For many years Hildegard Hawthorne, the granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote the "Books and Reading" column for St. Nicholas. She not only recommended books, but tried to describe some of the wonder within each volume. In this column she is recommending adventure tales of the sort, with our modern accoutrements, we could not experience today. George Borrow, incidentally, was an Englishman who wrote about his encounters and experiences in his own country. He was a great supporter of the Romany people (gypsies).You all know how interesting it is to listen to any one telling a personal experience, some adventure that has befallen him, something he has himself seen or done or struggled with. Even those who are not natural story-tellers can usually make such a subject alive and worth while; especially when it is an experience outside the common lot, and unlikely to happen to more than a very few out of earth's millions.
There is an old phrase, "Adventures to the adventurous," that seems to be borne out by the facts of life. Certain characters attract out-of-the-way occurrences. A man like George Borrow, for instance, could not wander along the quiet lanes of an English county without encountering all sorts of odd matters and queer people. There are men who drift toward danger and exciting adventures as their brothers do to the office or the bank, men who are drawn to the wild ways of sea and land as steel filings are drawn to a magnet.
Now and then, these sons of adventure put some of their life into a book. When they do, such books arc sure to make good reading. They possess some of the same spirit that lured their author on to meeting danger lightly, to going with his life in his hands among wild beasts and men, where peril and hardship were the only certain comrades of his trail. They are the talk of a man who has sat by many camp-fires in strange lands beyond far seas, a man who is familiar with the thoughts and customs of many and various peoples, and who has come to understand a great many things. Unluckily, there are not a large number of such books, because the adventurous life does not offer easy opportunities for authorship, and also because many men of this type have not the power of expressing what they know in words, written ones at least. So it is that many curious deeds in savage lands are never heard of by the rest of us. It is only when the writer happens to be one of those rare persons who can do two things excellently well at the same time: meeting his adventures and writing about them all in one swoop, as it were;—or when he manages, like Othello, to survive the many dangers he has passed, and turns in his old age to the telling of them,—that a real book of adventure gets written and comes at last into our hands.
It is of three or four books of this kind that I am going to speak this month; books good for "drear November," fine for reading before a wood-fire, when the smell of the smoke adds to the illusion, bringing to your very hearth the heart of the wild woods, snapping and crackling its own strange story in a language we are not yet wise enough to comprehend.
One of these records of personal adventure is William T. Hornaday's Two Years in the Jungle. A two years spent in the most wonderful wanderings through India, Ceylon, Borneo, and the Malay Peninsula, and told about by a man with a passion for the wilderness in a style as delightful as his subject. This is what he says in his introduction:
The green forest, the airy mountain, the plain, the river, and the sea-shore are to me a perpetual delight . . . he who loves the green woods and the rippling waters, and has felt the mystic spell of life in "a vast wilderness," will appreciate this record of my experience.But one needs not to know the mystic spell of wilderness life in order to appreciate this enchanting book; while, if you do not already love trees and running water and the mighty ways of nature, you will not get very far into its pages without learning to do so. There are all sorts of exciting experiences, as you may imagine, startling customs, things beautiful, and things ugly, for the book is a true book.
Mr. Hornaday writes of animal life in the jungle from the standpoint of a master, for on this subject his knowledge is amazing, the result of many years of arduous study and discovery. What tales we get of trained elephants, of tigers in their jungle freedom, of animals whose very names are unfamiliar to us! There is the manis, for instance, a species of ant-eater attired in a coat of mail, a gentle creature, but both obstinate and determined. No cage or box could keep him safe; no rope could be fastened to him. When he was disturbed, he would roll himself neatly up and clamp matters with his tail. He adopted this attitude when Mr. Hornaday wanted to measure him. and though the naturalist got three men to help, the whole of them were not a match for that tail; the struggle was tremendous, but the manis maintained his position—"One would have thought that tail was riveted in place," says Mr, Hornaday.
It is unwise in real life to rush from one extreme to another, but in books this rule does not hold good. You will find only pleasure in turning from the hot and humid lands of the Hornaday book to George Kennan's Tent-Life in Siberia. It was forty years ago that this trip was taken—another two-year jaunt—but in all that time little more has been discovered relating either to the country or its fierce population. Rugged and arduous, it is not a place to attract even the most hardy. It was practically an unknown world when Kennan went there, and so it remainSj except for this thrilling book.
The expedition was one of several undertaken in the interests of the Western Union, which had decided to establish an overland telegraph route to Russia. The plan was a failure, and, with the success of the Atlantic cable, was finally abandoned, but it was one of the great enterprises of the world, and attended by countless adventures, hairbreadth escapes from multitudinous dangers, deeds of daring and what-not of the splendid and the stirring.
The book contains a description of the horse-express across those desperate plains—the greatest horse-express in the world—which alone is worth the reading of the entire book. The customs of the Cossacks take you back to the Middle Ages; there is a marriage by capture that you won't find surpassed in any romance. You get the actual scent and look of things. You meet the arctic mosquito, beside which his New Jersey brother is a poor thing indeed. This little northerner has only a short time to operate, but he makes up in activity and power for that deficiency; just as. to take a more agreeable example, the wild flowers have a beauty and variety undreamed of in more temperate zones.
There is one man of adventures who knew well both the tropics and the frozen north, and who wrote of them in several volumes. This was a French Creole, Paul du Chaillu, and whether you begin with his Equatorial Africa or his Land of the Long Night, you are sure of a good time. He has a picturesque and colorful way of writing. and can get the picture in his memory so clearly on his page that it glows vivid as life. His travels were extensive and remarkable, and he was the first white man to get to several places.
I used to know him when I was little more than a child, and delighted in listening to his recitals of adventure on some wild African hunt or along the snow-bound trail of an arctic winter. He was the first man to bring back information of the existence of the gorilla and the pygmy tribes of Africa, and never quite recovered from his wrath at having had his stories doubted. He was a short, powerful man, dark and extremely ugly, with glowing eyes, and he liked to sit on the floor when he told his stories, with an attentive circle around him. When he got thoroughly worked up over a gorilla hunt, he would thump his deep chest and produce much the same sound the gorilla sends booming through the forest; it was unforgettable. He would let out a perfect flood of words, with a strong French accent—he spoke French and English equally badly, but most picturesquely—until you seemed to be actually there with him in the dark jungle, with the terror of the great fierce beast oppressing you, surrounded hy savages, the only white within a radius of hundreds of miles.
These books are stories of forest and plain and mountain; there remains the sea, most marvelous of all, eternal mystery, an adventure in itself, a story without beginning or end. There are several great sea tales by men who lived in ships and who learned to know the ocean as well as a man may. One of these is Frank T. Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot, the story of a round- the-world hunt after sperm-whales, or cachalots, to give them their proper name.
Bullen's life has been as romantic as that of any hero of fiction. He ran away to sea at twelve, after floating around London streets as a waif. It was six or eight years afterward that he started on this cruise, leaving New Bedford. Massachusetts, as mate of the ship. The tale is an absorbing one; it is one of the great stories, and you will not come across a better in many a year of reading. A tale so true, so grim, so thrilling with adventure, so salt with the sea and strange with its life, so outspoken, it almost takes your breath away.
To-day the sperm-whale industry is almost dead. Of the hundreds of ships that fared gallantly from New England and Long Island ports upon their deep-sea hunting, few survive. But here in this book, salt and strong and vivid, it lives for all time. On heaving decks, to the creaking of mast and spar and rigging, the sting of the windy spray and the slap of angry waves, you go after the mighty creature of the five oceans, who spouts and plunges and dies in a mad churning of air and water. The life of the ship surrounds you as you read on and on. The men are uncouth, interesting, good and had, but never indifferent. You make perilous ports and lie in still harbors. Other ships are sighted and spoken. You have passed into a new world, brimful of mad action, or lost in long hours of calm, a place of danger and of peace, an extraordinary mingling of the immensities of ocean and the narrow bounds of the ship. When the time comes for you to disembark, you will be mighty sorry; you will be homesick for days, in fact.
Another good sea yarn that relates actual experiences is the diary of Captain Slocum's journey round the world in the little boat he built and sailed entirely alone. That was, indeed, a great adventure! In addition to writing the story, the captain gave talks that were delightful. I forget whether it was in one of these or in the book that he tells of the place where the benighted inhabitants still believed the earth to be flat, and of how he labored, in vain, to correct this error. There were excited discussions, neither side yielding an inch. At last, however, there was nothing left unsaid, and the opponents gave up in despair, confining themselves to gestures whenever they met. the captain describing circles in the air, his opponents spreading out their hands in order to designate huge, flat spaces. Silently they would pass each other, dumbly waving their arms; and the captain, at least, enjoyed it thoroughly.
It has always seemed to me that one ought to know as much as possible of this world. We are in it for only a limited time, and it is an extremely interesting and wonderful place. To let any chance to know it better slip by is as foolish as it would be to go to an exposition and then refuse to look at most of the exhibits. It is, of course, impossible to do or see everything there is to be seen or done. We have to spend some time growing up, and a lot more in keeping ourselves going; and after a while we are not able to be very strenuous. Still, we have about thirty or forty years during which we can do a good deal; and by helping out with the records of what other persons have accomplished, we can come to a pretty fair notion of most things. Only, we need to use our time with some sense. If you spend all your time reading about boys who are leading precisely the same sort of life as your own, or of girls who have n't an idea you are not familiar with, you are n't going to get much of an outlook; when the time comes to pass on to some other existence, you will hardly have begun to know this one, whose mysteries lie buried between the covers of books within our very grasp. To neglect taking at least a peep would be almost like going to a feast and leaving most of the dishes covered, while you content yourself with ham and eggs or even beefsteak.
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