How an unlikely explorer took globetrotting to new lengths.
Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea
A SENSE OF THE WORLD
How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler
By Jason Roberts
HarperCollins. 382 pp. $26.95
Before there were cars, long-distance buses, high-speed trains and jet
airplanes, there was a man who traveled a quarter of a million miles.
He did it by cart, by carriage, by sledge, by ship and by foot. And he
did it "intermittently crippled" and "permanently blind." His name was
James Holman, and for a time he was the most famous of the many
intrepid English travelers who set out for faraway places at the end
of the Napoleonic Wars.
Holman and his heroic achievements are all but forgotten today. Long
before his death in 1857, he had faded into lonely obscurity, a relic
of a romantic, pre-mechanized age. Jason Roberts first saw mention of
him in a slim book called Eccentric Travelers . But Holman's only
eccentricity was his urgent need "to cling to the road like a
lifeline," writes Roberts in A Sense of the World , an eloquent and
sympathetic biography of the long-gone voyager.
Holman's afflictions were somewhat mysterious. Born in Essex in 1786,
he'd gone to sea in the Royal Navy at the age of 12. After three years
spent on the damp, frigid deck of the HMS Cambrian, a frigate based
out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Holman developed what seemed to be
rheumatism, an old man's illness that afflicted many young sailors.
When he sought a cure in Bath, his rheumatic symptoms eased, but he
lost his sight mysteriously and completely.
Roberts is gruesomely thorough in depicting the perils -- mostly from
the medical profession -- that threatened the blind in the early 19th
century. "In 1811," writes Roberts, "even the most enlightened medical
professional knew no more about the eye than might a curious butcher."
Cures for blindness included leeches, couching (poking a thick needle
into the pupil) and setons (threads sewn vertically between the
shoulder blades "to draw down the head's malignant humors"; they
invariably became septic). If none of those methods worked (and it was
pure luck if they did), the blind could expect a life of reliance on
charity: "Almost no one wanted to hire the blind . . . . Most sighted
people were unsettled by [their] presence," writes Roberts.
But Holman rejected every curb on his independence. He refused to wear
the customary rag over his eyes, and he developed a surefire way of
moving around on his own: a metal walking stick that produced "an
authoritative series of taps" allowing him to navigate by sound. And
to avoid outright charity, he finagled a lifetime appointment as a
Naval Knight of Windsor, which provided him with lodging and a stipend
as long as he attended daily service in the castle's chapel.
Holman did not attend chapel for long. His health began to fail, and
his doctors conveniently prescribed convalescence in sunny France. It
was Holman's first solo journey in a foreign country, and he found it
exhilarating. Likely, his doctors did not envision the sort of
footloose travel cure that he came to favor. Granted a one-year leave
from the Naval Knights, he was away for two, traveling through much of
Europe, never staying in one place very long. Travel, he quickly
realized, was "the only thing keeping him alive."
When he returned, he wrote a bestselling book of his journeys that
earned him the sobriquet the "Blind Traveler." And he began making
ambitious (and surreptitious) plans to circumnavigate the globe. His
poverty dictated his itinerary -- and his wish to circumvent officious
friends dictated the secretiveness. He decided to go by land through
Russia, traveling like the "impoverished peasantry . . . in simple
horse-drawn carts and wheel-less sledges" and saving money "by
engaging no guide or translator, trusting himself to pick up the
notoriously difficult Russian language in transit." His friends would
have been right to interfere. "Reaching the Pacific this way," writes
Roberts, "meant crossing some of the world's coldest, harshest, and
least-charted terrain, lands so bleak that even the more hospitable
parts had been serving as a much-dreaded penal colony for almost two
centuries."
But nothing could have pleased Holman more, as he later wrote: "I was
engaged under circumstances of unusual occurrence, in a solitary
journey of several thousand miles,through a country, perhaps the
wildest on the face of the earth, and whose inhabitants were scarcely
yet accounted within the pale of civilization; with no other attendant
than a rude Tartar postillion, to whose language my ear was wholly
unaccustomed. And yet I was supported by a feeling of happy
confidence."
And he almost pulled it off, making it as far as Irkutsk, "the world's
most isolated city," when the czar got wind of the traveling
Englishman. Fearing that Holman would discover the extent of Russia's
forays into North America, Czar Alexander had the blind man
unceremoniously kidnapped and dumped on the Polish border.
Holman's Russian troubles weren't over when he returned to England.
There, he discovered that a treacherous fellow traveler had leveled
charges that would dog Holman for rest of his life. John Dundas
Cochrane, known as the "Pedestrian Traveler," had made it almost as
far across Russia as Holman had, on foot. But in his account of his
journey, he made Holman into "a sort of harbinger marking the end of
risk," asking "Who will then say that Siberia is a wild, inhospitable,
or impassible country, when even the blind can traverse it with
safety?"
While that charge -- that if the blind Holman could make the journey,
it was no great traveling feat -- became a theme of later reviews of
Holman's books, it hardly dampened his wanderlust. Into his sixth
decade, he was "an intrepid invalid (at times simultaneously incapable
of standing up and standing still)." He embarked on what was for the
Royal Navy "the deadliest expedition of all time" to the miasmic
African island of Fernando Po, an outpost for attacks on the slave
trade. From there, he went on to Buenos Aires, South Africa,
Madagascar, India, China, Australia and beyond. "Somewhere in the
Atlantic, approaching England, Holman at last completed his circuit of
the world," writes Roberts.
Holman died alone in London, a week after finishing the autobiography
that he hoped would be his claim to long-lasting fame. That book was
never published; his heir lost the manuscript. But at last Holman has
an enthusiastic champion. Perhaps too enthusiastic: Roberts is rather
quick to defend some of Holman's more egregious errors, including his
tendency to pad his books with unreliable accounts of places to which
he'd never traveled. And yet his obvious admiration for Holman is
right and proper: The man "could claim a thorough acquaintance with
every inhabited continent, and direct contact with at least two
hundred distinctly separate cultures," and he did so by willing
himself forward, past every obstacle. Roberts's vibrant prose and
meticulous recreation of Holman's world offer modern readers a chance
to see what Holman saw as he tapped his way around the globe. ?
Rachel Hartigan Shea is a contributing editor of Book World.
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