Henry Beston

“ 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. ”

“ English planter and Indian brave join hands, Morton seizes the brown fingers of two tawny princesses; all join hands, and round and about the pole dance the fantastic company mid the wild uproar of a drunkenly beaten drum, shouts, the thunderous roar of old-fashioned muskets, and the faint silvery piping of an English melody. Is there a stranger picture in all American history than this revel at the Merry-Mount, this glimpse of tawny bodies, beaver coats, English sailors in great Dutch breeches, and Morton, in his London best? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us hope there were some good souls about to welcome and understand the poet of Merry-Mount.
Two years at Agamenticus, the hill seen afar over the sea as a high blue dome; two years among friendly folk, and then Morton of Merry-Mount wanders from earth to the Elysian fields where Good Queen Bess still reigns, and Shakespeare and Ben Jonson dwell, and no man strives to shape into some petty human scheme the mighty purposes of the Lords of Life. ”

“ Ras Michael had been led away. None could tell Bruce of the fate of Ozoro Esther.
One feels the approaching close of a drama. His old friends dead or in exile, the court dispersed, and himself heavily in debt, Bruce presently sought permission to leave Abyssinia. The new rulers were well disposed to him, and he might have stayed on, and retained his honours, but his world had been too violently re-made, and the European in him had awakened. Poor young Balugani had died of dysentery; the long and perilous journey home would have to be made alone. ”

“ In 1765, the year of his resignation from his post at Algiers, this paragon of consuls was thirty-five years old. He had some resources of his own, he was alone in life, and he had seen just enough of the world to make him wish to see more. A thirst for travel, like appetite, grows with indulgence. The mental fire driving him to his future of extraordinary adventure was an intellectual curiosity, and as one reads his own account of his vagabondage, one feels that he was far more interested in the human world than in the natural. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Anger at Plymouth, where men are forbidden to rejoice at the ancient and beloved festival of Christmas, anger at Plymouth because there is merriment in the land as well as fear and stern repression, anger at Plymouth because the diligence and business shrewdness of the lawyer from Merry England has cut into their trade in furs. The shoe pinches, the shoe spiritual and the shoe worldly. Clouds begins to gather on the bright waters of the woodland bay. ”

“ The 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; [10] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ It is not difficult to imagine the scene in the log-built room, the sombre elders with their lips drawn thin and judgment in their eyes, the old, angry phrases of punishment and vengeance coined thousands of years before under the desert’s pitiless sky, the narrator of the events leaning forward to tell his unseemly news of the impious merriment, and in the lulls of quiet and shocked meditation, the trills of a New England cricket and the neighbourly talk of birds. ”

“ Like men coming one after the other to try a feat of strength, great feudal nobles and confederacies gathered together to thrust him from power; there were constant battles and new confederacies, and then the slinking hyenas carrying off human carrion in the night of forest shadows, brilliant stars and the odour of the battlefield. And in the morning priests, who wore the robes of the priests of Solomon, marching in company to sacrifice to the Sun.
The journey from the coast to Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia, took Bruce and his young Italian companion ninety-five days. ”

“ Not a colossus or a Hercules like Belzoni, but a kind of eighteenth-century adult Olympian quite aware of the prestige of height and fine carriage, with the tolerant and humorous eye of an observer of life, and something of the pride and composure of a well-born Scottish gentleman.
The children of the folk who lived upon his estate used to stare at the huge man on the giant black horse. Their fathers had told them that the laird had visited the strangest kingdom in all the world, and that he had loved a great queen who was fair as the lady of Sheba in the Bible, and wore a golden crown. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ A forest land spread over mountains, a land thronged with black folk carrying burdens through mountain jungles, a land of lions roaring in the night, a land of spring rains and flooded water courses, a land of great feudal nobles clad in bright robes and riding with bare feet in the stirrup, a land of Biblical blood justice, Christian wonder-workings, wars and rumours of wars, a land whose sun beat through trees like a vast and terrible white sword, a land where almost the first thing seen by [190] Bruce was the stuffed skin of a malefactor swinging from a tree. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Into the great dark den of the African palace walks the tall man who looked the Dey of Algiers squarely in the eye; he hears uneasy breathing in the half-darkness, and sees a magnificent youth tossing about on a bed of animal skins. A woman of extraordinary beauty and stateliness approaches; it is the Ozoro Esther, old Ras Michael’s young wife, and young mother of the warrior lad. This Biblical queen, this great lady of the ancient court of Israel, was to be Bruce’s unfailing friend and kind protectress. ”