"Fatal North" by Bruce Henderson

This book is both another harrowing account of arctic exploration and a true crime mystery.

 In 1871, a US expedition on board the Polaris, led by Captain Francis Hall, attempted to reach the North Pole. They had reached North Greenland when Captain Hall died, following a short mystery illness, amid accusations that he had been poisoned. Sidney Buddington, the sailing master, took over as Captain. He, however, had a drinking problem and was terrified of getting stuck in the ice if they attempted top go any further north; he repeatedly refused permission for expeditions northwards. The crew became disorgnaised and mutinous. The ship did get stuck in the ice and then, during a panic when it was believed that the skip was sinking, half the crew were separated from the ship and marooned on an ice flow. They were then abandoned by Buddington and those aboard the ship. Those on the ice flow were kept alive through the efforts of a couple of eskimoes who built igloos on the floe and hunted seals to eke out their meagre provisions. Over the next 197 days, hungry and cold and in constant danger of the ice floe breaking up, they drifted 1500 miles south before being rescued by a whaler. This book attempts to answer the question of why the ice-floe men were abandoned by the Polaris party (which was also rescued, having had a rather better time of it) and whether Captain Hall was murdered. 

Selected quotes:

• "There was a paraselene - an illusion of multiple moons showing beside the true one, arranged so as to form an eerie but beautiful cross. The true moon was a surrounded by a halo, which also embraced two of the false ones, while the other mock moons had a separate halo, making a large circle concentric with the first. The two false moons nearest to the true one showed the colours of the prism." (Ch 8)
• "There was no tell-tale whistling of the wind among trees, for none existed here. Once out on the open plain, the wind struck full force without notice. The wind was felt before it was heard." (Ch 8)
• "Each berg presented, in contour, the effects of battles with wind and water, rain and storm, and the rough jostling with other bergs it had experienced." (Ch 15)

December 2022; 259 pages

Other books about travel, exploration and explorers, including Ninety Degrees North by Fergus Fleming can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Captain Cook" by Frank McLynn

 A hugely detailed (exhaustingly so) biography of the explorer James Cook. While I was interested in his early life (he was late going to sea and even then he worked for a long time in the merchant marine and his transfer from mate to able-seaman in the navy was a surprising career move) and the details of how he learned his trade as a surveyor during the Canadian campaign of the Seven Years War, I had very little interest in the minute details of Cook's day by day adventures in Tahiti or Tonga or even Hawaii; at this stage less would have meant more.

It was, however, to McLynn's credit that he sees Cook as a flawed human being who represented a corrupt and flawed Royal Navy with latent imperialist and colonialist intentions and fundamentally racist attitudes. Cook rarely comes out of an encounter with Polynesians and Maoris, Australian aboriginals and Melanesians, Inuit and Siberians etc; to his utter failure to understand the opposing culture he added autocratic decision making, flogging, maiming and even shooting 'natives' without compunction; I was only surprised that it took so long for an angry 'native' mob to murder him. McLynn repeatedly compares Cook with HM Stanley who, in McLynn's own (earlier) biography, is depicted as a monster). But McLynn doesn't do hagiography, describing James Wolfe, the British general who, by taking Quebec, turned Canada from French to English, as "habitually addicted to war crimes and even genocide ... deeply unpleasant ... by any standards a war criminal." (Ch 2). He also debunks the credentials of Alexander Dalrymple who seemed to receive rather kinder treatment at the hands of his descendant William Dalrymple in his history of the East India Company, The Anarchy.

But Cook's achievements are immense. A brilliant cartographer, he mapped New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia, he saw icebergs and almost the coast of Antarctica, he 'discovered' (to Europeans) Hawaii, he mapped the Oregon and Alaskan coast. The book alternates between descriptions of the sexual freedoms enjoyed by his sailors (but not Cook) in Tahiti and Tonga and, to a lesser extent, Hawaii, where they introduced syphilis, and the dramatic battles with the sea. 

So there's plenty of incident. But the sentences are long and the paragraphs are, at times, immense. I have always understood that a paragraph is organised around a single theme but McLynn sees them as department stores of ideas. I was repeatedly fatigued while reading this book.

The sort of biography that is brilliant for the scholar but rover-detailed and heavy-going for the general reader.

Selected quotes:

• "He insisted on doing things his way, and was obstinate, inflexible and even somewhat unpleasant." (Ch 1)
• "Great explorers are seldom outstanding human beings." (Ch 1)
• "Within six weeks of stepping ashore ... Cook had a wife." (Ch 3)
• "The arioi seemed to Cook and Banks no more than sex-obsessed strolling players ... Partly a freemasonry, partly a showbusiness organisation something like the Order of the Water Rats, partly a Polynesian version of the Eleusinian mysteries, they often ... performed on public and festive occasions, staging shows with a very strong sexual content, which were meant to point forward to the lubricious delights of Paradise." (Ch 6)
• "Yaws has the curious quality of providing immunity to syphilis." (Ch 6)
• "Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no whingers in a life-and-death maritime emergency." (Ch 7)
• "Typical eighteenth-century intellectuals, the Forsters were torn between the idealised picture of Polynesia as they would like it to be and the grim reality which they could not avoid  an almost perfect paradigm of Paradise Found and Lost." (Ch 12)
• "'No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough yo get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned ... A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company'." (Ch 12; quoting Samuel Jonson)
• "As he grows older a man obsessed with control is likely to find the sheer contingency of the world and its stubborn and irreducible nature intolerable, which in turn generates impatience and tantrums." (Ch 13)
• "In a new version of la ronde de l'amour the women of Nomuka transmitted syphilis to comrades of the men who had originally given it to them." (Ch 13)
• "The Tahitians laid on a super-erotic heiva, of a kind that, to use a later idiom, would have made a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." (Ch 14)
• "It is an unfortunate aspect of Cook's personality that he tended to attribute all his remarkably good luck to his own peerless seamanship and all his bad luck, in paranoid fashion, to a malign fate." (Ch 15)
• "By definition a man who wants quick results is not a careful planner." (Ch 17)

December 2022; 421 pages

Other books on travel and exploration, and other biographies of explorers, can be found on this page.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Alexandria: The Quest of the Lost City" by Edmund Richardson

 This is a wonderful story about a private in the East India Company in India in 1827 who deserts and reinvents himself as explorer Charles Masson. He has multiple adventures before becoming besotted with the idea that Bagram, near Kabul in Afghanistan, is the site of Alexandria-Under-the-Mountains, one of the many lost cities founded by Alexander the Great (he had previously stumbled across the site of the Harappan civilisation, but doesn't seem to have been impressed). His journeys included the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and the man-made caves behind them, Gholghola, the City of Screams (made by the wind passing through its pinnacles) which was destroyed by Genghis Khan, and a 'dead dragon'. His researches include the translation of an unknown Indian script and the discovery of "the very earliest dateable image of the Buddha which has ever been found" (Ch 6), a work of art with clear Greek influences. When his past caught up with him he was blackmailed into spying for the East India Company on his friends, the rulers of Kabul; he later became involved in the loot-fuelled British invasion of that country, then, suspected as a double agent, a British prisoner, until finally he escaped from India just as the British hubris caught up with them and they were slaughtered while retreating from Kabul in the winter of 1841 - 1842.

It is an incredibly romantic story, full of action, and would make a superb film. As well as the exotic location and the multiple story of survival despite incredible hardships, it is people with larger-than-life characters:

• James Lewis/ Charles Masson himself. He repeatedly reinvented his own story.
• Josiah Harlan, an American fantasist, traveller, and spy, who claimed to have been created Prince of Ghor (Ch 14)
• Joseph Wolff, a fanatical preacher. "He was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind. He had spent years wandering ... preaching all the way. Every day, he had become grumpier and more dogmatic." After annoying one party of Afghans they stripped him so he had to walk into Kabul naked. "Even when fully clothed, Wolff was a remarkable sight. ... Naked, he quite baffled the thesaurus."  (Ch 4)
• Henry Pottinger, the East Indian Company's resident in Bhuj: "Think back to the most easily irritated person you have ever met. Double their sensitivity. You might now be coming close to Pottinger. If you left him alone in a room for a few minutes, he would probably be nursing a lifelong grudge against the sofa and two of the floorboards by the time you returned." (Ch 6)
• "treasure-hunting Transylvanian Johann Martin Honigberger ... liked quoting Cicero, practising homeopathy, and smashing things." (Ch 6)
• Dost Mohammed, a ruler of Kabul, spent years "drinking his courtiers under the table" before becoming abstemious and banning alcohol. He has a proverbial reputation as a just ruler. (Ch 6)

It is also a chronicle of the shame of colonialism. Some incidents recounted are even more sickening than the comprehensive condemnation in The Anarchy by Willaim Dalrymple:

• "East India House was loot made manifest." (Ch 12)
• "'One or two little bits of smashery took place,' laughed one officer. 'It is perfectly annoying to see a lot of those fellows come screeching after you that they have been looted. This generally happens during the first or second day you enter a place'." (Ch 15)
• Loveday, a political officer, enslaved Indians to work on building his palace, one of whom displeased him and was savaged by Loveday's bulldogs, later dying  of his injuries. "He was proud of 'blowing from a gun' one local chief ... Loveday slid up the greasy pole like a man born to the art ... Loveday proved to be a world-class looter." (Ch 15)
• It's not just British imperialism that was evil. Alexander the Great massacred all the men of military age and enslaved all other inhabitants at both Tyre and Gaza. He looted and burned Persepolis. (Ch 20)

Selected quotes:

• "When Lewis was a teenager, the British economy was teetering on the brink of collapse. London's streets filled up with the newly homeless. ... The government responded with a sympathy which has marked British attitudes to the poor for centuries: they announced a plan to execute the protesters." (Ch 1)
• "When you walk into a room full of strangers, there's a precious moment when you can become whoever you want to be." (Ch 2)
• "The Pashtuns say that when God created the world he had a heap of rocks left over, out of which he made Afghanistan." (Ch 3) This reminded me of a similar quote about the founding of Montenegro, as found in The Venetian Empire by Jan Morris.
• "Alexander [the Great] travelled far. But stories about him have travelled even further. There is an Icelandic Alexander Saga and an Armenian epic, a Balinese poem and a French romance." (Ch 7)
• "Then the assassins came for Masson. One night, a sudden noise pulled him from sleep. He blinked awake and stumbled to the door. Men with knives were running up the stairs." (Ch 9)
• "The people of Malana are proud of their ancestor, Alexander the Great. The family business is no longer world conquest, but the cultivation of some of the most potent marijuana on earth." (Ch 11)
• "He was still convinced ... that the East India Company cared; that a thoroughly amoral, capitalist empire could also be kind." (Ch 12)
• "When it rained, the lower town flooded, and the poor waded through the shit of the rich." (Ch 15)
• "The Parsis had arrived in India from Persia over a thousand years earlier. They brought with them stories about Alexander: fearful tales, legends of a violent, ruthless king, who brought nothing but death and destruction in his wake." (Ch 20)
• "Heinrich Schliemann loved a tall tale even more than Charles Masson did. Today, schollars are divided between those who think he was a liar, and those who think he was a 'pathological liar'." (Ch 21)
• "Evans is another of history's great archaeological stars ... It is rarely mentioned that many of his craftsmen worked two shifts: the first, restoring Minoan antiquities, and the second, faking Minoan antiquities." (Ch 21)

This is an absolutely brilliant book. The hero is incredible, his adventures page-turning, and the cast of characters beautifully drawn. In addition, it is very well written. 

September 2022; 261 pages

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"News From Tartary" by Peter Fleming

 In 1935, Peter Fleming, Old Etonian (and brother of the later-to-become-more-famous Ian, author of the James Bond books), at the time a seasoned traveller and a Times correspondent attempted to travel 3,500 miles, with a French female companion called Kini, from Beijing to Kashmir, across parts of China which were remote, restricted and where there were rebellions and infiltration by both White and Red Russians. For a significant part of the journey they had no motorised transport - they spent three months without seeing any wheeled vehicle - and relied on horses, camels and donkeys. This beautifully written book is an account of their journey.

It is of its time. It speaks of racial differences when it means cultural differences. There is a definite feeling of European (and especially British Imperial) superiority (for example: "The Chinese garrison of the province was a garish and Gilbertian force, existing largely on paper and opium."; 6.1). The indigenous peoples are almost invariably represented as poor, backward, culturally bereft, dishonest, lazy, cruel to their animals (and sometimes one another) and incompetent. Fleming-the-sahib often has to bully them into doing what he wants of them. And, although he professes admiration for Kini, she is the one who cooks and sews and is in charge of the medicine.

My edition had no illustrations and I particularly missed a map.

But it is stuffed with incident (even an outbreak of plague!) and it possesses the vivid descriptions which is the hallmark of  great travel writing:

• "There was something forced and unnatural about the landscape. The little hummocks, the naked branches, looked - against the too bright, too picturesque background of sky and mountains - like the synthetic scenery which surrounds stuffed wild animals in a glass case." (4.1)
• "The sun beat down and mirage waterishly streaked the periphery of our field of vision." (5.1) I love 'waterishly'!
• "We spent five days there, lodged on a wilderness of carpets which had something of the decorative impermanence of a film set." (6.5)
• "He wore a black three-cornered hat and a rusty bottle-green coat tied around the waist with a scarf which might have been a dirty tricolour; thus clad, he looked, as he slouched along, like a minor and unsympathetic character in a play about the French Revolution." (6.6)

Selected quotes:

• "The slow train dragged itself wearily into the station - a long string of trucks ... from which the doors ... had been removed." (1.6)
• "We walked behind the lorries over a precarious bridge whose architecture seemed to be an affair of mud and mass-hypnotism." (1.8)
• "As we arrived at the inn, the building next to it - an eating-house where we had breakfasted - quietly and rather sadly collapsed, crumbling into rubble in a cloud of dust." (1.9)
• "The first day we were there a boy attached to the gold-seekers went off into the tamarisk and never came back. Search poarties ranged by day, huge bonfires blazed by night, and the lamas put in some fairly intensive clairvoyance, chanting and throwing dice to establish his geographical position. ... But the boy was never found; he must have died of hunger and thirst, perhaps only a little way away." (4.1)
• "Then there was the Lost City. We christened it in the Fawcett tradition; but I know that it is not a city and I cannot be sure that it is really lost." (4.1) Percy Fawcett was a well-known explorer of the inter-war period whose travels in the South American rain forests to locate a lost city are chronicled in The Lost City of Z by David Grann, a brilliant book (later made into a movie) which put me off exploration forever.
• "It occurs to me that there is too much grumbling in this book." (4.4)
• "We were never short of food; but, with the exception of perhaps an hour after the evening meal, there was no single moment in the day when we would not have eaten, and eaten with the greatest relish, anything that appeared remotely edible." (4.4)
• "Nobody in England now walks without putting on fancy dress to do it." (4.4)
• "Travelling Blind" (4.5, chapter heading) I include this because I have long been intending to write a novel with this title.
• "the sudden bursts of harsh song with which he emphasized rather than relieved the monotony of the march." (4.6)
• "It is a strange and terrible thing that lady novelists are right, that young men in deserts do dwell with a banal wistfulness on sentimentalized, given-away-with-the-Christmas-number pictures of their native land, forgetting the by-passes, the cloudbursts, the sheaves of bluebells lashed to motor-cycle pillions, the bungalows and the banana-skins and the bowler hats." (5.5)
• "Although we know that all men are brothers and that the peoples of the modern world are knit together in a great web of sympathy and understanding, we still find it impossible to be deeply stirred by things that happen to those fellow-beings whose skin is of a different colour to our own." (6.1)
• "The donkey, though perhaps on some beach of your childhood it provided an adventure which made you as breathless as your nurse, is a sublunary mount for the adult." (6.8) The 'nurse' tells you the social stratem for whom Fleming is writing!
• "You felt, in short, that you were at the end of the dead desert, which had swallowed - but showed no signs of having digested - the outposts of more than one civilization." (7.1)
• "You never know what may happen at a banquet in Kashgar, and each of our official hosts had brought his own bodyguard. Turki and Chinese soldiers lounged everywhere; automatic rifles and executioners' swords were much in evidence, and the Mauser pistols of the waiters knocked ominously against the back of your chair as they leant over you with the dishes." (7.2)

Peter Fleming also wrote Invasion 1940, a very amusing book about Britain's chaotic preparations at the start on the Second World War.

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 389 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Coronation Everest" by Jan Morris

Jan Morris (when he was James) was the Times Correspondent assigned to the 1952 Commonwealth Everest Expedition led by James Hunt which succeeded in being the first to conquer Everest, placing Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay on the top of the world. Morris managed to get the news to England (in the days before ubiquitous communications he used runners to take coded dispatches to the nearest radio transmitting station) just in time for the Coronation of Elizabeth Windsor as Queen of the UK.

What makes this book stand out is the quality of the prose. When Morris describes the mountain or the Sherpas or Nepal or anything he writes simply yet clearly and always uses the perfect word so that the images he conjures up are crystal clear. And he is original too. The classic mountaineer's biography might emphasize the perils and the hardships but Morris tells you of his discomforts and his difficulties so the reader is left in no doubt that the climb is arduous and that many aspects are thoroughly unpleasant. He is refreshingly realistic about the people he encounters too, and their customs and their foibles, and the disgusting food and drink he samples. This is no wonder-eyed traveller's tale but real life in all its shabby glory.

Selected quotes

• "He believed wholeheartedly in living off the country, and was an authority on chang, the glutinous substance used by the Nepalese for beer, and on rakhsi, the methylated spirits with which they foster the wild illusion that they are drinking gin." (C 3)
• "The valley of Katmandu was full of splendid medieval monuments, but there was nowhere quite so remarkable as Bhatgaon, which lies about twelve miles to the east of the capital. It was a town of dark and glowering appearance, instinct with the spirit of the Middle Ages. Its streets were narrow and tortuous, and in them you might well expect to meet the funeral procession of a plague, or mingle with branded slaves, or come across some defiant heretic blazing at the stake." (C 3)
• "While I had always admired Mallory’s famous reason for wanting to climb Everest, I was convinced that it would still be there next week." (C 5)
• "Here and there the valley was dotted with the statuesque figures of the yaks, who seemed to enjoy standing all alone in the wilderness gazing into eternity." (C 5)
• "As a doer of duty he seemed to me invincible; whatever job he was given, the building of a chicken coop or the translation of an Aramaic testament, he would first clothe the task in garments of unapproachable significance, and then proceed to complete it." (C 5)
• "Mallory said it was like a prodigious fang excrescent from the jaw of the earth; so sulky and brooding did it look that morning that I thought it must have a toothache. Great mountains surrounded it on every side, but it looked recognizably the greatest (and nastiest) of them all." (C 5)
• "The icefall of Everest rises two thousand feet or more and is about two miles long. It is an indescribable mess of confused ice-blocks, some as big as houses, some fantastically fashioned, like minarets, obelisks, or the stone figures on Easter Island." (C 6)
• "Sweet thick tea follows, tasting faintly of methylated spirits and strongly of the melted snow which provided the water – a taste, I used to think, desperately compounded of winds and desolation, for a raindrop frozen on the slopes of Everest must be a lonely sort of thing." (C 6)
• "Privacy was an abstract totally beyond their conception, and anyone might walk freely into anyone else’s house." (C 7)
• "During the Abyssinian War the Christian Science Monitor was presented by its correspondent in Ethiopia with a bill for two slaves." (C 8)
• "I do not normally behave in this autocratic way, except at the breakfast table." (C 8)
• "Who could have supposed that I would ever find myself in quite so historically romantic a situation, dashing down the flanks of the greatest of mountains to deliver a message for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II? It was all perfectly – oops, steady, nasty slippery bit! – all perfectly ridiculous." (C 11)

A splendidly original take on heroism.

Other books by James/Jan Morris reviewed in this blog:

• Venice
• Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

October 2011

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Livingstone" by Tim Jeal

 A biography of the Victorian British missionary and explorer of Africa who was greeted by Stanley with the famous words: "Doctor Livingstone, I presume."

Despite the fact that, as a missionary, he made only one convert who later apostatised  and, as an explorer, he made no significant discovery, David Livingstone was one of those Victorian icons who achieved near-saint status. This biography shows the man behind the myth. And he was horrid.

He was a self-made man. Born to poverty, living in a single room with his parents and four other siblings, he worked in a textile mill from the age of ten. Education came after eight PM. He must have had incredible determination and strength to save the money needed to go to medical school at the age of 21, moving on to missionary school and eventually being funded to go to Africa. But this strength and determination and the lack of either a proper childhood or, indeed, the chance to make mistakes and do the normal things that men learn from in their early adulthood meant that he was driven, intolerant of failure and weakness, and that he had almost no empathy. There is no doubt that these character traits made him able to struggle on where others gave up or died and there is equally no doubt that he was psychologically crippled, unable to provide leadership, and deeply flawed as a human being. His intolerance of personal failure led him to distort the truth to the point of lying and these lies led to other missionaries and their wives and children losing their lives. His inability to empathise led to the death of his own wife and the deaths of some of those for whom he was responsible, in expeditions he led. He was a monster.

The author makes these points time and again:

• "He was never able to judge others except by the standards he had set himself." (C 2)
• "He believed without question that in all working relationships one person had to dominate the other person or persons absolutely, whether man, wife, or fellow-missionary." (C 5)
• "Livingstone was to show himself capable not only of hypocrisy and self-righteousness in his dealings with colleagues but also of lies and double-dealing." (C 5)
• "Livingstone ... deliberately maligned innocent people for whose deaths he had been partially responsible, in order to escape the slur of having misrepresented the true situation ... He never showed regret for this behaviour." (C 12)
• "Livingstone ... would simply prove a disastrous leader." (C 14)
• "That central defect in Livingstone's character: his virtual inability to respond to the sufferings of others." (C17)
• "When his colleagues on the Zambesi fell ill, and could not endure hardships which he considered routine, he despised them for it. This scorn became so pronounced that in the end he was able to shrug off the deaths of the missionaries ... as just another form of spinelessness and lack of guts." (C 24)

But perhaps worse than these personal failings which might be excused as the normal foibles of a great man was Livingstone's intentions. He saw with crystal clarity that the reason missionaries were struggling to convert Africans to Christianity was because the power of tribal culture was too strong. "The central problem which any Christian critic of tribal organization faced was the fact that the whole system was based on collective generosity rather than on private ownership and personal wealth: a far more 'Christian' society in that respect than capitalist nineteenth century Britain." (C 8) So he proposed destroying tribal culture by a process of colonisation; he sought to replace tribalism with capitalism and the model he favoured was a few white people managing the labours of many black people: 

• "Everything, he repeated, was hopeless for Africa unless there was 'contact with superior races by commerce'. The Africans ... were cowardly and through their constant use of cannabis could not form 'any clear thought on any subject'." (C 10) 
• "Livingstone was one of imperialism's earliest prophets and advocates. From the mid-1850s he began writing about the British as a 'superior race' with a divine mission 'to elevate the more degraded portions of the human family'. British businessmen, he averred, were 'the most upright and benevolent in the world'." (C 13) 
• "Colonization ... would force social change on the Africans, destroying their customs and institutions and so leaving them psychologically prone to accepting a new set of beliefs." (C 24)

In the end the author tries to be fair to his subject and to explain why he was hero-worshipped: 

• "His dogged refusal to give up in the face of hopeless odds, his uncomplaining acceptance of agonizing pain and finally his lonely death conjure up images so powerful that his contemporaries' adulation seems, in retrospect, the only possible response." (C 24)
• "To be great is to be different, so ordinary criteria of judgment fall short. The point at which determination becomes obsession, and self-sacrifice self-destruction is very hard to estimate." (C 24)
• "Yet even if Livingstone's determination is called obsessive - and it was - it must be acknowledged that without this inflexibility he would never have left the mills." (C 24)

But in the end the people around him suffered. His wife (whom he had married because he felt that a missionary should have a wife to help him) and children were dragged along with him or sent back to England to live in poverty when he decided that they were an encumbrance. His fellow explorers were routinely denied any share in his discoveries by being lied about and libelled and just ignored when he wrote his books. Those who believed his claims about Africa (over-optimistic and false) suffered and died in trying to fulfil his plans.  

In many respects (such as the dreadful childhood and the routine use of falsehood to self-glorify and to libel others and the carelessness with the lives of others) Livingstone is very like that other famous African explorer Stanley: Frank McLynn in Stanley: the making of an African explorer shows what an awful man he was. Another 'eminent' Victorian who also worked others to death through refusing to believe that anyone's sufferings could match her own was Florence Nightingale, who biography by Cecil Woodham-Smith is here. Was it just Victorians whose heroes were monsters or are all 'great' people seriously flawed?

Other selected quotes:

• "Livingstone was not the first nor the last religiously motivated man to see his own wishes and personal preferences in terms of the dictates of Providence, and to justify them accordingly." (C 8)
• "Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five most young men learn, through close contact with other people, to accept that earlier ambitions and ideals may have been pitched too high. They come to realize that their are limits to their own abilities, and in marrying, or forming close attachments, are forced to recognize that compromise and concession are vital for the success of any close relationship." (C 24)
• "The expanding middle class ... discovered that Christian virtues could easily be exchanged for business virtues: abstinence, diligence, an exemplary home life and a weekly confrontation with the Maker could produce rewards in this life as well as the next." (C 11)

A brilliantly written book which exposes the monster behind the saintly hero.

September 2021; 384 pages

Other books about travel and exploration which are reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Erebus" by Michael Palin

 Palin follows the voyages of HMS Erebus, the ship that, with HMS Terror, took James Clark Ross on his voyage of exploration in the Antarctic in 1839 - 1843 before taking Sir John Franklin on his doomed search for the North-West Passage 1845 - 1848.

My biggest problem with books of this kind is that I find it difficult to follow the journeys without reference to a map. There are several maps in this book: most of them are adequate but I found great difficulty when it came to the quite intricate details of the North-West Passage, especially when Palin was describing the multiple searches for Franklin. Repetition of eg Lancaster Sound and Bering Straits (especially as the latter didn't seem to be marked on the maps) and all the islands that might have been promontories just left me confused.

Some great moments:

• "I love the idea of a medicine for hypochondria." (Prologue)
• "In classical mythology Erebus, the son of Chaos, was generally taken to refer to the dark heart of the Underworld, a place associated with dislocation and destruction." (C 1)
• "Boothia ... the only peninsula in the world named after a brand of gin." (C 2)
• "the tallest wave ever recorded in the southern hemisphere ... was measured at 78 feet high." (C 6)
• "Of all God's creatures, they [whales] seemed the least prone to hurrying. Their lives seemed to be the human equivalent of taking very long baths." (C 6)
• "This description of a penguin 'walking away upright as a dart ... looking like an old monk going to mass'." (C 10)
• "National confidence is precarious and needs to be fed a constant diet of achievement." (C 12)
• "In Waterloo Place ... is a memorial to Captain Scott. His failure was to be beaten to the South Pole. Franklin's was to be beaten to the first sea crossing of the Northwest Passage. The man who beat Scott to the Pole was Roald Amundsen. The first man to cross the Northwest Passage by sea was Roald Amundsen. He has no memorial in London." (C 17)
• "The shower in the bathroom is one of those where you have to run around to get wet." (Epilogue)

This book was great on the Antarctic explorations but for the North-West Passage I think Barrow's Boys and Ninety Degrees North, both by Fergus Fleming, are much better.

July 2021; 310 pages

Other books on exploration and explorers, and travel, which are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ninety Degrees North" by Fergus Fleming

This is a sort of sequel to Barrow's Boys, a book about the search for the North West Passage, interspersed with various explorations in Africa.

Fergus Fleming brilliantly describes the expeditions that attempted to reach the North Pole starting with Kane and ending with Amundsen's airship expedition. He chronicles the hardships and the hardships and the hardships willingly faced by what seems to have been a group of lunatics. It’s not just the cold:

• “When a group of men were walking together their breath enveloped them in a cloud of fine ice needles which rendered them almost invisible. Their progress was accompanied by a curious tinkling noise ... caused by their frozen exhalations falling to the ground.” (C 8)
• “Payer ... also noted the clinical effects of intense cold on the human body: he stopped sweating; his nose and eyes ran; he felt an increased to urinate and when he did so the urine was bright red; he suffered initially from constipation and then, after a few days, from diarrhoea; his beard became bleached.” (C 8)
• “The boxing matches had to be cancelled because the combatants were unable to see each other through their breath.” (C 10)
• “It was so cold that snow fell within Sverdrup’s sealed tent.” (C 17)
• “Boiling soup solidified before the bowl could be emptied.” (C 18)

Other hazards include::

• literally deadly boredom: “Dr Henrik Blessing experimented with morphine and gradually became an addict.” (C 13)
• frostbite,
• drowning,
• starvation: “If Dore had wanted a model to stand for Famine, he might have drawn Meyer at that moment and made a success” (C 9),
• Lots and lots of scurvy: “As previous expeditions had found that ordinary lime juice froze in its bottles and burst them, the Navy had supplied Nares with a concentrated version. The concentrating process involved boiling the juice in a copper kettle. Copper leaches Vitamin C and heat destroys it.” (C 10)
• self-poisoning: “The liver of a polar bear is the only known toxic source of vitamin A” (C 2),
• poisoning by person or persons unknown:“The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are very like those of a stroke - weakness,, vomiting and sometimes mania. Arsenic tastes sweet and causes a burning sensation in the stomach. The victim has an erratic pulse, vomits and becomes dehydrated - leading to intense thirst. Hall had exhibited every one of those symptoms.” (C 9) leading to a murder mystery whodunnit within the main narrative,
• attacks by bears,
• and a murder by shooting.

And still they returned.


It starts by telling us about John Symmes who never went to the Pole but lectured that it hosted a hole leading to seven concentric rings at the centre of the earth; 25 US senators backed an expedition to discover this: “It was common knowledge that the polar regions were cold and icy places. Where Symmes’s globe departed from the norm, however, was in its countersunk holes which represented the Poles themselves. These, according to Symmes, were gateways to a series of seven worlds that nestled within each other like the layers in a Chinese sphere. Sufficient sunlight poured through the holes to sustain a pallid form of life.” (C 1) “In 1885, the Revd William F. Warren published a work called ‘Paradise Found, in whose 500 pages he stated that the hole at the Pole led to the Garden of Eden. ... William F Warren was President of Boston University.” (C 13)

Then followed a number of attempts to force a way through the pack ice around Greenland or, alternatively, above Spitzbergen. Nansen in the Fram attempted to let the pack ice drift him to the Pole. Finally two rival explorers tried a quick dash using sledges. Cook and Peary both claimed to have reached the Pole. Cook’s claim swiftly fell apart under scrutiny (he was discovered to have lied about conquering Mount McKinley); Peary’s was accepted although he too had a history of making geographical claims that were later shown to be false; it seems likely both were lying.
“Robert Edwin Peary was undoubtedly the most driven, possibly the most successful, and probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration.” (C 16)Discovering a tribe of Eskimoes whose source of iron was three meteorites they regarded as holy, he stole them.
 
Did Peary lie? It seems probable that he did:

• He had promised to take Bartlett with him to the Pole but on the last stage sent him back; this meant he was the only person able to take navigational measurements to ascertain when the Pole was reached. (C 20)
• The speeds he claimed for the last stage of the journey (50 miles per day) were faster than anyone else had ever achieved. “If one accepts that there was no southward drift during those four days ... if one accepts that there was no longitudinal drift either ... if one accepts that he encountered no pressure ridges on his bee-line zip to the Pole, and if one accepts his latitude readings (written in an authentically shaky hand), then, and only then, could Peary have done what he did.” (C 20)
• He came back even faster ... if he got to where he claimed he had done. “The distances of almost sixty miles per day which he claimed for the southern journey are fantastical. Unless Peary was a superman - and Henson, Egingwah, Ootah, OOqueah and Seeglo were supermen too - he could not, by his own evidence, have done it.” (C 20)

There are sledgers, sailors, skiers and balloonists. Each method has horrors: “When Andree climbed aloft to defecate, Fraenkel and Strindberg watched the altimeter only partly in jest - they themselves had taken to spitting out of the door to lighten the load.” (C 15)

Other wonderful moments:

• “He was going to die anyway, he decided, so why waste time being ill at home. (In fact, he was just as ill abroad, catching every regional illness available, and in Mexico was speared in the abdomen.)” (C 1)
• “Kane’s narrative contained images so sharp that they all but bit his readers’ fingernails for them.” (C 1)
• “Kane ... acquired a trophy lover - an odd one. Margaret Fox was a spiritualist, an archetype of the breed, whose double-jointed toes rapped out in darkened rooms messages from beyond the veil. Kane also began to harbour delusions of grandeur. ‘You are not worthy of a permanent regard from me’, he told Margaret, in an unorthodox display of affection.” (C 1)
• “He was told to watch the aurora borealis, to make pendulum experiments to determine the force of gravity in different latitudes, and to record the variation and dip of needles. He was to measure the tides, currents, soundings, bottom-dredging and density of seawater. He was to register temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind velocity, rainfall, the form and weight of hailstones, the character of snow, the speed of glaciers, the frequency of meteors, the presence of ozone, and ‘electricity in all its multiform developments.” (C 9)
• “He doubled over and began to make involuntary hacking noises which at first puzzled him. On recognizing the dormant reflex he hacked all the harder ... as for the first time in six months he heard the sound of his own laughter.” (C 9)
• “James Gordon Bennett ... was one of the richest men alive. On a personal level, he was slightly revolting.” (C 11)
• “The Primus stove ...turned paraffin into gas, thereby utilizing the smallest amount of fuel to produce the greatest heat. It required pumping and gave off a disturbing roar, but was so safe that Scandinavian market women kept one under their skirts to keep off the chill.” (C 13)
• “Why was I given a Titan’s longings and then formed like an ordinary worker ant?” (C 13)
• “With the exception that Johanssen changed his underwear for the first time in four months, their existence was much the same as before.” (C 13)
• “He ... addressed the problem of how many hard-boiled eggs a man could eat at a sitting. Booking a table at a restaurant, he went in and ordered forty of them, with bread and butter and milk. The waitress asked with a straight face whether he wanted anything else.” (C 14)
• “That, however, was one of the less pleasant characteristics of the age of heroes: who was never room for more than one.” (C 14)
• “A number of supply depots had been arranged to assist a possible retreat ... Jackson had left among other things, eight gallons of Dewar's Scotch whisky.” (C 15)
• “When he shouted ... drops of sweat evaporated visibly on his neck.” (C19)
• “Preparing for such an enterprise was something for which Amundsen was ill-suited, involving as it did a knowledge of machinery and a sound grasp of business, two qualities which he lacked outstandingly or which, as he preferred to put it, he had not had time to acquire.” (C 22)

Beautifully written. If you ever feel the wanderlust read this book. Then go on a package to Tenerife instead. 

November 2020; 425 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

"The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf

The core of this book is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a remarkable Prussian polymath who knew Goethe (and Schiller) in Jena and Weimar, who assisted the revolutionaries in the French revolution, who explored northern South America, who inspired Bolivar and Darwin and who laid the foundations of what we know know as ecology.

He must have been a remarkable man: hugely intelligent, hugely energetic, scarcely sleeping, unceasing, talking endlessly; fantastically impressive but I'm not sure he could have been a friend. He didn't really seem to empathise with people. He was glad when his mother died (partly because it released him to spend his inheritance on his passions) and a letter of consolation to his sister-in-law failed spectacularly to console. Though supposedly attractive to women he wasn't attracted by them and chose as his companions young men. But, above all, he was noted for talking non-stop and never letting anyone around him get a word in edgewise. Perhaps he was better off communicating through his hugely best-selling books (which were so expensive to publish that they ruined him).

Humboldt is important partly because of his ability to communicate his ideas through his books but mainly because of what those ideas were. He was the first to really understand the inter-connectedness of nature. This is the reason why this book is only partly a biography of Humboldt. It also explores, in a chapter for each of them, the influence of Humboldt's ideas on:

• Darwin for evolution by natural selection,
• Thoreau on the interplay of science and art: "his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as 'an intolerable bore' who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read." (C 19)
• George Perkins Marsh, the US pioneer of the fight against deforestation, who believed that "if nothing changed ... the planet would be reduced to a condition of 'shattered surface, of climatic excess" (C 20)
• Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology
• John Muir who fought for the first US National Park as a way of preserving the wilderness.

As a young man, Humboldt lived in Jena, where Schiller worked at the university and Goethe often visited from nearby Weimar. (C 2) Goethe was interested in the underlying patterns of animals, what he called the urform. "He distinguished between the internal force - the urform - that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment - the external force - that shaped the organism itself." (C 2)

His first exploration started in Venezuela and early on he saw a lake whose water levels were falling and he realised the part that intensive agriculture and deforestation had played in that. When he got to the rain forest he realised that the animals were competing for food, predating on one another, and that even the trees were competing for light. He discovered the Brazil nut which he introduced to Europe. (C 5) In what would become Ecuador he climbed Mount Chimborazo, at the time thought to be the highest mountain in the world, as high as anyone else had at that time but he couldn't reach the summit because his way was blocked by a huge crevasse. But it was staring at the surrounding landscape from this vantage point that showed him the zones of vegetation and allowed him to later divide the wold into climate zones. (C 7)

Back in Europe he met 21 year-old Simon Bolivar, a rich, spoilt, womanising playboy; Humboldt inspired him so he would later abandon his life of pleasure and return to his native South America to lead the fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule (Bolivar later decreed that Bolivia should plant a million trees.). (C 9) He then embarked on a grand tour with another in a long line of good-looking, unmarried men, this time the chemist Gay-Lussac. (C 9) By luck, Vesuvius erupted when they arrived in Naples. (C 9) Later he met Alessandro Volta by Lake Como (C 10)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein just four years after the publication of Humboldt's tale of exploring South America; she made the monster declare to Victor that he wanted to escape to "the vast wilds of South America". (C 13)

Coleridge was inspired by Humboldt (C 13), as was John Lyell who wrote Principles of Geology which in turn inspired Darwin (C 13); in this book he theorised that climate is affected by tectonic movements. Humboldt knew Gauss and George Canning. (C 14)

For Humboldt it was all about connections. "He connected the sudden appearance of a new island in the Azores  on 30th January 1811 to a wave of earthquakes that shook the planet for a period of more than a year afterwards, from the West Indies, the plains of Ohio and Mississippi and then to the devastating earthquake that destroyed Caracas in March 1812. This was followed by a volcanic eruption on the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies on 30th April 1812." (C 15)

He turned sixty during his second great expedition through Russia and into Siberia. "Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the ... man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin's grandfather." (C 16)

Selected quotes:

• "When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel." (Prologue)
• "Goethe began to fling his arms around whenever he went for a walk ... he had discovered ... that this exaggerated swinging of one's arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal." (C 2)
• "When he heard that a farmer and his wife had been killed by the lightning, he rushed over to obtain their corpses." (C 2)
• "One morning Humboldt placed a frog's leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence ... but generated only a discouraging gentle twitch in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table.  ... Humboldt realised that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction." (C 2)
• "If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the similarities and differences without ever losing sight of the whole." (C 2)
• "Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense." (C 2)
• Goethe's "Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by an endless striving for knowledge, by a 'feverish unrest'." (C 2)
• "Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at different locations and the Rio Atabapo was 'delicious'." (C 5)
• "Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential to an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch." (C 5)
• "One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy's testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl." (C 8)
• "Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word 'God'." (C 18)
• "Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours." (C 20)
• "Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit." (C 20)
• "His finances remained precarious. He didn't even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive." (C 20)
• "'Solitude', Emerson warned him, 'is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife'." (C 23)

Humboldt is also explored by the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme in a broadcast on 28th September 2006; it can be accessed here> https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1c2

A little bit more than a biography. May 2020; 337 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tracking Marco Polo" by Tim Severin

Severin is an explorer and travel writer; other works of his include The Sindbad Voyage and The Brendan Voyage. In this trip he used motorbikes to follow the route of Marco Polo, comparing what he discovered with the account in Polo's famous book. His companions were Michael de Larrabeiti, a cameraman who later became a novelist, and Stanley Johnson who later became the father of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Johnson, initially described as "a burly young man with an unruly shock of blond hair" (C 1), becomes a sort of expedition bludgeon who drives his motorbike (which he repeatedly crashes) where it is determined not to go.

Despite still being an undergraduate at the time, Severin showed that many of the features of Polo's narrative could be matched with things still to be seen. For example, he found a family of Armenian descent in a Turkish village still weaving a fine silk cloth that he interpreted as 'buckram', described by Polo. He also ate a nectarine which he believed to be what Polo had called one of the 'apples of paradise' and locates the Village of the Magi, complete with an ancient Zoroastrian fire-temple. There is one moment (in chapter 7), though, where he discovers a water culvert which plunges into a subterranean tunnel and he compares it with Marco Polo's description, seemingly unaware that this might be the reference that Coleridge turned into "Alph the sacred river" which "ran through caverns measureless to man."

The history and travelled are enlivened by the description of three young daredevils on two motorbikes, originally with sidecars, which they couldn't properly ride (they didn't even have licenses for the English section of the journey). By the most brazen good fortune, the expedition repeatedly overcomes catastrophe. This would make a great road trip movie!

There are also a number of passages of extraordinarily brilliant description:

• "The mineraliferous mountains glowed in their reds, purples, greys and browns, where the naked rock lay exposed to the long winter snows and the fierce summer sun. The road itself was little more than a rough stony path along which we twisted and turned the labouring motorcycles, leaving plumes of dust along the steep climbs and round the sharp shoulders of the rocky flanks. From time to time we skidded down into valleys and the track plunged sharply into a rushing stream. Then with the engines roaring wildly, we were forced to slither crazily into the ford, hoping that our momentum would surge the machines across before water was drawn into the bubbling exhaust pipes or we came to grief on a hidden boulder." (C 4)
• "The fabled lakes of Band-i-Amir ... amongst the highest in the world. In the clear air of the Hindu Kush, they lie like a broken ribbon of glowing tortoiseshell, caught between the peaks. The walls of the surrounding cliffs contract and expand, giving strange and beautiful shapes to the cold, clear waters which lie in basins, slivers and goblets of crystal. At one end of the chain, a gentle trickle flows in to feed the series. At the lower end, the same trickle re-appears, lapping gently out over a natural dam of rock. When this outflow spills away over the downstream face of the dam, the mineral deposits from the sheet of water have covered the rock wall with a glowing patina of mingling tints, reds, blacks and yellows. In the heady air of the high plateau with the snow-sheathed peaks gleaming at a romantic distance, the limpid purity of the lakes of Band-i-Amir with their sheen of many colours successfully isolate an unsullied shrine of beauty." (C 10)

Other great moments:

• "The driver was in such a state of intoxication that he kept on getting his arms entwined in the spokes of the steering wheel" (C 3)
• "The lives of ordinary people have always been ruled by the common factors of climate and terrain." (C 11)

March 2020; 164 pages

Other great travel books in this blog:
This is one of a number of travel books reviewed in this blog, of which my favourites include:
Classics:

• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron: Samarkand etc
• Walking through Europe: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor and its sequel Between the Woods and the Water

Travelling in Britain:

• By milk float: Three men in a float by Dan Kieran and Ian Vince
• Walking on the coast (all of it): The Sea on our left by Shally Hunt
• By bike from Lands End to John O'Groats via a lot of pubs: Mud. Sweat and Gears by Ellie Bennett

And others:

• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: mostly the Trans-Siberian railway