Adventurer

“ It is usual to suppose that the fires of chivalry which are the beacons of adventure burn best on the altar of a soul enshrined in a fine temple. That, in fact, your born adventurer is a handsome dashing blade, the sort that men stand by and women turn to look after in the street. ”

“ All extremes touch each other: frigid praise and frigid censure wait on easily attainable or common powers: but the successful adventurer in the realms of Discovery, in spite of the shrugs, checks, and sneers of the timid, the malign, and the envious, leaps on an unknown or long lost shore, ennobles it with his name, and grasps immortality. ”

“ Whatever took place behind that beautiful but indifferent mask no one else ever learned; but simultaneously in the minds of these two adventurers—and surely, to call a man an adventurer does not necessarily imply that he is a chevalier d'industrie—a thought, tinged with regret and loneliness, was born ”

“ But then that is what Englishmen are, adventurers to the backbone; and all our magnificent muster-roll of colonies, each of which will in time become a great nation, testify to the extraordinary value of the spirit of adventure which at first sight looks like a mild form of lunacy. “Adventurer”—he that goes out to meet whatever may come. ”

“ The adventurers who began that struggle have left no descendants. The ideas of the world changed too quickly for that. But even far into the present century they have had successors. Almost in our own day we have seen one of them--a true adventurer in his devotion to his impulse--a man of high mind and of pure heart, lay the foundation of a flourishing state on the ideas of pity and justice. ”

“ The adventurer had become a real king, the king of a nation struggling to free itself from foreign domination, and he would have had an opportunity to play a great and noble part—had he been more than an adventurer. ”

“ He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer—a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon. ”

“ A man in the regular standing forces of his native state is not dubbed adventurer. When, for example, the immortal heroes Tromp and De Ruyter fought the British generals at sea, Blake and Monk, they were no more adventurers than are the police constables who guard our homes at night. Were Clive and Warren Hastings adventurers? They would turn in their graves if one brought such a charge. The true type of adventurer is the lone-hand pioneer. ”

“ There the raw adventurer who at the opening of his career pressed forward with eager expectation into a dark uncertain future met the returned fortune-seeker elated with success or broken-spirited through failure. ”

“ A tramp or sailor—which?
First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and back again?
Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett and Fielding?
It took me days of talk with the gang—boasting—and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch.
Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New York waterfront that same afternoon.... ”

“ For the sake of one he dearly loved he had become an adventurer that he might make his fortune. He had obtained the wealth he coveted, and now it appeared that he was doomed never to enjoy it.
While the gale lasted the ship was driving onward, and might in reality be approaching home, but now she was motionless, and it seemed that thus she might remain till their food should be exhausted and all should die, and the rigging should rot, and the bulwarks and decks decay, and at length the ship herself go down into the depths of the sea. ”

“ Many people object to the term adventurer, as one that has been generally associated with a class who travel with scanty purses and easy consciences. But Johnson defines an adventurer as “one who hazards a chance;” and when we consider that the population here have to a man almost made sacrifices elsewhere, in hopes of the speedier reward held out by the vicinity of these vast gold-fields, the term is not misapplied. ”

“ The objects of a walk are often disappointing, but the accidents are magnificent. The true adventurer does not walk so much in the hope of finding cities or mountains as in the hope of discovering by the end of his journey why he came out. ”

“ A set of adventures is nothing unless we have first gained a working and approximate human interest in the adventurer. He may be stabbed by his rival, or betrayed by his lady-love, or drowned in a storm, or killed in a man-trap, and we shall do nothing but call the watch together and thank God we are rid of a bore. ”

“ He seem'd as lithe and free and tall
And restless as the boughs that stir
Perpetual topt poplar trees.
And one, that one, had eyes to teach
The art of love, and tongue to preach
Life's hard and sober homilies;
And yet his eager hands, his speech,
All spoke the bold adventurer;
While zoned about the belt of each
There swung a girt of steel, till all
Did seem a walking arsenal. ”

“ Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost within sight from this very window. ”

“ The books of travel and discovery which I loved to read, had filled my mind with those stories of adventure which attend the explorer of unknown lands,—the wonders of scenery, and the strange pictures of life and people. There was in the career itself that blending of heroism and philanthropy, that mingled courage and humanity, which appealed to my heart by its very strongest sympathies; and I felt for these noble and devoted adventurers not less admiration than love. ”

“ I suppose she saw my disinclination, for as I handed her the card with the wool neatly wound on it, she thanked me and presently changed the subject, or at least shifted the ground.
"There is something so free about the life of an adventurer—I mean a man who wanders about doing brave things. If I were a man I would be an adventurer like you." ”

“ And yet now, here is an obscure adventurer who has landed on our shores as an enemy and an invader, and because he has met with a partial and temporary success, you are debating whether you shall not make an ignominious peace with him, and allow him to remain. ”

“ There are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers, but all the thousands I have known were fools of the romantic temperament, dealing with life as an artist does with canvas, to color it with fierce and vivid feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the passions of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the splendors of sunshine and starlight, the exaltation of battle, fire and hurricane. ”

“ The journey thither was expensive, and most of the men who undertook it were such as had accumulated, by their own industry, a good “stake” at home. They were adventurers, to be sure; but what is an adventurer? ”

“ Entire days are wasted at these games, which are often continued through the night round the blaze of their fires, till the last article of clothing or even the last blue bead is won from the desperate adventurer. ”

“ But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space. ”

“ Fifteen adventurers, already mounted, were waiting, motionless and silent. They were men with bold features and a resolute air, whose bronzed faces testified to the fatigue they had endured in their rough profession. ”

“ The bold Adventurer succeeds the best. ”

“ But there were others--obscure adventurers who had not his advantages of birth, position, and intelligence; who had only his sympathy with the people of forests and sea he understood and loved so well. They can not be said to be forgotten since they have not been known at all. ”

“ Finding his solitary career on the heath a little hazardous, in consequence of meeting a rare succession of exceptionally brave travellers who did not scruple to loose off their pistols at a single adventurer, he sought the moral and physical support of companions of his own vocation. ”

“ And so the band of high-spirited young adventurers discussed their prospects gaily, none seeing into the veiled future, nor knowing that the one they thought to leave to such safety was doomed to deadly peril, none dreaming that the remaining days of life of their gallant comrade were so few, and that they were about to bid him a final farewell. ”

“ We must read the diaries and journals of these daring adventurers for a complete understanding and appreciation not only of their tremendous courage and stamina but of the zealous spirit which moved them to find their fortunes in a strange land. ”

“ It is incredible what acuteness and skill such iron characters develope, and we must feel surprised that a single one of these adventurers ever sees his home again, I have lain for whole nights at the little fires of these people, and listened to their stories—how they became familiar with this life in their earliest youth, and returned to it when grey-haired, although able to live comfortably on their savings in the civilized world. ”

“ In so far as the adventurers meet with super-extraordinary beings, or ride on fleas of the dimensions of elephants, or have monstrous spiders weave for a field of battle a web between the moon and the morning star, or in so far as they sail on seas of milk to islands of cheese and altogether suspend the semblance of possibility—in so far are they heroes of absurd tales of wonder. But the narrators of the stories of imaginary voyages for the most part had primarily other objects than mere amusement in view ”

“ What a convenient and delightful world is this world of books!—if you bring to it not the obligations of the student, or look upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter it rather with the enthusiasm of the adventurer! ”

“ Those early explorers and adventurers were mostly brave, enterprising, and, after their fashion, pious men. In their clumsy sailing vessels they dared to go where no chart or lighthouse showed the way, where the set of the currents, the location of sunken outlying rocks and shoals, were all unknown, facing fate and weather, undaunted however dark the signs, heaving the lead and thrashing the men to their duty and trusting to Providence. ”

“ A few are reported, many are noted in the private journals of adventurers, most of them are just taken as a matter of course in the day’s work, but nobody has ever attempted to make a picture of all the world’s adventures for a day or a year. ”

“ When a gorgeous sunset thus impressed the imagination of men on their travels, the age was sure to be one of exploration and wild adventure; and there could not but be a succession of adventurers till the rovers had at least sailed round the globe, and ascertained its great continents and main seas. ”

“ We left another considerable body of adventurers behind us who thought they had discovered byways up the hill, which proved so very intricate and perplexed, that after having advanced in them a little they were quite lost among the several turns and windings; and though they were as active as any in their motions, they made but little progress in the ascent. These, as my guide informed me, were men of subtle tempers, and puzzled politics, who would supply the place of real wisdom with cunning and artifice. ”

“ Forgetting for awhile the distance which separated them from the America to which they were bound, they dwelt at great length upon the unknown pleasures which awaited them upon that golden soil, that land of promise for all sorts of adventurers, but which, alas! often offers those who go thither in the hope of gaining an easy fortune, nothing but disappointment and sorrow. ”

“ The adventurers often found themselves hundreds of miles from any possibility of help. Stamina in the face of hunger and hardship, courage and energy in opposition to attack and fear were the basic elements of salvation. ”

“ Such an opportunity would never again present itself, and hundreds who had thus far been disappointed, trusted to it as to their last resource,—hoping, in some of these, as they thought, untrodden valleys, to reap the same rich rewards that had fallen to the share of the first adventurers. ”

“ It is true no succeeding records of adventure can have the interest for us that gathers around those of the intrepid Verendrye, the mysterious Hearne, or the heroic Alexander Mackenzie, whose journeys we have already described, yet many daring [Pg 338] adventurers who have gone on scientific or exploratory expeditions, or who have travelled the wide expanse for sport or for mere curiosity, may claim our attention. ”

“ Reverses in life sit easily enough on the class that furnishes adventurers, but in my condition there are no adventurers. You and others like you descend to the ranks, and nobody thinks the worse of you. ”

“ We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world. ”

“ No less dangerous are those adventurers who can only bring to bear a more or less illustrious descent, or as its equivalent a reputation won upon the field of battle, and who are thus able to gain adherents in various ulèëbalangships. ”

“ Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry; ”