“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_.