No longer ago than this Easter time last past, we became acquainted with
the subject of the present notice. Our knowledge of him is not by any
means an intimate one, and is only of a public nature. We have never
interchanged any conversation with him, except on one occasion when he
asked us to have the goodness to take off our hat, to which we replied
‘Certainly.’
MR. BOOLEY was born (we believe) in Rood Lane, in the City of London. He
is now a gentleman advanced in life, and has for some years resided in
the neighbourhood of Islington. His father was a wholesale grocer
(perhaps), and he was (possibly) in the same way of business; or he may,
at an early age, have become a clerk in the Bank of England, or in a
private bank, or in the India House. It will be observed that we make no
pretence of having any information in reference to the private history
of this remarkable man, and that our account of it must be received as
rather speculative than authentic.
In person MR. BOOLEY is below the middle size, and corpulent. His
countenance is florid, he is perfectly bald, and soon hot; and there is
a composure in his gait and manner, calculated to impress a stranger
with the idea of his being, on the whole, an unwieldy man. It is only in
his eye that the adventurous character of MR. BOOLEY is seen to shine.
It is a moist, bright eye, of a cheerful expression, and indicative of
keen and eager curiosity.
It was not until late in life that MR. BOOLEY conceived the idea of
entering on the extraordinary amount of travel he has since
accomplished. He had attained the age of sixty-five, before he left
England for the first time. In all the immense journies he has since
performed, he has never laid aside the English dress, nor departed in
the slightest degree from English customs. Neither does he speak a word
of any language but his own.
MR. BOOLEY’S powers of endurance are wonderful. All climates are alike
to him. Nothing exhausts him; no alternations of heat and cold appear to
have the least effect upon his hardy frame. His capacity of travelling,
day and night, for thousands of miles, has never been approached by any
traveller of whom we have any knowledge through the help of books. An
intelligent Englishman may have occasionally pointed out to him objects
and scenes of interest; but otherwise he has travelled alone, and
unattended. Though remarkable for personal cleanliness, he has carried
no luggage; and his diet has been of the simplest kind. He has often
found a biscuit, or a bun, sufficient for his support over a vast tract
of country. Frequently, he has travelled hundreds of miles, fasting,
without the least abatement of his natural spirits. It says much for the
Total Abstinence cause, that MR. BOOLEY has never had recourse to the
artificial stimulus of alcohol, to sustain him under his fatigues.
His first departure from the sedentary and monotonous life he had
hitherto led, strikingly exemplifies, we think, the energetic character,
long suppressed by that unchanging routine. Without any communication
with any member of his family—MR. BOOLEY has never been married, but has
many relations—without announcing his intention to his solicitor, or
banker, or any person entrusted with the management of his affairs, he
closed the door of his house behind him at one o’clock in the afternoon
of a certain day, and immediately proceeded to New Orleans, in the
United States of America.
His intention was to ascend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, to the
base of the Rocky Mountains. Taking his passage in a steamboat without
loss of time, he was soon upon the bosom of the Father of Waters, as the
Indians call the mighty stream which, night and day, is always carrying
huge instalments of the vast continent of the New World, down into the
sea.
MR. BOOLEY found it singularly interesting to observe the various stages
of civilisation obtaining on the banks of these mighty rivers. Leaving
the luxury and brightness of New Orleans—a somewhat feverish luxury and
brightness, he observed, as if the swampy soil were too much enriched in
the hot sun with the bodies of dead slaves—and passing various towns in
every stage of progress, it was very curious to observe the changes of
civilisation and of vegetation too. Here, where the doomed Negro race
were working in the plantations, while the republican overseer looked
on, whip in hand, tropical trees were growing, beautiful flowers in
bloom; the alligator, with his horribly sly face, and his jaws like two
great saws, was basking on the mud; and the strange moss of the country
was hanging in wreaths and garlands on the trees, like votive offerings.
A little farther towards the west, and the trees and flowers were
changed, the moss was gone, younger infant towns were rising, forests
were slowly disappearing, and the trees, obliged to aid in the
destruction of their kind, fed the heavily-breathing monster that came
clanking up those solitudes, laden with the pioneers of the advancing
human army. The river itself, that moving highway, showed him every kind
of floating contrivance, from the lumbering flat-bottomed boat, and the
raft of logs, upward to the steamboat, and downward to the poor Indian’s
frail canoe. A winding thread through the enormous range of country,
unrolling itself before the wanderer like the magic skein in the story,
he saw it tracked by wanderers of every kind, roaming from the more
settled world, to those first nests of men. The floating theatre,
dwelling-house, hotel, museum, shop; the floating mechanism for screwing
the trunks of mighty trees out of the mud, like antediluvian teeth; the
rapidly-flowing river, and the blazing woods; he left them all
behind—town, city, and log-cabin, too; and floated up into the prairies
and savannahs, among the deserted lodges of tribes of savages, and among
their dead, lying alone on little wooden stages with their stark faces
upward towards the sky. Among the blazing grass, and herds of buffaloes
and wild horses, and among the wigwams of the fast-declining Indians, he
began to consider how, in the eternal current of progress setting across
this globe in one unchangeable direction, like the unseen agency that
points the needle to the pole, the Chiefs who only dance the dances of
their fathers, and will never have a new figure for a new tune, and the
Medicine-men who know no Medicine but what was Medicine a hundred years
ago, must be surely and inevitably swept from the earth, whether they be
Choctawas, Mandans, Britons, Austrians, or Chinese.
He was struck, too, by the reflection that savage nature was not by any
means such a fine and noble spectacle as some delight to represent it.
He found it a poor, greasy, paint-plastered, miserable thing enough; but
a very little way above the beasts in most respects; in many customs a
long way below them. It occurred to him that the ‘Big Bird,’ or the
‘Blue Fish,’ or any of the other Braves, was but a troublesome braggart
after all; making a mighty whooping and holloaing about nothing
particular, doing very little for science, not much more than the
monkeys for art, scarcely anything worth mentioning for letters, and not
often making the world greatly better than he found it. Civilisation,
MR. BOOLEY concluded, was, on the whole, with all its blemishes, a more
imposing sight, and a far better thing to stand by.
MR. BOOLEY’S observations of the celestial bodies, on this voyage, were
principally confined to the discovery of the alarming fact, that light
had altogether departed from the moon; which presented the appearance of
a white dinner-plate. The clouds, too, conducted themselves in an
extraordinary manner, and assumed the most eccentric forms, while the
sun rose and set in a very reckless way. On his return to his native
country, however, he had the satisfaction of finding all these things as
usual.
It might have been expected that at his advanced age, retired from the
active duties of life, blest with a competency, and happy in the
affections of his numerous relations, MR. BOOLEY would now have settled
himself down, to muse, for the remainder of his days, over the new stock
of experience thus acquired. But travel had whetted, not satisfied, his
appetite; and remembering that he had not seen the Ohio river, except at
the point of its junction with the Mississippi, he returned to the
United States, after a short interval of repose, and appearing suddenly
at Cincinnati, the queen City of the West, traversed the clear waters of
the Ohio to its Falls. In this expedition he had the pleasure of
encountering a party of intelligent workmen from Birmingham who were
making the same tour. Also his nephew Septimus, aged only thirteen. This
intrepid boy had started from Peckham, in the old country, with two and
sixpence sterling in his pocket; and had, when he encountered his uncle
at a point of the Ohio River, called Snaggy Bar, still one shilling of
that sum remaining!
Again at home, MR. BOOLEY was so pressed by his appetite for knowledge
as to remain at home only one day. At the expiration of that short
period, he actually started for New Zealand.
It is almost incredible that a man in MR. BOOLEY’S station of life,
however adventurous his nature, and however few his artificial wants,
should cast himself on a voyage of thirteen thousand miles from Great
Britain with no other outfit than his watch and purse, and no arms but
his walking-stick. We are, however, assured on the best authority, that
thus he made the passage out, and thus appeared, in the act of wiping
his smoking head with his pocket-handkerchief, at the entrance to Port
Nicholson in Cook’s Straits: with the very spot within his range of
vision, where his illustrious predecessor, Captain Cook, so unhappily
slain at Otaheite, once anchored.
After contemplating the swarms of cattle maintained on the hills in this
neighbourhood, and always to be found by the stockmen when they are
wanted, though nobody takes any care of them—which MR. BOOLEY considered
the more remarkable, as their natural objection to be killed might be
supposed to be augmented by the beauty of the climate—MR. BOOLEY
proceeded to the town of Wellington. Having minutely examined it in
every point, and made himself perfect master of the whole natural
history and process of manufacture of the flax-plant, with its splendid
yellow blossoms, he repaired to a Native Pa, which, unlike the Native Pa
to which he was accustomed, he found to be a town, and not a parent.
Here he observed a Chief with a long spear, making every demonstration
of spitting a visitor, but really giving him the Maori or welcome—a word
MR. BOOLEY is inclined to derive from the known hospitality of our
English Mayors—and here also he observed some Europeans rubbing noses,
by way of shaking hands, with the aboriginal inhabitants. After
participating in an affray between the natives and the English soldiery,
in which the former were defeated with great loss, he plunged into the
Bush, and there camped out for some months, until he had made a survey
of the whole country.
While leading this wild life, encamped by night near a stream for the
convenience of water, in a Ware, or hut, built open in the front, with a
roof sloping backward to the ground, and made of poles, covered and
enclosed with bark or fern, it was MR. BOOLEY’S singular fortune to
encounter Miss Creeble, of The Misses Creebles’ Boarding and Day
Establishment for Young Ladies, Kennington Oval, who, accompanied by
three of her young ladies in search of information, had achieved this
marvellous journey, and was then also in the Bush. Miss Creeble having
very unsettled opinions on the subject of gunpowder, was afraid that it
entered into the composition of the fire before the tent, and that
something would presently blow up or go off. MR. BOOLEY, as a more
experienced traveller, assuring her that there was no danger; and
calming the fears of the young ladies, an acquaintance commenced between
them. They accomplished the rest of their travels in New Zealand
together, and the best understanding prevailed among the little party.
They took notice of the trees, as the Kaikatea, the Kauri, the Ruta, the
Pukatea, the Hinau, and the Tanakaka—names which Miss Creeble had a
bland relish in pronouncing. They admired the beautiful, arborescent,
palm-like fern, abounding everywhere, and frequently exceeding thirty
feet in height. They wondered at the curious owl, who is supposed to
demand ‘More Pork!’ wherever he flies, and whom Miss Creeble termed ‘an
admonition of Nature’s against greediness!’ And they contemplated some
very rampant natives, of cannibal propensities. After many pleasing and
instructive vicissitudes, they returned to England in company, where the
ladies were safely put into a hackney cabriolet by MR. BOOLEY, in
Leicester Square, London.
And now, indeed, it might have been imagined that that roving spirit,
tired of rambling about the world, would have settled down at home in
peace and honor. Not so. After repairing to the tubular bridge across
the Menai Straits, and accompanying Her Majesty on her visit to Ireland
(which he characterised as ‘a magnificent Exhibition’), MR. BOOLEY, with
his usual absence of preparation, departed for Australia.
Here again, he lived out in the Bush, passing his time chiefly among the
working-gangs of convicts who were carrying timber. He was much
impressed by the ferocious mastiffs chained to barrels, who assist the
sentries in keeping guard over those misdoers. But he observed that the
atmosphere in this part of the world, unlike the descriptions he had
read of it, was extremely thick, and that objects were misty, and
difficult to be discerned. From a certain unsteadiness and trembling,
too, which he frequently remarked on the face of Nature, he was led to
conclude that this part of the globe was subject to convulsive heavings
and earthquakes. This caused him to return, with some precipitation.
Again at home, and probably reflecting that the countries he had
hitherto visited were new in the history of man, this extraordinary
traveller resolved to proceed up the Nile to the second cataract. At the
next performance of the great ceremony of ‘opening the Nile,’ at Cairo,
MR. BOOLEY was present.
Along that wonderful river, associated with such stupendous fables, and
with a history more prodigious than any fancy of man, in its vast and
gorgeous facts; among temples, palaces, pyramids, colossal statues,
crocodiles, tombs, obelisks, mummies, sand and ruin; he proceeded, like
an opium-eater in a mighty dream. Thebes rose before him. An avenue of
two hundred sphinxes, with not a head among them,—one of six or eight,
or ten such avenues, all leading to a common centre,—conducted to the
Temple of Carnak: its walls, eighty feet high and twenty-five feet
thick, a mile and three-quarters in circumference; the interior of its
tremendous hall, occupying an area of forty-seven thousand square feet,
large enough to hold four great Christian churches, and yet not more
than one-seventh part of the entire ruin. Obelisks he saw, thousands of
years of age, as sharp as if the chisel had cut their edges yesterday;
colossal statues fifty-two feet high, with ‘little’ fingers five feet
and a half long; a very world of ruins, that were marvellous old ruins
in the days of Herodotus; tombs cut high up in the rock, where European
travellers live solitary, as in stony crows’ nests, burning mummied
Thebans, gentle and simple,—of the dried blood-royal maybe,—for their
daily fuel, and making articles of furniture of their dusty coffins.
Upon the walls of temples, in colors fresh and bright as those of
yesterday, he read the conquests of great Egyptian monarchs; upon the
tombs of humbler people in the same blooming symbols, he saw their
ancient way of working at their trades, of riding, driving, feasting,
playing games; of marrying and burying, and performing on instruments,
and singing songs, and healing by the power of animal magnetism, and
performing all the occupations of life. He visited the quarries of
Silsileh, whence nearly all the red stone used by the ancient Egyptian
architects and sculptors came; and there beheld enormous single-stoned
colossal figures nearly finished—redly snowed up, as it were, and trying
hard to break out—waiting for the finishing touches, never to be given
by the mummied hands of thousands of years ago. In front of the temple
of Abou Simbel, he saw gigantic figures sixty feet in height and
twenty-one across the shoulders, dwarfing live men on camels down to
pigmies. Elsewhere he beheld complacent monsters tumbled down like
ill-used Dolls of a Titanic make, and staring with stupid benignity at
the arid earth whereon their huge faces rested. His last look of that
amazing land was at the Great Sphinx, buried in the sand—sand in its
eyes, sand in its ears, sand drifted on its broken nose, sand lodging,
feet deep, in the ledges of its head—struggling out of a wide sea of
sand, as if to look hopelessly forth for the ancient glories once
surrounding it.
In this expedition, MR. BOOLEY acquired some curious information in
reference to the language of hieroglyphics. He encountered the Simoom in
the Desert, and lay down, with the rest of his caravan, until it had
passed over. He also beheld on the horizon some of those stalking
pillars of sand, apparently reaching from earth to heaven, which, with
the red sun shining through them, so terrified the Arabs attendant on
Bruce, that they fell prostrate, crying that the Day of Judgment was
come. More Copts, Turks, Arabs, Fellahs, Bedouins, Mosques, Mamelukes,
and Moosulmen he saw, than we have space to tell. His days were all
Arabian Nights, and he saw wonders without end.
This might have satiated any ordinary man, for a time at least. But MR.
BOOLEY, being no ordinary man, within twenty-four hours of his arrival
at home was making The Overland Journey to India.
He has emphatically described this, as ‘a beautiful piece of scenery,’
and ‘a perfect picture.’ The appearance of Malta and Gibraltar he can
never sufficiently commend. In crossing the Desert from Grand Cairo to
Suez, he was particularly struck by the undulations of the Sandscape (he
preferred that word to Landscape, as more expressive of the region), and
by the incident of beholding a caravan upon its line of march; a
spectacle which in the remembrance always affords him the utmost
pleasure. Of the stations on the Desert, and the cinnamon gardens of
Ceylon, he likewise entertains a lively recollection. Calcutta he
praises also; though he has been heard to observe that the British
military at that seat of Government were not as well proportioned as he
could desire the soldiers of his country to be; and that the breed of
horses there in use was susceptible of some improvement.
Once more in his native land, with the vigor of his constitution
unimpaired by the many toils and fatigues he had encountered, what had
MR. BOOLEY now to do, but, full of years and honor, to recline upon the
grateful appreciation of his Queen and country, always eager to
distinguish peaceful merit? What had he now to do, but to receive the
decoration ever ready to be bestowed, in England, on men deservedly
distinguished, and to take his place among the best? He had this to do.
He had yet to achieve the most astonishing enterprise for which he was
reserved. In all the countries he had yet visited, he had seen no frost
and snow. He resolved to make a voyage to the ice-bound Arctic Regions.
In pursuance of this surprising determination, MR. BOOLEY accompanied
the Expedition under Sir James Ross, consisting of Her Majesty’s ships,
the Enterprise and Investigator, which sailed from the river Thames on
the 12th of May, 1848, and which, on the 11th of September, entered Port
Leopold Harbor.
In this inhospitable region, surrounded by eternal ice, cheered by no
glimpse of the sun, shrouded in gloom and darkness, MR. BOOLEY passed
the entire winter. The ships were covered in, and fortified all round
with walls of ice and snow; the masts were frozen up; hoar frost settled
on the yards, tops, shrouds, stays, and rigging; around, in every
direction, lay an interminable waste, on which only the bright stars,
the yellow moon, and the vivid Aurora Borealis looked, by night or day.
And yet the desolate sublimity of this astounding spectacle was broken
in a pleasant and surprising manner. In the remote solitude to which he
had penetrated, MR. BOOLEY (who saw no Esquimaux during his stay, though
he looked for them in every direction) had the happiness of encountering
two Scotch gardeners; several English compositors, accompanied by their
wives; three brass founders from the neighbourhood of Long Acre, London;
two coach painters, a gold-beater and his only daughter, by trade a
stay-maker; and several other working-people from sundry parts of Great
Britain who had conceived the extraordinary idea of ‘holiday-making’ in
the frozen wilderness. Hither too, had Miss Creeble and her three young
ladies penetrated: the latter attired in braided peacoats of a
comparatively light material; and Miss Creeble defended from the
inclemency of a Polar Winter by no other outer garment than a wadded
Polka-jacket. He found this courageous lady in the act of explaining, to
the youthful sharers of her toils, the various phases of nature by which
they were surrounded. Her explanations were principally wrong, but her
intentions always admirable.
Cheered by the society of these fellow-adventurers, MR. BOOLEY slowly
glided on into the summer season. And now, at midnight, all was bright
and shining. Mountains of ice, wedged and broken into the strangest
forms—jagged points, spires, pinnacles, pyramids, turrets, columns in
endless succession and in infinite variety, flashing and sparkling with
ten thousand hues, as though the treasures of the earth were frozen up
in all that water—appeared on every side. Masses of ice, floating and
driving hither and thither, menaced the hardy voyagers with destruction;
and threatened to crush their strong ships, like nutshells. But, below
those ships was clear sea-water, now; the fortifying walls were gone;
the yards, tops, shrouds and rigging, free from that hoary rust of long
inaction, showed like themselves again; and the sails, bursting from the
masts, like foliage which the welcome sun at length developed, spread
themselves to the wind, and wafted the travellers away.
In the short interval that has elapsed since his safe return to the land
of his birth, MR. BOOLEY has decided on no new expedition; but he feels
that he will yet be called upon to undertake one, perhaps of greater
magnitude than any he has achieved, and frequently remarks, in his own
easy way, that he wonders where the deuce he will be taken to next!
Possessed of good health and good spirits, with powers unimpaired by all
he has gone through, and with an increase of appetite still growing with
what it feeds on, what may not be expected yet from this extraordinary
man!
It was only at the close of Easter week that, sitting in an arm chair,
at a private Club called the Social Oysters, assembling at Highbury
Barn, where he is much respected, this indefatigable traveller expressed
himself in the following terms:
‘It is very gratifying to me,’ said he, ‘to have seen so much at my time
of life, and to have acquired a knowledge of the countries I have
visited, which I could not have derived from books alone. When I was a
boy, such travelling would have been impossible, as the gigantic-moving
panorama or diorama mode of conveyance, which I have principally adopted
(all my modes of conveyance have been pictorial), had then not been
attempted. It is a delightful characteristic of these times, that new
and cheap means are continually being devised, for conveying the results
of actual experience, to those who are unable to obtain such experiences
for themselves; and to bring them within the reach of the
people—emphatically of the people; for it is they at large who are
addressed in these endeavours, and not exclusive audiences. Hence,’ said
MR. BOOLEY, ‘even if I see a run on an idea, like the panorama one, it
awakens no ill-humour within me, but gives me pleasant thoughts. Some of
the best results of actual travel are suggested by such means to those
whose lot it is to stay at home. New worlds open out to them, beyond
their little worlds, and widen their range of reflection, information,
sympathy, and interest. The more man knows of man, the better for the
common brotherhood among us all. I shall, therefore,’ said MR. BOOLEY,
‘now propose to the Social Oysters the healths of Mr. Banvard, Mr.
Brees, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Allen, Mr. Prout, Messrs. Bonomi, Fahey, and
Warren, Mr. Thomas Grieve, and Mr. Burford. Long life to them all, and
more power to their pencils!’
The Social Oysters having drunk this toast with acclamation, MR. BOOLEY
proceeded to entertain them with anecdotes of his travels. This he is in
the habit of doing after they have feasted together, according to the
manner of Sinbad the Sailor—except that he does not bestow upon the
Social Oysters the munificent reward of one hundred sequins per night,
for listening.