The Book Of Gallant Vagabonds - free ebook by Henry Beston

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The Book Of Gallant Vagabonds

Henry Beston

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25 chapters

The BOOK of GALLANT VAGABONDS

The BOOK of GALLANT VAGABONDS

HENRY BESTON Ship Bonetta Salem Departing from Leghorn Courtesy Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. THE HARBOR OF LEGHORN IN SHELLEY’S DAY SHOWING THE AMERICAN SHIP “BONETTA” OF SALEM LEAVING PORT. The Book of Gallant Vagabonds By HENRY BESTON ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Copyright, 1925, By George H. Doran Company THE BOOK OF GALLANT VAGABONDS —A— PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To COLONEL THEODORE ROOSEVELT and MRS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION OF MANY

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FOREWORD

FOREWORD

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 stra

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I

I

Here was a man who was born with two great gifts, one the most precious in the world, the other the most perilous. The first was an abounding physical vitality which made the casual business of being alive a divine adventure, the second, an imagination of the sort which refuses discipline and runs away with the whole mind. The adventure begins in the spring of the year 1772 with the farmers of the Connecticut Valley halting their ploughs in the furrow, and straightening up to stare at a certain

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II

II

Now came difficulties and explanations, and John cut the knot by going to sea. Four years later, at the end of a voyage, a young American seaman walks the narrow streets of London’s “Sailortown.” John Ledyard is now twenty-five years old, life has done little with him, and he has done little with life; his friends at home are beginning to regard him as something of a ne’er-do-well, and the pockets of his sailor breeches are emptier than ever. In “Sailortown” an April sun is shining, the dank sme

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III

III

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 un

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I

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 en

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II

II

Negotiations with Mehmet Ali and the building and the test of Belzoni’s water-lifting wheel consumed the greater part of a year; it was wasted time, for the Pasha decided against the use of the device. From the uncertainty which followed, the adventurer was rescued by his old friend, John Lewis Burckhardt, the traveller, who now persuaded the British Consul General, Henry Salt, to send Belzoni on a special expedition up the Nile. A colossal head of “Memnon” (in reality a head of Ramses II) was l

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III

III

He went first to Gizeh, and wandered about the three pyramids, studying and observing. From the sands of the Egyptian desert, which are cornelian in hue and strewn with colored pebbles much like fragments of ancient pottery, the pyramids rise as masses of old ivory stone suffused with a certain golden rust; the description is laboured, but the effect is not to be given in a word. Belzoni, trudging the sand, watched the late afternoon light bring out the grey. The second great pyramid, the pyrami

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IV

IV

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

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I

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 ve

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II

II

The known, the traceable, history of Edward John Trelawny begins with his birth in London in 1792, and comes to an abrupt end some seventeen years afterward. His father, Lt. Colonel Charles Trelawny, was a middle aged army officer who had retired to economise his wife’s fortune, the relics of his own, and play the rôle of stern, Roman father on the stage of family life. Both family and family name were Cornish, and the boy began life with the heritage of those of Cornish blood, the heritage of a

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III

III

The younger son, having decided to throw in his lot with the poet’s, remained in Pisa. He liked the group and the environment, though the bookish intellectualism of the Shelleys swept him often enough beyond his depth. Byron, also living in exile, was a familiar figure, and there were rides together out into the country and pauses by the roadside to indulge in the noisy sport of pistol practice. Shelley read, and hidden away in a little pine wood, wrote poetry; Byron lurked in his huge palace gu

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IV

IV

The Greeks had risen against their Turkish masters, a committee of enthusiastic lovers of liberty had been formed in London to advance the cause, and this committee had persuaded Byron to act as their agent in Greece. From the point of view of what the cant of the day calls publicity, the choice was an excellent one; considered with a harsh and practical eye, it was absurd. This nervous, temperamental artist with the habits and posing mannerisms of a regency beau, this traveller who scarce could

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V

V

With the return from Greece, the great days of adventure are at an end, the rest of Trelawny’s long life is the story of the kind of man the world calls a “character.” The pause in England was brief, and in 1829 he returned to Italy, took a house in Florence, and busied himself bringing up his little daughter Zela, born to him of his Greek wife, and writing his autobiographical romance. It seems reasonably sure that sometime during these Italian years he proposed to Mary Shelley, but without suc

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I

I

In a little room built of brown logs, and with casement windows open to the sun and the sounds of early summer, the pilgrim elders of Plymouth sat at table discussing a scandal on the coast. The abomination was amongst them, the sighing after strange flesh, yea, the very Calf of Horeb! At a plantation on the sylvan shores of the Great Bay of the Massachusees (for so was Boston Harbor anciently known) there had been held a scandalous carousal, much “quaffing and drinking of wine and strong liquor

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II

II

Dame Alice Miller, widow of a well-to-do gentleman of Swallowfield in Berkshire, was in trouble and distress of mind,—she was at odds with her own son. This son, co-executor with his mother of his father’s will, was cruel, violent, and ungovernable; he had been summoned to court for throwing a neighbour’s wife out of her pew during a church service; he was now attempting to brutalise his mother into giving him full control of all inherited property. As the poor woman had the interest of five lit

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III

III

“The Great Bay of the Massachusees,” for so was Boston Harbor anciently known, is a pleasant place with its long, whaleback islands, its countrified, hillocky shores, drumlin mounds, and inland glimpse of the little mountains known as the Blue Hills; it still retains something of a sylvan air; in 1625 it was a sylvan wilderness. Until very recent years, the most conspicuous feature of the bay was a vast field, almost a domain, sloping from a thicket of inland trees to the curving beach of the pl

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IV

IV

“There is a time for reaping and a time for sowing,” and for Thomas Morton a time for drinking the wine of life’s good pleasure. It is clear that the poet vagabond decided to enjoy life and, like Ecclesiastes, “prove his heart with mirth.” He had come to his years of philosophy, his path of life had led him to a glorious land, and a world of new adventures and impressions had cleansed from memory a past of tumult and bitterness. Master Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden was now his very own, and ther

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V

V

The Puritan settlement at Boston having been accomplished, the domain of Merry-Mount became part of the Puritan jurisdiction, and one of Endecott’s first acts was to go to the Mount, cut down the Maypole, and admonish the forlorn little band “to look ther should be better walking.” The surviving members of Morton’s company had not been attracting attention in any way, and Endecott’s visit was simply an outlet to the man’s hunger to punish. He was presently, for a very minor offence, to cut off t

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I

I

A tall, broad-shouldered, powerful man, a man six feet four inches in height, sitting on “the largest horse ever seen in Scotland.” “Mr. Bruce ... is the tallest man you ever saw gratis,” said laughing Fanny Burney. Not a colossus or a Hercules like Belzoni, but a kind of eighteenth-century adult Olympian quite aware of the prestige of height and fine carriage, with the tolerant and humorous eye of an observer of life, and something of the pride and composure of a well-born Scottish gentleman. T

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II

II

The forest kingdom of Abyssinia lies on a high and isolated plateau lifted above the tropical greenery of equatorial Africa; its slopes are steep, and its approaches mountainous and difficult. Once arrived on the heights, the traveller finds himself on a kind of land island with its own temperature, mountain-top climate, its own forest bred of the strange union of the fierce equatorial sun and the cool heights, and its own island people dwelling aloof in space and time. Though dark skinned, thes

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III

III

While in Abyssinia, Bruce observed a certain extraordinary custom. Had he forgotten to mention this custom in the volumes of travel he later published, he would have done well, for his description of the custom did more to brand him as a marvel monger than all the rest of the fantastic realities set down in his careful and accurate history of his Abyssinian years. This custom was eating of raw flesh from the living animal. Bruce had attended the great banquets of raw bullock meat,—exactly such b

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IV

IV

The strange things that befall vagabonds on their return! The Laird of Kinnaird found himself a rich man on his arrival in Stirlingshire. Coal had been discovered on his properties. A Scots laird and a travelled gentleman riding about his property on that largest horse ever seen in Scotland, marrying again and happily, and bringing up a family. He must have often wondered what became of all the great folk to whom he had once been Yagoube the counsellor. Ras Michael,—what of him? Did he ever know

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I

I

In the Paris of the late eighties, when men of letters met for a p’tit verre or a glass of coffee at a boulevard café, a question was often asked that had no answer but a shrug—what in heaven’s name had become of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet? The older men remembered him well, this overgrown, unmannerly whelp of eighteen who had suddenly appeared among them from some dull town in the Ardennes, and had made his way into the literary heart of things; they remembered the sensation which had followed Ve

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II

II

The poet having ceased to write poetry, a vast part of the house of the brain now lay dark and tenantless, its emptiness accentuated by a memory of the lost spirit whose poetic vitality had once filled the mansion. A wildness of wandering now seized the boy; he was trying to fill the haunted, echoing rooms as best he could, and like the king in the parable, he sought his guests on the roads. He goes to Stuttgart to study German; he crosses the St. Gothard pass on foot and visits Italy; he pays h

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