Oh, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Benin
One comes out where three goes in.
—_Old British Navy Song._
Green pleasant England again, the white cliffs of Dover, and the autumn
fog drifting down on London and the ships. Belzoni’s fame had gone before
him to the capital. His popular title of “Signor,” which both Italianised
him and linked him with his mountebank past, now fell into disuse, and it
was as “Mr.” Belzoni that he faced a new life of dignity and prestige.
Winter found the traveller and his Sarah living happily in London
lodgings, visited and consulted by the learned and the great. Belzoni
kept his head. With his usual commonsense he was busily at work arranging
an exhibition.
“Belzoni’s Exhibition,”—the words were magical a hundred years ago.
All London came to the hall on Piccadilly when the doors opened in the
spring of 1821. The old red-faced generals who had fought Napoleon
came to stare at Pasht and Osiris, egad, the port-sipping gentlemen of
substance, the fine ladies, and the sober citizens linking arms with
their bonneted wives. To please them, Belzoni had reproduced two of the
principal chambers in the tomb of Seti I, painting, sculptures and all,
and displayed “idols, coins, mummies, scarabœi, articles of dress and
adornment, lachrymatories, and a splendid mass of papyrus.” The tomb
of Seti was “lit within by lamps,” and made a tremendous impression.
And there was a poem by Horace Smith, “Address to a Mummy in Belzoni’s
Exhibition” which all the world was reading. Now and then the giant
moved towering through the throng, and mothers would bid their little
flaxen-haired boys and girls to look at the man who had opened the
pyramid.
A season in Paris followed the year in London, and then came the last
great adventure.
The fever of exploring woke again within his veins, and he determined to
cross the great African desert, and make his way to the almost fabulous
city of Timbuctoo. He would land in Morocco, go south through the
Moroccan possessions, and then join a caravan bound for the fateful city.
The plan seemed practical enough, and on an autumn morning in 1822, the
roving Titan bade farewell to his faithful amazon, and followed his boxes
and baggages aboard a vessel for Gibraltar.
In Fez, the Moroccan capital, they seem to have played with him for a
while, for the Emperor first gave him a permission to go through the
country, and then withdrew consent. The failure may have been due to
intrigue, as Belzoni imagined, or to the deep-rooted native distrust of
Europeans; it was probably a combination of the two. Much chagrined, the
explorer now returned to Gibraltar, and there determined on a course
which did honor to his courage and perseverance. The way south to
Timbuctoo being barred, he would make his way along the African coast to
the city of Great Benin, and then struggle northward to his goal. It was
a route to daunt any explorer, for it led into one of the darkest and
most dangerous areas of unknown Africa.
Sailing in trading ships and little vessels of one sort or another, the
adventurer slowly made his way south along the west African shore to
the English station of Cape Castle on the Guinea Coast. There Sir R.
Mends, commanding the British naval squadron on the African west coast,
befriended him and sent him to Benin in His Majesty’s Gunbrig _Swinger_.
On the 20th of October, 1823, the brig arrived off the bar of Benin River.
The brig _Providence_ was lying off Obobi, and Belzoni boarded her at the
invitation of her master, Captain John Hodgson. A month later, a “Fantee
canoe” belonging to the ship is lowered overside; it contains Hodgson and
Belzoni. The poor giant seemed “a little agitated,” particularly when the
crew, to each of whom he had made a present, gave him three loud cheers
on his stepping out of his vessel. “God bless you, my fine fellows,”
cried the explorer, “and send you a happy sight of your country and
friends.” He was clad in his eastern dress and turban, and still wore his
great, black beard.
A few days later word comes to the sailors that the guest whom they had
so cherished, loved, even, as a shipmate, is lying ill at Benin. Good
Hodgson hurried inland, and found the giant dying of African dysentery
in Benin city. In a palanquin, they hurry him down the river to Gwato,
hoping to get him to the coast and the sea air. But the end is at hand,
an end calmly envisaged; the last of his strength he spends trying to
write a letter to his wife; he entrusts Hodgson with a ring for her and a
message full of the most touching affection, then yields the ghost. They
buried him at Gwato under a great tree, and there he lies in the dark of
Africa.
So ends the tale of the monk who passed from the peace of a monastery to
an acrobat’s stage in a village square. The young Italian had accepted
his destiny calmly, and made the best of it, yet never bowed his head.
Thrust violently from the most retired of lives into the most bohemian,
he had remained,—_Belzoni_. There is something amusing, something rather
fine as well, in the way that he sailed through life like a fine ship
sent by the fates of the sea on dubious voyages. And what a sense of
achievement and honest adventure he had won from it all; it had all been
so well worth while.
History will remember him as the first of modern explorer-archæologists.
“One of the most remarkable men in the whole history of Egyptology,” says
Mr. Howard Carter, who found the Tutankhamen tomb.
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!
_Three_: EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY
_Three_: EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY
I
About a hundred years ago, on a pleasant summer morning, two young
Englishmen came down to the water front of the Italian port of Leghorn,
got into a boat, and rowed off to look at the shipping in the bay. The
two venturers made an odd pair, for the oarsman was a tall, powerfully
built fellow with piercing blue eyes, thick black hair, and the features
of an Arab, whilst the other was slender, boyish and yellow-haired, and
had innocent blue eyes, and a schoolboy’s innocence of beard.
The first vessel round which they rowed, a Greek trader, displeased
them, for she was dirty of deck and sail, but beyond her lay a graceful
full-rigged ship flying the Stars and Stripes. At the sight of this fine
vessel, the following conversation took place. It has been set down word
by word, for one does not take liberties with the phrases of the great.
“It is but a step,” said the oarsman, “from these ruins of worn-out
Greece to the New World; let’s board the American clipper.”
“I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad
realities,” protested his companion with a smile.
“You must allow,” returned the other, “that that graceful craft was
designed by a man who had a poet’s feeling for things beautiful. Come,
let us go aboard; the Americans are a free and easy people, and will not
consider our visit an intrusion.”
A turn, a few strokes, and the boat approached the American ship. By
the gangway, an American salt with a quid of tobacco squirrelled in his
cheek, was busy at something or other, and every now and then this honest
fellow walked to the rail to spit calmly overside into the historic
Mediterranean. While thus pleasantly engaged, he caught sight of the
small boat coming alongside, and shouted, “Boat ahoy!” A mate came to the
rail.
“May we go aboard?” said the dark, Arab-looking man.
[Illustration: TRELAWNY AS THE OLD SEAMAN IN SIR JOHN E. MILLAIS’S
PAINTING “THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.”]
“Wal, I don’t see why not,” answered the American mate, cheerfully and
without ceremony.
“You have a beautiful vessel,” said the first speaker, once he had gained
the deck. “We have been rowing about looking at the ships, and admiring
yours.”
“I do expect now we have our new copper on, she has a look of the brass
sarpent,” agreed the American.
“She seems so beautiful,” said the first speaker, “that we have been
wishing we might have a vessel like her.”
“Then I calculate you must go to Boston or Baltimore to git one,” replied
the ship’s officer. “There’s no one this side the water can do the job.
We have our freight all ready and are homeward bound; we have elegant
accommodation, and you will be across before your young friend’s beard is
ripe for a razor. Come down and take an observation of the state cabin.”
The hospitable seaman now led his guests to the state cabin, and would
not let them go till they had drunk a toast under the Star-Spangled
Banner to the memory of Washington and the prosperity of the American
commonwealth. Peach brandy was the drink. The toast concluded, the mate
rummaged for a moment in a locker, and then offered his visitors a gift
right from an old time sailor’s heart.
“There, gentlemen,” said the sailor. “Guess you don’t see nuthin’ like
this in these parts!”
“Plug tobacco,” said the dark man.
“Yes sirree, Mister,” replied the mate. “And real old Virginia cake. Jest
you set your teeth in that, Mister,” he continued offering the plug to
the fair-haired guest, “and tell me if you’ve tasted anything so good
since the big wind.”
The fair-haired visitor, however, refused both the brandy and “the chaw,”
but managed to quaff a glass of weak grog to the memory of the first of
presidents. The blue eyes gathered a strange fire.
“Washington,” said this other visitor, “as a warrior and a statesman
he was righteous in all he did, and unlike all who have lived before
or since, he never used his power but for the benefit of his fellow
creatures.
He fought
For truth and freedom, foremost of the brave,
Him glory’s idle glances dazzled not;
’Twas his ambition generous and great.
A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”
“Stranger,” said the American, studying the speaker, his shrewd eye
bright with honest pleasure, “truer words were never spoken. There is dry
rot in all the timbers of the old world, and none of you will do any good
till you are docked, refitted and annexed to the new. You must log that
song you sang; there ain’t many Britishers will say as much of the man
that whipped them, so just set down those lines in the log or it won’t go
for nothing.”
A little shy, perhaps, yet glad that his words had given pleasure, the
youth with the yellow hair sat down to write. The quill pen made almost
no sound; and the faint noises of the harbor,—the voices of sailors
heard across the water from other ships, the chuckling of little waves
alongside, and the passing of bare feet on the deck overhead,—filled the
polite quiet. Yielding to some fancy or inspiration, the visitor did
not enter the lines he had quoted, but some others which pleased him
even more. This done, the Englishmen parted from their Yankee host, and
regained the dust, the street cries, the uniforms, and the hot yellow sun
of the old Italian town.
A musing mind pauses to wonder as to what might have been the name
of this Yankee ship anchored in Leghorn bay sometime in 1822. The
hospitable mate, “a smart specimen of a Yankee,” who was he? And above
all, what became of the ship’s log? 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.
A mysterious fellow, this “good friend Tre” of the piercing eyes. A word
from Shelley’s comrade and admirer, Edward Elliker Williams, had served
him as an introduction to the Shelley group, and his first visit to them
had taken place late one evening while the family was at Pisa. One sees
the Italian room in lamplight, a room to which sensible Mary Shelley
must have given something of an English air; one hears the English
voices through the quiet of provincial Italy. Trelawny enters, and the
surprised Shelleys see a personage who is not at all English-looking;
their visitor is a character out of Byronic romance, blazing eyes,
pirate brows, bronzed skin and all. He looked like “a young Othello.”
The newcomer, for his part, saw a rather bookish family gathered about
a bookish young man “habited like a boy in a black jacket and trousers
which he seemed to have outgrown”; it is Shelley he sees, reading as
always, slender, bent a little, and “extraordinarily juvenile.”
“Is it possible that this mild, beardless boy can be the monster at war
with all the world?” thought the young Othello.
While Shelley, as was his custom, went in and out of the room, as
silently and strangely as a spirit, Mrs. Shelley asked Trelawny of news
from London and Paris,—the new books and the operas, the new bonnets and
the new styles, the marriages and the murders. A domestic scene. When
Trelawny had gone, they spoke of him. Where had Mr. Williams encountered
this remarkable person? In Switzerland. And was he not a sailor? Yes, he
had been a sailor, and some said a pirate. A pirate, indeed! He could
tell the most wonderful stories of gory battles on the Java seas, and
expeditions to native strongholds in the jungles of Malaysia. Quite a
remarkable person, “our friend Tre.”
“Trelawny,” says a distinguished biographer of Byron, “was a liar and a
cad.” The judgment is prejudiced and severe. Whatever his faults, the
man acted a leading rôle in one of the most romantic episodes in English
literary history, and was well liked and respected by the great figures
of the play. The world recalls his association with Shelley and Byron,
his recovery of Shelley’s body after the storm, and the cremation in
classical style he arranged on the sands of Villareggio; it remembers his
flight with Byron to the aid of rebellious Greece. A marvellous chapter,
but only one of a life romance which is still something of an enigma.
Sailor? Pirate? Byronic stage-player? Let us see.