastlie practices” worthy of
the “madd Bacchinalians,” nor did his verses “tend to lasciviousness”;
it was simply an English country revel such as he must have often
witnessed in his youth. And in historic justice to Morton, it ought to be
remembered that the good fathers of Plymouth, ministering angels as they
were beside the repressers at Boston, exemplified the “Puritan” attitude
in every moment of their lives, that they had been difficult to deal
with in England, and that they had on several occasions severely tried
the tempers of their exceedingly tolerant hosts at Leyden. Theirs is a
large documentation, and the facts are clear. Morton, moreover, suffered
because he was a stray communicant of the Church of England. In his case
Puritan antagonism for such as held a contrary attitude to life mingled
with the _odium theologicum_ to beget what began as injustice and ended
as cruel persecution.
So ends the Maypole scene of the comedy. There was a sequel, for Morton
returned. The beauty of the New England wilderness had stirred the heart
of this vagabond country gentleman, and moreover, he had property and an
investment to protect. During his stay in England, the Puritans under
Endecott and Winthrop began the settlement of “the Great Bay of the
Massachusees.” What happened to the merry-maker when he fell into such
hands is a tale for philosophers.
V
The Puritan settlement at Boston having been accomplished, the domain
of Merry-Mount became part of the Puritan jurisdiction, and one of
Endecott’s first acts was to go to the Mount, cut down the Maypole, and
admonish the forlorn little band “to look ther should be better walking.”
The surviving members of Morton’s company had not been attracting
attention in any way, and Endecott’s visit was simply an outlet to the
man’s hunger to punish. He was presently, for a very minor offence, to
cut off the ears of an unfortunate home-sick Englishman, a member of the
Church of England, who had been so browbeaten by “the saints” that he was
half a madman. One of the saints in England ventured to send a warning
to the New England brethren that there were already “diverse complaintes
against the severity of your government, especially Mr. Indicutts, and
that he shall be sent for over, about cutting off the Lunatick man’s
ears.”
This thin-lipped man, with the icy and merciless eyes,—his portrait
may be seen on the walls of the Massachusetts Historical Society,—was
presently to judge the “Lord of Misrule.” For Thomas Morton was once
more in his “Canaan.” While in London, he had been of service to Isaac
Allerton, an agent of Plymouth Colony, and Allerton had outraged Plymouth
by bringing back the disturber. There is still something mysterious about
this return with Allerton; it may be that Morton arranged it for the sake
of its irony.
From Plymouth, Morton went boldly to his property at the Merry-Mount, and
with great courage ventured to brave the Puritan tyranny. At a general
court in Salem, he very rightly refused to sign some hodgepodge of the
Mosaic law and English custom which the saints intended as a kind of
constitution, making his assent conditional on the addition of the
words,—“So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the laws of the
Kingdom of England.”
The refusal marked him for destruction. Now comes his arrest and trial on
the most trivial of charges; he had, so the saints protested, “taken away
a canoe from some Indians.” A delightful touch of Puritan love for the
redskin. “Charges,” wrote Mr. Charles Francis Adams, who was no partisan
of Morton’s, “which amount to absolutely nothing.” What chance had this
English gentleman, who knew himself to be a subject of King Charles and
whose soul was still a subject of Elizabeth, in this court composed of
seventeenth century Englishmen labouring under the extraordinary delusion
that they were primitive Jews of the Arabian desert? Once more the man of
Cliffords was condemned, set in the stocks, his property confiscated, and
he was sent to England penniless and half-starved for lack of money to
buy food.
Nothing can excuse this brutal, inhuman, and lawless condemnation. Now
comes a typical Puritan touch of vindictiveness. His persecutors waited
till the vessel carrying Morton to England came in sight of Merry-Mount,
and then set the house at the Mount afire, so that their victim might
see the destruction of his property. “That the habitation of the wicked
appear no more in Israel” wrote Winthrop sententiously. Was there ever
anything more heartless?
Poor “Mine Host” of the festal Maypole! “The smoake that did ascend,”
said he, “appeared to be the very sacrifice of Kain. Mine Host (that a
farre of abourd a ship did there behold this woeful spectacle) knew not
what he should doe in this extremity but beare and forbeare as Epectetus
says: it was bootless to exclaime.... The stumpes and postes in their
black livery will mourne.” And he cried, “Cruell Schismaticks!”
A campaign of slander now followed the violence, and it was whispered
about that the Lord of Misrule had been sent for on “a foule suspition of
murther.” There is no trace of any warrant, there is no trace of crime
committed by Morton; the one actual fact is that the English authorities
again delivered the prisoner. The source of the libel has recently been
uncovered; it was the pretty thought of Morton’s delightful stepson!
As Morton continued to live in England quite unmolested, though with
a vindictive enemy at his heels, it may be safely said that the whole
slanderous attack was a pure fabrication. Tested in England, the scene
of the supposed high crimes and misdemeanours, the slanderous charges
evaporate into unlovely wisps of Puritan malice and the imagination of a
blackguard being sued by his sister for withholding her marriage portion.
Years pass, the last of Elizabeth’s Merry England melts away, Oberon and
Titania forsake the moonlit glade, and a sullen and apprehensive England
rises against its Stuart king. An old man in his seventies watches the
tumult, his eyes full of memories. Far away from the storm, over the wide
Atlantic, lies new Canaan where the sun itself is like _Rosa Solis_,
where the tawny braves walk the trails of the greenwood, the sea birds
feed by the marsh, and the plover rises piping from the grass. His Forest
of Arden! And Merry-Mount is there where he played Mine Host, raised the
antlered Maypole, and proclaimed an English holiday. He will return there
again with his “dogge” and fowling piece; he is old now, and even the
Puritan magistrate will be content to let him spend his old age roaming
the fields. Little he knew the Puritan mind!
In the summer of 1643, he lands at Plymouth; one party is in favor of
handing him over at once to the Boston magistrates; Governor Bradford,
however, himself along in years, will suffer him to spend the winter
in the Plymouth jurisdiction. The next spring, in compliance with this
condition, the old man leaves Plymouth, and travels about; he goes to
Rhode Island and to Maine. As he goes, Endecott watches him like a hawk.
There comes some unlucky slip, a moment’s entrance, perhaps, into the
Massachusetts jurisdiction; the warrant is already at hand, and the old
Lord of Misrule is once more in the hands of his old persecutor. Again
he was brought to trial before Winthrop and Endecott. On trial for what?
For having, in England, “made a complaint against us at the council
board.” How a criminal offence could be manufactured out of an English
subject’s proper appeal to the head of the state did not worry Winthrop
or his fellow casuists. They were both the law and the judges of the law.
Some of the “evidence” had been collected by Winthrop’s pretty trick of
opening his opponents’ letters.
Owing to Morton’s being “old and crazy,” wrote Winthrop, “we thought not
fit to inflict corporal punishment on him but thought better to fine
him.” What a smug air of self-approval there is in this phrase! It has
not been hidden from impartial history, however, the other side of the
story. Winthrop and Endecott actually kept the broken old man in prison
a year, and caused him to pass through the bitterness of a New England
winter without a fire, without bedding, and with fetters on his limbs.
Regaining his liberty only after a piteous plea, he made his way to the
little royalist colony at Agamenticus in Maine. Let us hope there were
some good souls about to welcome and understand the poet of Merry-Mount.
Two years at Agamenticus, the hill seen afar over the sea as a high blue
dome; two years among friendly folk, and then Morton of Merry-Mount
wanders from earth to the Elysian fields where Good Queen Bess still
reigns, and Shakespeare and Ben Jonson dwell, and no man strives to shape
into some petty human scheme the mighty purposes of the Lords of Life.
In _Cyrano de Bergerac_, De Guiche and Cyrano discuss Don Quixote’s
famous battle with the wind mills. “Beware of such a battle,” says De
Guiche; “you will be hurled into the mire.” And Cyrano replies—“Or
upwards to the stars.”
_Five_: JAMES BRUCE
_Five_: JAMES BRUCE
I
A tall, broad-shouldered, powerful man, a man six feet four inches in
height, sitting on “the largest horse ever seen in Scotland.” “Mr.
Bruce ... is the tallest man you ever saw gratis,” said laughing Fanny
Burney. Not a colossus or a Hercules like Belzoni, but a kind of
eighteenth-century adult Olympian quite aware of the prestige of height
and fine carriage, with the tolerant and humorous eye of an observer of
life, and something of the pride and composure of a well-born Scottish
gentleman.
The children of the folk who lived upon his estate used to stare at the
huge man on the giant black horse. Their fathers had told them that the
laird had visited the strangest kingdom in all the world, and that he had
loved a great queen who was fair as the lady of Sheba in the Bible, and
wore a golden crown. Sometimes at the “great house,” he would sit for
hours in a chair, clad in magnificent robes, and the serving folk would
whisper among themselves that the master was thinking of the old days and
the great queen.
Sometime in the middle years of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary
letter arrived at the house of His Majesty’s Prime Minister. It was
addressed to “Mr. Pitt, Vizir of England”; its sender was the Dey of
Algiers, and its message was terse and to the point. “Your consul in
Algiers,” said the missive, “is an obstinate person and like an animal.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Pitt, “who is His Majesty’s consul at Algiers?”
A look at some great ledger, full of the brim of clerkly penmanship, and
a question or two among the staff, soon elicited an answer. The consul
at Algiers was Mr. James Bruce, a young Scot of excellent family, who
had been recommended to the post by the honourable Lord Halifax. This
young man was the son of David Bruce of Kinnaird in Stirlingshire, he
had had an English education from tutors in London and at Harrow school,
and he was interested in travel and archæological research. “Humph,”
says Mr. Pitt, “anything else.” Yes, there was more to the story; he had
married the daughter of a prosperous London wine merchant, taken over the
business and then resigned it to his brother on the death of his wife
scarce a year after the marriage. He had travelled in Spain, studied
Arabic at the Escorial, was said to be “extremely good tempered and a
good scholar.” And here was the Dey of Algiers saying that he was “like
an animal.”
[Illustration: JAMES BRUCE]
The angry phrase of the Dey, however, was quite natural. As master of a
piratic kingdom cravenly humoured by the European powers, he had grown
accustomed to obedience of the most servile kind from all Christians
resident in his territories. If there is one supremely discreditable
episode in the history of what is ironically called Western Christendom,
it is surely this matter of the relations of the European powers and
the Barbary pirates. Great European nations faint-heartedly directed
their consuls to submit to incredible degradations,—the French consul in
Bruce’s time had been loaded with fetters and harnessed to a cart for
venturing to protest at some exaction, and another consul with gouty feet
threatened with the bastinado—many thousands of unhappy European sailors
were allowed to pass into the living death of Moorish slavery, and the
cut-throat authors of these outrages timidly flattered and paid. The
bare historical account does not tell the story; the reality of it is a
ship’s crew of weary, thirsty and cruelly-beaten men standing fettered in
the white glare of the Algerian sun, hearing “Christian dog” hurled at
them like a stone meant to wound.
With the arrival of his British Majesty’s new consul, Mr. James Bruce
of Stirlingshire, a brave spirit had appeared in this world of fatuous
pusillanimity. The tall, composed Scot was decidedly not the man who
would submit to degradation or any filthy foolery. When he had to fight,
he fought, whether the case in hand was the rescue of some poor tar
from his Moorish chains, or the protection of some minor official of
the consulate. His composure and good humour,—there is a kind of good
humour secretly rooted in the quality of courage—discomfited his pirate
neighbours, for they knew that he knew that his life was in danger. The
ferocious old shark of a Dey, being thus put out, had then addressed his
complaint to the “Vizir” of England.
History does not record what Mr. Pitt did or said on this occasion, but
it does mention that the tall consul who annoyed the Dey of Algiers by
looking him squarely in the eye decided to waste no more time among these
uninteresting sea jackals and slavers. He had taken the post of Algiers,
not because he sought the haven of political office, but because he hoped
to make his position a passport to North Africa. There were Roman ruins
about, in Bruce’s own words “the large and magnificent remains of ruined
architecture ... of exquisite elegance and perfection” and Bruce was a
true son of a century that went in for ruins and elegance.
Now comes his resignation from the post at Algiers and his appearance
in a new rôle. He will roam the coast in the character of an itinerant
Christian physician, a dervish of the art of healing. At Algiers he had
prevailed upon the naval surgeon attached to the Consulate to teach him
a little eighteenth century medicine, and had been quite successful with
his “purgings, vomitings and bleedings.” This quasi-knowledge was to be
of the greatest use to him in after life. “I flatter myself,” said he,
“no offence, I hope, I did not occasion a greater mortality among the
Mohametans and Pagans abroad than may be attributed to some of my brother
physicians among their fellow Christians.” When the parson of the
Consulate left, he took on the marrying and baptising.
In 1765, the year of his resignation from his post at Algiers, this
paragon of consuls was thirty-five years old. He had some resources
of his own, he was alone in life, and he had seen just enough of the
world to make him wish to see more. A thirst for travel, like appetite,
grows with indulgence. The mental fire driving him to his future of
extraordinary adventure was an intellectual curiosity, and as one reads
his own account of his vagabondage, one feels that he was far more
interested in the human world than in the natural. He wanted to see
people and events, and he went to strange countries because events and
people there would be supremely worth while. This point of view again is
decidedly of the eighteenth century. Just now, however, Roman ruins are
on his mind, and he is gathering together an expedition.
A notion suddenly checks him. The Dey has resented his demeanour, and may
possibly take revenge by refusing him an authorisation to go about in his
dominions. And now a great surprise, for presently an obsequious official
comes from the Dey bringing passes and an authorisation whose like had
never before been issued to a foreigner, and a pair of “presents.” The
presents are two grinning, good-natured young Irishmen, who stand in the
courtyard clad in the scanty rags tossed to Christian slaves, and with
the usual chains upon their legs. These young Celts, deserters from the
Royal Navy to the Spanish service, had been captured and enslaved by the
Algerians.
What can such an excess of benevolence mean? Little by little the story
comes to Bruce’s ears; the old Dey has secretly admired his courage all
the while.
The autumn of the year finds the antiquarian “dervish,” sketch-book
in “hand, wandering off into the interior of the Barbary States”; he
explores the dry, treeless mountain land of North Africa searching for
temples and ruins, he ventures to the edge of the desert and sketches the
Roman columns of some dead city overwhelmed by time, silence and sand.
One pictures the antiquarian expedition led by this composed Olympian
Scot, with a rich sense of humour lying half hid in a keenly intelligent
eye, the cavalcade consisting of the Irish sailors, a young Italian
architectural draughtsman, one Luigi Balugani, and Moorish attendants.
A classical column or a Roman shrine, suddenly seen through village
palms, brings all to a halt, quiet descends, pencils flourish busily,
measurements are taken; then follows the papery snap of a closing
sketch-book, a stir of hoofs, a variety of equine snorts, and off goes
the sometime consul of the eighteenth century in search of more antique
“magnificence.”
At El Djem, the huge amphitheatre which is larger than the colosseum at
Rome, had just had “two sections” blown to pieces to prevent its being
used as a fortress by marauding tribes. A rumour stirred the camp, a
rumour of a petrified Roman city with “petrified men and horses, women
at the churn, the little children, the cats, the dogs, and the mice.” A
romantic tale; indeed, it was all romance!
At Tunis the expedition gathered in one Osman, a “French renegade,” “very
brave,” says Bruce, “but he needed a sharp lookout that he did not often
embroil us where there was access to women or to wine.”
“I believe I may confidently say,” wrote Bruce, “that there is not either
in the territories of Algiers or Tunis a fragment of good taste of which
I have not brought a drawing to Britain.”
Adventure by sea now awaited this cultural cavalcade. Arriving at
Ptolemais, a small port of Tripolitania, the whole muster of Moors,
sailors, and attendants took passage on a small Greek junk bound for
Crete. The African littoral being in the grip of a famine, the ship had
arrived from Crete with a cargo of corn. Returning to Crete, a storm
presently gathered up the vessel, and wrecked her on the Libyan shoals.
Bruce swam ashore, and falling into the hands of Arabs who had come to
plunder the wreck, was stripped naked, and beaten. Painfully hurt, and
ignorant of the fate of his goods and his company, he took refuge from
the continuing storm in the lee of bush. In the morning an old man and a
number of young men came up to where he was sitting. Then Bruce:
“I gave them the salute _Salam alicum!_ which was only returned by one
young man in a tone as if he wondered at my impudence. The old man then
asked me Whether I was a Turk, and what I had to do there? I replied I
was no Turk, but a poor Christian physician, a dervish that went about
the world seeking to do good for God’s sake, and was then flying from
famine and going to Greece to get bread. He then asked me if I was a
Cretan? I said I had never been in Crete, but came from Tunis, and was
returning to that town, having lost everything I had in the shipwreck of
that vessel. I said this in so despairing a tone that there was no doubt
left with the Arabs that the fact was true. A ragged, dirty barracan was
immediately thrown over me and I was ordered up to a tent in the end of
which stood a long spear thrust through it, a mark of sovereignty.”
Little by little the company and even the baggage come to light. The
wanderings begin again; they become confused and difficult to follow; the
tall Scot is acquiring a touch of the true vagabond mind; one now finds
him roaming everywhere, ruin or no ruin. The sailors are sent home; the
company drops away; his young Italian architectural draughtsman, Luigi
Balugani, is now with Bruce, now waiting in some end-of-the-world town
for his return.
Somewhere in Northern Africa he encounters a tribe who eat lions, and
shares their repast. “The first was a he-lion, smelling violently of
musk.... I then had a lion’s whelp six or seven months old; it tasted on
the whole the worst of the three.”
In Egypt he ascended the Nile, fought off bandits in the Valley of the
Kings, made friends with Ali Bey, governor of Egypt, and his Vizir, a
Copt given to astrology. His fame as wandering Christian physician had
opened the door, for Moslem rulers in the eighteenth century were as
eager to have Christian physicians as Christian rulers were to have
Moslem physicians in the twelfth. A case of telescopes, to which he clung
with a true Scot’s persistence, won for him the special standing of an
astrologer. As a reward for treating Ali Bey, the governor obtained from
Constantinople a kind of supreme _laissez passer_, “a firman of the Grand
Signor wrapped up in green taffeta, magnificently written and titled and
the inscription powdered with gold dust.” Ali Bey also gave him a letter
to Ras Michael, lord of Abyssinia.
The western coast of the Red Sea is a thing of lifeless burning rock and
glaring beaches of blazing white sand; in the eighteenth century the
region was still nominally a part of the Turkish Empire, and Turkish
officials dwelt in the coral houses, and waddled to the beach to plunder
travellers standing bewildered in the apocalyptic sun. In 1769, a
tall man arrived who looked his would-be plunderers in the face, and
even managed to awe them with his letter from the “Grand Signor” with
its powder of gold. This gentleman was the Laird of Kinnaird, for His
Majesty’s late consul at Algiers had succeeded to the paternal estate.
The Laird of Kinnaird seeing the world as a Frankish dervish! Balugani,
the draughtsman, was still with him; the young artist must have beep
something of a man.
“The noblest of all occupations,” wrote Bruce in later times, “is that
of exploring the distant parts of the Globe.” The Laird of Kinnaird was
on his way to perhaps the most inaccessible country of his world, a land
forgotten for five hundred years in the forests of Africa. Mr. Bruce had
determined to reach the Kingdom of Abyssinia.
II
The forest kingdom of Abyssinia lies on a high and isolated plateau
lifted above the tropical greenery of equatorial Africa; its slopes are
steep, and its approaches mountainous and difficult. Once arrived on
the heights, the traveller finds himself on a kind of land island with
its own temperature, mountain-top climate, its own forest bred of the
strange union of the fierce equatorial sun and the cool heights, and its
own island people dwelling aloof in space and time. Though dark skinned,
these folk are not negroes, but some Hamitic folk with a strong infusion
of Jewish blood.
Their kingdom is one of the oldest in the world; their rulers claim
descent from a son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. Converted centuries
ago from primitive Judaism to the Christianity of the African mind, this
singular mingling of the testaments under the sun of Africa produced a
kind of Jewish Christianity unique in the Christian world.
A forest land spread over mountains, a land thronged with black folk
carrying burdens through mountain jungles, a land of lions roaring in
the night, a land of spring rains and flooded water courses, a land of
great feudal nobles clad in bright robes and riding with bare feet in the
stirrup, a land of Biblical blood justice, Christian wonder-workings,
wars and rumours of wars, a land whose sun beat through trees like a vast
and terrible white sword, a land where almost the first thing seen by
Bruce was the stuffed skin of a malefactor swinging from a tree.
The Laird of Kinnaird had arrived at the court of Saul, King of Israel.
It was all there, the battles, the adventure, the death, the colour, and
the cruelty. The head of the state was Ras Michael, governor of Tigre,
the seventy-year-old soldier and intriguer who had assassinated one king,
poisoned another and was now ruling in the name of a third. Like men
coming one after the other to try a feat of strength, great feudal nobles
and confederacies gathered together to thrust him from power; there were
constant battles and new confederacies, and then the slinking hyenas
carrying off human carrion in the night of forest shadows, brilliant
stars and the odour of the battlefield. And in the morning priests,
who wore the robes of the priests of Solomon, marching in company to
sacrifice to the Sun.
The journey from the coast to Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia, took
Bruce and his young Italian companion ninety-five days. Both made the
journey wearing white Moorish robes.
Save for three Franciscan friars, of whose fate nothing is known, and of
a certain French surgeon, no European had been seen in Abyssinia for
close upon two hundred years. Bruce’s arrival had a decidedly dramatic
quality. An epidemic of the smallpox had fallen upon the land; the nobles
lay dying; the great houses trembled for their sons. Suddenly at the
end of the caravan road had appeared the tall Laird of Kinnaird in his
character of an observer and wandering physician.
A European and a wise man in their midst! It is the finger of Heaven! An
attendant comes begging him to visit Ras Michael’s son, the young warrior
Ayto Consu, who is dying of the plague.
Into the great dark den of the African palace walks the tall man who
looked the Dey of Algiers squarely in the eye; he hears uneasy breathing
in the half-darkness, and sees a magnificent youth tossing about on a
bed of animal skins. A woman of extraordinary beauty and stateliness
approaches; it is the Ozoro Esther, old Ras Michael’s young wife, and
young mother of the warrior lad. This Biblical queen, this great lady of
the ancient court of Israel, was to be Bruce’s unfailing friend and kind
protectress.
Bruce opens the doors and windows, fumigates the rooms with incense and
myrrh, and washes them with vinegar and warm water. The young prince
passes the crisis of the plague, and lives.
The incident gives Bruce a name and a place. He is no longer the unknown
European, but Yagoube, which is James,—Yagoube the physician, counsellor,
and spring of secret wisdom. Slaves bring him new and clean clothes in
the fashion of Gondar the capital. “My hair was cut round, curled and
perfumed in the Amharic fashion, and I was thenceforward in all outward
appearance a perfect Abyssinian.” From this day on, he will be a noble
of the Abyssinians, he will ride with them, surprise them with his
marksmanship, and follow them to battle with the wild, half-negro tribes.
He found the rôle of physician counsellor a congenial one, and carried
it through with the best of humour. He thus described his visit to a
young Abyssinian princess; the account and the humour of it are very
characteristic of the man.
“The young patient being brought forward, soon after, one of the slaves,
her attendant as in a play, pulled off the remaining part of the veil
that covered her. I was astonished at the sight of so much beauty ...
the rest of her dress was a blue shift which hung loosely about her and
covered her down to her feet, though it was not very rigorously nor very
closely disposed all below her neck. She was the tallest of the middle
size, and not yet fifteen years of age, her whole features faultless....
Such was the beautiful Aiscach, daughter of the eldest of the ladies I
was then attending.
“If Aiscach was ill,” said her mother, “you would take better care of
her than of either of us.” “Pardon me,” said I, “Madam, if the beautiful
Aiscach was ill, I feel I should myself be so much affected as not to be
able to attend her at all!”
A scuffle with a kinsman of Ras Michael’s led to a feat which became the
talk of Abyssinia.
In the king’s house, Bruce sat discussing the merits of gunnery with
Guebra Mascal, a kinsman of the royal house. The Abyssinian, somewhat the
worse for drink, took exception to something Bruce had said.
“He said I was a Frank and a liar,” Bruce recounted, “and on my
immediately rising up, he gave me a kick with his foot. I was quite blind
with passion, seized him by the throat, and threw him on the ground,
stout as he was.” Guebra Mascal then wounded Yagoube slightly with his
knife, but the giant Scot wrested the knife from his antagonist and beat
him with the handle.
Any disorder in the king’s house being punishable by death, all present
felt uneasy. Steps were taken to hush up the incident, but in some manner
the story reached the ears of the king. The Abyssinian, as the aggressor,
was summoned to the throne.
“What sort of behaviour is this my men have adopted with strangers?”
cried the king. “And with _my_ stranger, too, and in the king’s
palace.... What! am I dead? or become incapable of governing longer?”
Matters seemed about to take an ill turn. At this Bruce became alarmed,
for he was as generous spirited as he was courageous. Hastening to the
palace, he pleaded with the offended king for the life of Guebra Mascal,
and managed to save his life; yet the man long remained his bitter enemy.
The king, however, apparently continued to ponder on the affair, for
presently he sent for the tall physician.
“Yagoube,” said the king, “did you soberly say to Guebra Mascal that an
end of a tallow candle, in a gun in your hand, would do more execution
than an iron bullet in his?”
Said Bruce—“Will piercing the table on which your dinner is served (it
was of sycamore, about three-quarters of an inch thick) at the length of
this room be deemed a sufficient proof of what I advanced?”
“Ah, Yagoube,” said the king, “take care what you say.”
Now follows an odd scene. Yagoube the stranger calls for a gun, and under
the eagerly curious eye of the king and some attendants loads it with
half of “a farthing candle.” Slaves then bring forth three stout battle
shields of toughest and thickest bull hide, and set them one behind the
other. One feels the incredulity, the sense of something miraculous about
to happen, even the little touch of awe.
Now comes quiet, the aiming of the gun, a crash, and a palace room full
of pungent powder smoke. Yagoube’s half of a farthing candle has pierced
all three shields. Then comes the turning on its side of the royal table,
and another roar; the candle has passed through the table top!
The principle involved is a simple matter of physics, but such learning
of the devil had not yet arrived in Abyssinia. The prestige which
Yagoube’s height, composed manner, and well-born air had already won
for him was enormously increased. The old Ras presently heard of it,
and begged the tall physician to repeat his miracle. “Magic!” said the
Abyssinian priests, yet bore their guest no ill will; the exploit was
visible proof of the world by which they lived.
Bruce now brought to light the mission which had really led him to
Abyssinia. He was in search of the source of the Blue Nile, the true Nile
of the ancients. The other half of the mystery, the source of the White
Nile, the Nile of the inundations, apparently did not stir the eighteenth
century mind, and it was not till 1856, when Burton and Speke arrived
at the great Nyanza lakes, that the true source of the floods became
known to modern Europeans. There is interesting evidence that the Romans
possessed the secret, for Nero sent “two centurions” up the river, who
returned with the report that it arose amid “great lakes.”
Yagoube’s notion of “going to see a river and a bog, no part of which
he could take away” seemed incomprehensible to his hosts, and they were
very loath to let him go into the wild, half-hostile hinterland. Coming
to some realisation that his friend’s wish to reach the ancient river was
the ambition of his life, the king solemnly invested Yagoube Bruce, the
Laird of Kinnaird, with the feudal overlordship of the district of Geesh
in which the springs of the Nile arose.
The road between the capital and his fief was a dangerous one, for it
wound through the territories of a quasi-independent native prince named
Fasil, and this prince was hostile to the then rulers of Abyssinia. Would
not Yagoube, their friend, remain with them in the safety of the capital?
Bruce, however, rose to the challenge to his courage and resolution.
Now comes an encounter with Fasil, and the refusal of the chieftain
to let the laird pass. But Yagoube wins in the end, by captivating
the savage with feats of gunnery and horsemanship. Presently Fasil,
completely won, brings Bruce a present of a fine, loose, muslin garment
fit for an African lord, and a handsome grey horse.
“Take this horse,” said the chieftain; “do not mount it, but drive it
before you, saddled and bridled as it is.”
On into the forest goes the tall laird; the savages flee before the
chief’s horse, and fall down before it. On the second of November, 1770,
James Bruce arrives at the Blue Nile.
He stood on the brink of a steep hill, and saw the springs of the river
below, and the river flowing away as a brook that had “scarcely water to
turn a mill.” Hurrying pell-mell down the steep hillside, and falling
twice as he ran, Bruce “the Abyssinian” reached the welling flood. In his
hand he carried a large coconut shell which he had carried with him from
Arabia, and this he filled with Nile water, and tossed off to the health
of King George.
“I was arrived at the source of the Nile,” he wrote, “through numberless
dangers and sufferings the least of which would have overwhelmed me but
for the continual goodness and protection of Providence. I was, however,
but then half through my journey, and all those dangers which I had
already passed awaited me again on my return. I found a despondency
gaining ground fast upon me, and blasting the crown of laurels I had too
rashly woven for myself.”
III
While in Abyssinia, Bruce observed a certain extraordinary custom. Had
he forgotten to mention this custom in the volumes of travel he later
published, he would have done well, for his description of the custom did
more to brand him as a marvel monger than all the rest of the fantastic
realities set down in his careful and accurate history of his Abyssinian
years.
This custom was eating of raw flesh from the living animal.
Bruce had attended the great banquets of raw bullock meat,—exactly such
banquets are served today in the halls of Abyssinia’s present ruler, Ras
Tafari—but he was unfamiliar with the eating of living flesh. Chancing
one day to be riding down a forest road, he encountered two peasants
driving a cow ahead of them. Presently, they became hungry, and Bruce saw
a strange thing. Throwing the cow down, and trussing her securely, Bruce
saw the natives feel the flesh along the backbone with their fingers,
select a place, cut a square flap with a sharp knife, lift up this flap
of hide, and cut themselves a square of living steak. This done, they
put back the flap of hide in place, and tied it down with vegetable
fibres. After their meal they drove the animal on ahead of them down the
road.
Bruce questioned the men, and asked questions about the matter at the
capital, but was told that he had seen nothing unusual.
On his return to Gondar from his expedition to the Nile, he found the
kingdom once more in feudal disorder; enemies of Ras Michael were
gathering their retainers, and the wild Galla tribes had been enlisted in
the fray. The roar of battle and the thunder of charging horsemen shake
the forest land, corpses of traitors and suspected folk hang on all the
trees, the Abyssinian city reeks of death, and at night Bruce is troubled
by hyenas dragging human carrion into the courtyard of his house. The
court goes to battle, and Bruce goes with it to the great African plain
by Gondar. Horsemen gathering by thousands and ten thousands stir the
dust of the field to a tawny cloud, and in the haze their breastplates
and lances catch the sun.
How completely Biblical is this fragment from Bruce’s account of the
battle! “The first person that appeared was Kesla Yasous, and the horse
with him, stretching out his hand (his face being all besmeared with
blood for he was wounded in his forehead) he cried as loud as he could,
‘Stand firm, the king is safe in the valley!’”
The struggle ends in the crushing defeat of Ras Michael, the wild Galla
tribes pour into Gondar, and the old Ruler goes to his palace to await
the end. Alone in the turmoil, but master of himself and unconfused,
Yagoube, the tall Scot, makes his way to the deserted palace of the once
all powerful lord of Abyssinia.
The lives of vagabonds are full of romantic scenes, but there are few
which so stir the imagination as the last meeting of the Laird of
Kinnaird and the able, despotic old man who held kings in the hollow of
his hand. The forest city was still; the great warriors with the mystical
names,—Heart of Christ, Servant of the Holy Ghost, Shield of Jesus, were
dead; the people waited to hear the war cries of the victorious factions
in the streets. Bruce entered the palace unchallenged by a sentry. The
throne room was “hung with mirrors brought at great expense from Venice
by way of Arabia and the Red Sea; they were mostly broken; their copper
gilt frames had been made by some Greek filigrane workers from Cairo.”
And in this empty room of the broken mirrors, magnificently clad in his
robes of scarlet and heavy golden thread, and throned in the seat of
power, sat old Ras Michael silently waiting the arrival of his murderers.
The next morning, Galla savages occupied the palace, and Bruce saw them
grimacing into the mirrors, breaking them, and grinding them to powder.
Ras Michael had been led away. None could tell Bruce of the fate of Ozoro
Esther.
One feels the approaching close of a drama. His old friends dead or
in exile, the court dispersed, and himself heavily in debt, Bruce
presently sought permission to leave Abyssinia. The new rulers were well
disposed to him, and he might have stayed on, and retained his honours,
but his world had been too violently re-made, and the European in him
had awakened. Poor young Balugani had died of dysentery; the long and
perilous journey home would have to be made alone.
The permission to depart was given unwillingly, and only after repeated
entreaty. Once more the Abyssinian forest gathers the laird and his
native escort into its greenery.
Suddenly Bruce sees another cavalcade approaching through the leafy
quiet, and from the dress of the riders knows them to be nobles of the
land. Are they partisans of the victors riding forth to visit the new
lands they have been given, or friends of the old kingdom riding to
silence and exile? The tall laird suddenly reins in his horse with a
start,—the cavalcade is the train of Ozoro Esther. This meeting in the
forest was the last sight tall Yagoube had of his Biblical queen.
Ozoro Esther! Bruce remembered the day when she rose from beside Ayto
Consu’s bed of sickness, and turned to him, superb in her dark and
stately beauty. “But now,” she had said, “if I am not as good a friend to
Yagoube who saved my children as I am a steady enemy to the Galla,—then
say Esther is not a Christian, and I forgive you.” The great lady of the
palace of the broken mirrors was on her way to Jerusalem to pray for Ras
Michael.
“The troops of Begemder have taken away my husband, Ras Michael, God
knows where,” said she.
A romantic episode enough, this meeting in the wood, yet it ends in a
lighter key. Tecla Miriam, a young noblewoman who had chosen to follow
the beautiful Ozoro, turned to Yagoube with a jest. The tall Scot seems
to have been a favourite with the ladies.
“But tell me truly, Yagoube,” said Tecla Miriam, “you that know
everything while peering and poring through those long glasses, did you
not learn by the stars that we were to meet you here?”
“Madam,” answered the laird, “if there was one star in the firmament that
had announced to me such agreeable news, I should have relapsed into the
old idolatry of this country, and worshipped that star for the rest of my
life.”
Instead of returning to Europe by the caravan route to the ports of the
Red Sea, Bruce was on his way down the west slope of the Abyssinian
plateau. At the foot of the wooded mountain slope lay the desert country
of Senaar, and at the edge of the desert lay the Nile. The way proved
long and dangerous. A simoon half smothered Bruce and his faithful
Abyssinian followers, a scoundrelly Arab sheikh abused them and would
have cut their throats and robbed them, and finally the camels began to
die.
In order to save his notes, his observations and his scientific
instruments, Bruce dismounted, and trudged the sand. “In this whole
desert,” he wrote, “there is neither worm, fly, nor anything that has
the breath of life.... My face was so swelled as scarcely to permit me
to see, my neck covered with blisters, my feet swelled and inflamed and
bleeding with many wounds.”
Now came a water shortage, and Bruce and his followers killed two camels
to drink the camel water stored in their bodies. “We drew four gallons
of camel water,” runs the account; “it was indeed vapid and of a bluish
cast, but had neither taste nor smell.” Their strength still continuing
to fail (Bruce had “three large wounds on the right foot, and two large
wounds on the left which continued open”) they determined to save their
lives by throwing away the quadrant, telescopes, and time-keeper and ride
the camels alternately.
On the 28th of November they consumed the last of their black bread
and dirty water, and at seven o’clock in the morning they saw the
distant roofs of Egyptian Assouan. At a quarter to ten, on the 29th of
November, 1772, James Bruce, Laird of Kinnaird, and late Lord of Geesh in
Abyssinia, “arrived in a grove of palm trees” by the Nile. Here friendly
souls helped him, and he even regained his abandoned goods.
IV
The strange things that befall vagabonds on their return! The Laird of
Kinnaird found himself a rich man on his arrival in Stirlingshire. Coal
had been discovered on his properties.
A Scots laird and a travelled gentleman riding about his property on
that largest horse ever seen in Scotland, marrying again and happily,
and bringing up a family. He must have often wondered what became of
all the great folk to whom he had once been Yagoube the counsellor. Ras
Michael,—what of him? Did he ever know that the old man fought his way
back to power, and died still holding the kingdom in his hand? And Ayto
Consu, the young prince with whom he had sworn eternal friendship in the
Abyssinian phrase—“by the heart of an elephant”? And Ozoro Esther whom he
had last seen in the forest going to Jerusalem to pray for Ras Michael,
taken from her by the troops of Begemder?
His story, when he came to tell it, was but half believed. The fierce,
magnificent, passionate revelation offended the eighteenth century mind.
What had a century of laces, gallantry and candles, a century trying
to live by something known as “reason,” to do with this kingdom of the
old, dark deities? The offence to the spirit of the age presently bred
a spirit of denial. “Pshaw,” said the bewigged gentleman, “but does the
dog think to fool us all with his Abyssinian folderol?” Even wise old
Johnson took sides against “the Abyssinian.” It was “Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia” against the reality.
The episode of the repast of living flesh became a thing of derision.
Lord This refused to believe it; Lady That shuddered prettily, the coffee
house wits wrote mocking poetry.
“Nor have I been where men, (what loss, alas!)
Kill half a cow, and turn the rest to grass.”
sang that dull rhymester Peter Pindar, in a tedious epistle to Bruce full
of a stay-at-home’s easy jocosity. Bruce’s one official honour was a
presentation to the king; all other possible glories sank from view in a
rising tide of offended disbelief.
A lesser man, a man less able to see life as a whole, would have borne
the world a sour grudge. Not so the Laird of Kinnaird. He lived out his
years in good temper and unshaken composure. But in his later portraits
there is a look which tells the whole story of his attitude to the
polite world of disbelievers; the words can almost be heard—words
not said angrily or sneeringly, but with well-founded and humorous
conviction—“what incredible fools!”
_Six_: ARTHUR RIMBAUD
_Six_: ARTHUR RIMBAUD
I
In the Paris of the late eighties, when men of letters met for a _p’tit
verre_ or a glass of coffee at a boulevard café, a question was often
asked that had no answer but a shrug—what in heaven’s name had become
of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet? The older men remembered him well, this
overgrown, unmannerly whelp of eighteen who had suddenly appeared among
them from some dull town in the Ardennes, and had made his way into
the literary heart of things; they remembered the sensation which had
followed Verlaine’s publication of his poetry.
What liberties the boy had taken with the spirit and the forms of verse;
the young wipe-nose-on-his-sleeve had disordered the whole world of
poetry with his free rhymes, his poems in prose, his prose in poems, and
his raving sonnets on the colours of vowels. “I accustomed myself,” he
had said, “to direct hallucination, and managed quite easily to see a
mosque where stood a factory, a school of drums kept by angels, wagons
on the roads of heaven, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters
and mysteries, a whole vaudeville, in fact, lifted heads of terror
before me.” He had written of a day in spring, “Lying sprawled in the
valley one feels that the earth is nuptial and overbrims with blood.” A
strange eighteen-year-old! Some remembered the boy in his square-cut,
double-breasted jacket of the seventies, his little, flat, pancake hat,
pipe, and long, womanish hair hiding the back of his collar and touching
his shoulders.
And now the younger generation were reading him with enthusiasm, copying
his mood and manner, and annoying their elders with questions about him.
Tell us of Arthur Rimbaud. Is he still alive? Did he ever actually exist?
Is he simply a ghost whose name Verlaine has chosen as a pseudonym?
“Dead crazy, or king of a desert island,” said the bookish Vanier to
a young student stirred by the reading of Rimbaud’s _Illuminations_.
“On several occasions there have been rumors of his death,” said Paul
Verlaine. “We can not confirm the news, and would be saddened by finding
it the truth.”
[Illustration: ARTHUR RIMBAUD]
What had become of the runaway boy from the Ardennes, the boy with the
sulky mouth and hostile, insolent, and splendid eyes, the boy who ran
away from home to live like a strolling ragamuffin, cheeked his elders,
wrote astounding verses, and first made use of the new and alarming
freedoms of modern poetry?
Had an angel suddenly descended to the boulevards of Paris, grasped a
meditating literary nabob by the hair, and whisked him from his marble
table and his café au lait to the burning beach of French Somaliland,
the man of letters would have found a trader adding up the wriggling
figures of a French account. There would not have been a book about
to suggest literature; the trader was not interested in literature,—a
silly business; he was interested in figures and trade like any sensible
Frenchman with his life to gain. Figures, snaky French fives and sevens
written down in purple ink under the Somali sun, notes about coffee and
hides and firearms. The trader was M. Arthur Rimbaud. Had the nabob
rushed to tell him that all young Paris was buzzing with his name, he
probably would have been greeted with a rather unpleasant laugh.
No account exists in English of the mysterious last years of Rimbaud
turned vagabond and African trader, for the material is difficult to
assemble, and the tale has to be pieced out from notes in stray letters,
reports of the Colonial office, and even the proceedings of British
learned societies. Moreover, there exists no study of the purely vagabond
side of his unique career.
Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville in French Flanders on October
20th, 1854. It is a dull industrial town in a dull region given over to a
Victorian industrialism of weeds, rust, broken windows, and little brick
workshops, an industrialism without any dignity of power.
His father, an army officer, having a roving disposition, and his mother
“an authoritative air,” they agreed to separate, and the boy was brought
up by the mother. The family was not rich exactly, yet was comfortably
off in the careful French way; there were brothers and sisters for Arthur
to grow up with, and things went well enough till Arthur’s fifteenth
year. Then came to pass in that plain bourgeois house a situation quite
without a parallel. Arthur, having grown into a lank, gawky, sulky
boy with large hands and a provincial twang to his speech, began to
develop into a genius with the ripened intellect of an adult, and this
sulky child with the amazing grown-up mind remained subject to the
purse strings and parental direction of a common-place, ill-educated,
middle-aged woman who lacked acuteness of mind to see the change.
Much has been written of Mme. Rimbaud’s “domination” of the prodigy, and
its effect on the boy’s mind. Yet the mother does not appear to have been
unduly harsh or unfeeling; she simply was incapable of understanding the
mind of her son. Moreover, she was not without that sense of terror and
exasperation which consumes parents who find the children of their flesh
developing alien minds and alien ways.
From so grotesque and abnormal a situation, the boy on whom genius had
descended, escaped by running away. He accompanied his mother and sisters
for a walk, pretended to wish to go home to get a book, and disappeared.
This first vagabondage, undertaken in the disordered war-year of 1870,
landed him in the jail for strays and political suspects at Mazas. His
one understanding friend, the young schoolmaster Izambard, then rescued
him, and sent him back to his mother. Mme. Rimbaud was naturally quite
upset. “I fear the little fool will get himself arrested a second time,”
she wrote to Izambard; “he need never then return, for I swear that
never in my life should I ever receive him again. How is it possible to
understand the foolishness of the child, he who is so good and quiet
ordinarily?”
She did not want her Arthur to be a vagabond. The word has a far
different connotation in French than it has in English. In English,
it has acquired something of a poetic flavour; in French it is still
decidedly a term of reproach. The French, who plan their lives and their
children’s lives with a minuteness Englishmen and Americans can never
understand, see nothing romantic in a high road wanderer without a
definite place in life or a definite goal. The sense of the definite goal
is keen in France.
Imagine, then, the anger and despair of Mme. Rimbaud, good Frenchwoman
that she was, when her sixteen-year-old genius took to sleeping in
barns and following the road. She felt the same way about it an English
mother might feel about a son’s inclination to take spoons. There is
still another element in the relation of Arthur and his mother which
escapes the English or American student of Rimbaud’s life, and that is
the supreme place of the parent in the hierarchy of the French family.
Arthur’s escapades were a blow to Mme. Rimbaud’s authority and prestige;
in the eyes of the French neighbourhood Arthur’s vagabondage shamed the
mother as well as the son.
After his first return, the boy endured the old, impossible situation
for a week, and then fled once more from Charleville. Brussels sees him,
and Paris, a boy with worn, dusty clothes staring into the windows of
bookshops. At Paris he joined the Communist army for a while. Having been
given no uniform, he escaped the general massacre of the insurrectionary
troops, and went eastward over the road to Rheims and Château-Thierry. He
had no money, but he had youth, his dreams, and a colossal impudence. On
occasion he would invade houses while the owners were away in the fields,
and go to bed in the best bed. The manœuvre was not always as successful
as the boy might have hoped.
There rises before the mind’s eye a picture of the gawky, impudent,
runaway stripling with the insolent eyes trudging the white roads
of France with their fine, sharp surface dust and underbody hard and
relentless as a ribbon of solid stone; one sees him pass the haycocks
in the fields, the yellow-green of river meadows, the opaque, greenish
streams, the poplars, and village chimneys curling up wood smoke into the
rosy, humid dawn.
The boy enjoyed the bohemian adventure, and found a place in his mind for
its sordid side.
Through 1870 and most of 1871 he comes and goes; he writes, he sulks, he
listens to impressive lectures about the heavy necessity of beginning
to think of a profession or a career. Arthur, sulkily imprisoned in his
abominated Charleville,—“my native town leads in imbecility among small
provincial towns”—had a horror of dull labour. He saw too much of it
about him. “Masters and workmen, yokels all of them, all ignoble. The
hand with the pen is worth the hand with the plough. What a century of
hands!” Said Verlaine, “He had a high disdain for whatever he did not
wish to do or be.”
Presently comes the great change and the first real opportunity. He sends
a sheaf of poems to Paul Verlaine, and Verlaine replies inviting him to
be his guest in Paris.
From an abnormal situation the boy thus advanced to an absurd one. The
Verlaines were poor, and the poet and his seventeen-year-old wife were
living with the wife’s parents in order to save money. They may have been
prepared for the coming of a young man, even a very young man, but this
gawky, queer, unmanageable seventeen-year-old boy...! It is clear that
he soon came to be regarded as an inconvenient intruder by the practical
ladies of the poet’s family.
In spite of his difficulties, many of his own making, the year 1871-’72
was Rimbaud’s great year. He perfected his theory that the maker of
poetry should be a _seer_, and practise “the long, immense, and reasoned
disordering of the senses,” and give to the world “the supreme exaltation
arrived at through things unheard of and unnameable.” The Parisian
literary world, not knowing what to make of art so disorderly and
personal, Rimbaud took his familiar refuge in rudeness. A consciousness
of his genius strengthened the wings of his pride. In odds and ends of
time, in order to gain a little money, he hawked key rings under the
arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. Paris beginning to bore him, he actually
returned for a little time to Charleville.
While Rimbaud was at Charleville, Verlaine, beset by family troubles,
wrote to him begging him to join him in a vagabond tour. Rimbaud, whose
consciousness was melting in the flame of hallucinations and poetic
ecstasies, accepted at once, and in July, 1872, the two poets set off
together. “I sought the sea, as if it were to cleanse me from a stain,”
wrote Rimbaud. A curious pair and a curious pilgrimage. One has a
glimpse of mean lodgings, gutters, roadsides, empty pockets, visions,
exaltations, absinthe, dirt and debt. From Belgium, they went to England,
where each gathered a few pence teaching French. Returning to Brussels
in July, 1873, Verlaine, while in some kind of mental state best studied
by psychopathologists, shot his fellow poet in the wrist with a pistol,
and was promptly imprisoned by the Belgian authorities. The wound was not
serious.
Mme. Rimbaud owned a kind of farm and country house at Roche, and later
in the same month of July she suddenly saw Arthur coming towards the gate
with his arm in a sling. Now comes a problem to be answered by those who
study genius; Rimbaud ceased writing poetry forever. The verse which was
to stir France and mould a world style was thus the work of a boy in his
eighteenth year. What had taken place? Had his capricious genius flown
away to another bough? Had his poetry of visions and hallucinations begun
to uncover mysteries beyond the power of the human spirit to endure? Had
some intense satisfaction he had known in the composition of poetry begun
to fade?
Such is the tale of Arthur Rimbaud’s bizarre career as a poet. Is it a
wonder that the younger generation wished to know what had become of the
man?
II
The poet having ceased to write poetry, a vast part of the house of
the brain now lay dark and tenantless, its emptiness accentuated by a
memory of the lost spirit whose poetic vitality had once filled the
mansion. A wildness of wandering now seized the boy; he was trying to
fill the haunted, echoing rooms as best he could, and like the king in
the parable, he sought his guests on the roads. He goes to Stuttgart to
study German; he crosses the St. Gothard pass on foot and visits Italy;
he pays his lodging with casual labor as he goes. And always searching,
searching, searching with growing exasperation in his tone.
Then Charleville, and a winter picking up Arabian and Russian,—he is
trying to house the intellect in a room once inhabited by something
of the very essence of the spirit,—then a journey through Belgium and
Holland, and a meeting with a Dutch recruiting sergeant who persuaded
him to join the Dutch colonial army. On May 19th, 1876, he signs an
engagement for six years, receives 600 francs as a gratuity, sails for
Java, disembarks at Batavia, serves for three weeks, deserts, and returns
to Europe on an English ship.
Returning to Charleville, he remained there but a short time, and then
hurried to Cologne. A strange new guest had arrived unsought in his
mind’s house, the money-saving instinct, for it is deeper than reason,
of the provident French mind. Its first manifestation was not exactly
a sympathetic one; in fact, the poet’s part in it has a sniff of the
bounder, Latin style. Envying the easy commissions of the sergeant who
had enlisted him, this deserter so loudly sang the praises of the Dutch
Colonial army that he induced a dozen young Germans to accompany him to
Holland and enlist. Rimbaud then pocketed the enlistment commission, and
escaped to Hamburg.
At Hamburg a circus is in need of an interpreter, and the sometime
poet of hallucinations is given the post. With the circus he goes to
Copenhagen, and then flies from it to Stockholm.
The winter of ’78 and ’79 found him in the isle of Cyprus as foreman of
a quarry. The work proved unhealthy, Rimbaud caught typhoid, and in the
summer of 1879 he wandered home to recover. His friend Delahaye, finding
him at the farm of Roche, ventured to ask him if he still had an interest
in literature. Rimbaud shook his head with a smile, as if his thoughts
had suddenly turned to something childish, and answered quietly, “I no
longer concern myself with it.”
In the spring of 1880, the poet being then twenty-six years old, he
returned to Africa and the East, there to spend his last eleven years.
In August, 1880, he was at Aden on the Red Sea, as an employee of the
French trading house of Mazaran, Viannay and Bardey. The town is one of
the most singular and utterly terrible places of the earth.
“You could never come to imagine the place,” wrote Rimbaud. “There is
not a single tree, not even a shrivelled one, not a single blade of
grass, not a rod of earth, not a drop of fresh water. Aden lies in the
crater of an extinct volcano which the sea has filled with sand. One sees
and touches only lava and sand incapable of sustaining the tiniest spear
of vegetation. The surrounding country is an arid desolation of sand. The
sides of the crater prevent the entry of any wind, and we bake at the
bottom of the hole as if in a lime kiln. One must be indeed a victim of
circumstance to seek employment in such hells!”
The house by which Rimbaud was employed traded in Abyssinian ivory, musk,
coffee, and gold, and their Abyssinian station was at Harrar. Rimbaud
having developed a marvellous facility for native languages, he was
presently put in charge of the Abyssinian branch. Harrar stood on an
elevation, and the climate was fair enough, though in the spring rains
it was often damp and cold. The poet wandered about fearlessly, buying
gums and ostrich plumes. It was a busy, confused, uncertain career, and
Rimbaud wrote of it with a snarl. Here he was, buried in a world of
natives, and “obliged to talk their gibberish languages, to eat their
filthy dishes, and undergo a thousand worries rising from their laziness,
their treachery, and their stupidity. And this is not the worst of it;
there is the fear of becoming animalized oneself, isolated as remote as
one is from all intellectual companionship.”
The month of July, 1884, saw the house of Mazaran, Viannay and Bardey
vanish from the scene, and emerge as the property of Bardey. In October,
1885, the poet’s contract with this new Maison Bardey expired, and he
refused to renew it after a “violent scene.” He had spent five years as
a trading agent in Arabia and Abyssinia; he knew the country and its
languages as did no other European, and he thought it time to go into
business for himself. At Aden dwelt another French agent, one Pierre
Labutut, and with this man Rimbaud presently founded a new company.
Old Menelik of Abyssinia wanted guns; he paid fancy prices for rifles,
and Rimbaud and Labutut determined to run in rifles on a grand scale.
They would secure rifles of a disused model in Europe, ship them to Aden,
transfer them to a caravan gathered at Tadjourah on the Somali coast, and
then take them to Choa, and sell them to Menelik. At Liége in Belgium
or at French military depots, old rifles might be had at seven or eight
francs apiece; they would sell them to Menelik for forty francs and the
freight.
It was a difficult and complicated task. There were a thousand things to
be thought of—provisions, salaries, camel hire, extortions, tips, taxes,
impositions, buying and maintenance. The caravan would have to spend
fifty days in a “desert country” among unfriendly tribes.
“The natives along the caravan route are Dankalis,” said Rimbaud; “they
are Bedouin shepherds and Moslem fanatics and they are to be feared.
It is true that we are armed with rifles while the Bedouins have only
lances. Nevertheless, all caravans are attacked.”
A difficulty with the French foreign office over the matter of gun
running now intervened, and then came a serious blow. Labutut died,
deeply in debt, and leaving the weight of the whole complicated
enterprise on Rimbaud’s shoulders. In spite of these checks, however, the
poet went ahead with his scheme and led his caravan to Choa.
The caravan arrived, but the scheme was a failure. “My venture has taken
the wrong turn,” wrote Arthur to Bardey. The huge expenses had not only
eaten up all the expected profits, but had even consumed the little
sum Arthur had managed to amass in the previous years. Yet he paid all
Labutut’s debts and gave a sum to his partner’s young son. “His very
generous and discreet charity,” said Bardey, “was probably one of the
very few things he did without snarling or shrill complaints.”
Then to Cairo with what money he has in a money belt about him. He
“cannot” return to Europe because he would certainly die in the cold
winter, he is too accustomed to a “wandering, free and open life” and
because he has “no position.” That French touch at the end! Presently he
re-establishes himself at Harrar, and manages to gain a modest living.
One sees him at his little trading station cautiously receiving small
shipments of rifles, weighing coffee in scales, and estimating the worth
of his ivory,—a lean, sun-browned French trader in his early thirties. In
1889 he received a letter which must have put a strange look on his face.
It was from a Parisian journalist.
“Sir,” it ran, “living so far away from us, you are doubtless unaware
that in a very small group at Paris, you have become a legendary
personage. Literary reviews of the Latin quarter have published you, and
your first efforts have even been gathered into a book.”
In 1891 an infection of the knee obliged him to return to Europe, an
operation failed to check the malady, and in November he found that
timelessness which he once pictured as “the sea fled with the sun.”
As a personage, Rimbaud remains the most mysterious of all vagabonds.
The ceaseless, embittered, eager search for something that was his
life,—what shall be its last interpretation? Did he seek something which
had fled him, or something to replace the thing which had fled? From the
Latin quarter of the 80’s, with its book shops, its old dank houses, and
drizzling rain of the cloudy Parisian spring to the lifeless oven of
Aden, his mind had known but one aim, and that an aim unlike any other
sought by the great vagabonds. No answer may be found by scanning the
poetry, for Rimbaud the poet and Rimbaud the Somali trader were two men.
Active, nervous, intellectual, difficult and often utterly unpleasant
and unsympathetic, he wanders about his bales of goods in the warehouse
shadows, a mysterious and intriguing figure. After all, though he did
not find the answer he sought—who does?—he found activity, and for him
activity was the soul’s rest.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island.
[2] A type of Russian carriage.
[3] Tip money.
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