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?
[Illustration: 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.