The BOOK of
GALLANT VAGABONDS

HENRY BESTON

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

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1925,
By George H. Doran Company

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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.

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?

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.

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.