A. H. Layard, by William Brockedon

Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) is famous for discovering and excavating the palaces of the Assyrian kings. Undertaken between 1845 and 1851, this achievement made him celebrated as one of archaeology’s great pioneers, a man who brought to public notice a civilization few knew very much about before. The autobiographical materials presented here describe his earlier life in England and on the continent — and especially the years of his original journey eastward and his dramatic adventures among the Bakhtiari of the Zagros Mountains (1849-1842). The excerpts below are from Volumes I and II of his Autobiography and Letters, 1903, and from the 1894 edition of his Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia.

Born in England in 1817, Layard spent much of his boyhood in Florence. The family arrived in Italy in 1820. Young Layard’s formal schooling both in England and on the Continent was somewhat patchy, and it was his father who seems to have taught him most about art and literature. In Italy he played as a boy with the children of the English poet Walter Savage Landor.

Landor, literature, and The Arabian Nights

They were allowed to run wild, nearly barefooted, and in peasant’s dress, amongst the contadini (peasantry). Almost before they could lisp, Landor began to teach them ancient Greek. They were not sent to school, and the only time at which they were subjected to any kind of discipline was when his ungovernable temper was excited by something which they may have done to displease him, when he treated them very harshly. It is not surprising that this mode of bringing up his family should have led to much unhappiness. As it is well known, he left his wife soon after the time to which I am referring, and led a solitary and querulous life in England, until shortly before his death, when he returned to Florence, and was, I believe reconciled to her and his children.

Although my father had shunned personal intercourse with Landor, he greatly admired some of his writings and the vigour and purity of his English. He made me read the “Imaginary Conversations,” and learn passages from them. I took great delight in them; but they produced one effect which my father little contemplated: I imbibed from them those radical and democratic opinions which I sturdily professed even when a boy. The grand figure and powerful head of Walter Savage Landor, his sonorous voice, when he impressed upon me the beauty of the old Greek language, and the importance of its acquisition in order to speak and write good English, as he was often in the habit of doing, are still present to my memory. Many years after he addressed an Ode to me, which is published amongst his poetical works.

I profited little from my schooling at Signor Rellini’s Istituto, except that I obtained there that acquaintance with the Italian language which in after days was a source of so much pleasure, and of so much use to me. For such general knowledge as I acquired, and for the development of a taste for Literature and the Arts, I was indebted to my father. He was fond of reading, and possessed a small, but not ill-selected library. His favourite authors were those of the Elizabethan age. He taught me to appreciate and enjoy the plays of Shakespeare and Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” Occasionally he read aloud to me passages from the plays of Ben Jonson, and other dramatists of the time, whose works he did not think it desirable to place in my childish hands. He admired the style of Hume, whose “History of England” I read with him. He was also fond of reciting the verses of “Peter Pindar” with me.

I had my own favourite books in which I was allowed freely to indulge. Before I had reached my thirteenth year, I had read all the novels of Walter Scott then published. But the work in which I took the greatest delight was the “Arabian Nights.” I was accustomed to spend hours stretched upon the floor, under a great gilded Florentine table, poring over this enchanting volume. My imagination became so much excited by it that I thought and dreamt of little else but “jins” and “ghouls” and fairies and lovely princesses, until I believed in their existence, and even fell in love with a real living damsel. I was deeply smitten with the pretty sister of one of my school-fellows. I fancied I had a rival in an English boy of my own age. We quarreled in consequence, and as we were both taking lessons of a fencing master, we determined to settle our differences in mortal combat with foils without the buttons. How we were prevented carrying out our bloody intentions I now forget.

My admiration for the “Arabian Nights” has never left me. I can read them even now with almost as much delight as I read them when a boy. They have had no little influence upon my life and career; for to them I attribute that love of travel and adventure which took me to the East, and led me to the discovery of the ruins of Nineveh. They give the truest, the most lively, and the most interesting picture of manners and customs which still existed amongst Turks, Persians and Arabs when I first mixed with them, but which are now fast passing away before
European civilization and encroachments. (Autobiography, v. I, 25-27)

Intellectual influences in London

Returning to the land of his birth, where his father died not long after, Layard joined his uncle’s law firm in London at the age of 16. His aunt kept a salon attended by distinguished artists and men of letters — one of them a friend of Goethe. Wordsworth was also frequently among the guests.

The person who exercised the greatest influence upon my future career was Mr Henry Crabb Robinson. I had made his acquaintance at Paris in August 1835, when on a tour in France and Switzerland with Mr Brockeden. With Stansfield, the painter, he joined company and travelled with us, took a friendly interest in me, and invited me to call upon him on my return to England at his chambers in the Temple, where he was in the habit of receiving many literary men of eminence. He had been the friend of Goethe and Wieland. He was so good a German scholar that the former said of him that “not only did he speak good German, but made good German.”

He was amongst the first Englishmen who cultivated the language, and made known to his countrymen the principal works of the most eminent German authors. His conversational powers were considerable. Having read and seen much, he possessed a large store of anecdote, and told his stories well. His experience of the world was large. He had lived during his youth in Germany and was a correspondent of the Times newspaper when Napoleon invaded that country. He used to narrate, with much effect, how he narrowly escaped falling into the hands of the French authorities, who would have shot him on account of the letters, which were very hostile to the Emperor…

It was Mr Robinson’s habit to have his friends to breakfast, especially on Sunday mornings. I received a general invitation to these breakfasts, of which I was delighted to avail myself. I soon became a welcome and almost a necessary guest on these occasions as I was useful in helping him to entertain his company. These meetings became a source of great pleasure and instruction to me. I frequently met at them some of the most eminent literary men of the day—amongst them Wordsworth, with whom Mr Robinson was very intimate. They had travelled together on the Continent, and he was accustomed to pay frequent visits to the poet at his residence at Rydal Mount. He was an ardent and enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry, which he read aloud with great animation and effect. He gave me a love for it which has not left me.

The poet himself, with his venerable and stately appearance, inspired me with the greatest respect and admiration. He was very kind to me, allowed me to talk to him freely about his works and on other subjects and even made at my suggestion a translation of one of Michael Angelo’s sonnets of which I was very fond. I have still in my possession the slip of paper upon which I wrote down this translation as he dictated it to me. It was afterwards published with some variations…

Mr Robinson was a Unitarian and what was then called “a philosophical Radical.” He introduced me to Mr Fox, the celebrated Unitarian preacher, who then had a chapel in the city which I frequently attended. The eloquence and powerful rhetoric of this remarkable man were a great attraction to me. His discourses and the conversation of my friend Mr Crabb Robinson rapidly undermined the religious opinions in which I had been brought up, and I soon became as independent in my religious as I had already become in my political opinions.

My uncle, who was supposed to look after me, and to exercise a moral control over me, was little pleased with either, as they both differed so entirely from his own. Being a Tory of the old school and a strict Churchman, he was bound to look upon them with feelings approaching to horror. He was afterwards wont to accuse Mr Crabb Robinson of having unsettled my mind, and of having encouraged in me pursuits and tastes entirely opposed to the serious study of the law, and which led me to abandon it for a life of travel and adventure. The charge was perhaps well founded. I have no reason to regret that it was so. (Autobiography, v. I, 54-56)

Italian society and politics

In the 1830s Layard made a number of visits to the Continent — travelling in Italy, mixing in Italian society, and befriending Cavour and the Carbonari. He particularly remembered the Contessa Galateri, ‘well-known in Turin Society’ for her beauty and accomplishments.

Although the education of women was, up to a very recent period, sorely neglected in Italy, and their intellects had been as little attended to as their morals, an accomplished and highly-cultivated Italian lady—and I have known many such—has always appeared to me the most perfect type of her sex. The Galateris were acquainted with, or allied to, the principal families in Piedmont. During our excursion (i.e., in 1835-36) we spent much of our time in country houses, and in the most agreeable society. We were a merry party, committing all manner of extravagances, singing, dancing, serenading by night on the water, and making expeditions in the hills.

We spent a very pleasant week in rambling about the mountains, and then paid visits to country houses, amongst them to the villa of the Cavours, where Camille de Cavour was then staying. Italian countryhouse life, with its freedom and complete absence of conventionality, has always had a great charm for me. The society was delightful. We everywhere met handsome and accomplished women. We had concerts, and I played more than once on the flute in Masses performed at church ceremonies…

One of the young men whose acquaintance I had thus formed, a certain Signor Soffietti, who was a zealous member of one of these secret associations, had given me a letter and some papers to be delivered to a Piedmontese political refugee living at Lyons. I stopped there a couple of days to see him. There were many other fugitives from Piedmont and other parts of the Peninsula living in the city, who were in correspondence with the promoters of the insurrectionary movements in Italy, and who were known as “Carbonari,” the name then given to the members of the secret revolutionary societies which were conspiring against the Austrian rule in Italy.

Their agents had on many occasions been guilty of acts of bloody vengeance upon the oppressors of their country, which had brought them to the scaffold. I was presented, as a friend of Italian liberty, to several of these youthful conspirators at a secret meeting to which I was invited, having been previously warned that such meetings were strictly prohibited by the French authorities, and that, if we were discovered, we should all pass into the hands of the police, and probably find ourselves in prison. My enthusiasm in the cause induced me, however, to run the risk, although I remember being well pleased when I found myself safe back in my hotel.

Although these young men were as conspirators odious to, and persecuted by, all Continental Governments, they were, for the most part, honest and sincere patriots in the truest sense of the word—ready to make every sacrifice, even that of life, for the freedom and independence of their country, and for what they believed to be its welfare. They lived in the greatest poverty; had renounced all worldly advantages; and had, in numerous instances, even cast off the dearest of ties—those of the family—when their relations disapproved, or feared to be compromised by, their proceedings… To their indomitable courage and perseverance, and to their readiness to sacrifice even life for their country, Italy owes her freedom and her regeneration. I little thought that it was under the lead of the young man whose acquaintance I had made at Turin that this great work was to be accomplished. (Autobiography, v. I, 78-92)

Travelling east — Montenegro

Wearying of the routine in his uncle’s London law office, where he was employed copying documents, Layard (22) joined Edward Ledwich Mitford (32) on a journey to Turkey and the Middle East.  Ledwich was to continue overland to India. For Layard it was the beginning of his association with Mesopotamia and the long-buried remains of ancient Nineveh.

It chanced that Mr Edward Ledwich Mitford, a young Englishman who had been connected with a mercantile house at Mogador in Morocco, and who had made some interesting excursions through little known parts of that dangerous country, desired to establish himself in Ceylon as a coffee-planter. Like myself, he wished to leave England as soon as possible; but being of an adventurous disposition, and dreading the sea, he had formed a plan for going to Ceylon by land through Europe, Central Asia, and India. He proposed to me that we should perform the journey together.

I was much struck by this grand idea. It coincided entirely with my love of travel and adventure, and, if carried out, would enable me to visit many of the most interesting parts of the East, and to realize the dreams that had haunted me from my childhood, when I had spent so many happy hours over the “Arabian Nights.” I willingly accepted his proposal. And it was agreed that we should leave England without delay. (Autobiography, v. I, 102)

But notwithstanding these doubts and considerations, I experienced a happy sensation of relief at leaving England and abandoning a pursuit which was odious to me. I was now independent, and no more exposed to the vexatious interference and control to which I had hitherto been subjected, and greatly resented. I was of sanguine and hopeful temperament; I had robust health and much energy, and courage and determination enough to grapple with any dangers and difficulties that I might have to encounter. I was consequently in no way dismayed by the prospect before me, but was fully prepared for the consequences, whatever they might be, of the step that I had taken.

In leaving England I had nothing to regret except the separation from my mother. Had I remained, I should in all probability have passed through life in the obscure position of a respectable lawyer, unless some opening, which could not have been foreseen, might have enabled me to distinguish myself in some other career. (Autobiography, v. I, 108-109)

A visit to the capital city of Cetinje. At Cetinje Layard stayed with the Vladika, the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro who was head of government. The Vladika’s reform program, intended to introduce his subjects to Western Civilization, appeared to be faltering.

We remained several days at Cetinje, passing most of our time with the Vladika, with whom I had much conversation as to the condition of his people, and as to his attempts to civilise and educate them. He had procured a billiard-table from Trieste, and was fond of the game. We played several times together. On one occasion whilst we were so engaged, a loud noise of shouting and of firing of guns was heard from without. It proceeded from a party of Montenegrin warriors who had returned from a successful raid in the Turkish territory of Scutari (Albania), and, accompanied by a crowd of idlers, were making a triumphal entry into the village.

They carried in a cloth, held up between them, several heads which they had severed from the bodies of their victims. Amongst these were those apparently of mere children. Covered with gore, they were a hideous and ghastly spectacle. They were duly deposited at the feet of the Prince and then added to those which were displayed on the round tower near the convent.

I could not conceal from the Vladika my disgust at what I had witnessed, and expressed my astonishment that, with the desire he had expressed to me of civilising his people, he permitted them to commit acts so revolting to humanity and so much opposed to the feelings and habits of all Christian nations. He replied that he must readily admit that the practice of cutting off and exposing the heads of the slain was shocking and barbarous, but it was an ancient custom of the Montenegrins in their struggles with the Turks, the secular and bloodthirsty enemies of their race and faith, and who also practiced the same loathsome habit.

He was compelled, he went on to explain to me, to tolerate, if not to countenance, this barbarous practice which he condemned on every account, because it was necessary to maintain the warlike spirit of his people… They were few in number compared with their enemy, and unless they were always prepared to defend their mountain strongholds, they would soon be conquered and exterminated… There was nothing he dreaded more, he said, than a lengthened peace, for if the Montenegrins were once to sleep with a sense of security, and were no longer in a state of continual warfare, they would soon be conquered.

It was for these reasons, he declared, that it would be unwise on his part to make any attempt for the present to put a stop to a practice which encouraged his people in their hatred to the Turks, and in their determination to perish rather than allow the Moslems to obtain a footing in their mountains. (Autobiography, v. I, 132-133)

Law and order in Montenegro. A poet and a man committed to reform, Montenegro’s leader discussed with Layard his plans for the Balkan nation. He was busily building schools, and planned to appoint Serbians to staff and manage them.

The Vladika had introduced, for immediate purposes, some new laws, but he was then occupied in framing a new code better adapted to improve the civilisation of his subjects. He explained to me how hitherto human life had been too lightly esteemed amongst the Montenegrins. Injuries and insult were readily avenged by the death of the offender, and quarrels were of frequent occurrence; murders were constantly committed.

In the past the murderer had been only punished by a fine in money paid to the family of the victim; now he was punished by death, the criminal being taken to his own village, and there shot by his own kith and kin. Women when convicted were stoned to death also in their native villages. He made to me the almost incredible statement that previous to the enactment of this new law the feuds ending fatally between individuals and between villages were so frequent, that there were years in which as many as 600 deaths occurred, and that there were never less than 300. For the previous two years the average was 400, and in each case the murderer had been condemned and executed. (The estimated population of Montenegro at the time was around 100,000. RS)

Punishments were now inflicted for robbery, theft, and other crimes; this formerly was rarely the case. The result was that public order and security had been, His Eminence maintained, established to a great extent in his dominions, although he did not deny that there was yet much to be done. He was, however, engaged in framing a complete code of laws, which he hoped would have the effect of placing Montenegro on an equality in these respects with European states. But in order to accomplish this fully, it was necessary to educate its population, and with this object he was engaged in building schoolrooms in different parts of the principality, which would be opened within a year, and placed under the direction of schoolmasters from Servia, as there were no Montenegrins yet capable of undertaking their management.

He declared that his subjects, although ignorant and occupied with little else but war, looked with anxiety and interest to the successful result of his efforts to introduce civilisation amongst them, and that he had every hope that in a few years a great change for the better would have taken place in their habits and condition. He greatly extolled the independence of character and love of liberty of his people. The Austrians and Russians, he declared, were slaves, the Montenegrins free men who would not tolerate arbitrary or despotic rule. They were all equal… (Autobiography, v. I, 134-135)

Character and conduct of the Montenegrins

I was much struck with the superior intelligence and liberal views of the Vladika. It was certainly remarkable that so young a man, brought up in the prejudices of a wild and barbarous people — hostile to all change and improvement, excessively tenacious of their ancient national habits and traditions, and cut off from the rest of mankind by implacable enemies and almost impassable mountains — should have developed the qualities which he possessed. I could not but admit that he deserved the reputation which he enjoyed amongst those who had known him during his travels.

At the time of my visit to him the Montenegrins had the character of being a tribe of robbers, marauders, and assassins, brave and ready to die in defence of the freedom which they had maintained in their mountain fastnesses, but bloodthirsty and treacherous. They were not altogether undeserving of their reputation. Their constant and frequently unprovoked raids upon their neighbours’ territories for the purpose of plunder, or to gratify their religious fanaticism by slaughtering the infidels, were accompanied by acts of ferocious cruelty, which had long rendered the name of Montenegrin odious and dreaded by Mussulmans and Christians alike.

Secure in their inaccessible mountains, excellent marksmen, awaiting their enemies behind rocks, brave and ready to die rather than lose their freedom, they were able to resist for generations the numerous attempts made by the Ottomans and Austrians to punish and subdue them. When, as in more than one instance, the Turks were obtaining advantages over them which might have led to their subjection, they received the powerful support of Russia, who for political objects of her own, and out of sympathy for people of her own race and faith, was always ready to step in for their defence, and to menace the Porte with her displeasure if it ventured to take advantage of the successes which its troops might have achieved over the mountaineers.

The Mussulman inhabitants of the districts adjacent to the Black Mountain were consequently compelled to submit to the depredations and excesses of their restless and barbarous neighbours. Their villages were burnt, their women and children barbarously mutilated and slain, and a harvest of heads periodically carried off as trophies by their invaders. (Autobiography, v. I, 136-137)

In the vicinity of Tarsus, on the Mediterrranean. After calling at Constantinople, and crossing Anatolia, the travelers descended from the Taurus Mountains to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey at Selefkeh, on their way to Aleppo and Jerusalem.

Our path was carried through a valley along the bank of the Calycadnus, a broad and clear stream, now called by the natives the Ghiok Su — “blue water.” The mountains on either side were thickly wooded. As the night came on we saw on all sides the fires of an encampment of the Ourouks. Although Iapandé, which we reached after dark, had only three or four houses, it contained the travellers’ oda (guest-house), which was rarely, if ever, absent from a Turkish village. There we installed ourselves, and were hospitably supplied with the best supper that the village could produce.

The evening meal, served to us by the kindly villagers in the room reserved for their guests, usually consisted of a very palatable soup, small lumps of boiled mutton, an omelet, a pilaf, and large flat cakes of unleavened bread. Sometimes, however, there was no meat to be obtained, as the inhabitants themselves did not often enjoy what was to them a luxury. I need scarcely say that we were never given wine or any spirituous liquor in a Mussulman house, whilst strong raki was usually presented to us by Christians, nor had we any provision of such things with us. We drank nothing but water and the usual sour milk which is found in most Turkish cottages in the interior. Fresh milk is considered unwholesome by all Easterns, and is rarely, if ever, drunk.

According to the custom of the country, nothing is paid for food, which is furnished by the community gratuitously to a stranger, but it was our invariable habit to give a small sum for the Odabashi, or owner, or man in charge of the guest-house. Sometimes we were, in addition, supplied with coverlets, which now that the weather was cold — we were in the month of November — were very acceptable, and we slept on the mattresses covered with European chintz, which formed a kind of low divan round the room, the floor of which was covered with mats. The principal drawback upon these otherwise pleasant nights’ quarters were the fleas and other vermin. We were, however, free from their attacks in our “Levinge” sheets, and they diminished and finally disappeared as the cold weather came on.

Before the supper was brought in upon a polished metal tray, the chief men of the village would sit with us. They retired when we ate and returned after we had finished our meal, leaving us when we desired to retire to rest, which we did very early, as we were generally fatigued with our long day’s ride. I still look back to those evenings pleasantly spent in conversing with these simple and kindly people, and in obtaining information as to their country habits, and customs. I thus learnt to appreciate the many virtues and excellent qualities of the pure Turkish race, and to form that high opinion which I have never had reason to change of the character of the true Osmanlu, before he is corrupted by the temptations and vices of official life and of power and by intercourse with Europeans and the Europeanised Turks of the capital. (Autobiography, v. I, 192-193)

After arriving at Selefkeh (ancient Cilician Seleucia) and crossing the Calycadnus by a Greek or Roman bridge, they explored the nearby country.

We wandered about during the remainder of the day in search of ruins. We found the remains of two temples with many columns of white marble still standing, and of a theatre with porticoes and adjacent edifices; architectural ornaments of exquisite delicacy of work and beauty of design; numerous capitals and shafts of columns of a florid Corinthian order scattered about the town, and built into the walls of houses — I counted no less than fifteen of the latter in the yard of our khan (guest-house) — an extensive excavation in the rock below the castle, about 150 feet long, 75 broad, and 40 deep, with arches of solid masonry round the sides, the bottom reached by stairs formed of large blocks of stone; many excavated tombs in the surrounding rocks, with the troughs similar to those we had met with in such abundance in Phrygia; sarcophagi used as reservoirs for fountains, with remains of inscriptions, some of the Christian era; and on all sides traces and foundations of ancient buildings.

About two miles from Selefkeh, in a valley wooded with larch, I found an aqueduct of which fifteen arches in two tiers, nine in the lower and six in the upper, still remained. The view which it commanded was of marvelous Southern beauty — the fine old castle and the ruins of the ancient city backed by the lofty serrated range of Taurus, the small plain with its luxuriant vegetation, beyond the blue Mediterranean, in the extreme distance Cyprus faintly visible. Scenery of this exquisite loveliness abounds along the Karamanian coast which we had reached.

As we continued along the coast we passed many ruins, some apparently of small temples, others of tombs and the remains of buildings. During the day we had seen in the distance to the east the mountains of Syria rising majestically from the sea. As we forced our way through myrtle and olive bushes and marshy ground, game of many descriptions rose in all directions — francolins (the black partridge), partridges, quails, snipe, ducks, widgeon, and various kinds of water-fowl.

The sun went down in all its glory, lighting up this beautiful coast and the distant mountains of Taurus and Syria, and turning the blue Mediterranean into a sheet of purple and gold. In the distance, close to the coast, rose the picturesque castle of Korgos, built upon a small island. I never saw anything more lovely, nor had I ever enjoyed so many delightful sensations as our day’s ride afforded me. I have never forgotten it. The beauty of the distant mountains, the richness of the vegetation, the utter loneliness and desolation of the country, the wonderful remains of ancient civilization, the graceful elegance of the monuments, the picturesque aspect of the ruins, the blue motionless sea reflecting every object, with here and there a white sail, all combined to form a scene which it would be difficult to equal and impossible to surpass. (Autobiography, v. I, 197-200)

Jerusalem and Petra

Although the British consul in Jerusalem strongly warned against it, because of the menace of marauding Bedouin, Layard was determined to visit Petra. The following narrative combines material from his Autobiography and Letters with excerpts from the more complete account provided in the Early Adventures.

I had determined to visit Petra and some of the more important sites and ruins on the other side of Jordan. The authority of the Egyptian Government had not been established to the east of that river… The country was consequently unsafe for travelers, and the British Consul, and such Europeans as I had met in Jerusalem, declared that I could not attempt to pass through it without running the greatest risk. Parties of Bedouin marauders were said to be scouring the plains, and the scanty Arab population of Moab and Petra was said to be treacherous, fanatical, and hostile to Europeans.

Wherever I might go I should find myself in the midst of robbers and assassins. It would be impossible to reach Petra without either engaging the services of an Arab Sheikh of local influence and of power, who could conduct me in safety through the tribes on my route, for which I should have to pay a handsome backshish, or without a large military escort, which the Egyptian authorities would be unable to afford me…

The difficulties and dangers of this expedition which I meditated appeared to be so great, and the warnings of the Consul and others were so serious and urgent, that my companion, Mr Mitford, considered it prudent not to run them. I was determined, however, not to be baffled. We agreed to part for the time, and to meet again at Aleppo, to which place he would proceed leisurely by way of Damascus, after prolonging for some time his stay in Jerusalem. I was to make the best of my way to that place through the desert. (Autobiography, v. I, 279-281)

The journey described in Layard’s Early Adventures was an unending succession of fraught encounters with Bedouin tribesmen, one of them taking place soon after he reached Petra. Layard was accompanied by a personal servant, Antonio, and two youthful Arabs, Awad and Musa.

On the following morning we entered the Wady Musa, or Valley of Moses, and in an hour and a half I found myself amid the ruins of Petra. Everywhere around me were remains of ancient buildings of all descriptions, whilst in the high rocks which formed the boundaries of the valley were innumerable excavated dwellings and tombs. As I had intended to visit the ruins leisurely, I did not stop to examine them but, passing through them on my camel, ascended to a spacious rock-cut tomb, in front of which was a small platform covered with grass. There I made up my mind to pitch my tent.

I dismounted and spread my carpet. I had scarcely done so when a swarm of half-clad Arabs, with disheveled locks and savage looks, issued from the excavated chambers and gathered round me. I asked for some bread and milk, which were brought to me, and Antonio prepared my breakfast, the Arabs watching all our movements. Their appearance was far from reassuring, and my guides were evidently anxious as to their intentions. They were known to be treacherous and bloodthirsty, and a traveler had rarely, if ever, ventured among them without the protection of some powerful chief or without a sufficient guard.

They remained standing round me in silence, until they perceived that I was about to rise from my carpet with the object of visiting the ruins in the valley. Then one of them advanced and demanded of me in the name of the tribe a considerable sum of money, which, he said, was due to it from all travelers who entered its territory. I refused to submit to the exaction, alleging that I was under the protection of Sheikh Abu-Dhaouk. I was ready, I added, to pay for any provisions that might be furnished to me, or for any service of which I might be in need.

This answer gave rise to loud outcries on the part of the assembled Arabs. They began by abusing my two guides, whom they accused of having conducted me to Wady Musa without having first obtained the permission of their sheikh. A violent altercation ensued, which nearly led to bloodshed, as swords were drawn on both sides. An attempt was made to seize my effects, and I was told that I should not be allowed to leave the place until I had paid the sum demanded of me. As I still absolutely refused to do so, one, more bold and insolent than the rest, advanced towards me with his drawn sword, which he flourished in my face. I raised my gun, determined to sell my life dearly if there was an intention to murder me. Another Arab suddenly possessed himself of Musa’s gun, which he had imprudently laid on the ground whilst unloading camels….

In the first place, I thought it right to resist this attempt to blackmail a traveller; and, in the second, had I been even disposed to yield, I had not enough money with me to give what was asked. I therefore directed Musa and Awad to reload the camels and to prepare to accompany me. Seeing that I was determined to carry out my intention of visiting the ruins without their permission, the Arabs formed a circle round me, threatening to prevent me from doing so by force, gesticulating and screeching at the top of their voices. With their ferocious countenances, their flashing eyes and white teeth set in faces blackened by sun and dirt, and their naked limbs exposed by their short shirts and tattered Arab cloaks, they had the appearance of desperate cut-throats ready for any deed of violence. (Early Adventures, 14-17)

At this juncture the Sheikh of Wady Musa made his appearance.

Having somewhat calmed his excited tribesmen and obtained silence, the Sheikh of Wady Musa inquired into the cause of the disturbance. Having been told it, he announced that he had a right, as chief of the tribe in whose territory the ruins were situated, to the sum originally demanded, and that unless I paid it he would not permit me to visit them. He was a truculent and insolent fellow, tall, and with a very savage countenance; rather better dressed than his followers, and armed with a long gun and pistols, whilst they only carried swords and spears.

I repeated my resolution not to submit to this imposition, and warned him that if any injury befell me he would be held personally responsible by Ibrahim Pasha, who had given ample proof that he could punish those who defied his authority. Abu-Dhaouk, moreover, I said, was a hostage for my safety. I then rose from my carpet and, directing Awad and Musa to follow me with the camels, which they were loading, prepared to begin my examination of the ruins.

The sheikh, seeing that I was not to be intimidated, and fearing the consequences should any violence be offered to me or to my guides which might lead to a blood-feud between his tribe and that of Abu-Dhaouk, ordered his men to stand back, and I went on my way without further interference. As I descended into the valley he called out to me by way of benediction, ‘As a dog you came, as a dog you go away.’ I gave him the usual Arab salutation in return, and threw him a piece of money in payment for the bread and milk which had been brought to me on my arrival. This return for hospitality would have been resented as an insult by a true Bedouin, but he picked up the silver coin, and as I left I saw him crouching down on his hams surrounded by his Arabs, evidently discussing the manner in which I ought to be dealt with.

Awad and Musa were a good deal alarmed at my reception, and feared that the sheikh and his followers would find some means of avenging themselves upon me. They urged me, therefore, to leave the valley as soon as possible. But I was convinced that, notwithstanding the chief’s threats, he would not venture to rob or injure me… I was determined, as I had come so far to visit the ruins of Petra, to examine its principal monuments leisurely, and I spent the whole day in doing so. I was not molested, but I observed Arabs watching all my movements…

The most striking feature at Petra is the immense number of excavations in the mountain-sides. It is astonishing that a people should, with infinite labour, have carved the living rock into temples, theatres, public and private buildings, and tombs, and have thus constructed a city on the borders of the desert, in a waterless, inhospitable region, destitute of all that is necessary for the sustenance of man — a fit dwelling-place for the wild and savage robber tribes than now seek shelter in its remains. (Early Adventures, 17-19)

Though he survived the journey south of the Dead Sea, and made it back to Damascus, Layard admits in his Autobiography that the venture was foolhardy. He was in fact lucky to come out alive.

Consul Young and my other European acquaintances considered me guilty of unjustifiable foolhardiness in undertaking so dangerous a journey under such conditions, and foretold that all manner of mishaps were certain to befall me, the least of which would be that I should be stripped to the skin and have to find the way back to Jerusalem naked and barefooted.

They were right, and had I had a little experience of Arabs and of travelling in the desert, I should have listened to their warning. But I had romantic ideas about Bedouin hospitality, and believed that if I trusted to it, and placed myself unreservedly in the power of the Bedouin tribes, trusting to their respect for their guests, I should incur no danger. I did not know that the Arab tribes who inhabit the country to the south and east of the Dead Sea differ much from the Bedouins of the desert, of whom I had read in the travels of Burkhardt, and that they fully deserved the evil reputation which they had acquired at Jerusalem. (Autobiography, v. I, 282)

From Mosul to Baghdad

Layard and Mitford crossed on horseback from Aleppo to Mosul, then travelled by raft down the Tigris to Baghdad. En route, Layard’s imagination was fired by scenes along the way — his mind turning romantically back to The Arabian Nights.

The Tigris was now swollen by the melting of the snow in the great range of mountains in which it takes its source. During the usual floods of spring, which generally last for about two months, the inhabitants of the banks use its rapid stream for the conveyance of their merchandise and other produce by raft to Baghdad. These rafts, which are frequently of large size, are made of the inflated skins of sheep and goats, which are fastened together by willow twigs. Upon these are laid reeds and planks, on which the goods to be conveyed are piled. They are guided by one or two men, and, when large, by more with paddles. When they arrive at their destination they are, after being unladen, broken up. The wood finds a ready sale — the skins are brought back for further use.

When travelers use these rafts, as they frequently do, they have wooden bedsteads placed upon them, which, formed into a kind of hut by being arched over with canes covered with felt, afford a pleasant shelter from the sun during the day, and from the cold air during the night. We determined to avail ourselves of this comfortable means of conveyance to Baghdad, and to sell our horses. I sold my mare — although greatly out of condition after her long journey — for about the same price as I had paid for her…

Our raft was about twelve feet long and eight feet wide, and was made up of fifty skins, the price of a raft being regulated according to their number. On the planks and reeds which were laid across them were placed two bedsteads such as I have described. One boatman only was required to guide our craft. He seated himself on his hams on a board, with paddle in hand, which he used to keep the raft in the centre of the stream, or to impel it to the bank in case we desired to land. We shot rapidly down the current in the middle of the river, which had overflowed its banks to a considerable distance, and were soon out of sight of Mosul.

Late in the afternoon we perceived the great conical mound of Nimroud, which I had before seen from Hammun Ali, rising in the distance. We were carried over the remains of a very ancient dam, probably of Assyrian times, over which the river dashed in foaming waves. Our pilot skillfully guided his raft, which bent and heaved as if it were about to break up and deposit us in the stream through the perilous rapids. We then glided swiftly and calmly onwards, the huge Assyrian mounds gradually disappearing in the evening twilight. During the night we continued our voyage, our boatman apparently not sleeping, and in the morning when we woke, found ourselves floating past the barren, precipitous Hamrin Hills, through the lower ridge of which, soon losing itself in the desert, the Tigris forces its way. We swept by many ancient mounds and ruins, with the walls and foundations of buildings exposed where the banks had been washed away by the impetuous stream.

We reached the ruin of Tekrit, inhabited by Arabs, in the afternoon. Here we had to wait for about an hour to change our boatman, and to refill the skins of the raft, from which the air had escaped. We then resumed our voyage, and the next day, having floated onward all night, came in sight, about noon, of the first grove of palms on the Tigris, and the first that I had ever seen. Amongst these tall and graceful trees, and beneath their shade, were clusters of orange, citron, and pomegranate trees, in the full blossom of spring. A gentle breeze wafted a delicious odour over the river, with the cooing of innumerable turtle-doves. The creaking of the water-wheels, worked by oxen, and the cries of the Arabs on the banks added life and animation to the scene. I thought that I had never seen anything so truly beautiful, and all my “Arabian Nights’” dreams were almost more than realized.

I know of no more enchanting and enjoyable mode of travelling than that of floating leisurely down the Tigris on a raft, landing ever and anon to examine some ruin of the Assyrian or early Arabian time, to shoot game, which abounds in endless variety on its banks, or to cook our daily food. It is a perfect condition of gentle idleness and repose, especially in the spring. The weather was delightful — the days not too hot, the nights balmy and still. We were warned that there were Arabs on the banks who would rob us and plunder us of our raft if we ventured to land, or would fire upon us if we refused to approach the shore. But we saw none of them. (Autobiography, v. I, 322-325)

Baghdad 1840

There was a reason why they were not attacked — a ferocious penalty for robbery had until recently been imposed in Baghdad, although Layard was not to find this out until later. After they had arrived in the city a small house was put at the travellers’ disposal by the Political Resident or Agent of the East India Company at Baghdad, Colonel Taylor, a scholarly man who had previously seen service in the Indian army.

In the society of Englishmen and native gentlemen my time in Baghdad passed most agreeably and too quickly. I still look back to those days with pleasure and regret. Nor was it spent unprofitably. Upon the advice of Colonel Taylor I engaged a moonshee (writer/secretary) to give me lessons in Persian, and I was able to acquire sufficient of that language to be of great assistance in my subsequent wanderings in Persia. Colonel Taylor himself was a most accomplished and profound Eastern scholar, with a rare acquaintance with Arabic literature, and abounding in general knowledge.

He possessed a choice and valuable collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and especially of the works of the early Arabian geographers, which threw light upon the ancient geography and history of Babylonia and Assyria and the regions subsequently ruled by the Caliphs… Colonel Taylor was as modest and retiring as he was learned and accomplished. He published little or nothing, and when he died in England his great and rare knowledge died with him.

The residency was a vast building, divided, as I have said, into two parts, the Divan Khaneh, and the enderun or harem. The Colonel entertained his guests in the Divan Khaneh, the rooms of which were handsome and spacious. His table was spread for every meal with the most profuse hospitality, and there were places for all the English in Baghdad, who were welcome to it whenever they thought fit to dine or breakfast with him and his family. The service was performed by a crowd of Arabian and Indian servants in their native costumes, moving noiselessly about with naked feet, and attending promptly and well to the wants of the guests.

At breakfast, the Indian non-commissioned officer in command of the guard of Sepoys always appeared, and after drawing himself up in military fashion and giving the prescribed salute, announced in Hindustani that “all was well.” When the meal was ended, an army of attendants brought in kalleons, the Persian hookah, or waterpipe, of silver and exquisite enamel, one for each person at the table, except, of course, the ladies. (Autobiography, v. I, 339-340)

The condition of Baghdad. Layard describes the misgovernment of Baghdad under the Sultanate, and visits a typical local Governor, or Pasha, of the time. He contrasts what he knows about the city under the Caliphate and its appearance under Ottoman rule.

Much as I had been struck with the appearance of Baghdad as we had floated to it through groves of palms and orange and citron trees, with the gilded domes of Kausiman, and the many cupolas covered with bright enameled tiles of the city itself rising above them and glittering in the sun, so much the more was I disappointed when I found myself in its narrow and dirty streets. More than one quarter was nothing but a heap of ruins without inhabitants.

Even in the part occupied by the better class of the population, the houses, some of considerable size, were for the most part falling into decay. The exteriors, like those of the houses of Damascus, were of sun-dried bricks without ornament or window. It was only after passing through a long, tortuous, vaulted entrance that the extent of the interior and the beauty of its painted and sculptured decorations, fast falling into decay and perishing, were perceived. The streets had consequently a mean and poverty-stricken appearance, which was not altogether warranted by the condition of the inhabitants.

The mosques, with their beautiful domes and their elegant minarets, were falling to ruins. No attempts were made to repair and maintain them. The ample revenue which had once been applied to these purposes, and came from the bequests of pious persons, and from other sources, had now passed into the hands of the Turkish Government, and no part of them was applied to the object for which they had been intended. Of the great edifices, the palaces, the colleges, the caravanserais, the baths, and other public edifices which had once adorned Baghdad, scarcely anything remained… The city of the Caliphs had become a desolation and a waste.

The only part of Baghdad which retained any animation and life was the bazaar; long, gloomy, narrow streets, covered with awnings of matting to keep out the rays of the sun, and lined on either side with shops or booths, with raised platforms in front, on which were seated cross-legged their owners, patiently waiting, smoking their narguilés (hookahs) and sipping their coffee, until a customer might ask for their wares. At constant intervals were the coffee-shops, within and in front of which sat on low stools a mingled crowd of Mussulmans and Christians, inhabitants of the town and Arabs from the country, some playing at draughts or chess, or at a game in which beans were moved backwards and forwards in cups cut into a board, and passers-by occasionally stopping to offer advice and to suggest a move.

These bazaars were always crowded from daybreak to nightfall, after which they were entirely deserted except by solitary watchmen and the usual street dog. I often passed through them in the night, and was always impressed by their gloomy, weird, and silent aspect after the busy and noisy scene that I had witnessed during the day, when Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Indians, and men of every colour and clime hustled each other, and the place resounded with their discordant cries. Then, a horseman could with difficulty make his way through the crowd; and the mounted officers of the Pasha, and the Bedouin on his mare, with his long spear tufted with ostrich feathers, were assailed with loud or muttered curses as they attempted to force their way through the dense mass of human beings. (Autobiography, v. I, 342-343)

New Turkish regime no better. Under the old Turkish system, Pashas or Governors were “almost independent of any control.” They sometimes made improvements, but their discipline was harsh. In 1840 things were changing. Now the worst kind of officials were being sent from Constantinople to govern the provinces — men driven by no higher motive than personal gain from extortion and bribery.

The last of the semi-independent Governors in Baghdad had been one Daoud Pasha, a man of energy, and of sufficient intelligence to take some interest in the prosperity of the province. He had introduced the cultivation of sugar, and had found other means of giving employment to the population. By measures of great severity and cruelty he maintained order in his Pashalic. In his time robbers were rare, the Bedouins were kept in check, and the roads were secure; he was the last who had inflicted upon evil-doers the horrible punishment of impalement.

He was in the habit of placing them on the stakes at the two ends of the bridge of boats across the river, and on either side of it, as a warning to those who visited the city and had to pass between them. Dr Ross had recently seen four culprits thus exposed, one of whom was said to have lived for several days in excruciating agonies.

Daoud’s successor, one Ali Pasha, was one of those officials brought up in the Porte, who, after the abolition of the old system, were generally sent from Constantinople to govern the provinces. He was an ignorant, narrow-minded, idle, and corpulent Turk, with a thin varnish of civilization, and an affectation of European manners which distinguished the new school of Turkish statesmen and public functionaries… He thought of little else than of making money wherewith to bribe persons of influence at Constantinople, in order to retain his government for as long a period as possible. He took no interest whatever in the prosperity of the province or the welfare of its population…

In company with Mitford I called upon him. We were mounted on Arab horses with splendid trappings embroidered with gold, specially provided by the Pasha himself. We were preceded by several cawasses (armed bodyguards) on horseback in picturesque costume, carrying silver-headed maces, and by runners with staves of the same metal. A guard of Sepoys and a number of attendants on foot completed the procession. We had to force our way through the crowded bazaar, scattering the buyers and sellers, the Arabs with their vegetables and other produce of their fields, the women with their baskets of fruit and bowls of sour curds, to the right and to the left…

We ascended a flight of steps, and were ushered into a beautiful apartment, the walls and ceilings of which were adorned with exquisite designs and carved trellis work in wood, and inlaid with ivory and small mirrors. It was a chamber quite worthy of Haroun al Reshid in his prime.

The Pasha was standing ready to receive us, and after the usual ceremonies and salutations, sank down again upon the low, luxurious divan, inviting us at the same time to sit upon the chairs which had been prepared for us. He was disgustingly obese, and his appearance was rendered even more repulsive than it would otherwise have been by his costume. Unaccustomed to the heat of Baghdad, and suffering, as he informed us, greatly from it, he wore nothing but a light jacket of white linen and a pair of shalways or baggy trousers of wide dimensions, was without shoes or stockings, and his naked chest was fully exposed.

Masses of fat hung upon him. Such was the type of many Turkish functionaries, men who took no exercise, rarely left their divans and their long pipes, gorged themselves twice a day with the most fattening dishes, and thought of little but the delights of the harem. His head was small and close shaven; he constantly removed his fez to mop it with his handkerchief. His countenance was insipid, stupid, and sensual, and his small eyes and the few straggling white hairs on his chin, which served for a beard, showed that he was of real Tartar descent.

Pipes — the cherry and jessamine sticks were then still in use — and coffee were brought to us. Our conversation was limited to the usual compliments and to the stereotyped questions and answers which passed on such occasions between Turkish Pashas and European travellers. Our audience was soon brought to a close, and we took our leave, returning to the Residency.  When one saw the kind of men to whom the government and welfare of the Sultan’s subjects were confided, the condition of his Empire, the signs of poverty, misery, and decay which surrounded one on all sides, could scarcely be a matter for surprise. (Autobiography, v. I, 344-349)

In Persia: seeking permission from the ‘Matamet’ in Isfahan

It was known that there were ancient ruins in the southern Zagros mountains, those of the city of Susa among them. Because it was across the Persian border Layard needed permission to enter the region. To obtain it from the regional governor, the ‘Matamet’ — a eunuch by the name of Manuchar Khan — he made his way from Hamadan to Isfahan, a violent storm striking his party en route.

I soon got wet to the skin. Except when the vivid flashes of lightning, accompanied by deafening peals of thunder, showed us surrounding objects, we were in total darkness. When the storm had ceased and we had wandered about for some time, distant lights and the barking of dogs directed us to the village of which we were in search. After scrambling through ditches and wading through water-courses, we found ourselves at the gate of a ruined khan (guest-house) where some men were gathered round a bright fire.

They were strolling shoemakers, who were on their way to Isfahan, and had taken up their quarters for the night in a vaulted passage which had afforded them shelter from the storm. Upon the fire they had kindled was a large caldron of savoury broth, which was boiling merrily. The long ride had given me an appetite, and I seated myself without ceremony in the group, and began to help myself without waiting for an invitation.

The shoemakers, although good Mussulmans, made no objection to my dipping my own spoon into the mess with them. Seeing that my clothes were soaked by the rain, and that I was suffering from ague, they very civilly left me alone in the recess in which they had established themselves, and I was able to dry myself by their fire and to spread my carpet for the night by the side of its embers.

The gardens amongst which I had entered before arriving at Tehrun reach in an almost uninterrupted line to Isfahan. They produce fruit and vegetables of all kinds, especially melons of exquisite flavour, which have an unrivalled reputation throughout Persia… The many horsemen, and men and women carrying loads of produce, whom I passed on the road showed me that I was approaching Isfahan; but nothing could be seen of the city, which was completely buried in trees. By constantly asking my way I managed to reach, through the labyrinth of walls which enclose the gardens and melon beds, the Armenian quarter of Julfa…

Mr Edward Burgess, an English merchant from Tabreez, who was at Isfahan on business, hearing that I had arrived, came to see me and offered to be of use to me. He proposed that we should present outselves to the governor, Manuchar Khan, or, as he was usually called, ‘the Matamet’, to whom he was personally known. (Early Adventures, 112-114)

Layard now had his first meeting with Manuchar Khan, the much-feared Persian governor of Isfahan who was determined to humble the Bakhtiari and to put its leader in chains. Manuchar Khan, the ‘Matamet’, would have a lot to do with Layard’s fate in the next two years.

The Matamet himself sat on a chair, at a large open window, in a beautifully ornamented room at the upper end of the court. Those who had business with him, or whom he summoned, advanced with repeated bows, and then stood humbly before him as if awestruck by his presence, the sleeves of their robes, usually loose and open, closely buttoned up, and their hands joint in front — an immemorial attitude of respect in the East. (A footnote adds that ‘the attendants of the Assyrian King are thus represented in the sculptures from Nineveh.’)

In the ‘hauz’, or pond of fresh water in the centre of the court, were bundles of long switches from the pomegranate tree, soaking to be ready for use for the bastinado, which the Matamet was in the habit of administering freely and indifferently to high and low. In a corner was the pole with two loops of cord to raise the feet of the victim, who writhes on the ground and screams for mercy. This barbarous punishment was then employed in Persia for all manner of offences and crimes, the number of strokes administered varying according to the guilt or obstinacy of the culprit.

It was also constantly resorted to as a form of torture to extract confessions. The pomegranate switches, when soaked for some time, become lithe and flexible. The pain and injury which they inflicted were very great, and were sometimes even followed by death. Under ordinary circumstances the sufferer was unable to use his feet for some time, and frequently lost the nails of his toes. The bastinado was inflicted upon men of the highest rank — governors of provinces, and even prime ministers — who had, justly or unjustly, incurred the displeasure of the Shah.

Manuchar Khan, the Matamet, was a eunuch. He was a Georgian, born of Christian parents, and had been purchased in his childhood as a slave, had been brought up as a Mussulman, and reduced to his unhappy condition. Like many of his kind, he was employed when young in the public serve, and had by his remarkable abilities risen to the highest posts. Considered the best administrator in the kingdom, he had been sent to govern the great province of Isfahan, which included within its limits the wild and lawless tribes of the Lurs and the Bakhtiari, generally in rebellion, and the semi-independent Arab population of the plains between the Luristan Mountains and the Euphrates.

He was hated and feared for his cruelty; but it was generally admitted that he ruled justly, that he protected the weak from oppression by the strong, and that where he was able to enforce his authority life and property were secure. He was known for the ingenuity with which he had invented new forms of punishment and torture to strike terror into evil-doers, and to make examples of those who dared to resist his authority or that of his master the Shah, thus justifying the reproach addressed to beings of his class, of insensibility to human suffering.

One of his modes of dealing with criminals was what he termed ‘planting vines.’ A hole having been dug in the ground, men were thrust headlong into it and then covered with earth, their legs being allowed to protrude to represent what he facetiously called ‘the vines.’ I was told that he had ordered a horse-stealer to have all his teeth drawn, which were driven into the soles of his feet as if he were being shod. His head was then put into a nose-bag filled with hay, and he was thus left to die. A tower still existed near Shiraz which he had built of three hundred living men belonging to the Mamesenni, a tribe inhabiting the mountains to the north of Shiraz, which had rebelled against the Shah.

They were laid in layers of ten, mortar being spread between each layer, and the heads of the unhappy victims being left free. Some of them were said to have been kept alive for several days by being fed by their friends, a life of torture being thus prolonged. At that time few nations, however barbarous, equaled — none probably exceeded — the Persian in the shocking cruelty, ingenuity, and indifference with which death or torture was inflicted. (Early Adventures, 115-117)

Among the Bakhtiari

After the Matamet gave his permission to visit this part of Persia, Layard was delayed for five weeks: the men who were to accompany him into the world of the Bakhtiari tribes were in no hurry to leave Isfahan. During this period he familiarized himself with the Persian language and acquired the Bakhtiari costume he wore over the months to come.

The day after my interview with the Matamet I succeeded, after some trouble, in finding Shefi’a Khan, who had promised to introduce me to Ali Naghi Khan, the brother of the principal chief of the Bakhtiari tribes. They both lodged in the upper story of a half-ruined building forming part of one of the ancient royal palaces. The entrance was crowded with their retainers — tall, handsome, but fierce-looking men, in very ragged clothes. They wore the common white felt skull-cap, sometimes embroidered at the edge with coloured wools when worn by a chief, their heads being closely shaven after the Persian fashion, with the exception of two locks, called ‘zulf,’ one on each side of the face.

The Bakhtiari usually twist round their skull-caps, in the form of a turban, a long piece of coarse linen of a brown colour, with stripes of black and white, called a ‘lung,’ one end of which is allowed to fall down the back, whilst the other forms a topknot. In other respects they wear the usual Persian dress, but made of very coarse materials, and, as a protection against rain and cold, an outer, loose-fitting coat of felt reaching to the elbows and a little belong the knees. Their shoes of cotton twist, called ‘giveh,’ and their stockings of coloured wools, are made by their women.

A long matchlock — neither flint-locks nor percussion-caps were then known to the Persian tribes — is rarely out of their hands. Hanging to a leather belt round their waist, they carry a variety of objects for loading and cleaning their guns — a kind of bottle with a long neck, made of buffalo-hide, to contain coarse gunpowder; a small curved iron flask, opening with a spring, to hold the finer gunpowder for priming; a variety of metal picks and instruments; a mould for casting bullets; pouches of embroidered leather for balls and wadding; and an iron ramrod to load the long pistol always thrust into their girdles. I have thus minutely described the Bakhtiari dress as I adopted it when I left Isfahan, and wore it during my residence with the tribe.

I was equally astonished at the magnificence of the palaces of Shah Abbas and other Persian kings, with their spacious gardens, their stately avenues, and their fountains and artificial streams of running water, then deserted and fast falling to ruins. It was not difficult to picture to oneself what they must once have been. Wall-pictures representing the deeds of Rustem and other heroes of the ‘Shah-Nemeh,’ events from Persian history, incidents of the chase and scenes of carouse and revelry, with musicians and dancing boys and girls, were still to be seen in the deserted rooms and corridors, the ceilings of which were profusely decorated with elegant arabesques… In the halls, the pavements, the paneling of the walls, and the fountains, were of rare marbles inlaid with mosaic… These gorgeous ruins — desolate and deserted — afforded the most striking proof of the luxury and splendour of the Persian court in former times…

But the most characteristic and curious scenes of Persian life were those I witnessed in the house of a Lur chief who had left his native mountains and had established himself in Isfahan, professing to be a ‘sufi,’ or free-thinker. He invited me more than once to dinner, and I was present at some of those orgies in which Persians of his class were too apt to indulge. On these occasions he would take his guests into the ‘enderun,’ or women’s apartments, in which he was safe from intrusion and less liable to cause public scandal. They were served liberally with arak and sweetmeats, whilst dancing girls performed before them.

Many of these girls were strikingly handsome — some were celebrated for their beauty. Their costume consisted of loose silk jackets of some gay colour, entirely open in front so as to show the naked figure to the waist; ample silk ‘shalwars,’ or trousers, so full that they could scarcely be distinguished from petticoats, and embroidered skullcaps. Long braided tresses descended to their heels, and they had the usual ‘zulfs,’ or ringlets, on both sides of the face. The soles of their feet, the palms of their hands, and their finger- and toenails were stained dark red, or rather brown, with henna. Their eyebrows were coloured black, and made to meet; their eyes, which were generally large and dark, were rendered more brilliant and expressive by the use of ‘kohl.’

Their movements were not wanting in grace; their postures, however, were frequently extravagant, and more like gymnastic exercises than dancing. Bending themselves backwards, they would almost bring their heads and their heels together. Such dances are commonly represented in Persian paintings, which have now become well known out of Persia. The musicians were women who played on guitars and dulcimers. These orgies usually ended by the guests getting very drunk, and falling asleep on the carpets, where they remained until sufficiently sober to return to their homes in the morning. (Early Adventures, 118-125)

Living with the Bakhtiari. Given the reputation of the Bakhtiari for treachery, cruelty, and murder, Layard pondered how he would manage life among them. After some days of difficult travel over mountain trails he arrived at Kala Tul, the fortress of their chieftain Mehemet Taki Khan.

As I rode along I could abandon myself to my reflections, which were of a very mixed kind. I was much elated by the prospect of being able to visit a country hitherto unexplored by Europeans, and in which I had been led to suppose I should find important ancient monuments and inscriptions. It would have been impossible to have undertaken the journey under better auspices. Shefi’a Khan seemed well disposed towards me. I had every reason to believe that during our intercourse at Isfahan I had gained his friendship, by various little services which I was able to render him.

As he had earlier served for a short time in a regiment of regular troops organized by English officers in the Persian service, and had thus acquired some knowledge of Europeans, he did not look upon them, as ignorant Persians did in those days, as altogether unclean animals, with whom no intercourse was permitted to good Mussulmans. His wild and lawless followers were kind and friendly to me, and I had no cause to mistrust them. But the Bakhtiari bear the very worst reputation in Persia. They are looked upon as a race of robbers — treacherous, cruel, and bloodthirsty. Their very name is held in fear and detestation by the timid inhabitants of the districts which are exposed to their depredations. I had been repeatedly warned that I ran the greatest peril in placing myself in their hands, and that although I might possibly succeed in entering their mountains, the chances of getting out of them again were but few.

However, I was very hopeful and very confident that my good fortune would not desert me, and that by tact and prudence I should succeed in coming safely out of my adventure. I determined at the same time to conform in all things to the manners, habits, and customs of the people with whom I was about to mix, to avoid offending their religious feelings and prejudices, and to be especially careful not to do anything which might give them reason to suspect that I was a spy, or had any other object in visiting their country than that of gratifying my curiosity and of exploring ancient remains. Accordingly I abstained from making notes or taking observations with my compass except when I could do so unobserved. Whilst associating with my companions on intimate terms, and conversing freely with them, I abstained from touching their food and their drinking vessels unless invited to do so, and from showing too much curiosity and asking too many questions about their country, its resources, and the roads through it.

Two tracks led to Kala Tul — the castle of Tul — where Mehemet Taki Khan was then residing. One track followed the course of the river and crossed the plain of Mal-Emir, the other took a direct line across the mountains. We passed through a hamlet called Sheikhun, surrounded by pomegranate trees in full fruit, but deserted at this time of the year by its inhabitants, who were living higher up on the mountain side. The chief of Sheikhun, who received Shefi’a Khan and his followers with the warmest expressions of friendship, embracing them all round, was an immediate retainer of the great Bakhtiari chief. As he could not persuade them to pass the night in his encampment, he insisted that they should remain to breakfast. He slew a sheep for them, and brought us a great bowl of sour milk and delicious honeycombs.

We reached our night’s quarters after a most toilsome and dangerous climb. We had now entered the district of Munghast, and had reached a high elevation. The air was keen and piercing, and I had good reason to lament during a bitterly cold night the loss of my wadded quilt… After scrambling and crawling down a most precipitous descent — men and horses appearing to those below them as if piled up one upon the other — we came to a narrow ravine formed by a torrent now dry. Making our way over the loose stones and boulders in its bed, we issued into a small plain, and saw, high up on a mound at a short distance from us, the castle of Tul — the end of our long and weary journey. (Early Adventures, 131-144)

In the Fortress of Kala Tul. The chieftain Mehemet Taki Khan was away when Layard arrived at his castle, so he was formally received by the Khan’s first wife, Khatun-jan Khanum. She told him that her son was gravely ill with fever, and when the boy’s illness worsened she urgently sent for her husband to return. Together, the Khan and his wife implored Layard to try and effect a cure.

My reputation as a Frank (i.e., European) physician had preceded me, and I had scarcely arrived at the castle when I was surrounded by men and women asking for medicines. They were principally suffering from intermittent fevers, which prevail in all parts of the mountains during the autumn. Shortly afterwards the chief’s principal wife sent to ask me to see her son, who, I was told, was dangerously ill, and I was taken to a large booth constructed of boughs of trees, in which she was living. It was spread with the finest carpets, and was spacious enough to contain a quantity of household effects heaped up in different parts of it.

The lady sat unveiled in a corner, watching over her child, a boy of ten years of age, and about her stood several young women, her attendants. She was a tall, graceful woman, still young and singularly handsome, dressed in the Persian fashion, with a quantity of hair falling in tresses down her back from under the purple silk kerchief bound round her forehead. As I entered she rose to meet me, and I was at once captivated by her sweet and kindly expression.

She welcomed me in the name of her husband to Kala Tul, and then described to me how her son had been ill for some time from fever, and how two noted practitioners of native medicine had been sent for from a great distance to prescribe for him, but had failed to effect a cure. She entreated me, with tears, to save the boy, as he was her eldest son, and greatly beloved by his father. I found the child very weak from a severe attack of intermittent fever. I had suffered so much myself during my wanderings from this malady that I had acquired some experience in its treatment. I promised the mother some medicine and told her how it was to be administered… The condition of the boy, however, became so alarming that his father was sent for.

The guests at the castle, myself included, came down to meet him. Mehemet Taki Khan was a man of about fifty years of age, of middle height, somewhat corpulent, and of a very commanding presence. His otherwise handsome countenance was disfigured by a wound received in war from an iron mace, which had broken the bridge of his nose. He had a sympathetic, pleasing voice, a most winning smile,and a merry laugh. He was in the dress which the Bakhtiari chiefs usually wore on a journey, or when on a raid or warlike expedition — a tight-fitting cloth tunic reaching to about the knees, over a long silk robe, the skirts of which were thrust into capacious trousers, fastened round the ankles by broad embroidered bands.

His arms consisted of a gun, with a barrel of the rarest Damascene work, and a stock beautifully inlaid with ivory and gold; a curved sword, or scimitar, of the finest Khorrassan steel — its handle and sheath of silver and gold; a jeweled dagger of great price, and a long, highly ornamented pistol thrust in the ‘kesh-kemer,’ or belt, round his waist, to which were hung his powder-flasks, leather pouches for holding bullets, and various objects used for priming and loading his gun, all of the choicest description… His saddle was also richly decorated, and under the girths was passed, on one side, a second sword, and on the other an iron inlaid mace, such as Persian horsemen use in battle. Mehemet Taki Khan was justly proud of his arms, which were renowned throughout Khuzistan. He had a very noble air, and was the very beau-idéal of a great feudal chief.

Although tribal politics in Asia are notoriously tainted with, if not founded upon, treachery and deceit, Mehemet Taki Khan had the reputation of being a generous and merciful enemy, and a trustworthy, just, and humane man, and his followers were devotedly attached to him. He could neither read nor write, but he was exceedingly intelligent, and especially fond of poetry. He was sincerely anxious to promote the good of his people and the prosperity of his country by maintaining peace, by securing the safety of the roads through his territories, and by opening his mountains to trade.

He had scarcely entered the enderun of the castle, to which his wife had removed, than he sent for me. I found him sobbing and in deep distress. His wife and her women were making that mournful wail which denotes that some great misfortune has happened or is impending. The child was believed to be at the point of death. The father appealed to me in heartrending terms, offering me gifts of horses and anything that I might desire if I would only save the life of his son. The skilful native physicians he had summoned could do nothing more for the boy, and his only hope was in me.

The child was in a high fever, which I hoped might yield to Dover’s powder and quinine. I administered a dose of the former at once, and prepared to pass the night in watching its effect. I was naturally in great anxiety as to the result. If the boy recovered I had every reason to hope that I should secure the gratitude of his father, and be able to carry out my plan of visiting the ruins and monuments which were said to exist in the Bakhtiari Mountains, and which it was the main object of my journey to reach. If, on the other hand, he were to die, his death would be laid at my door, and the consequence might prove very serious, as I should be accused by my rivals, the native physicians, of having poisoned the child.

About midnight, to my great relief, he broke out into a violent perspiration, which all the native remedies hitherto given him had failed to produce. On the following day he was better. I began to administer the quinine, and in a short time he was pronounced out of danger, and on the way to complete recovery. (Early Adventures, 147-152)

The success of his medical treatment secured Layard’s position, not simply as a guest, but as a treasured member of the tribe and even of the household itself. He was provided with new clothes, mothered, and invited to marry the most beautiful woman in the enderun — providing he converted to Islam first.

The gratitude of the father and mother knew no bounds, for the affection among these mountaineers for their children is very great. They insisted that I should in future live in the enderun, and a room was assigned to me. Mehemet Taki Khan made me accept a horse, as mine had not recovered from the effects of the journey over the mountains. But what I most needed was linen and clothes. These were supplied to me by his wife. I was indeed sadly in want of my second shirt. I had been compelled, after I had been robbed of it, to hide myself in the rushes on the bank of a stream to wash the one I wore, and to wait without it until it had been dried by the sun. My Persian clothes, of European cotton print, were in the shabbiest condition, and beyond repair. The Khatun’s women soon made for me all that I was in want of.

Khatun-jan Khanum — ‘Lady of my soul’ — was the principal wife of Mehemet Taki Khan, and the mother of his three children. There were two other ladies who ranked as wives of the chief, but who were on a very different footing from the Khanum, whose apartment her husband regularly shared. She was one of the best and kindest women I ever knew. She treated me with the affection of a mother, nursing me when I was suffering from attacks of fever, which were frequent and severe, and during which I was frequently delirious for several hours. She took charge of the little money that I possessed, as she feared that in my wanderings in search of ruins and inscriptions I might be exposed to great danger if it were known that I carried it with me. She acted as my banker, and gave me what I needed for immediate use, which was very little indeed, as there was nothing to buy, all that I required being furnished to me by her husband and herself.

Neither she nor her women, nor indeed any of the wives and female relatives of the chief and his brothers, ever veiled themselves before me. I was in the habit of passing the evening listening to the Khanum’s stories about the tribes. The chief was frequently present and took part in the conversation. I was even permitted, contrary to the etiquette of the harem, to eat with her, and Mehemet Taki Khan would jokingly taunt me with introducing European customs into the enderun, as it was not proper for even the husband to sit at the same tray with his wife, although in private. The other wives of the Khan, who were young and not ill-looking, never sat in his presence unless invited to do so, taking their places among the waiting-women of the Khanum, who was always treated with the greatest respect and consideration by her husband, and by her partners in his affections.

Khanumi, Khatun-jan’s sister, who was some years younger than herself, was the beauty of Kala Tul. Indeed, it was said that there was not a more lovely woman in the tribe, and she deserved her reputation. Her features were of esxquisite delicacy, her eyes large, black, and almond-shaped, her hair of the darkest hue. She was intelligent and lively, and a great favourite with all the inmates of the enderun. The chief and the Khanum would often tell me that if I would become a Mussulman and live with them they would give her to me for a wife. The inducement was great, but the temptation was resisted. (Early Adventures, 152-154)

At sunset attendants bearing trays on their heads appeared in the lamerdoun (guest’s quarters within the castle). The dinner consisted of the usual pillaus, with the addition of kibabs, stewed fowls, roast game, and several kinds of sweet dishes. After dinner coffee was handed round in the Arab fashion, kaleôns were smoked, and some of the guests played at backgammon, whilst others conversed or read or recited poetry until it was time to sleep, when every one spread his carpet upon the floor and settled himself for the night.

I usually dined in the enderun. Mehemet Taki Khan was fond of talking with me about England and her institutions and European inventions. He took a very enlightened view of such matters, was eager to induce the wild inhabitants of his mountains to engage in peaceful pursuits, and was very desirous that the country should be opened to commerce. These conversations generally took place in the evening in the inner court, where his favourite horses were tethered, and where he would sit amongst them on his carpet. But he was also in the habit of questioning me on those subjects when we were seated at the entrance to the castle, surrounded by the elders and principal men of the tribe.

He would make me describe to them railways and various modern discoveries, and explain to them the European sciences of astronomy, geology, and others unknown to his people. As they were at variance with the teachings of the Koran, he would direct a mullah to argue the matter with me and to endeavour to confound me. The learned man was generally satisfied with a simple denial of what I had stated, quoting in support of it some verse from the holy volume. But this did not satisfy the chief, who was anxious for knowledge. He would make me describe the wigs worn by judges and barristers in England, and then, with a jovial laugh, would exclaim, ‘You see that to make a cadi (judge) in England it only requires two horses’ tails!’

He had some difficulty in understanding why I had left my home to incur the privations and dangers of a journey through wild and inhospitable regions. He could scarcely believe that I had been impelled to do so by the love of adventure, and by a curiosity to visit new countries and to explore ancient remains…

The Bakhtiari are probably the descendants of the tribes which inhabited the mountains they still occupy from the remotest antiquity. They are believed to be of pure Iranian or Persian blood. They are a splendid race, far surpassing in moral, as well as in physical, qualities the inhabitants of the towns and plains of Persia — the men tall, finely featured, and well built; the women of singular beauty, of graceful form, and when young almost as fair as Englishwomen. If the men have, for the most part, a savage and somewhat forbidding expression, it arises from the mode of life they have led from time immemorial. They are constantly at war, either among themselves or with the Persian Government, against which they are in chronic rebellion.

In addition, they are arrant robbers and freebooters, living upon the plunder of their neighbours and of caravans, or of the pusillanimous population of the plains, amongst which they are in the habit of carrying forays with impunity. But notwithstanding the fierce and truculent appearance of the men, I have never seen together finer specimens of the human race than in a Bakhtiari encampment. (Early Adventures, 160-162)

Mehemet Taki Khan

I frequently witnessed whilst in Mehemet Taki Khan’s camp the effect which poetry had upon men who knew no pity and who were ready to take human life upon the smallest provocation or for the lowest greed. It might be supposed that such men were insensible to all feelings and emotions except those excited by hatred of their enemies, cupidity, or revenge. Yet they would stand until late in the night in a circle round Mehemet Taki Khan as he sat on his carpet before a blazing fire which cast a lurid light upon their ferocious countenances — rather those of demons than of human beings — to listen with the utmost eagerness to Shefi’a Khan, who, seated by the side of the chief, would recite, with a loud voice and in a kind of chant, episodes from the ‘Shah-Nameh,’ describing the deeds of Rustem, the mythical Persian hero, or the loves of Khosrau and Shirin.

Or sometimes one of those poets or minstrels who wander from encampment to encampment among the tribes would sing, with quavering voice the odes of Hafiz or Saadi, or improvise verses in honour of the great chieftain, relating how he had overcome his enemies in battle and in single combat, and had risen to be the head of the Bakhtiari by his valour, his wisdom, his justice, and his charity to the poor. The excitement of these ruthless warriors then knew no bounds. When the wonderful exploits of Rustem were described — how with one blow of his sword he cut horse and rider in two, or alone vanquished legions of enemies — their savage countenances became even more savage.

They would shout and yell, draw their swords, and challenge imaginary foes. When the death of some favourite hero was the poet’s theme, they would weep, beat their breasts, and utter a doleful wail, heaping curses upon the head of him who had caused it. But when they listened to the moving tale of the loves of Khosrau and his mistress, they would heave the deepest sighs — the tears running down their cheeks — and follow the verses with a running accompaniment of ‘Wai! Wai!’

Such was probably the effect of the Homeric ballads when recited or sung of old in the camps of the Greeks, or when they marched to combat. Such a scene as I have described must be witnessed to fully understand the effect of poetry upon a warlike and emotional race.

Mehemet Taki Khan himself was as susceptible to it as his wild followers. I have seen him, when we were sitting together of an evening in the enderun at Kala Tul, sob like a child as he recited or listened to some favourite verses. When I expressed to him my surprise that he, who had seen so much of war and bloodshed, and had himself slain so many enemies, should be thus moved to tears by poetry, he replied, ‘Ya, Sahib! I cannot help it. They burn my heart!’ (Early Adventures, 211-213)

A fugitive from the Matamet

Manuchar Khan — the ‘Matamet’ or Persian Governor of Isfahan — was determined to subdue the Bakhtiari and break the power of their chieftain Mehemet Taki Khan. He demanded a huge payment in taxes, and when this demand was ignored, marched with a military force toward the mountains. Separated from Mehemet Taki Khan, and trying to rejoin him, Layard became a fugitive in Arab country threatened by the Persian army, where whole tribal groups were confusedly on the run.

The plains between the rivers Karun and Jerrahi were now a parched and dreary waste with occasional remains of ancient cultivation, and of former habitations, marked by low mounds strewed with bricks and potsherds. The heat was intense and I had to ride about thirty miles, the owner of the mule walking by my side. It was evening before we found ourselves at Kareiba, a large village of huts built of reeds and mats, on the banks of the Jerrahi. I dismounted at the ‘musif’ of the sheikh, who was a Seyyid (a purported descendant of the Prophet).

Before daybreak on the following morning a messenger arrived from Thamer, the chief of the Cha’b Arabs upon whose territories I had now entered, with orders for the sheikh to abandon the village at once, and to move with its inhabitants and their property to the neighbourhood of Fellahiyah. Similar orders were sent to the Arab settlements higher up the river. It was reported that Mehemet Taki Khan had crossed the Jerrahi on the previous night, about three miles above Kareiba, and that the Matamet had already left Shuster (modern Shustar) with a large force in his pursuit. But my host, the Seyyid, pretended to be entirely ignorant on the subject, and maintained that not only had the Bakhtiari chief not entered the Cha’ country, but that he had turned back to the mountains.

The village now became a scene of great confusion and excitement. The men and women began to pull down the huts, and to bind together the reeds of which they were constructed in order to make rafts on which to float down with their families and their property to Fellahiya. Domestic utensils, such as caldrons, cooking-pots, and iron plates for baking bread, with quilts, carpets, sacks of corn and rice, and the poultry, which had been in the meanwhile captured by the naked children, were piled upon them. The herdsmen were collecting their cattle and their flocks. All were screaming at the top of their voices, and sometimes the men, ceasing from their work, and joining hands, would dance in a circle, shouting their war-song.

Already rafts similarly loaded began to float past the village, the orders of the Cha’b sheikh having been promptly obeyed by the Arabs on the upper part of the river. The inhabitants of Kareiba showed great activity in making their preparations, and early in the afternoon they had for the most part already departed on their rafts, and the village was nearly deserted. Those that remained were in great alarm, expecting every moment that the Matamet’s irregular cavalry would sweep down upon them. (Early Adventures, 239-240)

Dykes are destroyed to flood the country and obstruct the Persian advance

The country between Kareiba and Fellahiyah had been placed under water by destroying the dykes and embankments of the river and of the canals, so that it was impassable by horsemen, and I could go no farther. Everyone was too much occupied with his own affairs to attend to a guest and a stranger. The ‘musif’ had been pulled down, and the owner could with difficulty prevail upon his women to prepare for me a mess of boiled millet and sour curds, which was barely sufficient to satisfy my hunger after a long fast.

Rafts, with their loads of men, women, and children, and their miscellaneous cargoes of domestic furniture, provisions, and poultry, were leaving one by one. My guide informed me that, although he had engaged to accompany me to Fellahiyah, he could not, as the waters were out, reach that place. As he could not remain in the deserted village, he declared that he must make his way back at once with his mule, and, mounting the beast, started off at a brisk trot across the plain.

At sunset the sheikh was ready to leave, his wives, children, and property having been already placed in a large flat-bottomed wicker boat, coated with bitumen — the only one belonging to the village. As there was plenty of room in it, I expected that he would allow me to accompany him; but when I asked him for a passage he curtly refused to permit an infidel Christian to be with his women and to pollute his vessel. Then, turning sulkily away, he got into it himself and pushed it into the middle of the stream. He was the last to leave the village, which was now completely abandoned by its inhabitants, and I was left standing alone on the river-bank.

The only course left to me was to follow the example of the Arabs, and to make a raft for myself. As the moon would not rise for some time, I spread my carpet on some reeds and mats which I had collected together, hoping to get a little sleep, as I was much fatigued. But I was soon surrounded by hungry dogs which had been left behind and were howling piteously. It was with difficulty that I could keep them off with a long stick. The discordant cries of hundreds of jackals, seeking for offal amongst the remains of the huts, added to the frightful chorus.

It was not impossible that lions, which are found in the jungle and brushwood on the banks of the rivers in this part of Khuzistan and other beasts of prey, might be attracted to the spot. But what I had more reason to fear than the dogs and wild animals were the bands of horsemen, and especially the Bowi Arabs, who were scouring the plain in all directions in search of plunder. Had I been discovered by them, I should at least have been stripped to the skin and left to my fate, if nothing worse had befallen me.

At length my raft was ready. I placed myself upon it, with a tent pole to guide it, and pushing it from the bank trusted myself to the sluggish stream. The dogs followed me, barking and howling, until a deep watercourse stopped them. I floated along gently, keeping as well as I could in the centre of the river.

The river-banks presented a scene of extraordinary bustle and excitement. They were thickly inhabited, and there seemed to be an endless succession of reed huts upon them. These their owners were now busy in destroying for the purpose of making rafts. The whole population was engaged in this occupation and in driving herds of buffaloes and camels and flocks of sheep through the mud and water, and swimming them across the stream and the numerous canals for irrigation which were derived from it on both sides.

Some were floating across the river on inflated sheepskins, carrying their children on their shoulders and bundles on their heads. Even the women and girls, divesting themselves of their long blue shirts — their only garment — were helping to convey their goods and chattels to the opposite side of the river, which was considered safer from the hostile incursions of marauding horsemen than the western bank. There was a general flight. Everywhere men sent by the Cha’b chief were breaking down the dams in order to flood the country. The crops which were ripe had been set on fire, and on all sides clouds of smoke rose into the clear sky. A thickly peopled and highly cultivated region was thus utterly devastated in a few hours.

I passed unobserved among the numberless rafts, and unnoticed by the Arabs on the banks. At length I came to an extensive grove of palm-trees…  extending for about two miles where the inhabitants seemed to consider themselves secure from attack, as they were not, like those on the upper part of the river, removing their property. The stream, which had been much reduced in size by the numerous watercourses for irrigation derived from it, passed through the centre of a court. I perceived on both sides rows of Arabs seated on carpets. Attendants were hurrying about with little coffee cups, and with water-pipes, formed of the shell of the cocoa-nut, such as are usually smoked by Arabs.

Pushing my raft to the bank, I landed, and was informed that I was in the ‘musif’ of Sheikh Thamer, the chief of the great Arab tribe of Cha’b. The sheikh himself was seated, with some of his guests, at the upper end of the enclosure. When I presented myself to him, he invited me to be seated, making room for me by his side. In answer to his question whence I came and where I was going, I explained to him that I was an English traveller coming from Shuster on account of the disturbed state of the country.

The sheikh was known to be untrustworthy and treacherous, and to have upon his head the blood of more than one relation, whom he had murdered in order to attain the chieftainship. But he was very generous to seyyids and mullas, who, in consequence, flocked to Fellahiyah and condoned his evil deeds. When we were seated I informed the sheikh that the object of my coming to Fellahiyah was to see Mehemet Taki Khan, who, I had reason to know, had taken refuge in his territories. He called Allah to witness that Mehemet Taki Khan had thought of taking refuge with him, but he had turned back towards the mountains, and had probably reached a place of safety in them. I was convinced that Sheikh Thamer was not telling me the truth; but, finding that it was useless to press him further, I returned to the ‘musif’, determined to remain there until I could discover where Mehemet Taki Khan was concealed.

I spread my carpet in that part of it which was reserved for visitors of distinction. In the evening I was not a little surprised to see my old friend Mirza Koma, the governor of Behbahan, enter the ‘musif,’ accompanied by one Muhammaed Ali Khan, the chief of the Noui tribe, whom I also knew. They had arrived in Fellahiyah accompanied by about fifty horsemen. The whole party, covered with mud and showing evident signs of having suffered great privations, had a wretched and forlorn appearance. Their horses, too seemed to be nearly starved and could scarcely walk. The Mirza was glad to see me, and after supper related to me what had occurred since we parted at Behbahan, how he had been betrayed, like Mehemet Tai Khan, by the Persians, his son made prisoner, and his town taken and sacked, and how he had escaped with a few followers to Fellahiyah.

On my condoling with him upon his misfortunes, he replied with his usual good humour, ‘God is great! This is the fifth time that I have been driven from Behbahan, a fugitive, without wife or family, and naked. When those dogs of Persians have stripped the flesh off the bone they will leave it to me to gnaw.’

It was late before the inmates of the ‘musif’ could compose themselves to sleep, for Arabs never tire of chattering. I had not slept the previous night, and the events of the day had added not a little to my fatigue. I was not sorry when I could stretch myself upon my carpet, to take the rest of which I was so greatly in need. I sank at once into a profound sleep. (Early Adventures, 239-247)

With the whole countryside in disorder, and Mehemet Taki Khan now a prisoner of the Persians, anarchy prevailed. Both the Bakhtiari and the Arabs, “without a chief whom they respected, and who was able to maintain some authority over them, were fighting among themselves, and were plundering and maltreating the peaceable inhabitants of the province.” In these circumstances Layard and one of Taki Khan’s younger brothers, Au Kerim, fell into the hands of a Bahmehi chief certain to betray them — Khalyl Khan.

Caught as we were in a trap, and surrounded by Khalyl Khan’s retainers, had we sought to defend ourselves, and blood had flowed, we should have been instantly cut to pieces. There was nothing to be done but to submit… I was in the hands of lawless men, who might have considered it their duty to murder a European and an infidel, and who were as fanatical as they were ignorant. I therefore took my saddle-bags, which contained a few things that were precious to me — my medicines, my compass, and my note-books — and followed Au Kerim into the enderun.

We were no sooner within the room than the door was closed upon us and bolted from the outside. Au Kerim then denounced Khalyl Khan in the strongest terms that his vocabulary could afford, but in a low voice lest he should be overheard, for there are some insults which, among the Lurs, can only be washed out with blood… Although our host was known to be capable of any villainy, Au Kerim believed that Khalyl Khan would probably only take our horses and a little property, and leave us to shift for ourselves in his inhospitable mountains, and that having robbed us, and after recovering from his nightly debauch, our treacherous host would allow us to continue on our way.

Knowing the bloodthirsty and savage character of the Bahmehi, I did not feel the same confidence as my companion as to our fate. I was labouring under too much anxiety, and overwhelmed by too many thoughts to be able to sleep. To be murdered in cold blood by a barbarian, far away from all help or sympathy, the place and cause of one’s death to be probably forever unknown, and the author of it to escape with impunity, was a fate which could not be contemplated with indifference.

We could hear the voices of the chief and his companions in the adjoining room, and the sounds of wild Lur music. They were evidently carousing. Khalyl Khan had the reputation of being given to arak and wine — a rare vice among the mountain tribes. At length all was quiet, and the carousers had apparently retired to rest.

Escape and flight

It was some time after midnight when we were disturbed by the withdrawal of the bolt of the door. Au Kerim sprang to his feet, and I followed his example, not knowing who was about to enter and with what intent. The chief’s wife, whom we had seen in the afternoon after our arrival, stepped stealthily into the room. She denounced her husband to Au Kerim, in a whisper, as a ruffian who had no respect for the ties of family or the duties of hospitality. She would not, she said, have the blood of a kinsman upon her head, and she had come to release the guest whom he had treacherously seized.

The gate of the castle was open. Khalyl Khan, after his debauch, was fast asleep, and Au Kerim could take his horse and depart, and God be with him! Then, addressing me, she said, ‘What have we to do with you, a stranger, and what have you done to us that we should do you harm? Go with him, and let not your blood be also upon our heads’

Our arms were still in the guest room. We took them and went down, with as little noise as possible, to the yard, where our horses, with their saddles on, had been tethered for the night. The chief’s wife accompanied us to the gate, which had not been closed, and wishing us again ‘God speed,’ left us when we had passed through it… As soon as we were out of the gate we led our horses down a precipitous descent away from the village. We proceeded as cautiously and noiselessly as possible, and when we were at a short distance from the foot of the mound we descended the mountainside over rocks, loose stones, and bushes, as fast as we could.

It was with great difficulty that we could drag our horses to the foot of the high mountain range. A stony, hilly country, at this time of the year uninhabited — the tribes being in the summer pastures, with their flocks and herds — still separated us from the plain of Behbahan. We were at some distance from the castle when, about midday, we perceived that we were being pursued by a party of horsemen. Au Kerim, who was mounted on a high-bred Arab mare, put her to full speed. Khatun-jan Khanum had lent me one of Mehemet Taki Khan’s horses, which was strong and fast, and I was able to keep up with my companion. Both our animals were tired, and the heat on these bare and rocky hills, reflecting the burning rays of the sun, was intense.

We were following a long, narrow valley, through which ran the Tab, a small stream, one of the confluents of the river Jerrahi. It wound through the flat alluvial land formed by the various changes in its course. We could, therefore, gallop our horses, and were gaining on our pursuers, when Au Kerim’s mare stumbled and fell, throwing her rider over her head. I was a little behind him, and when I came up to him he was on the ground evidently in much pain and unable to rise. His mare had run away.

I was about to dismount to help him, but he entreated me to leave him, and to fly as fast as my horse could carry me, as I could not be of any use to him, and he would be unable to protect me. He advised me to strike into the hills as soon as I could do so, and to conceal myself in some ravine during the rest of the day. I saw that I could be of no assistance to him, and to remain with him would have been to risk my life unnecessarily. The horsemen who were in pursuit, and were rapidly approaching us, were too numerous to admit of the possibility of resistance. With a heavy heart and a sad presentiment of the fate which awaited him, I urged on my horse, and following his advice, turned into the hills by a track which led through a narrow defile.

After awhile, seeing that I was not followed, I endeavoured to discover some sheltered spot well hidden in the hills, where I could find water and grass for my horse and shade for myself, as the midday heat and scorching rays of the sun were almost beyond endurance. I had not slept for nearly thirty-six hours, and had eaten nothing since the previous night. I was suffering from excruciating thirst, and I dreaded lest an attack of the intermittent fever, which had never left me, might come on, and that I should be delirious and helpless.

My horse, greatly distressed from want of food and water, could scarcely carry me any longer. I was in despair, not knowing what to do or which way to turn, when I happily came to a retired place where there was an abundant spring, shaded by a few stunted konar trees. The soil around produced an ample supply of grass. I owed this welcome discovery to my horse, which suddenly began to neigh and to sniff the air — a sign that water was near. I gave it the rein, and it turned immediately to the spot, which was so well concealed that I should not probably have found it but for the instinct of the animal.

I was beyond measure thankful when I found myself in this oasis and was able to take some rest. Fortunately I still had some think cakes of unleavened bread and a few dried figs, which Khatun-jan Khanum had crammed into my saddle-bags. As my small stock of provisions would not suffice for long, and as I could not foresee when I might reach tents in which I could safely trust myself, I ate sparingly. My horse had made a rush at the springs. After it had drunk sufficiently I tethered it in the grass, and, stretching myself in the shade of a tree, fell at once asleep. (Early Adventures, 270-275)

When I related my adventures to my Bakhtiari and Shusteri friends, they declared that I must have been under the special protection of Hazret Ali, as without it no single horseman could have passed through the country which I had traversed without being murdered by robbers or devoured by lions.

It was not until long after this that I learnt the fate of my unfortunate friend, Au Kerim. He had been captured by Khalyl Khan and his horsemen, who were our pursuers. The Bahmehi chief, fearing that if he were to put his kinsman to death there would be a perpetual blood-feud between him and the Bakhtiari, had given over his prisoner to Ali Riza Khan, Mehemet Taki Khan’s rival, who the Matamet had appointed chief of the tribes in his stead. There was ‘blood’ between the two chiefs and their families. Ali Riza Khan told Au Kerim to prepare for death. The unhappy youth covered his face with his hands and was immediately shot dead.

Had I fallen into the hands of Khalyl Khan I might have shared the same fate. The death of Au Kerim caused me sincere grief. Of all the brothers of Mehemet Taki Khan he was the one who possessed the most estimable qualities, and for whom I entertained the greatest friendship. (Early Adventures, 279-280)

Between Basra and Baghdad
Layard’s continuing loyalty to Mehemet Taki Khan led the Persian authorities to order his arrest. Escaping from detention in the city of Shuster Layard then made his way back to Baghdad. On the final stage of his journey between Basra and Baghdad he was accompanied by two other men, one of them a postal courier.

We were in the plain of Babylon, and were approaching the site of that mighty city… The Euphrates having overflowed its banks, and no attempt having been made by the Turkish Government to retain it in its original bed, a vast tract of country once populous and highly cultivated had been covered with water. The great marsh thus formed extended from above Hillah, an Arab town built on the site of Babylon, to below the junction of the Euphrates and the Tigris, at Korna.

The local Seyyid killed a sheep for us, believing me to be an officer in the service of the Pasha of Baghdad, and the Agayl not considering it desirable to undeceive him, as we were still in danger of being stopped and robbed. He would not allow us to continue our journey before daylight, as several lions, he declared, had been seen and heard skulking round the place during the previous night. I wished to brave the danger, which, I was convinced, was much exaggerated, if it existed at all, and to avoid what I considered a more serious peril, the burning rays of the midday sun; but my companion refused to stir, and it was not until dawn that we resumed our journey.

We stopped in the afternoon in a small village at a short distance from Hillah, on learning that a large party of Shammar Arabs were plundering the country in all directions and that horsemen had been seen during the day on the road to that place. This great Bedouin tribe was then at war with the Pasha of Baghdad, and was committing depredations in this part of the province. In the night we were alarmed by an attack upon the village. There was a great deal of firing; the men chanted their war-song, and the women made that piercing, quavering noise called the ‘tahlel,’ or ‘kel,’ by striking their open mouths with the palm of their hands, yelling at the same moment. After some time the enemy — whether Bedouins, or more probably thieves seeking to rob the date trees — retired, and I returned to my carpet, which I had spread on the roof of a house.

Before daylight some travellers, who had walked from Hillah, arrived and told us that they had found the road clear of Bedouins. We consequently started at once for that place, which was only four miles distant. On arriving there, I stopped at a coffee-house, to obtain some refreshment, whilst the postman went to find a brother Agayl, in order to inform himself of the state of the country between the town and Baghdad. He was advised to proceed at once… and after we had eaten some kibabs and rice in a cook-shop in the bazaar we mounted our horses. We soon left behind us the palm groves and the great mounds which cover the palaces of ancient Babylon, and found ourselves on the broad and well-beaten caravan track leading to Baghdad.

Parties of irregular horse were stationed at the caravanserais which have been built at regular distances on the much-frequented road between Hillah and Baghdad. Their officers assured us that the road was safe, as the Bedouins had retired to the desert, pursued by the Pasha’s troops. We had passed the third of these great buildings, when we saw in the distance, amidst a cloud of dust, a number of horsemen galloping towards us. Members of the Shammar tribe, they were soon upon us. One or two galloping at full speed towards me, brought their mares up on their haunches when their long quivering spears were almost within a few inches of my body.

In an instant, and before I had time to make myself known, the Agayl and I were thrown from our horses. When I fell my ‘keffiyeh’ (Arab head-dress) dropped off, and exposed a red ‘tarbush,’ or fez, which I had put on under it to protect my head from the sun. One of the Arabs cried out that I was a ‘Toork,’ and a man who had dismounted, seizing hold of me as I lay upon the ground, drew a knife and endeavoured to kneel upon my chest. I struggled, thinking that he intended to cut my throat, and called out to one of the party who, mounted upon a fine mare, appeared to be a sheikh, that I was not a ‘Toork,’ but an Englishman.

He ordered the man to release me, and then told me to get up. He was a handsome young man, with a pleasing expression, the most brilliant and restless eyes, the whitest teeth, which he constantly displayed, and long tresses of braided hair falling from under his ‘keffiyeh.’ Looking at me for a moment he exclaimed ‘Billah! He tells the truth. He is the English “hakim” (doctor) of Baghdad, and he is my friend, and the English are the friends of our tribe.’ Then, addressing himself to me, he asked me why I was there alone and without the protection of Sofuk, the great sheikh of the Shammar, who was known to be at war with that ‘dog, the son of a dog,’ the Pasha of Baghdad, and to have defeated his troops and occupied his country.

It was evident that he either took me for Dr Ross, of Baghdad, who had more than once visited the celebrated chief of the Shammar, and was well known to the tribe, or that he desired to protect me, and had invented an excuse for doing so. I endeavoured to explain to him that I was travelling to Baghdad, and that I was accompanying the Agayl, who was employed by the English ‘balios’ (consuls), in conveying letters, and had consequently never been molested by the Bedouins, and that, as an Englishman, I had no fear of the Shammar, who, I knew, were the friends of the English, and that I placed myself under his protection. He replied that it was fortunate that I had met with him, as he was a kinsman of Sofuk. Had I been a ‘Toork,’ my life would have been forfeited, as there was blood between the Shammar and the Osmanli.

He then bade me continue my journey. But in the meanwhile his followers had torn open the letter-bags, and had scattered their contents upon the ground. They had also robbed the Agayl of the greater part of his clothing, and had emptied my saddle-bags, taking my watch and compass and a few silver pieces which I possessed. They appeared to be but little under the control of the young sheikh. I appealed to him to restore my property. He ordered the men who had plundered me to do so, but after high words had passed between them they not only refused, but compelled me to give them my ‘zibboun,’ or long Arab gown, my ‘keffiyeh,’ and my shoes and stockings, leaving me only my ‘tarbush,’ Arab shirt, and ‘abba.’ They then took possession of our horses, the young chief being unable or unwilling to interfere further in our behalf.

We were left standing alone, almost stripped to the skin. I, however, considered myself fortunate in having escaped with my life. Had it not been for the interposition of the sheikh and for my having been taken for Dr Ross, I should unquestionably have been put to death for a Turk. The Agayl, who had not recovered from his fright, declared that he had only feared for me, as these dogs of Shammar, although they had robbed him, would not have dared to murder him, and have thus caused a blood-feud between the two tribes. But as for me, he said, they would have cut my throat as they would have cut the throat of a sheep.

We then began to collect the letters as fast as we were able. The day was rapidly drawing to a close, and in my utterly destitute condition I was anxious to lose no time in reaching Baghdad. We were still some hours distant from the city. Not being accustomed to walk with bare feet, I suffered the greatest pain and inconvenience from the want of shoes and stockings. The ground was so heated by the sun that it burnt the soles of my feet, which soon began to swell, blister, and bleed. My companion, who had gone barefooted from his birth, did not suffer as I did, and took compassion upon me.

Notwithstanding the great suffering I experienced, I hurried on as fast as I could, fearing lest I should not arrive at Baghdad before the sun rose. It was the beginning of September, and the summer heat had not yet diminished. I felt that I should die of thirst and fatigue if I had to cross the plain before us during the day, and I hoped that we might reach the city before morning. But the night was not to pass without a further adventure. We were suddenly stopped by two Arabs on foot, armed with short, heavy clubs. They demanded our clothes, and as we had no means of resistance, I was compelled to surrender my ‘tarbush’ and my ‘abba’, for which one of the thieves generously gave me his own ragged cloak in exchange. My head was now bare, and as it had been shaved in order to complete my disguise, I had an additional motive for wishing to avoid the scorching rays of a Mesopotamian sun.

At the gates of Baghdad

My thirst during the night was almost more than I could bear. Only once I was able to quench it. Under the walls of the last caravanserai we found a small caravan preparing to depart for Hillah. With it were one or two Agayls who were known to my companion. They offered me a skin filled with ‘leben,’ or sour milk, and I drank until I could drink no longer. Thus refreshed, notwithstanding the tortures that I had suffered from my feet, I felt fresh courage to continue our journey.

As the dawn drew near I could distinguish, with a joy and thankfulness that I cannot describe, the long line of palm groves which cover the banks of the Tigris above and below Baghdad. We soon reached the river, and as it was necessary to cross it, the Agayl went in search of a boatman whom he knew. He shortly returned with a ‘kufa,’ a circular boat made of reeds overlaid with bitumen, the owner of which quickly ferried us to the opposite bank. We landed in a garden outside the city walls, and near one of the gates. It was still closed and would not be opened until sunrise. I sank down on the ground, overcome with fatigue and pain.

A crowd of men and women bringing the produce of their gardens, laden on donkeys, to the bazaars, were waiting for the moment when they were to be admitted. At length the sun rose and the gate was thrown open. Two cawasses (servants) of the British Residency, in their gold-embroidered uniforms, came out, driving before them with their courbashes (whips) the Arabs who were outside, to make way for a party of mounted European ladies and gentlemen. I was the same party that, on my previous visit to Baghdad, I had almost daily accompanied on their morning rides.

The passed close to me, but did not recognize me in the dirty Arab in rags crouched near the entrance, nor, clothed as I was, could I venture to make myself known to them. But at a little distance behind them came Dr Ross. I called to him, and he turned towards me in the utmost surprise, scarcely believing his senses when he saw me without cover to my bare head, with naked feet, and in my tattered ‘abba.’

Very few words sufficed to explain my position. He ordered a ‘syce,’ or groom, who was following him, to give me his horse, and helping me to mount, which I had much difficulty in doing, took me to his house. (Early Adventures, 307-312)

Layard’s letters home were few and far between. Months elapsed between his joining the Bakhtiari and his writing about his experiences when he finally got back to Baghdad. Included in his Autobiography and Letters is a communiqué briefly summarizing several months of adventuring that he sent to his mother on his return.

Baghdad, 24^th January 1842

I regret that I have been unable to make drawings; the state of the country would not allow me to do so, and indeed it was very seldom that I was able to make a note, or to take a bearing by the compass. During my last trip I discovered other sculptures and the sites of several ancient cities.

I luckily escaped very well, having only been plundered once, although the journey was a very dangerous one, and, succeeded in visiting every spot of any interest that, during my former excursion in Khuzistan, I had left unexamined. I found my poor friend Mehemet Taki Khan still in chains, with his family in a most distressing state. One of his brothers, with whom I had spent many happy hours, had been cruelly murdered, and on entering Shuster one of the first things I saw was the head of an old friend rotting in the Bazaar!

The number of persons that have perished in this province is scarcely credible. I visited the great robber Baktiyari chief, who received me very civilly in his celebrated mountain stronghold, and, contrary to my expectations, gave me every opportunity of visiting the country. I had the honour of being introduced to all his wives (he has twelve), and of getting well drunk with him on some Shiraz wine. In fact, we were sworn friends, and I only regretted that time would not allow me to join him in a few plundering expeditions, and other parties of pleasure, which he very kindly offered to bring about for my amusement.

I also spent a few days with the Wali of Luristan, who received me with much kindness and treated me with great hospitality. The only two Englishmen who had ever ventured into this country, Captain Grant and Mr Fotheringham, had been murdered by the predecessor of the present Wali, and, as Major Rawlinson had strongly warned any European against attempting to enter the country, I was somewhat anxious as to the result of my journey.

I am now, however, so well acquainted with this curious people that I had little difficulty in forming a friendship with him. The only scoundrel that ill-treated me was the Sheikh of the Beni Lam Arabs… Whilst among the tribe I was daily in the greatest danger, and had I not luckily been in company with a Seyyid, a descendant of the Prophet, I scarcely know how I should have succeeded in passing through the country. As it was, I was attacked, and robbed of the little money that I possessed. The Matamet, the commander of the Persian troops, had also left orders at Shushter to have me arrested; but I dared the Governor to do so, and remained in the town and travelled about the country without noticing his threats or remonstrances.

I have avoided living with the Colonel or any of the residents here, although I dine with them every day, and have taken a small house to myself, where I sit alone and am busily occupied during the day, writing and putting my notes in something like order. I have every reason to be most grateful to Colonel Taylor, who is a most amiable and worthy man. It would be well for England if every city in the world had such a Resident.

During the thirty years he has resided here it is impossible to describe the mode in which he has established the English name and character. A few days back we celebrated the birth of the Prince of Wales with great éclat. The steamer on the river was dressed with flags and fired a Royal Salute. In the evening the Resident’s house was illuminated, and the street hung with lamps. Who a few years back would have anticipated this? (Autobiography and Letters, V. 2, 12-13)

In Constantinople, 1842-45

Layard’s hard-won knowledge of the situation on the Turko-Persian border came to the attention of the British Ambassador in Constantinople, and he was eventually made an unpaid attaché at the Embassy. He also engaged in risky after-hours escapades in the company of another member of the Embassy staff — a Mr Alison — on one occasion secretly visiting a Princess of the Sultan’s Imperial family in the seclusion of her private apartments.

Mr Alison was in every respect a most delightful and entertaining companion, and, as we had the same tastes and pursuits, we agreed very well together. His perfect knowledge of the Turkish language and character were of great use in our frequent walks in Stamboul and our excursions in the neighbourhood of the city. Many were the adventures we had together, some amusing, some not without risk and danger. One of these adventures may be worth relating.

We were in the habit of going on Friday afternoons to the ‘Sweet Waters of Asia’ (a district of the city, RS) to look at the gay and picturesque groups of Turkish women, who assembled there on that day in spring, and, seated on the grass with their children, enjoyed a kind of picnic, smoking their narguilés, drinking sherbet, and eating sweetmeats. We were returning from one of these excursions in Mr Alison’s caique, which was rowed by three of the most stalwart and skilful Turkish caiquijis on the Bosphorus, when we perceived some ladies in very bright-coloured ferigis (cloaks), evidently of high rank, standing on the marble steps of an imperial kiosk, built on the water’s edge, and about to enter an eight-oared boat.

We stopped for a time to observe them. One, who was the most richly dressed of the party, stepped into the caique followed by the others, who were evidently her attendants, and, seeing that we were looking at her, cautiously lowered her veil, and showed her face, which appeared to us, from the glimpse we obtained of it, surpassingly lovely, and made a sign which we interpreted as an invitation to follow her.

Accordingly, when her caique left the stairs of the kiosk, we directed our boatmen to keep as near to it as they prudently could. As it had a larger number of rowers than ours, we had some difficulty in keeping up with it, especially as our caiquijis were evidently unwilling to continue the pursuit, and did not row their best. When we came to the spot where the Golden Horn meets the two streams — one coming from the ‘Sweet Waters,’ the other from the direction of the sacred suburb of Ayoub — the lady’s caique turned into the latter. We were about to follow, when our caique struck against something, and a dead body rose to the surface of the water close to us.

Our boatmen now threw down their oars, and refused to go any further. The appearance of the corpse was an evil omen, warning them, they said, against taking any part in an adventure, which might have grave consequences both to us and to them. The ladies, they declared, belonged evidently to the harem of a person of high rank, and if we were caught by the police, or were seen following them, we might incur the greatest possible danger. As they could not be persuaded to continue the chase, we had to return home much disappointed.

The following morning a Turkish woman, closely veiled, called at Mr Alison’s house, when I chanced to be there, and requested to speak with him. Having assured herself that no one except ourselves was present or could hear what she had to say, she told us that she had been sent by the lady, whom we had seen and followed on the previous day, to invite us to visit her. She refused to disclose the name of her mistress or to say who she was. If, she said, we would go to a garden wicket in a street in the Ayoub quarter which she described, at a certain hour on the following day, we would be admitted and the lady would receive us. She then left us.

Although the adventure was not without peril, and it was even possible that a trap might be laid for us, we determined to run the risk. The following day we accordingly went to Ayoub at the appointed hour. We had no difficulty in finding the wicket the messenger had described, in a narrow, solitary street in an out-of-the way part of the quarter. The gate was at once opened by a woman, and we entered it, apparently unobserved. She led us across a garden to a large kiosk of old Turkish architecture, with broad, overhanging eaves. We were ushered into a large hall, the walls and ceiling of which were sumptuously and most exquisitely decorated with gilding and painted ornaments in the Oriental style, whilst the ceiling was inlaid with pieces of looking-glass, which produced a rich and lovely effect. Such in those days, before Turkish taste was corrupted by European influence, were the decorations seen in the palaces of the Ottoman nobles.

On a very low divan at the further end of this hall was seated a lady, whom we recognised at once as the one we had seen at the ‘Sweet Waters.’ We had not been deceived by the glimpse she had allowed us to obtain of her face, when she furtively lowered her veil as she stepped into her boat. She was young and singularly beautiful, with the large almond-shaped eyes, the delicate and regular features, and the clear, brilliant complexion, somewhat too pale perhaps for perfect beauty, peculiar to Turkish women of mixed Circassian descent. She was splendidly clad in the dress then worn by wealthy Turkish ladies, before it was rendered vulgar and unbecoming by the introduction of French fashions. Round about her stood a number of girls, all richly clad, and for the most part exceedingly pretty, who were evidently her attendants.

She invited us to be seated on the divan beside her, and entered at once into conversation. She asked numerous questions upon all manner of subjects, politics included, said that she knew who we were, and that, seeing that we had observed her at the ‘Sweet Waters’, she had resolved to make our acquaintance, but that she had been imprudent in inviting us to follow her and was glad that we turned back when we did. She then ordered narguilés, coffee and sweetmeats to be brought, which were handed to us by some of her damsels, she herself partaking of them with us.

We were soon engaged in a very lively discourse. The ladies were delighted with Alison, who spoke their language perfectly, and laughed uproariously at his jokes and anecdotes. No one knew better how to entertain and amuse Orientals than he did. After we had talked for some time, the lady directed some of her attendants to play on the usual Turkish instruments, and others to dance, which they did very gracefully. But the dance soon degenerated into a kind of romp in which all the girls took part — pelting each other with comfits, and tumbling over each other on the floor and divans amidst shouts of laughter, to the great amusement of their mistress, who encouraged them in their somewhat boisterous play.

In those days this sacred quarter of the Turkish capital, which contains the tombs of the first Mussulman martyrs who fell before Constantinople, was rarely visited by Europeans, who were exposed in it to insult and molestation from its fanatical inhabitants, chiefly Mullas and Softas, or students of the religious law. We were glad, therefore, to ecape from it unobserved, and to regain our caique, which we had left at some distance in the Golden Horn.

The lady, whose acquaintance we had thus made, had given us no clue as to who she might be; nor would the attendant who admitted us to the garden answer any questions on the subject. She was evidently of high rank, from her distinguished manners, the richness of her dress, and the luxury in which she lived. Our curiosity was greatly excited, and we determined to satisfy it. With this object we sent for an old Italian woman, generally known as ‘La Guiseppina,’ with whom we were well acquainted, and who kept a small hotel in Pera. She had access to most Turkish harems, and was much employed by Turkish ladies in executing commissions for them.

We informed her of our adventure, and described the lady and the house in which she had received us. ‘La Guiseppina’ undertook to discover our mysterious beauty and to communicate with her, and to return with the information we required before the end of the day. According to her promise she reappeared after a few hours, but with a face pale with terror. The lady, she declared, belonged to the Palace, and was, she had reason to believe, a sister of the Sultan. She implored us not to persist in the adventure, or to meet the lady again under any circumstances. If we were found with her, our lives would unquestionably, she said, be forfeited, and even if a suspicion arose that we had visited her, the consequences to us might be most serious.

We were quite ready to follow the advice of ‘La Guiseppina’, as the scandal of an exposure — to say nothing of the danger we might run — would have been very great, especially in the case of Alison who held a high diplomatic post. We, therefore, determined not to repeat our visit to our lovely friend. She continued for some time to send her messenger to reproach us for not having fulfilled our promise to see her again, and to appoint a time for meeting her. But we persisted in our resolution not to expose her or ourselves to further risk.

This Princess — for the lady was, no doubt, the Sultan’s sister — subsequently made herself notorious by not wearing a yashmak, or veil, and by throwing off many of the restraints placed upon Turkish women, and especially upon members of the Imperial family and harem, who were not then permitted to appear in public without precautions being taken to prevent any man from approaching them, and to maintain for them the strictest privacy. She was accustomed to appear at the ‘Sweet Waters’ and other places of public resort without concealing her features, and even to mix with the crowd.

Europeans were led to believe that the Princess was a ‘strong-minded’ person who was seeking to reform the condition of women in Turkey, and who was herself setting an example of freedom and independence of the restraints placed upon her sex which would soon be followed by others. But the Mussulmans were much scandalised by proceedings contrary to their religion and their customs, and the Sultan was soon compelled to interfere to put an end to them. The Princess was ordered not to appear any more in public, and, when it was necessary for her to do so, to wear the thickest of yashmaks. She disappeared from the scene, her vagaries were soon forgotten, and I do not know what became of her. (Autobiography, V. II, 145-150)

The educational work of American missionaries

During the winter of 1843-44 I passed most of my time at the Embassy — working for Sir Stratford Canning and obtaining political information for him, corresponding with the Morning Chronicle, and continuing my studies in the Turkish, Hebrew, and Chaldean languages.

I was anxious to promote the establishment of schools amongst the indigent Christian and Jewish populations of the Turkish capital — a matter in which Lady Canning took a very lively interest. We were able to open some schools in the poorest quarters of the city, and eventually one was founded for the education of children of the better classes without distinction of faith, it being meant for Christians and Mohammedans alike. To conduct it Lady Canning obtained the services of two ladies from England, the Misses Walsh, who managed the establishment very creditably and successfully, and devoted themselves to the work.

Later on, the Sultan generously presented Sir Stratford Canning with a large house in the main street of Pera, which belonged to the Turkish Government or to the Imperial domain, and to which this school, previously existing in a bad and inconvenient locality, was transferred. In it the children of many of the English engineers, who were then employed in the Turkish Arsenal and elsewhere, as well as those of Ionian and Maltese families and of Greeks and Armenians, received a fairly good education.

At that time the only schools in Constantinople where children could obtain anything like a European education were under the direction of the Jesuits, and of the American Missionaries. The former, who succeeded in making many converts, principally among the Armenians, were under the protection of the French Government, and were used by it for political purposes and to spread the influence and promote the interests of France. The American Missionaries, who had no political objects in view, and who did not profess to make converts to the Protestant faith, although the instruction they gave often led indirectly to that result, were a most zealous, devoted, and learned body of men.

They had spread themselves over the greater part of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and Asia, and in parts of Persia — especially in the provinces occupied by the Nestorians — and everywhere opened schools for the instruction of the native Christians. I was intimately acquainted with many of them, in Constantinople and elsewhere in Turkey, and received much kindness from them. After long struggling against the opposition and persecution they incurred, chiefly from the native Christians, and notably from the Greek and Armenian clergy, who were jealous of their influence and hostile to the spread of knowledge amongst those whom it was their interest to maintain in complete ignorance, the labours of the American Missionaries were rewarded by no inconsiderable success.

To them may be attributed in a great measure the movements which have since taken place in European Turkey, and in Armenia, in favour of national independence and against the rule of the Turks. Most of the leaders of the Bulgarians in their struggle against the Porte were educated in the American College, known from its founder as ‘The Robert College,’ a vast and commodious edifice, situated near the village of Bebek, and commanding one of the most beautiful and extensive views over the Bosphorus and its shores. There they acquired their knowledge of the institutions, laws, and customs of civilised countries, and those principles of political freedom which they sought to carry out in the rising against the Turkish rule, which led, many years after the time of which I am writing, to the independence of the Bulgarian race.

Another important result of the endeavours of the American Missionaries to establish schools amongst the native Christians was that, whilst it excited the jealousy and hostility of the Greek and Armenian clergy, it compelled them to make efforts to spread education amongst their own flocks, and so to prevent their having recourse to the teaching of foreigners, who were looked upon as heretics, and who were accused of the design of making converts to the Protestant faith.

Nothing has contributed more to the improvement of the Christian races throughout the Ottoman Empire in an educational, and perhaps a political, point of view, than these early efforts of the American Missionaries to open schools and to disseminate knowledge amongst those populations by means of translations of standard works of all kinds, and by teaching the elements of science in their various establishments.

They were amply supplied with money from the United States — chiefly, I believe, through the Board of Foreign Missions. Braving the climate, and the persecution and ill-treatment to which they were not infrequently subjected, they established themselves in the most remote and least frequented parts of the Turkish Empire, where they lived with their families — not forgetting the comforts of their native land, especially rocking-chairs and pumpkin-pie. I frequently, in the course of my wanderings, partook of their hospitality, and always received a warm welcome from them. Several whom I knew fell victims to their devotion, and to the hardships, exposure, and vexations to which they were subjected. (Autobiography, V. 2, 120-122)

Jayant Mukundray Patel, medical miscreant sans pareil, has at last been found guilty of serious crime. And in the Brisbane Supreme Court on July 1st 2010 he received his penalty. For the manslaughter of Mervyn John Morris, James Edward Phillips, and Geradus Wilhelmus Gosewinus Kemps, and for causing grievous bodily harm to Ian Rodney Vowles, Justice John Byrne sentenced him to seven years in jail.

Addressing Patel, Justice Byrne said that “In view of the verdicts of the jury, there is no denying the gravity of your offence and your repeated serious disregard for the welfare of the four patients.” The judge added that Patel’s fatal operations “might easily have been avoided. Had you sought a second opinion on whether to proceed, the indications are that another surgeon would have advised against them all.”

But Justice Byrne was much too kind. Patel’s psychopathic eagerness to wield the knife had been known well before he arrived in Australia. And a second opinion was something he never required. At the Kaiser Permanente Hospital, in Oregon, where after several years of malpractice his surgical cases were reviewed (three had died, while a fourth lost gastrointestinal function after Patel performed a colostomy backward) “Medical staff alleged that he would often turn up, even on his days off, and perform surgery on patients that were not even his responsibility. In some cases this surgery was not even required, and caused serious injuries or death to the patient.”

For his depredations in Brisbane the prosecution asked a minimum of ten years. Given that the death toll for which Patel appears responsible may have been between 80 and 90 men and women (in the course of two years’ surgical mayhem) many think this was too short. And the prospect of his now being released on parole after only 3½ years is for some surviving victims downright disturbing.

But Australians are a generous and forgiving people. Mrs Judy Kemps, who lost her husband Geradus Kemps, said the main priority was a conviction. “That guilty verdict is what I really wanted. The jury did a good thorough job, sitting there all those weeks listening to the case.” According to a report in the Brisbane Times Mrs Kemps went on to add that “even if Patel was released after three and a half years she would not be concerned.” Anyway, the whole grisly story of Patel’s career as a medical mutilator is here: Doctor Death in Bundaberg.

This they signally failed to do. Instead, they systematically obstructed investigations into criminal activity within their jurisdiction, and blatantly intervened to assist Patel escape justice, providing him with a free flight back to America.

Three representative members of the administrative bureaucracy at Bundaberg Base Hospital appeared as witnesses before an inquiry in 2005 — The Director of Services, the District Health Manager, and a third responsible for the nursing staff. Samples of their testimony are presented at the conclusion of Doctor Death in Bundaberg as Appendices A, B, and C.

Reader’s opinions will no doubt be varied and various. My own view is that it would be difficult to find a lower caliber of personnel: intellectually limited, with unconvincing credentials, devoid of any sense of responsibility, and morally impaired. Devotees of nationalized medicine with its armies of nondescript officials should perhaps be careful what they wish for. You wouldn’t trust a sick dog with Appendices A, B, and C. Ultimately, alas, and regardless of rogue medicos like Jayant Patel, bureaucratic personnel like these always ruin such schemes. Read the full story here: Doctor Death in Bundaberg.

That’s why Jessica Watson’s voyage is interesting. Will something happen to her? Tens of thousands are following her blog as Ella’s Pink Lady, a sturdy Sparkman and Stephens 34 sponsored by Ella Baché, heads down across the Pacific to the Southern Ocean.

Jessica Watson

Jessica’s plainly a nice kid and having a great time — but is she well-advised? When New Zealand-born mum Julie said on television that sailing around Cape Horn was no more dangerous than crossing the street (or did she say that crossing the street was more dangerous?) you began to wonder. Is there something in the water? Or is it just the Antipodal Mind?

Few of us think clearly when badgered by hostile interviewers, and that might have had something to do with it. But it’s an unusual claim, especially when the sailor is a 16-year-old girl, not strongly built, who indeed looks more of a child. In contrast to mum Julie, others with rather more sailing experience show more respect. After surviving a tumultuous night off Tierra del Fuego among the breaking seas and invisible rocks known as “the Milky Way”, Joshua Slocum wrote in 1898:

“Hail and sleet in the fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face; but what of that? It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is northwest of Cape Horn, and it was the white breakers of a huge sea over sunken rocks which had threatened to engulf her through the night.

It was Fury Island I had sighted and steered for, and what a panorama was before me now and all around! It was not the time to complain of a broken skin. What could I do but fill away among the breakers and find a channel between them, now that it was day?

Since she had escaped the rocks through the night, surely she would find her way by daylight. This was the greatest sea adventure of my life. God knows how my vessel escaped.”

“The greatest sea adventure of my life.” That was Captain Joshua Slocum’s measured judgment, aged 52, after 30 years of wrecks, strandings, dismastings, and many storms in all the seven seas. At Cape Horn, having eventually found smooth water among the islands near Cockburn Channel, he climbed the mast to survey the wild scene astern:

The great naturalist Darwin (wrote Slocum in Sailing Alone Around the World) looked over this seascape from the deck of the Beagle, and wrote in his journal, ‘any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week.’ He might have added, ‘or seaman’ as well.

Then there’s Sir Francis Chichester. Both a solo flier in the 1930s and a solo round-the-world sailor in 1966-67, he wrote that the thought of Cape Horn “not only frightened me, but I think it would be fair to say that it terrified me. The accounts of the storms there are, quite simply, terrifying… I told myself for a long time that anyone who tried to round the Horn in a small yacht must be crazy. Of the eight yachts I knew to have attempted it, (this was back in 1966, RS) six had been capsized or somersaulted, before, during, or after the passage…”

Not a picnic. Not like crossing the road.

Joshua Slocum, 1844–1909

Just to get our bearings, now that solo circumnavigation has become a record-book contest for teenagers, let’s remember what Captain Joshua Slocum achieved over one hundred years ago. Since that time there have been hundreds of ocean sailors and many narratives, yet both his voyage and his book remain unique. In the introduction to a 1948 edition Arthur Ransome wrote that

Sailing Alone Around the World is one of the immortal books. Joshua Slocum was the first man to sail round the world in a small boat with none but himself as captain, mate and crew. Other men may repeat the feat. No other man can be the first. Captain Slocum’s place in history is as secure as Adam’s.

Captain Joshua Slocum

Briefly told, Slocum was born in Nova Scotia, his formal education ended when he was ten, and after running away from home at the age of 16 he lived almost entirely at sea. Along with boat-building, sailing was his world. Other lives and vocations he explored through the library he carried with him when, as a ship’s master on full-rigged ships, he had room for books. (See Note at end of this essay for the books in his library.) Later in life, on his round-the-world voyage, when he found that in calm weather his boat Spray would keep on its course with the helm lashed, he told how he spent his time. It was not taken up at the wheel:

“No man, I think, could stand or sit and steer a vessel round the world. I did better than that; for I sat and read my books, mended my clothes, or cooked my meals and ate them in peace. I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so I made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”

Virginia Slocum

A notable aspect of Slocum’s life at sea is that after being given command of the barque Washington, in 1869, his wife Virginia always travelled with him, bearing several children to whom she taught their lessons as the family sailed along. Husband and wife were close; after Virginia’s early death in Buenos Aires in 1884 he took a long time to get over it. One of his sons wrote that “Father’s days were done with the passing of mother. They were pals…” Another son said that “When she died, father never recovered. He was like a ship with a broken rudder.”

The next decade was one of decline. But ten years later he had recovered enough to make that legendary solo voyage in a fishing smack found near New Bedford. Though the Spray was old, and propped up in a farmer’s field, he decided to rebuild it himself (“My ax felled a stout oak-tree near by for a keel… and the much-esteemed stem-piece was from the butt of the smartest kind of pasture oak.”). Then, aged 52, he set off alone to circumnavigate the globe — with no engine, no generator, no electricity, no self-steering mechanism or autopilot, no radio, no refrigerator, no GPS, no roller-furling sails, no sponsors, and a $1.50 tin clock for a chronometer. It is said he departed with only $1.80 in cash; though he profitably traded miscellaneous goods along the way.

Sail Plan, Spray

While most sailors now go west to east, taking advantage of the prevailing winds, Joshua Slocum sailed east to west — the hard way round Cape Horn. How was his prodigious circumnavigation achieved? As Richard Henderson writes in Singlehanded Sailing, “The success of his voyage was largely due to masterful seamanship. He learned to read the weather, maneuver his clumsy craft in tight places, handle her heavy gear, claw to windward when necessary, ride to a sea anchor, lie to or run off in heavy weather, and balance his boat so that she would sail for days with the helm unattended.” And, we might add, by being alert to danger every minute he was afloat.

Not asleep or dreaming.

Jessica and Jesse: Living the Dream

Whether Jessica Watson was awake, asleep, or just dreaming when her boat Ella’s Pink Lady collided with a container ship just before she set off round the world is unclear. It happened at night, and there are claims and counter-claims. But the romantic rhetoric of dreaming is everywhere in the writings of modern teenage record-breakers. At her website there’s “a big thanks to our sponsors for making Jessica’s dream come true.” Elsewhere she “hopes to inspire everyone with a dream in their heart”, a sentiment fervently endorsed by her fans: “Go Jessica, live the dream!” they cry again and again.

Ella’s Pink Lady leaves Sydney

She also acknowledges the inspiration of Jesse Martin, the young Australian who rounded the world in 1999 – 2000, and whose record at age 17 she hopes to shatter. Martin may be a somewhat indifferent sailor, but you can’t take away from him the fact that he set out, broke the age record sailing an identical S & S 34 to Jessica’s, and wrote a book about it. It must be said here and now, however, that one record of Martin’s is unlikely to be broken for many years. His writings contain more windy nonsense about ‘dreaming’ and ‘living the dream’ than all history has recorded hitherto. Even a well-known American dreamer gets into the act on a prefatory page:

“I encourage you to continue to set high goals for yourself and to continue to pursue your dreams. You can do anything that your imagination, effort, and talent will let you achieve. Best wishes. Sincerely, Bill Clinton.”

With Jesse and Jessica we reach the end of the road pioneered by Joshua Slocum. Teenage circumnavigations are now increasingly Showbiz — part of the theatrical-histrionic-industrial complex (aka the media). How far this will be true of Jessica’s trip remains to be seen. But with Jesse Martin’s 2002 world-wide adventure cruise on the schooner Kijana, the spin-off from his circumnavigation, it was made fully explicit. For this project the globe was seen as a vast movie set, a sequence of colorful painted backgrounds where a cast of characters — some amateur and some professional — were supposed to enact defined and scripted “adventures”, the “natives” changing from place to place but really being just exotic décor.

Unpacking the word “Showbiz” may help us see what has happened. Looking back a hundred years to Slocum, you see a tough and secure identity doing something no other man had done. Solo round-the-world sailing began with a resourceful, self-sufficient, hardworking and humorous New Englander, not Leonardo DiCaprio. Taking things semantically, first Captain Joshua Slocum did the “business”; then through writing and lecturing he put himself and his remarkable achievement on “show”. With Jesse and Jessica this order is reversed. First, negotiations are carried out with all sorts of sponsors who know exactly what sort of “show” they require. Then Jesse and Jessica go out to do the “business” — if they can. This is called reality television.

Kijana, Schooner

Sailing solo around the world made Jesse Martin a celebrity. But what to do next? How about a bigger dream, with a huge white photogenic schooner, media deals, and an American publisher talking up another book, most of it directly inspired by Showbiz itself — a movie in fact. In his account of this ill-fated project in Kijana, the Real Story, (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2005, Kijana being the name of the boat) Jesse’s mission statement tells how the new voyage will be a three-year-long “adventure” with “tropical jungles, exotic ports, sparse deserts and wild natives”. After leaving Australia he’d head “straight for Papua New Guinea; then on to Indonesia, India and Africa, where the crew would leave the boat on the coast of Tanzania and cross the continent by land while another crew would sail our boat around to meet us on the other side. I wanted to ride camels across the Serengeti Plain, then raft down the Congo River to meet the boat on the Atlantic coast.” (Kijana, the Real Story, 12-13)

The Amazon, the Caribbean, and the Galapagos Islands would follow, in a thirteen-part series with corporate backing pitched at the youth market. And before long everything fell into place. In 2002, with his best friend and his brother on a $285,000 boat christened Kijana, plus two young women chosen for their looks and their music, Jesse sailed off “to find and film paradise” — first making for Maya Bay in Thailand. Maya Bay was “one of the places I dreamed of visiting, and the location of the Leonardo DiCaprio film The Beach”, a movie  that “portrayed the image of paradise we were searching for.” It may have been inspiring at the time, but as a film The Beach lies somewhere between a ClubBohème wet dream and a vision of hippie apocalypse, where an exclusive group of swinging singles find “paradise” on an unmarked island in the Gulf of Thailand — until bullets start flying.

What on earth can one say? First, Jesse’s paradise is a collage of tropical getaway brochures, distant echoes of old South Sea adventure stories, plus Leonard DeCaprio and Virginie Ledoyen making out under the palms. That’s for starters.  Muddled into the dream is an anthropological fantasy that tribal peoples who live in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Pacific, not to mention Africa and South America too, are waiting in their native simplicity to cater to western bohofolk in big yachts with nothing better to do.

It’s unresistingly puerile — but that itself raises serious questions. Is it also a vision shared more generally Downunder? Considering the youthful author’s loosely bohemian background it would be foolish to expect much in the way of historical or cultural understanding. But If you took a surgical slice of his brain might it represent a cross-section of ‘enlightened’ Australian middle-class attitudes as a whole? I suspect it would. And that it reflects widespread regional delusions.

The Antipodal Mind

The attitude toward danger we find in Jessica Watson’s bold yachting venture is suggestive. East of the Indian Ocean, south of Indonesia, and washing indistinctly out into the Pacific, something appears to have gone missing from the Darwinian survival kit. Both in Australia and New Zealand — traditionally known as the “Antipodes” — there’s a feeling that while nasty things happen in the rest of the world, they’ll never happen here to us. The Antipodal Mind assumes that because we’re sincerely multicultural and opposed to war and have busy academic Peace Centers busily doing whatever Peace Centers do — we’ll be safe.

Prompted by the tourist industry, there has also been a sentimental tendency to glamorise people, places and activities once thought unglamorous and risky to visit. From the security of the Antipodes unstable Pacific micro-states are regularly shown as a benign mixture of palms, lagoons, and adorable brown children with beguiling eyes, places where handsome yachts and giant cruise ships lie peacefully at anchor.

Under the rubric of romantic primitivism large numbers of antipodal bien-pensants convinced themselves that even the most violent tribal societies were rather fun — and were certainly colorful and exciting. Disneyfication added another element. Where primitivist fantasy denies there is anything to fear from tribalism, romantic puerility presents us with the intellectual and educational understanding of a child. It’s as if everything the West has painfully learnt about the Third World in the last fifty years has been ignored, occluded, or erased.  Is it because of this lethal mix of sentimentalism, incuriosity, and raw ignorance that tourists go year after year to places where there’s a reasonable chance of being blown to bits?

What do outsiders make of it? I think it can be confidently said that you won’t find these delusions in the lands northwest of here, where most Asians see such attitudes as a mental affliction of farang. Living amongst upheavals and riots, floods and famines, political corruption and political despotism, desperately crowded cities and civil wars that have decimated whole populations, Asians matter-of-factly know danger for what it is (part of daily life), and are inclined to regard those who by a freak of geography have been shielded from such things as fools in a fool’s paradise. Like birds on Pacific Islands that have no predators — rather like New Zealand kiwis indeed — their sense of self-preservation seems underdeveloped. Cape Horn? Not to worry. Like crossing the street.

But let’s cut to the chase: only people living at the end of the earth, safely surrounded by deep water, get to think about danger this way. And from this perspective that comment on the negligible dangers of Cape Horn is a characteristic expression of the Antipodal Mind. It complacently assumes that the GPS will function flawlessly; that navigation will need neither sextant nor log tables; that weather forecasts will reliably get through; and that the vulnerable vane/oar/linkages of the self-steering gear at the stern will never be swept away. Plus of course that a secure radio link will enable encouraging daily conversations between Team Watson and Jessica, providing an invisible supportive web of world-wide contacts that give “solo sailing” a rather different meaning than it used to have. No problemo. No danger. Just a breeze.

Worse things do happen at sea

Yet even a casual landlubberly inquiry shows malfunctions and mishaps all the time. True, September’s UK Yachting Monthly starts with the usual ingratiating images of yachts in palm-fringed lagoons, but the very next page has lightning melting a VHF aerial on a mast. That means the end of radio contact: not good. Nearby a Bronze Medal is being awarded to a Scottish lifeboat man. He had rescued two Swedes from a boat that had been knocked down twice in a Force 9 gale with 20-foot waves — and the rescue depended entirely on the radio working as it should. Elsewhere there’s a woman climbing out of a yacht wrecked in Mexico. Somehow the autopilot had spontaneously gone from ‘auto’ to ‘standby’; because there was no power no warning sounded; disaster swiftly followed.

Sir Francis Chichester at work

Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth Circles the World is full of this sort of thing. The book seems at times one long grumble, a catalog of mishaps and an exhausting litany of complaint. One day some broken glass cut the man’s bare feet and made him cross. But what did he expect, from an unsecured bottle of whiskey, except shattered fragments everywhere when the boat turned upside-down in the Tasman Sea? The pervasive tone of exasperation makes Gipsy Moth Circles the World a hard read compared to Joshua Slocum’s good-humored and humorous Sailing Alone Around the World (1898). All the same, the picky relentlessness of Chichester’s detail shows clearly what young sailors like Jessica, with more modern gear and more stable boats, still have to face.

If he isn’t fixing a valve in the motor’s exhaust that is letting in water, he’s trying to get an electric bilge pump working or secure a slipping self-steering vane. When he isn’t fixing the brake on the propeller, he’ll be spending a whole morning bleeding the engine’s fuel system, fuel pump, priming pump, and filter. There are so many things to do that he provides readers with the maintenance list he made out, 71 items long, as an agenda. These are the first ten tasks it contains:

Check water tank connections
Secure cockpit locker hasp
Fix preventer to galley drawers
Try self-steering vane without extra lead
Freshen nip of tiller lines to self-steering
Check engine water level
Stow burgee stick
Rig tiller tackle to cabin
Try more slack on self-steering oar
More solid cockpit repair to keep deck water out

Chichester fixing self-steering gear

The other day Jessica reported using goo to fix persistent deck or cockpit leaks. Then on Nov 9th she said she was doing some jobs she’d put off because of “bouncy” seas, and was working on her own maintenance list, including “a really good check over for chafe and wear.” On November 16th she gave “the little Yanmar engine a full polish up and scrubbed out the bilges.” There seems to be a notion among teenagers that polishing an engine makes it run better. Jesse Martin also describes cleaning the outside of an engine, giving it a pat, and being pleased by the way it subsequently performed. This is evidently considered maintenance. But Jessica’s daily blog is endearing, with plenty about dolphins, while baking cupcakes was a huge turn-on for the fans.

“Wow!!!!! Love those cupcakes…” wrote Rob of Ingleburn, “You are truly an inspiration to everyone. Keep doing what you are doing. You are wonderful.”

Captain Joshua Slocum also cooked at sea. Feeling in need of fortification after Cape Horn he fried some buns. As sturdy in their construction as the Spray itself, one of them still sat on the mantel of his home back in Massachusetts some years later. So perhaps the two matelots have an unexpected affinity. Anyway Jessica’s okay. There’s a lot of what is best in the Antipodal character about her — ‘let’s give it a go’ combined with a jaunty attitude and an optimistic will to succeed. We wish her well. Luckily the middle of the ocean has been serene so far and the Pacific well-behaved — almost a danger-free zone. Slocum once knew a ship’s master who took a benignly complacent view of the Pacific Ocean and claimed that its perils had been much exaggerated. Then a hurricane nearly blew his ship out of the water. After that, wrote Slocum, he was a changed man. Maybe that will happen to Jessica too. Maybe not. We shall see.

Congratulations Jessica! Well done and welcome home — Sydney May 15 2010.

Sailing Alone Around the World

By Joshua Slocum

Chapter One

A blue-nose ancestry with Yankee proclivities – Youthful fondness for the sea – Master of the ship Northern Light – Loss of the Aquidneck – Return home from Brazil in the canoe Liberdade – The gift of a “ship” – The rebuilding of the Spray – Conundrums in regard to finance and calking – The launching of the Spray.

In the fair land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world’s commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birth-place mentioned on his certificate be Nova Scotia. I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States — a naturalized Yankee, if it may be said that Nova Scotians are not Yankees in the truest sense of the word.

Joshua Slocum aged about 39

On both sides my family were sailors; and if any Slocum should be found not seafaring, he will show at least an inclination to whittle models of boats and contemplate voyages. My father was the sort of man who, if wrecked on a desolate island, would  find his way home, if he had a jack-knife and could find a tree. He was a good judge of a boat, but the old clay farm which some calamity made his was an anchor to him. He was not afraid of a capful of wind, and he never took a back seat at a camp-meeting or a good, old-fashioned revival.

As for myself, the wonderful sea charmed me from the first. At the age of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on the bay, with chances greatly in favor of being drowned. When a lad I filled the important post of cook on a fishing-schooner; but I was not long in the galley, for the crew mutinied at the appearance of my first duff, and “chucked me out” before I had a chance to shine as a culinary artist. The next step toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage. Thus I came “over the bows,” and not in through the cabin windows, to the command of a ship.

The Northern Light

My best command was that of the magnificent ship Northern Light, of which I was part-owner. I had a right to be proud of her, for at that time — in the eighties — she was the finest American sailing-vessel afloat. Afterward I owned and sailed the Aquidneck, a little bark which of all man’s handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of beauty, and which in speed, when the wind blew, asked no favors of steamers. I had been nearly twenty years a shipmaster when I quit her deck on the coast of Brazil, where she was wrecked. My home voyage to New York with my family was made in the canoe Liberdade, without accident.

My voyages were all foreign. I sailed as freighter and trader principally to China, Australia, and Japan, and among the Spice Islands. Mine was not the sort of life to make one long to coil up one’s ropes on land, the customs and ways of which I had finally almost forgotten. And so when times for freighters got bad, as at last they did, and I tried to quit the sea, what was there for an old sailor to do? I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else.

Next in attractiveness, after seafaring, came ship-building. I longed to be master in both professions, and in a small way, in time, I accomplished my desire. From the decks of stout ships in the worst gales I had made calculations as to the size and sort of ship safest for all weather and all seas. Thus the voyage which I am now to narrate was a natural outcome not only of my love of adventure, but of my lifelong experience.

*    *    *

One midwinter day of 1892, in Boston, where I had been cast up from the old ocean, so to speak, a year or two before, I was cogitating whether I should apply for a command, and again eat my bread and butter on the sea, or go to work at the shipyard, when I met an old acquaintance, a whaling-captain, who said: “Come to Fairhaven and I’ll give you a ship. But,” he added, “she wants some repairs.”

The captain’s terms, when fully explained, were more than satisfactory to me. They included all the assistance I would require to fit the craft for sea. I was only too glad to accept, for I had already found that I could not obtain work in the shipyard without first paying fifty dollars to a society, and as for a ship to command — there were not enough ships to go round. Nearly all our tall vessels had been cut down for coal-barges, and were being ignominiously towed by the nose from port to port, while many worthy captains addressed themselves to Sailor’s Snug Harbor.

The next day I landed at Fairhaven, opposite New Bedford, and found that my friend had something of a joke on me. For seven years the joke had been on him. The “ship” proved to be a very antiquated sloop called the Spray, which the neighbours declared had been built in the year 1. She was affectionately propped up in a field, some distance from salt water, and was covered with canvas.

The people of Fairhaven, I hardly need say, are thrifty and observant. For seven years they had asked, “I wonder what Captain Eben Pierce is going to do with the old Spray?” The day I appeared there was a buzz at the gossip exchange: at last some one had come and was actually at work on the old Spray. “Breaking her up, I s’pose?” “No; going to rebuild her.” Great was the amazement. “Will it pay?” was the question which for a year or more I answered by declaring that I would make it pay.

Lines of Spray

My ax felled a stout oak-tree near by for a keel, and Farmer Howard, for a small sum of money, hauled in this and enough timbers for the frame of the new vessel. I rigged a steam-box and a pot for a boiler. The timbers for ribs, being straight saplings, were dressed and steamed till supple, and then bent over a log, where they were secured till set. Something tangible appeared every day to show for my labor, and the neighbours made the work sociable.

It was a great day in the Spray shipyard when her new stem was set up and fastened to the new keel. Whaling-captains came from far to survey it. With one voice they pronounced it “A1”, and in their opinion “fit to smash ice.” The oldest captain shook my hand warmly when the breast-hooks were put in, declaring that he could see no reason why the Spray should not “cut in bow-head” yet off the coast of Greenland.

The much-esteemed stem-piece was from the butt of the smartest kind of a pasture oak. It afterward split a coral patch in two at the Keeling Islands, and did not receive a blemish. Better timber for a ship than pasture white oak never grew. The breast-hooks, as well as all the ribs, were of this wood, and were steamed and bent into shape as required. It was hard upon March when I began to work in earnest; the weather was cold; still, there were plenty of inspectors to back me with advice. When a whaling-captain hove in sight I just rested on my adz awhile and “gammed” with him.

New Bedford, the home of whaling-captains, is connected with Fairhaven by a bridge, and the walking is good. They never “worked along up” to the shipyard too often for me. It was the charming tales about arctic whaling that inspired me to put a double set of breast-hooks in the Spray, that she might shunt ice.

*    *    *

The seasons came quickly while I worked. Hardly were the ribs of the sloop up before apple-trees were in bloom. Then the daisies and the cherries came soon after. Close by the place where the old Spray had now dissolved rested the ashes of John Cook, a revered Pilgrim father. So the new Spray rose from hallowed ground. From the deck of the new craft I could put out my hand and pick cherries that grew over the little grave. The planks for the new vessel, which I soon came to put on, were of Georgia pine an inch and a half thick.

The operation of putting them on was tedious, but, when on, the calking was easy. The outward edges stood slightly open to receive the calking, but the inner edges were so close that I could not see daylight between them. All the butts were fastened by through bolts, with screw-nuts tightening them to the timbers, so that there would be no complaint from them. Many bolts with screw-nuts were used in other parts of the construction, in all about a thousand. It was my purpose to make my vessel stout and strong.

Now, it is a law in Lloyd’s that the Jane repaired all out of the old until she is entirely new is still the Jane. The Spray changed her being so gradually that it was hard to say at what point the old died or the new took birth, and it was no matter. The bulwarks I built up of white-oak stanchions fourteen inches high, and covered with seven-eighth-inch white pine. These stanchions, mortised through a two-inch covering board, I calked with thin cedar wedges. They have remained perfectly tight ever since.

The deck I made of one-and-a-half-inch by three-inch white pine spiked to beams, six by six inches, of yellow or Georgia pine, placed three feet apart. The deck-inclosures were one over the aperture of the main hatch, six feet by six, for a cooking-galley, and a trunk farther aft, about ten feet by twelve, for a cabin. Both of these rose about three feet above the deck, and were sunk sufficiently into the hold to afford head-room. In the spaces along the sides of the cabin, under the deck, I arranged a berth to sleep in, and shelves for small storage, not forgetting a place for the medicine-chest. In the midship hold, that is, the space between cabin and galley, under the deck, was room for provision of water, salt beef, etc., ample for many months.

The hull of my vessel being now put together as strongly as wood and iron could make her, and the various rooms partitioned off, I set about “calking ship.” Grave fears were entertained by some that at this point I should fail. I myself gave some thought to the advisability of a “professional calker.” The very first blow I struck on the cotton with the calking iron, which I thought was right, many others thought was wrong. “It’ll crawl!” cried a man from Marion, passing with a basket of clams on his back. “It’ll crawl!” cried another from West Island, when he saw me driving cotton into the seams.

“It’ll crawl!”

Bruno simply wagged his tail. Even Mr. Ben J——, a noted authority on whaling-ships, whose mind, however, was said to totter, asked rather confidently if I did not think “it would crawl.” “How fast will it crawl?” cried my old captain friend, who had been towed by many a lively sperm-whale. “Tell us how fast,” cried he, “that we may get into port in time.” However, I drove a thread of oakum on top of the cotton, as from the first I intended to do. And Bruno again wagged his tail. The cotton never “crawled.”

When the calking was finished, two coats of copper paint were slapped on the bottom, two of white lead on the topsides and bulwarks. The rudder was then shipped and painted, and on the following day the Spray was launched. As she rode at her ancient, rust-eaten anchor, she sat on the water like a swan.

The Spray’s dimensions were, when finished, thirty-six feet nine inches long, over all, fourteen feet two inches wide, and four feet two inches deep in the hold, her tonnage being nine tons net and twelve and seventy-one hundredths tons gross. Then the mast, a smart New Hampshire spruce, was fitted, and likewise all the small appurtenances necessary for a short cruise. Sails were bent, and away she flew with my friend Captain Pierce and me, across Buzzard’s Bay on a trial-trip — all right.

The only thing that now worried my friends along the beach was “Will she pay?” The cost of my new vessel was $553.62 for materials, and thirteen months of my own labor. I was several months more than that at Fairhaven, for I got work now and then on an occasional whale-ship fitting farther down the harbor, and that kept me the overtime.

Note: The strength of Slocum’s prose speaks for itself. It needs no critical gloss. Nonetheless it is of interest that Van Wyck Brooks called Sailing Alone Around the World a “nautical equivalent” of Thoreau’s Walden. Brooks edited an anthology of classic New England literature in 1962, A New England Reader. He included the Strait of Magellan chapters from Sailing Alone Around the World alongside Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dana, and Prescott.

It may also be of interest to list some of the books Joshua Slocum took with him to read at sea:

Darwin’s The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Newcomb’s Popular Astronomy, Todd’s Total Eclipses of the Sun, Bates’s The Naturalist on the Amazons, Macaulay’s History of England, Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay, Washington Irving’s Life of Columbus, Boswell’s Johnson, Don Quixote, Life on the Mississippi, one or more titles by Robert Louis Stevenson, a set of Shakespeare, and in ‘the poet’s corner’, as he called it, works of Lamb, Moore, Burns, Tennyson, and Longfellow. (Above information courtesy of the works of Walter Magnes Teller.)

But Koch was dead right when he wrote in Science of Searle’s 2004 book Mind, a Brief Introduction, that “pound for pound, you don’t get much better value,” singling out the final chapter for special praise. With the title “Philosophy and the Scientific World-View” it is moderate and commonsensical, and even its passing remarks are very much to the point.

Modern cultural anthropologists have yet to fully understand the meaning of such judgements as this: “There could not be a long-term conflict between nature and culture, for if there were, nature would always win; culture would always lose.” He also suggests that philosophical questions are more simply answered than neurobiological questions, and that it’s the latter that represent the real challenge today.

Philosophy and the Scientific World-View

[The final chapter of Mind, a Brief Introduction, by John Searle.]

I have tried to give an account of the mind that will situate mental phenomena as part of the natural world. Our account of the mind in all of its aspects—consciousness, intentionality, free will, mental causation, perception, intentional action, etc.—is naturalistic in this sense: first, it treats mental phenomena as just a part of nature. We should think of consciousness and intentionality as just as much a part of the natural world as photosynthesis or digestion.

Second, the explanatory apparatus that we use to give a causal account of mental phenomena is an apparatus that we need to account for nature generally. The level at which we attempt to account for mental phenomena is biological rather than, say, at the level of subatomic physics. The reason for this is that consciousness and other mental phenomena are biological phenomena; they are created by biological processes and are specific to certain sorts of biological organisms.

Of course, this is not to deny that our individual minds are shaped by our culture. But culture is not something in opposition to biology; rather, culture is the form that biology takes in different communities. One culture may differ from another culture, but there are limits to the differences. Each must be an expression of the underlying biological commonality of the human species. There could not be a long-term conflict between nature and culture, for if there were, nature would always win; culture would always lose.

* * *

People sometimes speak of the “scientific world-view” as if it were one view of how things are among others, as if there might be all sorts of world-views and “science” gave us one of them. In one way this is right; but in another way this is misleading and indeed suggests something false.

It is possible to look at the same reality with different interests in mind. There is an economic point of view, an aesthetic point of view, a political point of view, etc., and the point of view of scientific investigation, in this sense, is one point of view among others.

However, there is a way of interpreting this conception where it suggests that science names a specific kind of ontology, as if there were a scientific reality that is different from, for example, the reality of common sense. I think that is profoundly mistaken. The view implicit in this book, which I now want to make explicit, is that science does not name an ontological domain; it names rather a set of methods for finding out about anything at all that admits of systematic investigation.

The fact that hydrogen atoms have one electron, for example, was discovered by something called the “scientific method,” but that fact, once discovered is not the property of science; it is entirely public property. It is a fact like any other. So if we are interested in reality and truth, there is really no such thing as “scientific reality” or “scientific truth.” There are just facts that we know.

I cannot tell you how much confusion in philosophy has been generated by the failure to perceive these points. So, for example, there are frequently debates about the reality of the entities postulated by science.

But either these entities exist or they do not. The view that I have of the matter is this: The fact that hydrogen atoms have one electron is a fact like the fact that I have one nose. The only difference is that for quite accidental reasons of evolution, I do not need any professional assistance to discover that I only have one nose, whereas given our structure and given the structure of hydrogen atoms, it takes a good deal of professional expertise to discover how many electrons are in a hydrogen atom.

* * *

There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe out situation in it. As far as we know, its most fundamental principles are given by atomic physics, and, for that little corner of it that most concerns us, evolutionary biology.

The two basic principles on which any such investigation as the one I have been engaging in depends on are, first, the notion that the most fundamental entities in reality are those described by atomic physics; and, second, that we, as biological beasts, are the products of long periods of evolution, perhaps as long as five billion years.

Now, once you accept those points, and they are not points just about science but about how the world works, then some of the questions about the human mind admit of rather simple philosophical answers, though that does not imply that they admit of simple neurobiological answers.

We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as a part of it.

[This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Interest with the title “Over There, Then: John Gunther’s Inside Europe”]

The War had started and Churchill had lots on his mind. But even in September 1939 he still had time for John Gunther. The much-travelled American journalist was one of the few outsiders who had been in Moscow on August 24th, the very day the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, and Churchill wanted to hear how this stunning maneuver was received on Moscow’s streets.

What exactly Gunther told Churchill is unrecorded, but the words of the British leader were something Gunther remembered for years. “Russia,” Churchill murmured, brooding aloud about the Soviet Union, and rehearsing lines that would become famous in a more polished form, “was a mystery in a mystery in a mystery.”

* * *

The wartime meeting with Churchill was no fluke. During the 1930s and 1940s John Gunther’s Inside Europe had made him the most famous American newsman of them all. A friend of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Gunther threw parties at his home in New York for the likes of John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—Inside Russia was dedicated to his good friend Greta Garbo.

He spent perhaps more time than was sensible with Walter Winchell and Elsa Maxwell in places like the Stork Club and Toots Shor’s and 21. But his books anatomising different continents—Inside Latin America, Inside Asia, Inside Africa, Inside Russia—were translated into ninety languages and sold millions of copies around the world.

Yet nothing else was as successful as his 1936 Inside Europe. It foreshadowed what the Nazis had in store. Much as Robert D. Kaplan today has been a Cassandra warning of the descent of entire Third World regions into anarchy, Gunther warned of the European forces leading inexorably to World War II.

Inside Europe

Inside Europe wasn’t a paperback. At the cheaper end of the British market in the 1930s books were selling for sixpence, but this was a whopping 500-page hardback retailing at 30 shillings, or sixty times that price.

That didn’t slow sales one bit. In its first year, 1936, Inside Europe sold 65,000 copies at about 1,000 copies a week, and continued to sell through 1937 at the same rate. By 1939 it had sold nearly 120,000 copies and continued to turn over through the Second World War. John Gunther was later told he was the best-selling American author of non-fiction in Britain since Mark Twain.

There were three reasons for this success, and the first was timing. Appearing first in January 1936 in London published by Hamish Hamilton, and later by Harper’s in the USA, Inside Europe provided a close literary echo, scene by scene and act by fateful act, of the international drama of the times. Running steadily through numerous updated impressions and editions, it climaxed in the “Peace Edition” of October 1938—the month when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

In the words of historian John Lukacs “1938 was Hitler’s year”. It saw the annexation of Austria, Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich, and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Readers of Inside Europe’s October 1938 edition were able to follow these developments almost as they happened.

Not only were they given brilliant thumb-nail sketches of the Nazis in Germany (and a matchless photograph of Goering at a reception, an enormous bull draped with braid and medals confronting a frail and exquisite lady from Japan) but there were also incisive studies of the whole tragi-comic gallery in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the Balkans, in East Europe. Gunther also dealt ably with the United Kingdom itself, where, through May 1940, the struggle between Churchill and his domestic opponents had yet to play out.

As a portrait gallery the photographs are outstanding—with one striking exception. The shot of Stalin is a typical blurry Soviet retouch job, where the crude hand of some studio helot can be seen brushing the hair, brightening the eyes, and putting a smile on the despot’s face. All too lamentably, this pictorial failing also extends to the text in the last chapters about Stalin and the USSR—something we shall come to in due course.

The second reason for the book’s success was depth. Though Gunther’s later work was often based on visits of only days or weeks, Inside Europe drew on twelve years’ research and reporting from every European capital; on personally investigating Hitler’s Austrian background and personally witnessing events like the Reichstag fire trial; on continually sharing information with journalistic colleagues Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, H. R. Knickerbocker and William Shirer, and with literary acquaintances Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West.

The high cost of Nazi hoodlums

The third reason for the book’s success was its style and tone. Gunther grew up in Chicago, cut his journalistic teeth at the Chicago Daily News before going to Europe, and enjoyed colorful muckraking journalism. During a trip back to the Chicago at the end of the 1920s he collaborated on a News article titled “The High Cost of Hoodlums” that appeared in the October 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It told how you could have an enemy “bumped off” for as little as $50, though the rate for a newspaper man like himself might be as high a $1000. In Inside: the Biography of John Gunther (1992) Ken Cuthbertson wrote that:

Despite the fact that “The High Cost of Hoodlums” was written sixty years ago, it retains its vitality as a superb historical snapshot of the Chicago of 1929… It provided a highly readable behind-the-scenes look at how 600 hoodlums had succeeded in terrorizing Chicago’s three million citizens.

One way of looking at Inside Europe is to see it as “a highly readable behind-the-scenes look” about the even larger number of hoodlums who were already terrorizing Germany and would soon menace the continent. BBC producer Brian Miller described in 2001 how the “racy mixture of politics and Capitol Hill gossip” put together by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in 1931, Washington Merry Go Round, successfully pioneered muckraking book journalism in the US.

Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Brothers in New York, thought the same approach might be tried on Europe’s dictators. He chose Gunther to write the book, and Gunther’s powerful style ensured that Inside Europe broke through the suffocating climate of active censorship and intimidation (“this fog of untruth, or else of censorship, which was really a kind of self-censorship”) that was depriving British readers of the facts about Hitler and the drift to war.

In Vienna since 1930, Gunther had several things going for him. First, he was fast and could meet deadlines. Second, according to Brian Miller, “he was not subject to conservative proprietorial censorship because both his publishers were liberally minded and inclined to let him write whatever he liked, provided it ‘took the lid off’ something.” Third, “he was not subject to censorship and intimidation by dictators themselves because he made quick raids into their territories and only wrote when safely back in England or the USA.”

Inside Europe was a huge commercial success that sold half a million copies and gave him political entrée everywhere. Not only Churchill welcomed him. Two years later in 1941 in Washington, after returning from Latin America, Sumner Welles called Gunther in to brief Roosevelt on the region. Welles had provided letters of introduction to a dozen national leaders, and now Gunther was supposed to report what he’d found: Hitler had boasted of building “a new Germany” in Brazil, and Nazi sympathizers were everywhere.

But Roosevelt appeared less receptive than Churchill, and Gunther hardly got a word in. Instead he was treated to a rambling 45-minute lecture on foreign affairs during which, Gunther later wrote, “I kept thinking that FDR looked like a caricature of himself, with the long jaw tilting upward, the V-shaped opening of the mouth when he laughed, the two long deep parentheses that closed the ends of his lips.”

With Walter Duranty in Moscow

When John Gunther headed for Europe in 1924 it was after a two-year spell with the Chicago Daily News working alongside Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg. In London he met Dorothy Thompson, a strong influence and life-long friend, and had an affair with Rebecca West, nine years his senior, who opened doors for him in British literary circles. In London he also married his first wife Frances—the beginning of a stressful relationship that ended in 1944.

During those years he reported from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople, and Moscow. It was in Moscow in 1928 that Gunther first met the New York Times representative Walter Duranty—in those days it seems everybody who went to Moscow did. Visiting Duranty’s apartment he reported,

When one dines with him in Moscow, an extremely pretty girl, smart in semi-evening frock, opens the door, shaking hands. She then disappears again, and late in the evening, asks Walter if he wants to get to work, she has finished the Izvestia proofs. Then they go to bed together. In the morning, she shines the shoes. Mistress, secretary, servant. An unholy trinity for you! Of course, by Moscow law, since they share the same residence, she’s his wife, too…

The pretty girl’s name was Katya, by whom Duranty later had a son. But the mild irregularity of the arrangement Gunther witnessed in Moscow was merely the tip of an iceberg. In Paris in the years before 1914, Duranty was a close friend of Aleister Crowley, a genuine madman fascinated by excretory functions, sexually aroused by blood and torture, and a “master” of the occult.

Duranty and Crowley shared the same woman, Jane Cheron, and all three of them were heavily into opium, sex, and black magic. Even when Duranty was escorting Gunther around Moscow in 1928 he remained in some sort of marital relation with Cheron, who was still in France. Did Gunther know any of this?

Perhaps he did and perhaps he didn’t care. Duranty, who had lost a foot in a railway accident and had a limp (the picture shows him not long after this event) was a famous raconteur and the pleasure of his company seems to have swept all doubts aside. In Stalin’s Apologist (1990) Sally J. Taylor tells how forty years later he and his wife visited Duranty where he was living in Orlando, Florida. Duranty came over to the motel where the Gunthers were staying, and according to Jane Gunther he was “enchanting, in his very best form.” They all stayed up until 4.00am, with Walter being “terribly funny, and very very wicked.” After Duranty left their motel, John turned to his wife and said, “Walter is just a scamp!”

But Duranty was not, alas, just a scamp. He was also a man many regarded then and now as a scoundrel. Not for nothing did Malcolm Muggeridge call him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism,” or Joseph Alsop describe him as a “fashionable prostitute”, or Robert Conquest, later, call for every word he ever wrote about the Soviets and collectivization to be challenged again and again.

It’s possible that Duranty was in the pay of the Soviets, though another long-term New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, who looked into things during his own stay in Moscow, denied that Duranty was ever in the pay of anyone except the New York Times.”

Perhaps. Yet it’s inescapable that his immediate reward for doggedly covering up mass murder in the Ukraine was the indulgence of the regime, the tumultuous applause he received in the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 for assisting America’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and a call from Stalin four weeks after Duranty’s return to Moscow offering the unprecedented privilege of a second interview. Stalin’s words at the time, however accurately or inaccurately rendered by Duranty afterwards, were something he quoted with pride for the rest of his life:

You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.

The literary culture of the time

All of this raises questions about the journalistic and literary culture of the time. How could someone from the world of Aleister Crowley and the Paris bohemian demi-monde be hired by the New York Times as its resident commentator in Moscow on Russia under Bolshevik rule? How did he become the best-read authority in the US on Stalin’s famous planned economy? Why was such a man invited to Washington in July 1932 to advise Roosevelt about Soviet gold production?

Whatever the answers to those question, it’s plain that Walter Duranty rubbed off on John Gunther. The reason seems to have had something to do with the fact that both Gunther and Duranty were the sort of men who would rather write anything than not write at all. More I suspect than is the case today, many journalists of Gunther’s time were novelists manqué. Only fiction was considered truly prestigious, and readable fiction was not about economic trends, voting patterns, or industrial production. Duranty periodically tried to write both novels and short stories, and in Hollywood, in the years of his decline in the 1940s, he teamed up with Mary Loos, a niece of the screenwriter Anita Loos, to crank out stories and scripts.

The same literary interests drove Gunther. He never stopped writing novels—The Red Pavilion, The Golden Fleece, The Lost City. Most of them sank without trace. Through Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson he knew dozens of novelists and yearned for literary recognition.

When success came, however, it was not for fiction but for his reportorial colossus Inside Europe (though he must have enjoyed a Popular Front gathering of the League of American Writers in 1938 when he was invited on stage, and dined with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

When in 1935 Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers approached him to write Inside Europe, Gunther turned him down—not once but twice. “In those days I was more interested in fiction than in journalism and my dreams were tied up in a long novel about Vienna that I hoped to write.” Only when offered the huge sum of $5000 did Gunther reluctantly accept. What’s interesting is that when he finally sat down to write, the approach was personal and novelistic almost as much as analytic and interpretive. Events in Europe were being shaped by a cast of extraordinary characters, Gunther believed, and Inside Europe would be about their beliefs, motives, and charisma.

To get under way he agreed to produce three articles, and “The three articles”, wrote Gunther, “turned out to be the three chief personality chapters in the book—Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” What drove him was the need to show the force of their personalities and how they wielded power over other men. In a letter to Canfield he said that this approach “derives from something deeper in me than political conviction; it comes from the fact, for good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist.”

* * *

Inside Europe is still riveting. No-one who reads Gunther’s description of Hitler and his friends will easily forget it, whatever they may have read since World War II:

He reads almost nothing. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been outside Germany since his youth in Austria and speaks no foreign language, except a few words of French. He is nearly oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of mine travelled with him, in the same aeroplane, day after day, for two months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.

Gunther had also spent time in Bucharest and knew the ominous mixture of Ruritanian farce and fascist menace to be found in Rumania. Only two streets away from King Carol’s palace one could see well-dressed members of the Iron Guard lounging in a café, sipping Turkish coffee, and talking about revolution. Founded in 1927 the program of the Iron Guard, he wrote, “was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong nationalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the countryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns.”

The portrayal of Stalin

So far so good. And it’s reasonably good for hundreds of pages. But then one comes to Stalin—and it’s pure undiluted Walter Duranty. Stalin has, we are told

“Guts. Durability. Physique. Patience. Tenacity. Concentration. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock. His perseverance, as Walter Duranty says, is ‘inhuman’. When candour suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do. In his article ‘Dizzy from Success’ he was quite frank to admit that the collectivisation of the peasants had progressed too quickly.”

This is truly a gem. Stalin’s magnanimity is shown by his “frankness” in “admitting” that collectivisation had “progressed too quickly.” Gunther sums up the desperate suicidal resistance of the peasants in the following four sentences: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Yes. John Gunther actually wrote that it wasn’t Stalin, or the Communist Party, or the NKVD, or the Red Army troops who seized their grain and herded them without food or water onto railway wagons and shot them if they resisted; they “killed themselves.”

Even so, Inside Europe was a major achievement. It brought to public notice the Empire of Evil that was about to expand and take over the whole of central Europe. It powerfully confirmed the Nazi menace Churchill had toiled for years to publicise. And Gunther’s Inside Europe played no small part in bringing US elite opinion out of the dangerous miasma of isolationism that prevailed.

That such a perceptive journalistic observer could be drawn into Duranty’s deceptions about the Soviets had no simple explanation. It may however be because one of Gunther’s strongest personal virtues, loyalty, here became also a vice. He could never bring himself to believe (or to even imagine) that however entertaining Duranty may have been down through the years, and however firmly he had stood by his side during the painfully protracted death of Gunther’s son, his old friend from the 1920s was also a thorough scoundrel whose writings about Stalin were full of lies.

We know how it ended. But what was Sir Francis Galton thinking of when eugenics began? What led from the quiet book-lined study of a Victorian scientific worthy, loved by his family and admired by his peers, to the charnel houses of the Nazi era? Did he in fact have a crack-up, and did this lead inexorably step by step to the mother of all cultural crack-ups in Germany?

He had that rarest of all things human, an original mind—and it developed early. By age six he had learned the Iliad and the Odyssey well enough to correct his elders. When his father’s friend Leonard Horner visited one day and tiresomely quizzed the child on their fine points, Galton replied: “Pray, Mr. Horner, look at the last line in the Twelfth Book of the Odyssey,” and scampered off. This translates as “But why rehearse all this again? For even yesterday I told it to them and thy noble wife in thy house: and it liketh me not twice to tell a plain-told tale.”

But there were early signs of mental fragility too. An erratic school career led eventually to Trinity College, Cambridge, but the strain of the Mathematics Tripos proved too much. Affected by dizziness and other symptoms of mental stress when trying to concentrate, he settled for a pass degree, and for six years dropped out of academic and intellectual life almost entirely. The time from 1844 to 1850 was spent adventuring in Africa and the Middle East and socialising with the hunting set back home.

Darwin and the ‘hereditary bent’

When The Origin of Species appeared in 1859 it was a turning point. Charles Darwin was a cousin. Coming at a critical stage of both his scientific career and his domestic life, Darwin’s book shattered Galton’s religious beliefs and turned him towards biological research. He always had what he called “a hereditary bent of mind”, and from 1859 he proceeded to investigate, he said later, matters “clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.”

But the two topics—heredity and racial improvement—are not inseparable. Why was it that the human race needed to be improved? How was it that for Galton the “central topic” of heredity became indissolubly associated with the biological improvement of human kind, a worthy enough project in the abstract, but ethically hazardous in the extreme?

Doubtless there was more than one cause, but my argument here is that it mainly originated in the private grief of childlessness. Although his cousin Charles Darwin fathered several children, Galton’s marriage was infertile, and as each year passed without issue he developed a growing obsession with heredity, fertility, procreation, and the need for a controlled and managed caste system that would ensure the reproduction of people like himself.

African exploration

Between the idle years after university from 1844 to 1850, and the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Galton built a considerable reputation as an explorer, geographer, and travel writer. David Livingstone had reached Lake Ngami from the south and east, and in 1850 Galton proposed to approach it from the west through today’s Namibia, a route of some 550 miles from Walvis Bay. With African experience in the Sudan behind him, he had the support of the Royal Geographical Society, and took the precaution of visiting Drury Lane for theatrical supplies before he left. There he bought beads and belts for trade-goods, along with a nice little crown.

This came in handy in Ovamboland. There, King Nangoro expected Galton to stand still while he (the king) spat well-gargled water all over his guest’s face. This was to discourage any lurking evil spirits—and no doubt it did. When Galton declined to submit to this ritual, however, the king retaliated by refusing to let the expedition continue. There matters stood for some time until Nangoro hospitably offered his daughter Princess Chipanga as a temporary wife. Galton found her installed in his tent largely naked except for a covering of

red ochre and butter, and as capable of leaving a mark on anything she touched as a well-inked printer’s roller. I was dressed in my one well-preserved suit of white linen, so I had her ejected with scant ceremony.

This added insult to injury, and only when Nangoro was crowned with the fetching little item from Drury Lane was the king sufficiently appeased to let Galton go. Anyway, once his work in southern Africa was finally completed he hurried home to England where he expeditiously married the daughter of the Dean of Peterborough. In Francis Galton, The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (1974), D. W. Forrest notes thoughtfully that

His attachment to Louisa Butler does not appear to have been a romantic or sexual one. She was evidently plain, and he was more handsome as a man than she beautiful as a woman.

A photograph confirms this judgment. One wouldn’t wish to make too much of it except that for anyone hoping for children, as Galton did, the combined absence of any romantic motive or sexual attraction may have handicapped the union from the start. In his old age he wrote in his autobiography emphasizing that the most important thing was not the sentiments of bride and groom, but “the wider effect of an alliance between each of them and a new family.”

But if there were no new family? What then?

The crack-up

He married Louisa Butler on returning from Africa in 1852. Now he plunged into a busy life of travel writing, Tropical South Africa being followed by Hints for Travellers and The Art of Travel, and the first 10 years of Galton’s married life apparently went well. He played a prominent role at the Royal Geographical Society during the heated controversy over the source of the Nile, and in 1864 Galton was one of the notables on stage in a theatre in Bath at the public humiliation of John Speke by Richard Burton, when Speke—his face “full of sorrow, yearning, and perplexity”—escaped from the lecture hall and was not seen alive again.

Nothing quite so serious happened to Galton. But in 1866, scheduled to read a paper about charts for sailing ships at a meeting of the British Association, he felt ill, excused himself, arranged to have the paper read for him by another, and hurried away. It would be not until 1869 that he was once more entirely right in the head. He wrote later:

Those who have not suffered from mental breakdown can hardly realise the incapacity it causes, or, when the worst is past, the closeness of analogy between a sprained brain and a sprained joint. In both cases, after recovery seems to others to be complete, there remains for a long time an impossibility of performing certain minor actions without pain and serious mischief, mental in the one and bodily in the other.

Galton and the unconscious

Galton says nothing about the precise nature of “the incapacity”, or what “the worst” was like. Yet no-one at the time was better qualified to cast light on the pathologies of the mind. In the course of his “inquiries into human faculty” (the title of some essays gathered in book form in 1883) he had looked more deeply into the mysterious operations of the unconscious than any other Englishman alive—Carl Gustav Jung both followed and acknowledged Galton’s pioneering research. The full story can be read in Henri F. Ellenberger’s 1970 The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Much experimental research on word association was involved, Galton summarizing it as follows:

Perhaps the strongest impression left by these experiments regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.” (My emphasis, RS)

Mental phenomena such as what? One would like to know. But although by 1877 he had a mass of information drawn from the margins of his own unconscious, he drew back from printing more than a selection of the alarming things he had found. One’s private associations were too personal to have much scientific value, he said, excusing himself from publication:

It would be too absurd to print one’s own associations singly. They lay bare the foundations of a man’s thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world.

Hereditarian obsessions

Modern biographies are sometimes loaded with bedroom gore, and most of the time we want less of it. Regarding Galton we would like to have more. In 1974 D. W. Forrest pointed to a possible connection between his “obsessional characteristics”, his mounting anxiety about having children, his mental breakdown between 1866 and 1869, and his turn from geographical research to unrelentingly focus on heredity, fertility, and the need for the intellectual classes to keep breeding:

His growing interest in heredity dates from about the time when it was evident that his marriage was likely to prove infertile. There is no reason to suppose that the marriage was not consummated. It is more likely that the infertility was genetic: neither of his brothers had children and none of Louisa’s sisters.

Poor Louisa! There are numerous photographs of Galton himself but few showing his wife. One that may date from around 1870 shows a face resigned and dolorous—she must have been under extreme strain. If they were childless, thought Galton, there must be an obvious reason (and it couldn’t be him). In the next few years a stream of articles and books dealt with matters of descent and fertility in a way that implicated his wife.

Examining peerages that became extinct he satisfied himself that sterile women were the cause. Poor peers, especially those of middling circumstance raised to the peerage, married rich heiresses. What they got was money, not children, for an heiress “who is the sole issue of a marriage, would not be so fertile as a woman who has many brothers and sisters… Marriage to an heiress, while financially advantageous, brought with it the potential incubus of a barren union…”—a union like his own. In his conclusion he wrote emphatically that

Although many men of eminent ability… have not left descendants behind them, it is not because they are sterile, but because they are apt to marry sterile women…

Louisa was no heiress. But she otherwise appeared to fit the pattern, and would have to be punished. So would her late, frail, father. And so would Galton’s older and partially disabled sister Adele, who had taught him The Odyssey and single-handedly nurtured his gifted mind.

A difficult personality

Karl Pearson, Galton’s disciple, who wrote a four-volume biography published between 1914 and 1930, spoke benevolently of Galton’s character and personality: he describes him as “affectionate” and “modest”. The testimony of several family members supports this and is entirely along the same lines. Yet the evidence suggests her husband also had a cruel streak.

When a field assistant who had helped him in Africa appealed for help in return, Galton, a rich man, turned him down with a miserly rebuke. Upon his death he willed his servant of forty years the merest pittance. He pursued the American journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, of Stanley and Livingstone fame, with a vindictiveness inspired by little but the man’s desire to conceal his illegitimacy, a hidden fact Galton determined to expose. Galton’s critics underline these tendencies. Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society acknowledged that Galton was perfectly straight in all his dealings, but added that “he was essentially a doctrinaire not endowed with much sympathy. He was not adapted to lead or influence men. He could make no allowance for the failings of others and had no tact.”

But more than a lack of tact—an unmanageable fixation—was involved in the scientific writing he now produced. His wife’s father, Dean of Peterborough, had died of heart disease just before Galton married Louisa. In Hereditary Genius (1869) Galton wrote that Divines like his father-in-law were weak and unprolific men who bred weak and unprolific children. They “usually have wretched constitutions”; those of high moral character are usually unstable; and while a pious disposition was not uncommon, “there are also frequent cases of sons of pious parents who turned out badly.” In addition to this, a Voltairean piece mocking the inefficacy of prayer seemingly went out of its way to wound his wife.

Personally I have no doubt that much he said was true. There may well be a placebo effect, yet I’m reasonably confident that prayers are not empirically efficacious. But what was the point Galton was making? Wasn’t infertility, broadly speaking and within the understanding of the conventionally religious Louisa, a form of “sickness”? Didn’t he regard Louisa as suffering from it, and wasn’t it extremely likely that she was praying nightly to be healed? He was publicly ridiculing her only consolation.

The case of his older sister Adele is equally disturbing. With a spinal curvature “that frequently forced her to lie on her back on a board”, she represented congenital disability within his own family. As a child his nursery was in her room. “Delly” was the woman who first fostered his talents, who set him to memorising Homer. Her reward was an essay declaring that “Our human civilised stock is far more weakly through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animals, whether wild or domestic.” Something from the haunts of the unconscious appears to be at work here—something deeply disagreeable. “The proportion of weakly and misshapen individuals”, he went on, “is not to be estimated by those whom we meet in the streets; the worst cases are out of sight.”

Eugenics

So what should be done? People like Delly must be prevented from breeding: only the genetically perfect should be allowed to reproduce. In his 1873 essay “Hereditary Improvement” he insists that those of feeble constitution must embrace celibacy “lest they should bring beings into existence whose race is predoomed to destruction by the laws of nature.” They won’t actually be forcefully eliminated. But it is the bounden duty of those in power to “breed out feeble constitutions, and petty and ignoble instincts, and to breed in those which are vigorous and noble and social.” And just as his own sister Adele would be forced into celibacy under such a regime, there were also races that were “predoomed”—Princess Chipanga’s among them.

Whenever a low race is preserved under conditions of life that exact a high level of efficiency, it must be subjected to rigorous selection. The few best specimens of that race can alone be allowed to become parents, and not many of their descendants can be allowed to live.

Caste sentiment should be deliberately cultivated. England would be scoured for the names and addresses of gifted people who would be urged to intermarry. The intellectual aristocracy would receive special benefits; “untouchables” would receive nothing at all; and endowments would maintain a privileged Brahmin caste in healthy circumstances enabling it to multiply in comfort. Nothing more strikingly reveals Galton’s political naivete than his conclusion; and nothing more clearly exposes the workings of the perfectionist mind:

I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.

The new religion and state power

When Galton wrote, late in life, that the effect of Darwinism was “to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science”, a radical antinomian spirit was unleashed; and when he declared that eugenics “must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion,” adding that “it has indeed strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future,” a kind of displaced religious zeal was put at the service of political compulsion: allied to German nationalism, it is unsurprising that it led, step by step, to policies of racial exclusion and finally annihilation.

Like many others today he showed a curious inability to distinguish the undoubted value of Christianity’s ethical teachings from its more dubious theological claims, or to understand that by aggressively knocking the props out from under the latter he could bring the whole civilizational structure down in ruins. But then he had no philosophical insight whatever. And no sense of institutional care. At present western civilization is like an aircraft on auto-pilot, its moral course fixed in the Christian era, with nobody understanding where the navigational settings came from or how to adjust them, and fast running out of fuel. Despite his valuable scientific contributions, Galton’s blindness to the needs of both political and moral order surely contributed to this unhappy state of affairs.

(A longer version of this article was published in the March 2007 issue of Quadrant, and will also be appearing in the American journal Social Science and Modern Society.)

Bibliographic note

Karl Pearson’s four-volume The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 1914-1930, is the foundation of all subsequent biographies. Among recent works, D. W. Forrest’s 1974 Francis Galton: the Life and Work of a Victorian Genius, is the most readable. Nicholas Wright Gillham’s 2001 A life of Sir Francis Galton is the most comprehensive. Michael Bulmer’s 2003 Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry is the most suitable for scientific readers, with systematic treatments of Galton’s work on the mechanism of heredity, evolutionary problems, statistics, and biometry. It should also be mentioned that the website www.galton.org claims to have all Galton’s published works, plus Karl Pearson’s biography, in its files.

The American Interest , November-December 2006

They called him the most distinguished public intellectual of his time. Malcolm Cowley said he was “the last of the great humanists”, while Leo Marx claimed “it’s hard to think of another 20th-century American, in or out of the academy, who has written as many books regarded by academic experts as signal contributions to as many scholarly fields. Except for Edmund Wilson . . . not one comes to mind.”

Though his works were often repetitive they were good enough to win the National Book Award in 1961, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, the National Medal for Literature in 1972, the Smithsonian’s Hodgkins Gold Medal and the National Medal of the Arts in 1986. In 1975 the Queen made him an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire; he got the Prix Mondial del Duca in Paris in 1976 for lifetime contributions to letters; in Italy, after calling on Bernard Berenson, he was taken up by the Olivetti family and given a lavish reception at a handsome Roman villa, where 200 of Italy ’s most famous writers, architects and painters were gathered.

For fifty years Lewis Mumford inveighed against capitalism, militarism, technology, our ungovernable appetite for energy and our deplorable weakness for highways and cars, predicting environmental disaster if Western economic growth and America ’s thirst for petroleum were not brought under control. Middle Eastern wars and global warming seem to fulfil his darkest prophecies.

Yet who reads Mumford now? His incoherent politics might be one reason—endorsing Emerson’s radical individualism in one place and Henry Bellamy’s “basic communism” in another. But here I’m concerned with something else: the role of aesthetes in public affairs. Does American democracy have no place for cultural mandarins any more?

Concord and Walden Pond

Born in 1895 in New York , Lewis Mumford was the illegitimate issue of a brief liaison between his 30-year-old Protestant German-American mother and a young man in the Jewish household where she worked. His surname had been acquired by his mother a dozen years before during a short marriage to a man twice her age, Jack Mumford. About six months after their wedding, Elvina Conrida Mumford’s first and only husband seems to have got into some sort of “book-keeping trouble” and fled to Canada . The marriage was then annulled.

Lewis Mumford never met either the man from whom he took his second name—and whose only other legacy was a cheap edition of Dickens—or his much younger biological father, Lewis Mack. An Irish nurse provided whatever stability the household had. Mumford was kept in the dark about the whole parental story for many years, and though he vaguely understood that he was both illegitimate and half-Jewish, his mother raised a barrier against further inquiry. Only in 1942, when he was 47 years old, did she finally tell him the facts. According to his biographer, Mumford smilingly embraced her and said she shouldn’t worry, since both Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus were also illegitimate.

As a student at New York ’s Stuyvesant High School , young Lewis boyishly played around with science, and at 15 had an article accepted by Modern Electrics . But when he flunked basic algebra and found English was his best subject the matter was settled: He would be a writer—specifically a playwright and man of letters. It might be a bit much to see failing algebra as a crucial turning point, but his lifelong hostility to mathematics and quantification did start early.

Growing up on Manhattan during the years of the First World War Mumford tried on different American identities. Nearest to hand was Walt Whitman, a poet who had already sung the city of New York . But there was an exuberance about Whitman that wasn’t quite what he wanted. Thoreau was better: withdrawn, self-contained and defiant, better with trees than people, the kind of man an unprepossessing acne-scarred youth could warm to. But it was Emerson who most appealed—austere, towering, exemplary. “Emerson was a sort of living essence”, Mumford wrote in his 1926 survey of American literature, The Golden Day : “The preacher, the farmer, the scholar, the sturdy New England freeholder, yes, and the shrewd Yankee peddler or mechanic, were all encompassed by him; but what they meant in actual life had fallen away from him: he represented what they stood for in eternity.”

Emerson became Mumford’s lifelong idol: Mumford’s wife recalled having to listen to regular readings from the Journals: “I used to live with Emerson”, she said. “It was Emerson, Lewis, and me.”

Walking, talking

Emerson liked walking and so did Mumford. In 1916 he strode all over Manhattan —“East Side, West Side , north and south.” Biographer Donald L. Miller tells us how the New York neighborhoods he visited were observed, sketched, rated, while any that didn’t measure up got marked down for potential demolition. In New York ’s Jewish quarter “he encountered foul-smelling, clotted tenements he would later compare to those of Juvenal’s Rome .” All along the East Side, Mumford noted, “there was not a block after leaving Madison Avenue that was not dingy, grimy, dull and hopeless.”

Funny thing was, the inhabitants of these dull and hopeless blocks were enjoying a bright and hopeful existence. When he stopped to think about it, it was plain to Mumford that such a vital culture should be preserved, though to do this in accord with the latest principles he’d acquired at City College everything would have to be scrubbed and relocated first. A kind of Jewish Garden City formed in his mind—a Greek agora with a temple at one end, “an adjacent refreshment place, and many protected stalls” nearby, with “plenty of elbow room for gesticulation.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with a Jewish Garden City—quite the opposite. But did Mumford ask these lively gesticulating people if they wanted one? Did he talk to them at all? Like a Victorian traveller in Africa, the peripatetic visitor from the Upper West Side found the natives useful for stimulating moral reflections, pictorial fancies, and expansive civilizing plans, but conversation wasn’t part of the deal.

The contrast between his zeal for fixing New York City and his ignorance of its citizens exposed a persisting mental tendency. It was as noticeable in 1916, applied to life on the Lower East Side, as it was in the case of the International Garden City he proposed for the United Nations thirty years later, when he advised that 3,000 acres of Manhattan be forcefully requisitioned, screened by belts of grass and trees from the corruptions of commerce, and made into a leafy home for the benign world government to come.

Town planning as aesthetics

Lewis Mumford’s first book was his 1922 The Story of Utopias, a journalistic survey ranging from Plato to William Morris. Sympathetic judges say it showed commendable detachment and neither endorsed nor dismissed the utopian project as a whole. Yet the message Mumford distilled from Plato’s Republic went further than this. Here was a utopia that “pictured a community living a sane, continent, athletic, clear-eyed life; a community that would be always, so to say, within bounds”—and would be implicitly autarkic, too. It was a model he thought should be widely followed.

Mumford knew by the age of twenty that he really belonged in another time and place, writing that 6th-century B.C. Athens “would have been more to my liking than New York in the twentieth century after Christ.” And if ancient Greece would suit him better, why shouldn’t it suit the rest of New York ? Why not Athens on Hudson ? Parnassus on Palisades ?

To remake and reconstitute the garment district as a Garden City would be a good start—but in town planning one thing leads to another. New York was only a small part of the Hudson Valley . If the city were to be set to rights, there had to be a unified plan from the Adirondacks to the sea. In an essay on the “regional vision” John L. Thomas tells us that soon after discussing Plato’s polis, Mumford made the following comparison:

It is a mountainous region, this Greece , and within a short distance from mountain top to sea there was compressed as many different kinds of agricultural life as one could single out in going down the Hudson Valley from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Harbor . As the basis of his ideal city, whether Plato knew it or not, he had an ‘ideal’ section of land in his mind—what the geographer calls the ‘valley section.’

* * *

“The geographer” was a Scot named Patrick Geddes whose writings Mumford discovered at City College . Mumford swallowed whole Geddes’ ideas on regional and city planning. What exactly Geddes meant by a “valley section” need not concern us, except to note that it implied having a place for everything and putting everything in its place over hundreds of square miles and millions of acres.

Only a humorless Scot—or perhaps a drunken Russian—could have come up such a dirigiste fantasy, the political and economic ramifications of which hardly bear serious reflection. But each of these men—Mumford, Geddes and Mumford’s close friend, the Appalachian-trailing conservationist Benton MacKaye—had overriding moral and aesthetic concerns. If you got the right colors and shapes in the right places, according to a socialist scale that set firm bounds and limits, then politics (and funding) would look after themselves. What was needed was a high lookout from which a city could be seen with every building and district displayed. After that a planner could decide who and what went where.

Geddes got his view of Edinburgh from the Outlook Tower , a still-visited pseudo-medieval structure built on a high point near Edinburgh Castle , with a camera obscura at the top. For those unacquainted with this device, it projects a 360-degree synoptic image of one’s surroundings onto a table in a darkened room. Suddenly a confusion of human dwellings and workplaces forms a picture to delight the artist’s eye: not homes, just patches of color; not factories, just rectangular forms to be more suitably disposed.

MacKaye’s equivalent of the Outlook Tower in New England was a 542-foot rocky outcrop called Hunting Hill just west of Boston . From here he could see the tributaries of the Nashua River running through country familiar to Thoreau, while to the north “lay the Whitman River , along its banks the railroad bringing lumber and staples east to Boston and carrying manufactures back to the Berkshires and beyond.” Describing his own education, MacKaye said: “I graduated from Longley’s barnyard in 1893 and from Harvard in 1900”—Melvin Longley being the dairyman next door.

Mumford’s own version of the Outlook Tower was on the Palisades on the west side of the Hudson . One of the sketches collected in the Lewis Mumford Papers in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania bears the title in his own hand, “ Manhattan from top of Palisades .” Made during a walking tour in the area, the city in the sketch consists of an irregular horizon of forms and makes up only about 10 percent of the total composition, the rest consisting of river, trees and grass. There are, of course, no people to be seen.

Romantic transfigurations: the rural scene

Mumford followed The Story of Utopias in 1924 with a historical study of American architecture, Sticks and Stones . Many titles of swelling portentousness would follow: Technics and Civilization , The Culture of Cities , The Condition of Man and The Conduct of Life , to name but four. Along with Oswald Spengler’s 1926 The Decline of the West , they prophesied the technological nemesis of Western Man. All of them turgidly elaborated a handful of simple ideas, the first of which was that small is beautiful, and big must therefore justify itself.

The second held that rural arcadia is man’s natural environment: although cities bring forth man’s highest powers, metropolis is often inimical to the human spirit. The third idea was that whatever is “organic” is always and everywhere superior to “the machine”—the latter being a metaphor for all technology since time immemorial. The conclusions he drew were that science is out of control; growth must be stopped; unregulated development must be banned; the reckless consumption of finite resources must end; the ideal state is a stationary state; and planning must be imposed as widely as possible.

To justify this critique Mumford looked back into history. If utopias were to serve as a measure and a guide, they should be combined with what he called a “usable past.” But how could one tell the usable past from the unusable? Despite Mumford’s seemingly encyclopaedic reading and his deep immersion in Thoreau, when he rhapsodised about medievalism or about 17th-century New England towns and farms, what practical understanding of rural life did he actually have?

True, for 36 years Mumford divided his time between Manhattan and the slow-moving upstate hamlet of Leedsville, where he occupied what is called a farmhouse. This was not a working farm where a working farmer and his family made a living off the land. It was a congenial rural retreat for an urban intellectual—the sort of house that comes onto the market when working farmers go broke or die. True, too, his biographer Miller tells us,

As a young boy, from the time he was eight years old to when he was thirteen, he would spend part of the summer on a farm near Bethel , Vermont . . . . It was a world such as Henry David Thoreau had known, rustic but not wilderness, with farms and fields and streams and woods . . . a world Mumford would reference in his book on the art and life of Thoreau’s time, The Golden Day . There young Lewis learnt how to hunt woodchucks and squirrels, and “gained his first glimpse of a simpler, more deeply satisfying life than he found in the world of his New York relatives.

Perhaps so. But did he actually see any work being done? “When he wasn’t reading, hunting, fishing, or walking around the farm”, writes Miller, “Lewis would spend hours lying in a hammock, suspended between two maples in front of the house, listening to the rustling of the leaves above him.” There was also, as it happened, a 300-book library in the house. What I myself remember of life on the farm (and I spent rather more of my boyhood in the country than Mumford did) is the screaming of pigs being slaughtered and a farmhand falling off a haystack and breaking his neck. What Mumford remembered was lying in a hammock cradling Ruskin’s Modern Painters in his arms.

Romantic transfigurations: medievalism

The contrast between dream and reality is just as striking in Mumford’s enthusiasm for the medieval world. This enthusiasm makes an early appearance in his survey of American architecture, Sticks and Stones , where the reader learns that the noblest American residential building was the “medieval” tradition found in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the 17th century. By no means coincidentally, communalism is seen as inseparable from the aesthetic effect: “The charm of an old New England house”—a charm reflected also in the uniform styles of farmhouse, mill and meeting house—“was the outcome of a common spirit, nourished by men who had divided the land fairly and who shared adversity and good fortune together.” He added: “Would it be an exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete and intelligent partnership between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old New England village?”

Apparently not—the only thing to compare with the old New England village was the even older medieval European town where, according to The Culture of Cities , the entire social order was an enormous collective source of well-being. One didn’t have to sit at a desk or bully customers or sordidly wheel and deal: “Economic life was devoted to the glorification of God . . . and to the construction of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools.” And the key to well-being was this: “Business and religion were in an organic relationship.” So there was no conflict between values and work. Organic relationships are best—and we are told there was also a healthy “organic” relationship between religion and the life of the mind. This flourished in the cloister, where medieval life was (somehow) constantly in blissful retreat: “One withdrew at night: one withdrew on Sundays and on fast days: so long as the medieval complex was intact, a constant stream of disillusioned worldly men turned from the market place and the battlefield to seek the quiet contemplative round of the monastery.”

Organic relations are good, but the overriding value is really aesthetic—in other words, how everything looks . In Sticks and Stones Mumford praised the John Ward House in Salem for purely external visual qualities. Every step one takes nearer the house “alters the relation of the planes formed by the gable ends . . . so the building seems in motion, as well as the spectator; and this quality delights the eye quite as much as formal decoration.” Writing in The Culture of Cities about the medieval German town of Dinkelsbühl , he finds the same thing:

Blocked vista and irregular, upward pointing silhouette: gabled roof, tower, and spire worked in aesthetic harmony. The tracery of ironwork in the standard and shield of the foreground was a fine feature of civic art, especially notable in South Germany .

Again:

Rothenburg-an-der-Tauber: another typical profile, irregular but harmonious, following the contour of the land, with the more significant buildings thrusting against the sky. Organic planning and building, not for show but for defense, civic association, the expression of common values.

Were the residents of ancient Dinkelsbühl happy in their blocked vista with its irregular, upward-pointing silhouette? Were the citizens of Rothenburg-an-der-Tauber content with their buildings “thrusting against the sky?” Never mind blocked vistas—what about blocked drains? Throughout his life Mumford was extraordinarily reluctant to see the obvious connection between the continual expansion of science and technology that he feared and routinely denounced, and the practical interests and needs that drove this expansion all the way from the privations of the 11 th century to the amenities we enjoy today.

* * *

Despite occasional throwaway lines about the Black Death—“which sometimes killed off half the population of a town, but caused only a temporary recession”—Mumford’s feudal Europe was a world without lice, rats, plague, lepers, violence and insecurity, without crippling superstitions and hideous punishments, without crop failures and starvation, without arrogant abbots, brutal lords and brutish serfs. There are no packs of savage dogs (hard to deal with before firearms, and a serious problem around St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at one time), and no fiery conflagrations that might suddenly destroy 600 houses—as happened in London in 1091—because, alas, however pleasingly irregular their gables and silhouettes, they were mere structures of mud and straw.

As book followed book, Mumford’s wishful thinking about the medieval era got increasingly out of control, and the imagined glories of monastic life became an infatuation. By the age of 75 he seemed to have forgotten that at least nine-tenths of humanity—all normal families of men, women and children—were excluded from this celibate world: In one of his last works, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development , the single-sex monastic community is enthusiastically hailed as “an early model of the ‘welfare state’.”

The UN on Manhattan

Mumford’s comments on architecture were widely read and highly regarded. As recently as 1998 the Princeton Architectural Press published Sidewalk Critic , a collection of his New Yorker pieces from the 1930s, in which the anthologist describes him as “the most important architectural critic produced by the United States in the twentieth century.” Turning its pages we find him writing approvingly in 1932 of Frank Lloyd Wright, saying his “organic architecture” was “a matter of relating air, sunlight, space, gardens, outlook, social intercourse, economic activity, in such a fashion as to form a concrete whole.” In 1936 he likes the cork tiles on the kitchen floor of a Corbusier house, though he finds the bathroom window disappointingly small.

It has to be said that Mumford’s New Yorker columns contain much plain common sense, yet his architectural criticism overall left him spread-eagled between principles not easily reconciled—the “organic”; the modern view that “form should follow function”; something he finds in William Morris called “living form”; and along with all of this, the “usable past.” The result is that it’s never clear quite what he likes or why. He damns most historical styles as entirely unusable. Commenting on Corbusier in 1935 he condemns some barrel-vaulted ceilings as “stylistic atavisms” that remind him oddly of “Maine carriage houses of the eighteen-forties”, while in Sticks and Stones any attempt to revive colonial tradition is severely chastised: “What we call a revival is really a second burial.”

Yet elsewhere he finds revivalism legitimate. Because Mumford heartily approves of the English socialist and artist William Morris, The Culture of Cities introduces him as a man “who realized that society itself was the main source of architectural form, and that only in terms of living functions could living form be created.” In Morris’ “Red House” of 1852 “an attempt was made to discard ornamental tags and go back to essentials: honest materials, well-wrought: plain brick walls: a roof of heavy slates: every detail as straightforward and sensible as in a 17th-century English farmhouse.” So for Americans to revive 18th-century colonial architecture is wrong and foolish, but for a British socialist to revive a 17th-century English farmhouse is right and wise.

Archaism was hardly an issue when he came to consider the United Nations buildings—though form and function were. Mumford had been holding forth on this subject for years, in Sticks and Stones , for example, invoking Aristotle: “In the Aristotelian sense, every purpose contains an inherent form; and it is only natural that a factory or lunchroom or grain elevator, intelligently conceived, should become a structure quite different” from rectangular buildings traditionally conceived.

* * *

The doctrine that “form follows function” obviously applies to surfboards; why it should be expected to distinguish the premises of the butcher, the baker or the candlestick-maker is less clear. What architectural form would be appropriate for each? The plain fact is that for most functions, most of the time, 99 percent of humanity needs only four walls and a roof. For more abstract human purposes the doctrine that form follows function is a shaky guide. If, as Mumford assumed, the function of the United Nations complex in New York was to symbolize the “physical renewal of the whole city and the spiritual renewal of the whole world”, at the same time serving as a home for “the preservation of peace and a symbol of enduring harmony”, what form could it possibly take? An amiably sunlit stratospheric cloud?

His own proposals were grandiose, and in hindsight look as if he was already losing touch with reality. To be fair, other proposals were also very ambitious. The responsible UN committee was considering sites as large as forty square miles with the possibility of a “complete community” of 50,000 to be located in either Westchester or Fairfield counties. (Objections from local residents quickly put a stop to that.) But Mumford’s urban proposals were scarcely more modest. “This is no time for small plans or grudging half-measures”, he announced to the Royal Institute of British Architects in July 1946. He argued that an appropriate headquarters should occupy “between 1,000 and 3,000 acres within an existing world metropolis [ultimately New York] created by a large-scale process of slum clearance and replacement”; that the UN “should be a legally independent municipality”; and that it should comprise “a balanced urban community . . . capable of growing up to the point where it would hold a population between twenty-five and fifty thousand people in permanent residence.”

The gross area to be appropriated for this autonomous enclave comprised roughly all of Manhattan from east to west between about 34th Street and Canal. Mumford took pains to underline its essential anti-business ethos: “The city must be cut to the measure of a different kind of man from the powerful, domineering, semi-neurotic types who have left their marks so unmistakably on the great capitals of the past.”

* * *

The eventual site and building, designed by Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer , were of course a bitter disappointment to Mumford. He had argued that in a properly planned arrangement the new “world city” should be set off from “the visual clutter of New York”, and that it should be an inspiring symbol of world government and international cooperation, separated by a cordon sanitaire of trees and grass from midtown and Wall Street, standing in the sharpest possible contrast to the sordid money-grubbing world of capitalist enterprise overall. Lawrence Vale’s sardonic remark put it best: “How it is that a new mini city which turns its collective back upon New York may be construed as an example of world cooperation, Mumford did not say.”

Ethereal hot-air balloons

As he aged, the etherealizing trajectory of Mumford’s writing, moving always from the particular to the abstract, the visible to the invisible, exhortation to cosmic prophecy, grew more pronounced. This can be seen at the level of sentences as well as books. In The City in History he wrote “We must conceive of the city not primarily as a place of business or government but as an essential organ for expressing and actualizing a new personality.” Note the logical structure: Starting from an asserted but unargued imperative, he moves from the bricks and mortar of buildings, through the mystification of “expression” and “actualization”, to the goal of a new collective personality—the idealized psyche of reformed and reconstituted urban man.

Most of his books do the same. The first half of The Culture of Cities is a mine of miscellaneous information. Whether writing about Versailles , St. Petersburg , Bath , Carlsbad or Saratoga Springs , he usually has something interesting to say. But after the inevitable romanticizing of the medieval town, things slip ever more out of focus, and his claims become ever more extravagant. In the last chapter we learn that architecture is symbolic; that it has a peculiar part to play in the modern world—and we are also told rather alarmingly that it is not only “the essential commanding art” but that “the very notion of planning owes more to this art than to any other.”

Much of the rest, however, consists of banality. Between Mumford’s prefaces and his endings, vast regions of time and space are surveyed; a thousand names are dropped; and the mighty Zeppelin comes in to its mooring at last. But his closing peroration always resembles the expiring wheeze of a punctured hot-air balloon. Thus the conclusion to The Condition of Man (1944):

The inner crisis of our civilization must be resolved if the outer crisis is to be effectively met. Our first duty is to revamp our ideas and values and to reorganize the human personality around its highest and most central needs. . . . There is no wealth, as Ruskin said, but life; and there is no consummation of life except in the perpetual growth and renewal of the human person.

Utopia and paranoia

Charlatan or seer? Sage or simpleton? Hayek thought him pretty simple-minded, holding him up as an example of the “synoptic delusion.” Mumford had written in 1937 that we still have to develop “the art of simultaneous thinking: the ability to deal with a multitude of related phenomena at the same time, and of composing, in a single picture, both the qualitative and the quantitative attributes of these phenomena.” This, wrote Hayek in Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973), showed “a touching naïveté.” The synoptic delusion is “the fiction that all the relevant economic facts are known to some one mind”—and it enabled the enthusiasts for a deliberately planned society, of which Mumford was one of the more conspicuous, to “disregard all the facts he does not know.” The notion that if enough men practiced “the art of simultaneous thinking”, the problem of economic knowledge could be solved, Hayek thought downright hilarious.

But the direction in which Mumford was moving after World War II was no laughing matter. Utopian thinking suffers from the inevitable abyss between ends and means—in his case between the dream of perfect “organic relationships” and the crooked timber of humanity. Added to this was an economic delusion: For years following the Great Depression, Mumford anticipated a new collapse. As late as 1971 a bibliographic note of his accompanying Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation tells us to expect “the end of the market economy” within a generation.

A man who believed that could believe anything. And if one’s idées fixes include a still wider range of unattainable goals—about universal peace and world government and organic wholeness in human affairs—one is virtually bound to end up cross. Not only will you grow angry, your writing will sound increasingly paranoid as year after year, in book after book, grimly repeated warnings about “the machine” taking over the world, are, to all appearances, totally ignored. How can this be? Is there a conspiracy uniting business, industry, all political parties, the academy, the media, advertising interests, Hollywood, everything from Playboy to the Wall Street Journal —the lot?

* * *

Discussing these matters in The Paranoid Style in American Politics Richard Hofstadter noted that the paranoiac “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.” Hofstadter added:

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of a working politician.

Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. The demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.

Much of Hofstadter’s insight fits the mind revealed in Mumford’s two last major books, Technics and Human Development (1967) and The Pentagon of Power (1970), both of them appearing under the joint title of The Myth of the Machine . In the first place, Mumford’s attitudes certainly had little to do with those of a working politician. A “holistic” thinker, he felt deeply that the whole world needed to be changed, but that it was not his business to consider how this might actually be done.

There was something very Germanic about his Spenglerian contempt for parliamentary process, and an interesting aside on this question is supplied by his biographer. Miller says that in his youth Mumford was influenced by the “aristocratic ideal” of his German uncle, James Schleicher, who held that public life should be the preserve “of a right-thinking and knowing minority.” We are told that both Uncle James and his wife hoped their nephew would become a writer, though not one seeking “the approbation of the masses and majorities.” Mumford was faithful to this Nietzschean pair in his own way: Although he found it convenient to speak on behalf of “the people”, he never consulted them, sought their approval, or showed the least interest in their views.

The paranoid style makes much play with invisible processes that have been going on secretly for years and are far more serious than anyone could have imagined. It also points to deliberately concealed motives that the author—lucky for us—has successfully exposed. Mumford steadily insinuates that the “cult” of technology was one such hidden process. Even in the long-ago days of the Sumerians, oracles were revealing “the might of an invisible machine” (Technics and Human Development). By the end of the medieval period, he claims, “a new religion had in fact secretly come into existence: so secretly that its most devout worshippers still do not recognize that it is in fact a religion” (The Pentagon of Power).

Technics and Human Development also includes an illustration of an 18th-century automaton. This enchanting doll-like figure, with velvet jacket, lace cuffs, and knee-length satin trousers, looks exactly like Mozart at a writing desk. But Mumford is not deceived: “Behind this playful automaton was a deeper motive, only now visible: the desire to create life by purely mechanical means—or at least to place every living function under mechanical direction and control.”

Bureaucracy and the megamachine

Mumford’s theory of the “megamachine” combines two ideas. The first concerns social structure. He regards state organization in pharaonic times as a “power system” organized along mechanically hierarchical lines, with each human unit, from slaves to overseers to divine kings, having a specific place and function. The second idea notes that colossal state engineering projects were born in pharaonic times too. Images of pyramidal structures dominate his closing polemics against modernity: The political pyramid, crowned by the divine god-king, and the architectural pyramid, serving as his tomb, become fused in a single metaphor for all that is least desirable and most woefully persistent in our collective life—the “megamachine.”

Thus it is that the political structure of the bureaucratic state and monumental, prestige-generating governmental projects—whether pyramids of stone or voyages to Mars—are historically coeval. In sociological terms, this twin birth was the moral equivalent of the Fall of Man. From the days of the pharaohs all the way to the now-defunct Soviet system on the one hand and American society on the other, it has been downhill all the way.

To see the evolution of large-scale social organization in this light may not be wholly absurd. We speak without embarrassment of “military machines”, although we know perfectly well that this is a metaphoric extension from the world of the metallic, the determined and the unconscious to the organic world of conscious human agency. The blind spot in Mumford’s use of the metaphor is that he invariably combines a remorseless critique of large-scale “power systems” with the enthusiastic conviction that everything will be for the best if only it is planned.

Totalitarian bureaucracy, however, with its deformation of means and ends and its highly disagreeable consequences, was the proven outcome of his view that societies can be deliberately designed, of his indifference to individual liberty, and of his insistence on taking decision-making out of the hands of the people and on doing things for them. He never faced up to this truth in his writings, and there is little evidence he ever understood it, even though serious thinkers had been discussing it from the very moment Mumford first put pen to paper.

Even as he was writing The Story of Utopias , Ludwig von Mises published an essay entitled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth ” that, as Raymond Cubeddu put it, “set the scene for the scientific discussion of the problem of socialization. . . . Just when the hopes of socialism seemed to be about to come true Mises voiced the thoughts uppermost in the minds of many who lacked courage to speak out.” On the one hand, Mises argued that “socialism could not work or keep its promises . . . because under such a system economic calculations in terms of value were rendered impossible.” On the other, he asserted that the centralized organization of the economy inevitably “becomes transformed into a totalitarian regime.”

Mumford seems to have known nothing of this. Nor did he know, apparently, about the arguments regarding scientific research and freedom of inquiry set out by Michael Polanyi in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor did he ever understand what Hayek was on about. To be sure, The Road to Serfdom (1944) appeared in the bibliography of Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power , as did Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), but they were conceitedly taken to illustrate Mumford’s own views on “scientism”, while their economic and political implications were either misunderstood or ignored.

* * *

Yearnings for the Arcadian world of Walden Pond have grown ever stronger over the past fifty years, and romantic utopianism is alive and well. So why has Mumford’s message had so little effect? Two things stand out. The first is the powerful influence of Oswald Spengler—a German authoritarian hard to combine with his early commitment to Emerson and Thoreau. Biographer Donald Miller describes Mumford as what we might call an “optimistic Spengler”, but trying to Americanise the Great Doomsayer with a positive utopian spin is downright impossible. All you get are moralistic demands to reverse direction, frantic admonition, increasingly unreadable jeremiads directed at a citizenry that declines to listen.

This combined with a fundamentally aesthetic view of the world. Aesthetics justified power and promised control. It vanquished ambiguities and the messiness of political debate. It joined the repose of a cloistered life with the insistence that others be ruled from the cloister. Architecture was the queen of the arts—the “commanding art” he said—one that required order and control, and that inevitably meant pushing people around until things looked the way they should. It is not entirely coincidental that a well-known Austrian was a frustrated fine-arts student who developed an abiding passion for architecture as a form of politico-mythic demonstration, or that in their youthful discontent both he and Mumford walked incessantly (the one in Linz, the other in New York), redesigning cities as they went.

“If there is anything that can be called a specific German ideology, it consists in playing off romanticism against the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages against the modern world, culture against civilization, and Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft”, writes Wolf Lepenies in his recent The Seduction of Culture in German History . Under Spengler’s influence Lewis Mumford bought this whole package. A few pages later Lepenies quotes Thomas Mann to the effect that the democratic spirit “was totally alien to the Germans, who were morally, but not politically, inclined.”

Again the description fits. It is curious that a man who was so quintessentially American in many ways was so Germanic in others. Not speeches and moralistic harangues, just plain conversation with ordinary citizens was needed if he was to get his message across. Nitty gritty political talk. But as an exhibitionistic cultural mandarin he found this too hard. Writing 500-page books was easier.

Arnaud Bey was a French geographer in the employ of the Egyptian government. He said to us: “Why do you content yourself like other tourists to go no farther than Wady Halfa? Why not travel overland by camel from this very place, Korosko, to Khartoum? The Sheikh of the intervening Bishari Desert is in the village at this very moment. I know him well, and can easily arrange that he shall take you to Berber at moderate cost. You will then find your way by boat to Khartoum.”

We were amazed at the proposition, for the very names of those places were unknown to us. He drew a map on a small piece of paper for us to keep, on which he marked bits of useful information. At length, after hours of eating and drinking and talking, we fell wholly into his plan. The Sheikh was sent for, and I shall never forget his entrance.

The cabin reeked with the smells of a recent carouse, when the door opened and there stood the tall Sheikh, marked with sand on his forehead that indicated recent prostration in prayer. The pure moonlight flooded the Bacchanalian cabin, and the clear cool desert air poured in. I felt swinish in the presence of his Moslem purity and imposing mien. For all that, we soon came to terms, and were to start the day after the morrow.

A more complete change can hardly be imagined than that from a luxurious cabin to nightly open-air bivouacs on the cold sand. The track we followed was presumably the same that has been followed since the most ancient days; it bore marks of its continued use during recent times in the whitened bones with which it was strewed. Sometimes we came across a camel whose skin had not yet disappeared, but formed a hollow shell including marrowless and porous bones. These desiccated remains were of most unexpected lightness. My arm is far from strong, but I easily lifted with one hand and held aloft the quarter of a camel in this dried-up state.

Many strangers joined our slowly moving caravan. One group consisted of a husband on foot, with his wife and child mounted on a donkey, like the often-painted subject of the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Another personage was a middle-aged and rather mild-looking individual, who possessed little more than a sword, and was on his way to Abyssinia, where some fighting was expected with neighbouring savage tribes.

He proposed to take part in it and to make his profit from the slaves he captured. He was an old hand at this, and his businesslike account of the process was explicit. It was a moot question with him on each occasion when a man had been captured, whether to castrate him at once or not. If so, the man was apt to die, and would certainly require costly attention for a long time; on the other hand, if he recovered, his market value was greatly increased.

After four days’ travel from morning to evening, we came to a half-way place where a brackish but drinkable water was to be had, which replaced the redolent stuff that our water-skins afforded, and so on for four more days, when we reached the Nile at Abu Hamed, having cut across its huge bend.

Oh! The delights to such tourists as we were, of a temporary exemption from the discomforts of the desert, and of unlimited rations of water. We travelled farther by the side of the Nile for another three days or so, till Berber was reached, when we paid our dues and said good-bye to the camels. The governor of Berber was very civil; the sherbet he gave us, though made from limes and not from lemons, tasted heavenly. He gave me a monkey, and I bought another, and these two were my constant companions on camel-back and everywhere else for many months, until I returned to England.

Another boat had here to be hired to take us up to Khartoum. We got one in which the part below decks was much too low to stand in, and it swarmed with cockroaches, but it sufficed. We set sail, and in due time passed Shendy, the scene of the recent massacre of Abbas Pasha, a younger son of Mehemet Ali. At Shendy Abbas Pasha and his soldiers had committed all sorts of outrages, and finally he demanded the daughter of the local tax-gatherer in a form of marriage that was equivalent to temporary concubinage, which was a grave insult to her father, the most important man in the place.

The tax-gatherer was unable to resist; so he resigned himself, but gave orders secretly. While Abbas Pasha with his suite were at dinner and stupid with what they had drunk, the Pasha noticed that great bundles of stalks of the native corn were being brought in and stacked about the tent. He asked and was told that it was forage and litter for his Highness’s horses. When enough of this straw had been brought in, a signal was given to fire it, and every man who attempted to break through was massacred, including of course Abbas himself.

Finally we reached Khartoum, then a group of huts with a wagon-roofed hall for the audiences of the Pasha. We heard of an extraordinary figure, believed to be English, who had arrived some weeks previously. We went to call on him, knocked at the door, were told to enter, and came into the presence of a white man nearly naked, as agile as a panther, with head shorn except for the Moslem tuft, reeking with butter, and with a leopard skin thrown over his shoulder.

He was recognised at once by my companions as an undergraduate friend, Mansfield Parkyns. He had got into a College scrape, and, leaving Cambridge prematurely, found his way to Abyssinia, where during years of adventure he met and made friends with the aforementioned tax-gatherer of Shendy. Of the many travellers whom I have known I should place Mansfield Parkyns (1823-1894) as perhaps the most gifted with natural advantages for that career. He easily held his own under difficulties, won hearts by his sympathy, and could touch any amount of pitch without being himself defiled. He was consequently an admirable guide in that sink of iniquity, Khartoum.

The saying was that when a man was such a reprobate that he could not live in Europe, he went to Constantinople; if too bad to be tolerated in Constantinople, he went to Cairo, and thenceforward under similar compulsion to Khartoum. Half a dozen or so of these trebly refined villains resided there as slave-dealers; they were pallid, haggard, fever-stricken, profane, and obscene. Mansfield Parkyns complacently tolerated and mastered them all.

The abominations of their habitual conversation exceeded in a far-away degree any other I have ever listened to, but it was clever. When one of them was out of the room, the others freely related his adventures to us, in which some anecdote like this was frequent:

So he said, ‘Let us be friends; come drink a cup of coffee and smoke a pipe’—then he put poison into the coffee.

There is a gourd whose dried seeds are said to be poisonous and not very unlike coffee in taste, which is particularly convenient in such cases. With all their villainy there was something of interest in their talk, but I had soon quite enough of it. Still, the experience was acceptable, for one wants to know the very worst of everything as well as the best.

He was quietly dressed, “a soft-spoken man with a pleasant, kindly voice, agreeable, friendly, human, and considerate.” Mozart was important, and helped keep his pessimism at bay. But however friendly and soft-spoken he was on a sunny day with a song in his heart, we’re also told Oswald Spengler had a stormy countenance in which “irritability and self-mastery seem to be struggling for the upper hand.” His troubled gaze, wrote H. Stuart Hughes, reflected “the uneasy combination of harshness and sensitivity that has so often marked the German intellectual.”

Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Raymond Aron, were all influenced by The Decline of the West. After reading it in the 1920s Arnold Toynbee wondered if his own vast project was worth doing, or had this German schoolmaster (an “obscure nobody of prodigious erudition and romantic imagination” in the words of Neil McInnes) already answered the questions he wanted to ask? At Harvard, Henry Kissinger wrote a thick undergraduate thesis about Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant, and in his student days Northrop Frye is said to have kept a copy of The Decline beside his pillow.

But it was always a controversial work, and though each of the names above knew its importance—especially Frye—they might have been reluctant to say more. Spengler was too right wing, too outré, too dangerous. For that reason many writers owe this author invisible debts they have thoughtfully concealed. Lewis Mumford, for example, adopted much of Spengler’s critique of “the Machine” as his own—while the case of Jean Raspail, whose 1973 novel Le Camp des Saints describes the violent takeover of France by a wave of migrant “colored peoples”, is just as intriguing.

Civilizations have their seasons, Oswald Spengler taught—Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—and it is the winter of Faustian Man that is upon us: the conclusion of a supremely individualistic epoch in which space and time have been annihilated, machines have become ever more ingenious, no limits or taboos on thought or conduct are allowed to exist, moral nihilism flourishes, primitivism thrives, and a millenarian religiosity is preparing to take wing:

With the nineteenth century begins the winter of the West. Its thousand years of cultural vitality are over; there is no true artistic creativity left. The preceding centuries were marked by an instinctive sense of form and style—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque—but the new age is inchoate and confused.

It is the rise of the middle classes that explains this cultural incoherence. They resent the aristocracy with its refined manners and sure taste; they pursue untrammelled freedom as an end in itself; their ignorant artistic forays produce meaningless fluctuations of style—the warfare of Classicism and Romanticism leads to endless barren “experiments.”

Political life is equally meaningless. Parliamentarism provides a talking shop that obscures the basic political reality—the triumph of money. Before the power of financial speculation everything gives way: constitutionalism, democracy, even socialism. Politicians are the agents of financial interests.

Yet their power is not eternal. Blood, ethnic pride, cultural chauvinism, territorial instincts and natural aggressiveness, will soon assert themselves against the world of money, science, and technological prowess. An age of violent conflict is opening, and with the First World War of 1914-1918 it is obvious an era of perpetual warfare has begun.

New Caesars with armies of fanatical devotees struggle for mastery. Meanwhile the mass of mankind looks on with growing bewilderment, apathy, or resignation, prepared to accept the fate that determined soldiers, terrorist movements, fearful police and militarised states impose.

But long before this comes about, political ideologies and parties will have lost their meaning. Life in a globalised world falls to a level of uniformity where local and national differences virtually cease to exist. The only places that matter will be a handful of gigantic “world cities”—New York, Berlin, Tokyo or Beijing. These will be what Hellenistic Alexandria and Imperial Rome were to the ancient world—vast assemblages of people all living on top of one another, a mob following anyone who keeps them amused.

The lives of the masses will be an empty rehearsal of dull tasks and brutal diversions—arenas and gladiators, gross spectacles of sensuality and sadism watched by drunken roaring crowds. Music will be similarly depraved. Intellectual activity becomes mechanized, practical, cold, and merely clever. The educated lose their feeling for language, and the same basic speech—a coarse argot filled with obscenity—is spoken by intellectuals and workers alike.

Then when every trace of cultural form and style has disappeared, a new primitivism begins to pervade all human activity. Even the feeling for scientific truth—which may for some time outlast the dissolution of culture—grows vague and uncertain. Superstitions thrive; men believe anything; their appetite for the mysterious and supernatural expands and flourishes. It becomes hard to tell fiction from fact or fact from fiction.

In vulgar credulity the common people try to escape the universal boredom of work in a mechanized and bureaucratised world. Then out of the desolation of city life arises a “second religiosity”, a fusion of popular cults and dim memories of forgotten piety. In this way the uncomprehending masses seek to assuage their misery.

(With apologies to H. Stuart Hughes, whose condensation has here been freely updated.)

Spengler and the Nazis

The Decline of the West first appeared between 1918 (Volume One) and 1922 (Volume Two). It had a considerable impact in Germany, and because some of its ideas appealed to the nascent Nazi Party, Hitler and others looked favourably on Spengler at first. In parts of The Decline he evoked wild scenes of blood, destruction, and racial war that were just what they had in mind. But soon his other publications and lectures revealed a more complicated vision, while Spengler’s view of Hitler when it became known—“a heroic tenor, not a hero… A dreamer, a numbskull, a man without ideas, without strength of purpose, in a word: stupid”—did not help.

When they came to power in 1933 the Nazis condemned his latest work, The Hour of Decision, forbade mention of his name in the press, and banned the book. This was a little surprising since at one point he had enthusiastically hung a swastika outside his house. Assuming they hadn’t yet heard his comments on Hitler, one would have thought his latest work, filled with blood and iron and written with scorn and fury, contained more than enough to win Nazi approval. Rationalism is denounced as

…the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the wisdom of ancient peasant stock… Rationalism is at bottom nothing but criticism, and the critic is the reverse of a creator: he dissects and he reassembles; conception and birth are alien to him. Accordingly his work is artificial and lifeless, and when brought into contact with real life, it kills.

Much of this is recognisable anti-rationalist Romantic critique. But Spengler finds Romanticism no better:

Romanticism is not a sign of powerful instinct, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect. They are all infantile, these Romantics; men who remain children too long (or for ever), without the strength to criticise themselves, but with perpetual inhibitions arising from the obscure awareness of their own personal weakness; who are impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society, which is to them too masculine, too healthy, too sober.

Then in the last lines on the last page of the last chapter of The Hour of Decision there’s a call for worldwide fascist revolution: “Caesar’s legions are returning to consciousness… He whose sword compels victory here will be lord of the world. The dice are there ready for this stupendous game. Who dares to throw them?”

And these same everlasting “Youths” are with us again today, immature, destitute of the slightest experience or even real desire for experience, but writing and talking away about politics, fired by uniforms and badges, and clinging fantastically to some theory or other.

Mass rallies—gatherings of “the million-footed beast” to be seen at Nuremburg—were ridiculed, and his comments on the Germans themselves were less than flattering. “Germans in particular are great at suspecting, criticizing, and voiding creative action. They have none of that historical experience and force of tradition which are congenital with English life. Germany is a nation of poets and thinkers—in the process of becoming a nation of babblers and persecutors.”

Along with his brief but carefully worded statement opposing Nazi anti-Semitism, all of this convinced the Party that he was just another slippery intellectual—a type they heartily despised. What had never been a true love affair, just a tentative flirtation based on hope and misunderstanding, came to a sudden end. Spengler’s health had never been good: aged fifty-six, he died of a heart attack three years later in May 1936.

Lewis Mumford

Thoreau and the rural twilight of Walden Pond were what Mumford most admired in his youth—vacations at a farm in Upper New York State being fondly remembered for many years. In Lewis Mumford: a Life, his biographer Donald L. Miller describes how these visits gave him a somewhat misleading impression of country life, relaxing in a hammock, listening to the wind in the leaves, and occasionally glancing through the pages of John Ruskin. It was all very green and organic, entirely delightful, and far removed from his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

By the mid-1920s he had already written widely about American architecture and literature, making much of the contrast between virtuous small-town existence with its intimate human settings, and the grim inhumanity of megalopolis—the world of gigantic buildings and machinery. When he discovered identical themes in The Decline of the West, and saw their momentous implications, the whole thing hit Mumford like a ton of bricks.

Reviewing Volume One (translated in 1926) for The New Republic, he found it a “wild combination of Nietzschean mysticism and arrogant Junkerism.” But it was also, he added, an “audacious, profound… exciting and magnificent” work, “one of the most capable attempts to order the annals of history since Auguste Comte.” When Volume Two appeared in 1928, with its highly suggestive final chapter, the American realised that Spengler had given him not only a historical theory and a plan, but a suitable framework for a lifetime’s polemical work.

The last chapter of The Decline bore the title “the Machine” (a usage Mumford adopted and employed increasingly). It argued that from their first appearance mechanical devices were seen as near to sorcery—as essentially the work of the Devil and downright evil. Spengler sees technology as a form of misdirected thought, a perversion more and more hostile to organic life and its needs, until men are finally enslaved by their own creation:

Life makes use of thought as an ‘open sesame’, and at the peak of many a Civilization, in its great cities, there arrives finally the moment when technical critique becomes tired of being life’s servant and makes itself tyrant. The Western Culture is even now experiencing an orgy of this unbridled thought, and on a tragic scale. (Vol 2, Chapter XIV, 500)

Many civilizations in the past had been curious about Nature. Many cultures had developed impressive technology—triremes and catapults for example. But “very different is the Faustian technics” of the West, wrote Spengler, which right from the beginning “thrusts itself upon Nature with the firm resolve to be its master.” The Greek investigator contemplated possibilities; the Arabian dabbled in alchemy and magic; the destiny of Western Man was to subject Nature to his will:

The Faustian inventor and discoverer is a unique type. The primitive force of his will, the brilliance of his visions, the steely energy of his practical ponderings, must appear queer and incomprehensible to anyone at the standpoint of another Culture, but for us they are in the blood. Our whole Culture has a discoverer’s soul. To dis-cover that which is not seen, to draw it into the light-world of the inner eye so as to master it—that was its stubborn passion from the first days on. All its great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps, to emerge at last with the necessity of a Destiny. (501)

It is a destiny with catastrophic effects on Nature. Obsessed with Spengler’s politics, and his early interest in the Nazis, most commentators other than John Farrenkopf (Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics, 2001) have entirely ignored the striking fact that he also pioneered environmental doomsaying—the mighty tread of machinery is making the whole earth shake:

What now develops, in the space of hardly a century, is a drama of such greatness that the men of a future Culture, with other soul and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that ‘in those days’ nature herself was tottering. Modern politics strides over cities and peoples; even modern economics, deeply as they bite into the destinies of the plant and animal worlds, merely touch the fringe of life and efface themselves. But modern technology will leave traces of its heyday behind it when all else is lost and forgotten. For this Faustian passion has altered the Face of the Earth. (503)

Then in 1931 Spengler published Man and Technics. Here he announced that “Every work of man is artificial, unnatural… This is the beginning of man’s tragedy—for Nature is the stronger of the two.” Social evolution progressed disastrously from the organic to the inorganic, and the ruin of all past civilizations is attributed to the fact that “the fight against Nature is hopeless and yet—it will be fought out to the end.” Once again his American student Mumford was ready, notebook in hand. Mumford’s 1934 Technics and Civilization echoed Spengler’s title, while the portentous clash of Man and Nature, and technology and human nature, received a central place in his writing from that time on.

But the most astonishing thing is this. Mumford’s academic admirers, whose essays appear in Lewis Mumford, Public Intellectual, and who include many well-known American names, carefully avoid discussing the Spengler connection. It is therefore greatly to the credit of Mumford’s biographer, Donald L. Miller, that he makes explicit and drags out of the intellectual closet what the majority of academic scholars—who are mainly on the Left and embarrassed by this unseemly fact—have concealed. In Lewis Mumford, a Life, Miller writes that Mumford found in Spengler the “mighty theme” he was looking for—the history of mankind as a form of moral prophecy.

‘To produce a mighty volume’, Mumford had written of Herman Melville, ‘you must choose a mighty theme’. His own theme would be nothing less than the making of the modern world. Mumford had in mind a book in the manner of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, the prophecy of doom that greatly influenced a generation of war-weary European and American writers…

It was Spengler’s style of history, his brilliantly original approach to the material, that excited Mumford’s interest. Abjuring every canon of so-called objectivity, Spengler placed himself at the center of his history, observing, sympathizing, criticizing, comparing. Spengler probably came as close as anyone Mumford had yet encountered to writing the kind of history that he set out to write in his several books on America.

Jean Raspail

If you Google Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints you soon find yourself in strange company. Suddenly there are pages with names like White Nation—occasionally using Gothic lettering just to let you know which nation and Fuhrer they have in mind.

And it has to be said the Nazi association makes sense. There are passages in Raspail of a vileness about “colored” races and other cultures that surpass anything I have read in quite some time. Whole passages seem like an exhalation from some abscess in the psyche, a feverish zone of sexual neurosis and xenophobic loathing. The book jacket describes the author as a man who has travelled widely—Peru, Japan, the Congo. This should be reassuring: yet the intermittent racial hysteria in The Camp of the Saints makes you wonder whether, despite meeting so many other peoples, he truly understands humankind.

And what is striking is that the racial element in his story is unnecessary. It is a moral tale. The Camp of the Saints is really about the defencelessness of the West now that pity is admired as our noblest sentiment, philanthropy trumps all other virtues, and millions of “immigrants” are beating on a million doors.

The moral question Raspail asks is simple. If vast numbers of starving and ragged international paupers arrive on your doorstep, encouraged to believe that as notional refugees they have a right to move into your part of the world… What does Christian charity oblige you to do? If a large part of the population of Bangladesh sails from Calcutta to the Côte d’Azur in a vast armada believing they will be welcomed, fed, looked after, and treated as French citizens, you can hardly ask the navy to tow their ships out to sea and sink them, or ask the army to machine-gun men and women as they struggle ashore…

In Raspail’s novel the army is indeed called out and two divisions are posted on the southern coast. But the troops are useless. They melt away, not even firing their rubber bullets, since most of them sympathise with the “refugees”. The soldiers understand that their modern role is to identify with Third World victims and their problems—not to defend their own country, and certainly not to shoot the poor on behalf of the rich.

In any case all France agrees that violence against these tattered ruins of humanity is inconceivable. So instead they are welcomed with Christian compassion—only to savagely bite the hand that feeds. Freed at last after months of hideous privation at sea, the uninvited guests/immigrants/refugees/usurpers no sooner set foot in the West than they begin to burn, loot, rape, rob, and murder their hosts.

The title of the final chapter of The Hour of Decision is “The Colored World Revolution”, and Spengler’s vision of the takeover of the western world by “colored peoples” (amongst whom he includes Russians) is almost as fevered as Raspail’s. He begins by describing the fall of Rome to the Barbarians. The frontiers of the Roman Empire could have been defended, he insists, and for a long time they were. But the suicide of a nation occurs when its morale is broken—when it embraces “the late pacifism of a tired Civilization”.

Today Europe is too tired to resist (or such is Spengler’s drift); too pacifistic to even know what appropriate resistance is. Displaying a perverted and boundless charity, adopted almost as much appease as to help, western intelligentsias meekly atone for colonial sins with multiculturalist preaching and philanthropic conscience money, hoping to buy peace and security this way.

This death is inevitable, wrote Spengler, wherever spiritual disarmament has taken place under the influence of “urban pacifism with its desire for peace at any price.” Perhaps we should reserve judgement regarding these fatalistic predictions—or anyway their local application—until we see what happens to France in the next decade. Watch this space. And others. It’s interesting that a few years ago Jean Raspail also expressed his fears for France’s future in terms of its “dying soul”:

For the West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. There is almost no soul left.

Reading Oswald Spengler: a Critical Estimate, by H. Stuart Hughes. Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics, by John Farrenkopf. (This is a comprehensive 2001 study by a German-speaking scholar who draws on a wide range of Spengler’s untranslated writings.) Oswald Spengler Reconsidered, by Neil McInnes, in The National Interest, Summer 1997. The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. The last is an essay by Northrop Frye in Daedalus, Vol 103, Winter 1974.

Epilogue

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said much of The Decline of the West was “pretentious gibberish.” Franz Borkenau wrote that its mathematical speculations were “entirely untenable”, while Spengler’s philosophical notion that each civilization had its own unique conception of space was “hardly worth serious discussion.”

Northrop Frye wrote that swarms of critics have attacked the book’s details and “constantly and utterly refuted them ever since it appeared.” But he went on to add that “what Spengler produced is a vision of history which is very close to being a work of literature… If the Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of the world’s great Romantic poems.” The passages below, a synopsis of the civilizational cycle, suggest what Frye may have had in mind.

Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface.

As widely as these differ in creative power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, Bantus are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of this order.

But over this surface, too, the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality (dem urseelenhaften Zustande) of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualised the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul…

The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization… This—the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality that awaits every living Culture—is the purport of all the historic “declines,” amongst them the decline of the West.

Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop Bernward. The spring wind blows over it.

“In the words of the old-German architecture,” says Goethe, “one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing…”

The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of its being the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning and fears—witness the ornament of Romanesque-Gothic church porches of Saxony and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the Dipylon vases. But there is now the full consciousness of ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidae, in the age of Justinian, in that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and self-confidence…

At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization, the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave.

The spell of a “second religiousness” comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun—those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1, 106–108

The story of Dr Patel

Dr Jayant M. Patel—or ‘Doctor Death’ as he was christened by the Australian anaesthetist who watched his patients die—was first discovered mangling patients fully twenty years ago in New York. Given employment in an Australian hospital in 2003, where he continued on his destructive path, he was until recently the subject of an official governmental inquiry (The Bundaberg Hospital Commission of Inquiry, hereafter “the Inquiry”). This investigation involved a possible total of 87 deaths, and in an interim report of June 10, 2005, the Commissioner recommended that Patel be charged with murder. Prosecution may be difficult, however, for with the active connivance of Queensland health administrators he fled back to America last April, and his present whereabouts are unknown.

* * *

Patel was born in 1950 in Jamnagar, Gujarat, India, receiving his qualifications from the M. P. Shah Medical College in his hometown in 1973. While I haven’t visited Jamnagar, I know the region and adjacent towns, and although a qualitative ranking of Indian medical schools is unavailable, I think we may say with some confidence that in 1973 the M. P. Shah Medical College did not rank very high. In 1977 Patel moved to the United States, training as a surgeon in Rochester and Buffalo between 1978 to 1984, meanwhile working as a resident trainee surgeon at a local hospital.

In 1984 New York health officials cited him for failing to properly examine patients before surgery (we find exactly the same thing later in Australia), fined him US$5,000 for negligence, and placed him on three years’ clinical probation. Just as important is the fact that the American report also charged Patel with “moral unfitness to practice” medicine under New York law. According to an article in The Oregonian by Don Colburn and Susan Goldsmith (22.04.05) it accused him of falsifying operating theatre reports, “abandoning or neglecting a patient in need of immediate professional care”, and “harassing, abusing or intimidating patients either physically or verbally”.

In 1989 he moved to Oregon and joined the Kaiser Permanente Hospital as a general surgeon in Portland. How was work at this hospital found so easily? Colburn and Goldsmith show that in 1988, four years after Patel had been disciplined in New York for “negligence, incompetence, and unprofessional conduct”, a prominent Rochester surgeon named J. Raymond Hinshaw (now deceased) wrote the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners that Doctor Death showed “technical and professional brilliance”, and when asked for further detail responded with a strong defence of Patel’s application for a post as surgeon: the proceedings against Patel, he claimed, consisted of the “harassment of a brilliant young surgeon”, a man he would recommend “without reservation.”

Over in Oregon, according to Kathleen Haley, Executive Director of the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners, his glowing New York references carried more weight than his dismissal from the residency program in 1981, or his $5000 fine; and they successfully nullified the New York disciplinary action for negligence, incompetence, and unprofessional conduct. Another spokeswoman for the Oregon BME remembered uncomfortably that although the references were superb, she was aware of reports of deaths from Patel’s operations, “likely resulting from his less than quality surgical skills”.

These “less than quality surgical skills” would soon be displayed again. According to the useful Wikipedia entry it wasn’t long before Patel’s perverse enthusiasm for cutting and stitching human flesh was being noted at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Portland too: “Medical staff alleged that he would often turn up, even on his days off, and perform surgery on patients that were not even his responsibility. In some cases this surgery was not even required, and caused serious injuries or death to the patient.”

And yet, amazingly, the state of Oregon allowed him to mutilate, disable and kill a succession of patients over a period of nearly ten years. Eventually however even the Kaiser Permanente Hospital appears to have had enough. In 1998 it reviewed 79 surgical cases by Patel and found the evidence so disturbing that the hospital banned him from operating for pancreatic and liver surgery, required him to seek a second opinion on all complicated cases, and alerted the Oregon Medical Board.

When the Oregon Medical Board conducted its own review of the Kaiser Permanente cases it looked closely at four of them. Three had died, while a fourth lost gastrointestinal function after Patel performed a colostomy backward. The victim (this is the only appropriate word) had gone into surgery to have his colon fixed and ended up with his urethra severed. “They had to rearrange my testicles to take skin off to fix the urethra,” he said in a television interview in June 2005, “and it left me impotent.” Repairing the damage done by Patel took an additional four operations. “It appears in retrospect that he was a sociopath,” the victim added, suggesting that “when he went to Australia he became a psychopath.”

In the same Australian television program Oregon Medical Association associate executive director Jim Kronenburg said he was shocked by the havoc Dr Patel wrought, citing the case of a clamp that was left in the stomach of one patient. “Many of these things are not an issue of competence or judgment – they are just wrong,” he said. “They are things that no physician in my long experience would even contemplate doing. I mean they are just crazy.” Such was the Oregon record of Hinshaw’s “brilliant” applicant for a surgeon’s post in Portland, a man he recommended “without reservation”.

Time was now running out, and when the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners further restricted his permit to practice in September 2000, and with New York State forcing him to surrender his license in April 2001, it was time to jump ship.

The Australian option

But where could Doctor Death go? Where could a man like this find both employment and a salary of the kind he now expected and required, when his record was known in the USA, and when anyone who studied that record would suspect he was not merely incompetent but quite possibly mentally unbalanced—a man with a barely controllable urge to cut and slash, who shouldn’t be allowed within five miles of an operating theater?

For such a person there were I suppose two broad possibilities—South America and Australia. Both are common refuges for rogues and runaways. But in South America malefactors like Patel could easily get a bullet no questions asked: for any number of reasons Australia was a better option. Rumor had it that its citizens were so easy-going that even a 20-year record of medical mayhem might not be noticed, and a conman could easily pull the wool over their eyes. At the same time the Australian media’s eagerness to appease whoever claimed to be the victim of racial prejudice ensured that there should always be sympathisers to conceal his delinquencies and prevent them coming to light.

Anyway, Australia is where Jayant Patel turned up next. He was made a Senior Medical Officer at Bundaberg Base Hospital in April 2003, and later became Director of Surgery. It must not be thought that his application wasn’t vetted—it was. But Patel confidently lied his way through the relevant questions. Asked among other things if his license to practice had ever been subject to suspension or cancellation, he answered no, smoothly signing a declaration to the effect that “the above statements are true and correct.” At the same time the employment agency in Australia that steered Patel toward Bundaberg Hospital received almost a dozen persuasive referees’ letters from America, all dated 2001.

* * *

Before long the mad mangler was at it again. The Bundaberg Base Hospital is not a major facility. On a ranking of 1 to 3 it has only a Level 1 unit for post-operative intensive care. But when Toni Hoffman, a senior nurse who manages the Intensive Care Unit came back from a holiday in June, 2003, she found that “Dr Patel was wanting to do very complex and large-scale surgeries which really didn’t fit within our scope of practice.” He seemed particularly keen to relieve a patient of his oesophagus if he still had one; and when a man arrived in a desperate condition (with virtually inoperable cancer according to the much bigger hospital in Brisbane where he had been first examined, a place with a top-rated ICU designated Level 3) Doctor Death saw his chance.

Bullying his associates into silence, falsifying the theatre records as he went along (the patient was ‘stable’ he wrote, when in fact the patient was brain dead), he cut out the oesophagus of a man who then died six days later. Note that this is still mid-2003, at the start of his Australian career, and that most of the 1,202 patients he treated before fleeing the country were yet to come. But already concern was being expressed by staff at Bundaberg, and already attempts were being made to warn higher levels of the Queensland health bureaucracy. On the one hand a shocked Ms Hoffman in the Bundaberg ICU tried to alert administrators about the situation; on the other, Dr Cook at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital wrote a lengthy critique pointing out how inappropriate it was to perform such operations at Bundaberg. Both warnings were filed and forgotten.

Patel’s character and behavior at this time are well conveyed in the following excerpt from the transcript of Ms Toni Hoffman, (Bundaberg Hospital Commission of Inquiry, Transcript for May 23 2005.)

His whole persona and his whole bravado about things didn’t match up. One day he would say he had trained in the ‘States and had 15 years as a trauma surgeon. The next day he would say he had 25 years as a cardiothoracic surgeon. Every day there was a different qualification… and he was very loud, and very old-fashioned in his views about the drugs and treatments we use nowadays in intensive care.

He was about 20 years behind. Like, we’ve gone full circle in the types of drugs and things that we do in intensive care, and he was way back there, but he would consistently refer to Australia as the “Third World”, and say that by coming over here he was doing us a favor, that he didn’t need the money, and how backward we were in caring for patients… So a whole picture was evolving about Dr Patel.

Right from the start Miss Hoffman raised the alarm about Patel’s criminal carelessness—nicked aortas causing patients to bleed to death, punctured bowels causing fatal infections, oesophegectomies with wounds that never healed, apparently simple injuries like crushed toes that developed into gangrene and after that to amputated legs, along with a notorious indifference to hand-washing hygiene that led nurses to call him Dr E. Coli (“doctors don’t have germs” he said to reassure them). As the Manager of the Intensive Care Unit these cases usually became Hoffman’s responsibility—despite overburdened facilities that could hardly cope—and there they often died.

Right from the start she tried to get the Director of Medical Services, Dr Darren Keating, and the District Manager of the Bundaberg Health Service, Mr Peter Leck, to listen to her concerns. Dr Keating retorted that Patel was “a very experienced surgeon” and implied that they were lucky to have him on staff. Mr Leck repeatedly turned a deaf ear to all appeals. When a new Director of Nursing, Ms Linda Mulligan, was appointed at the hospital, Hoffman tried to enlist her help. But it was soon obvious that Ms Mulligan had no intention of involving herself in the wards. Withdrawing into the comfort of her administrative quarters, she emerged only when it suited her—though she did give Hoffman a book to help the manager of the Intensive Care Unit resolve what she believed was an unjustified personal hostility to Patel. If that failed, she said, then perhaps Hoffman should seek psychological counselling.

Meanwhile the toll of the mutilated and the dead continued to rise as a number of irrational, counter-productive practices were instituted by Bundaberg’s Director of Surgery. He wouldn’t allow any patient out of his busy unwashed hands, however severe the case. In a very Indian way, he seemed to feel that it would diminish his status to admit there was anything he couldn’t do, or anything he didn’t know. If he were to make such an admission he would in a sense “lose caste”. Despite the known limitations of Bundaberg’s facilities, therefore, and despite the basic level of its Intensive Care Unit, he refused to allow patients to be transferred to hospitals in Brisbane better equipped and staffed for handling complicated procedures.

If Hoffman stubbornly pressed to have a patient transferred, Patel responded by threatening to resign, and shouting that his operations were bringing $500,000 per year in revenue to the hospital. As in New York twenty years before, he couldn’t leave anyone’s patient alone, sometimes whisking them into the surgery for unwarranted “operations” without informing the doctor to whom they belonged. After this had happened a few times, with fatal results, the Director of Medicine at the hospital (who has a separate jurisdiction to the Director of Surgery) privately ordered the nursing staff never to allow Patel near his patients, and to watch them night and day; while the nurses themselves began hiding patients from Patel in order to keep them alive.

Surely the theatre records showed what was happening? But these were most unreliable. Habits of deception first seen in New York were continued at Bundaberg. Reports were systematically altered, their language strategically euphemised. The rate of post-operative infection had gone up noticeably after Patel began work at Bundaberg, and wounds that should have healed did not, the sutures failing and the two sides falling apart. This is called “dehiscence”; but Patel forbade the use of the term in reports. Dehiscence, he explained, was something else entirely. Discharge summary forms also had their language edited so that key issues were never picked up. As for  “adverse events” forms, staff working close to Patel were too frightened to fill them out. Some flatly refused to; some lost the forms; some said “what’s the point?”

The truth of the matter is that after a year Patel had established what amounted to a reign of terror. The younger surgical staff, men anxiously completing their last years at medical school, were fearful of rocking the boat in any way. Others, some of them also immigrant practitioners, were fearful of being sent home if they caused trouble.

A marginal psychopath?

It has been suggested earlier that there is a psychopathically sadistic streak in Dr Jayant Patel. A number of pointers lead in that direction: the body-snatching syndrome—a perverse and obsessive pursuit of human material for his knife, including patients belonging to his colleagues that his colleagues were desperately trying to hide; the invention of bogus clinical reasons to operate—reasons that competent observers denied existed; and besides this an attitude of callous indifference to his patients after surgery, regardless of their distress and whether or not the operation had succeeded or failed.

The opinion of the US victim of a back-to-front colostomy that left him impotent has already been mentioned in this regard (Patel he said was “a sociopath in Oregon, who became a psychopath in Australia”). In Australia he undertook an operation without anaesthetic. From the evidence presented by Dr Miach, the Director of Medicine at Bundaberg Hospital, who stumbled accidentally upon the scene, a pericardectomy was being performed although the patient “wasn’t properly anaesthetised, he wasn’t anaesthetised at all, and the patient was quite distraught… he was agitated, he was moving, he was sort of moaning, he was screaming. It was quite a procedure.” (Bundaberg Hospital Commission of Inquiry, Transcript for May 26, 2005, page 97/293)

This is bad enough. But the treatment and death of a Mr Bramich places the matter, in my view, beyond doubt. The victim in this case came into the Bundaberg Hospital after being severely crushed by a caravan. For a number of reasons it was appropriate for him to be transferred to the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane—including the fact that the Brisbane hospital had cardiopulmonary by-pass facilities—and a bed was quickly arranged at that institution.

But as soon as he saw the patient the transfer was blocked by Patel, who promptly took Mr Bramich away from another doctor. According to Doctor Death the injured man’s condition was not serious; and anyway, as he boasted to the distressed family, “I’ve been a cardiothoracic surgeon for 15 to 20 years, and if he needs anything I can do it here.” Indeed, the patient’s problems were so minor, according to Patel, that he thought nothing of interrupting his treatment of Bramich to slip out, cross to the operating theatre, and do a colonoscopy on someone else at the same time—in the course of which he managed to perforate the second patient’s bowel! [Imagine the unwashed hands rushing from the bungled colonoscopy back to deal with the blood now accumulating in Bramich’s chest…]

All senior medical opinion was that Bramich should go to Brisbane as soon as possible. This was vetoed by Patel, who then proceeded (after leaving an anaesthetist to deal with the patient whose bowel he had casually perforated minutes before) to extract blood from around the heart, a procedure called pericardiocentesis. There was no indication that this procedure was required—but here Toni Hoffman’s evidence to the Commission of Inquiry is best presented in her own words. Note that Hoffman was not herself present throughout this episode, which went on into the evening. Her account is that reported to her next day by a nurse who was present, and who was trying to care for Bramich:

We just didn’t know who to go to who would listen to us (Hoffman speaking) and the nurse—one of the primary nurses who was looking after him—describes Dr Patel’s using a stabbing motion…

Dr Patel decided he was going to do a pericardiocentesis, which is to try to get some fluid out from around the heart. He’d done an ultrasound first, and this showed there was no fluid around the heart. There was no indication to do this.

But Dr Patel decided he was going to do it anyhow, and the nurse who was caring for the patient described Dr Patel using a stabbing motion into the man’s heart around fifty times with a hard needle, not the normal type of thing that you use for pericardiocentesis.

Then the patient died. His death was witnessed by his 9-year-old daughter. When the patient’s wife gave way to grief, we are told that Patel screamed at her not to cry. For the nursing staff this episode was past bearing—next morning both Hoffman and the nurse who had been obliged to witness these events resolved to act:

She was so disturbed about this—we all were obviously—we were all of us so disturbed about this man’s care that we all wrote letters, and we called the union. We called our union because we didn’t know what to do and the union started to give us advice about what we could do, and also how to formulate our statements, and they also had their legal people read our statements before we handed them in.

Someone called a “quality control coordinator” provided the nurses with a “sentinel event form” to fill out, and this they duly did, but the Director of Medical Services, Dr Keating, downgraded it to not-so-urgent status. Next Hoffman tried to get the Director of Nursing, Ms Mulligan, to act, but unfortunately Ms Mulligan couldn’t see her for two weeks; and when she did grant her an audience, Ms Mulligan recommended that Nurse Hoffman read a 1970s book about personal conflicts and perhaps seek counselling.

Climax and disclosure

This was in July 2004. The stubborn bureaucratic refusal of Keating, Leck, and Mulligan to do anything whatever about the month-by-month mayhem in their midst—to even recognize there was a problem—continued to the end of the year; but by this time the efforts of Toni Hoffman and other concerned nurses to have Patel investigated were at last beginning to show results. One or two people in Brisbane were listening. It looked as if word about Doctor Death was finally getting out, and that the administrators at the Bundaberg Hospital would have to do something at last.

And indeed they did do something—something as scandalous as their previous inertia. Patel was now officially under investigation. Yet on December 24, as a kind of appreciative Christmas gift, Dr Keating wrote and offered to extend his contract for a further four years. (See Appendix A.) This was the last straw: Hoffman now decided to go outside the health system despite the dangers of doing so. She approached a member of the Queensland state parliament, and there the matter was first raised publicly in question time by the Queensland Shadow Minister of Health on March 22, 2005.

Yet this only strengthened the determination of Dr Keating and Mr Leck to defend and protect the interests of their malignant employee. In a fury, Leck summoned the hospital’s nursing staff and denounced the still unnamed whistle-blower who had taken information to parliament, threatening her with both dismissal and a term in a Queensland gaol. Didn’t she understand the terrible harm she had done? Why, he said, the open and critical public discussion of Patel’s activities that was taking place would “divide the doctors and nurses; stop patients coming to the hospital; and erode community confidence” in the hospital’s affairs. (From Exhibit 4, Ms Hoffman’s statement to the inquiry.)

The subsequent furore forced Patel’s resignation and brought an immediate outpouring of grief and indignation from the families of the dead and injured, along with expressions of political disgust for the Labor government. But even this had no effect on Bundaberg Hospital’s leading bureaucrats. Dr Keating wrote an appreciative letter thanking Patel for “his sustained commitment, ongoing enthusiasm and strong work ethic.” On behalf of the Bundaberg District Health Council the Chairman wrote “to offer our support and to advise that we are deeply saddened and appalled by the disclosure in Parliament.” And acting with indecent haste Mr Leck approved a $3500 international airfare to get Patel safely out of Australia.

How did it happen?

Patel’s disastrous career appears to have been made possible by three powerful forces: (1) The pressures felt by junior doctors fearful of creating difficulties for themselves by trying to oust a superior in the medical system, and perhaps also the existence of a kind of misguided professional loyalty. (2) The bureaucratic procedures and more especially the bureaucratic mentality of state hospital administrators. (3) A disinclination to expose an Indian-born surgeon, however menacing he was to public health, lest this bring cries of “racism” from the usual suspects.

* * *

At Bundaberg Hospital, over a period of two years, there must have been at least a dozen doctors aware of what was taking place. But some were only visitors, some were immigrant doctors who did not want to jeopardise their status, and some were young men with families fearful of the economic consequences of trying to get rid of a powerful and aggressive superior. All of them hoped to solve a problem they mainly saw as endangering their personal careers by moving on. One senior and permanent member of the medical staff, the Director of Medicine Dr Miach, having tried unsuccessfully to alert Keating to the situation, simply “told everybody not to go near him”. He developed “work around” solutions excluding Patel from certain procedures and keeping him out of the loop when cases had to be saved by transfer to another hospital. What is disturbing however is that though it was impossible to deal with Patel internally, within the Bundaberg Hospital system, nobody other than Ms Hoffman was prepared to go public on the issue.

An outside doctor, however, had already raised serious questions back in 2003, at the same time as Ms Hoffman herself, though no more attention seems to have been given to his report than to hers. Dr Peter D. Cook of the Mater Hospital in Brisbane was just as shocked to learn of the fatal oesophagectomy performed by Patel in June 2003 as Hoffman was to see it, and wrote in July to senior administrators in Brisbane questioning (a) Whether the surgeon was adequately trained, and suggesting that the advice of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons be sought. (b) Whether the surgeon had adequate recent experience performing the procedure. (c) Whether Bundaberg Hospital had sufficient backup facilities to allow support of such complex patients. “Clearly”, he wrote, “with a Level 1 Intensive Care Unit this is not the case.” In a letter of July 2003, he reported speaking directly to Dr Keating about the matter. (Bundaberg Hospital Commission of Inquiry, Exhibit 218)

But far more sinister than the inhibitions of the doctors at the Bundaberg Hospital was the immoveable and impenetrable bureaucratic regime run by Dr Keating, Mr Leck, and Ms Mulligan. The mental and organizational world in which such men and women live has been the subject of critical discussion from the birth of modern sociology, and Max Weber’s devastating description of the emerging class of German state bureaucrats—their conceit, arrogance, and presumption—is as relevant today as it was 100 years ago:

Rulers without honor, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.

It is virtually impossible to describe the ingrained evasiveness, the compulsive buck-passing, the deliberately obfuscatory language, the strategic amnesia, and the mechanical citing of rules to excuse the inexcusable, displayed by the Bundaberg Hospital administrative staff who successfully obstructed Ms Hoffman for two and a half years, and brought death or ruin to hundreds of patients. “Administrators without heart” indeed. How this group of people thought and acted is a frightening example of widespread trends in many government departments today, and is something that has to be seen first-hand to be believed. For that reason I have added Appendices Appendix A, Appendix B, and Appendix C, transcript materials from the Inquiry recording the evidence of Dr Keating, Mr Leck, and Ms Mulligan.

Racism and anti-racism

The evolution of moral terminology is an interesting subject. We have now reached a stage where the charge of “racism” is the most serious charge that can be brought against anyone in public life. Nothing carries more weight, and though legally this is still something of a grey area, socially, professionally, and politically, the consequences of such an accusation are grave indeed. (On the day of writing, a stupid, ignorant, and intoxicated remark by the leader of the Liberal Party in New South Wales has brought his downfall, and possibly the end of his political career.)

This being so, one can see why many of those who knew about Patel’s activities would have been justifiably fearful of speaking up lest their motives be impugned and their careers ruined. The risk of being denounced for racial prejudice would certainly appear to have been an important secondary or unspoken motive for silence and inaction. It is worth noting, for example, that when Toni Hoffman complained about Patel’s out of date methods and long-superseded types of medication, Dr Keating at once told her to remember that “Patel was from another country”. The implication being that it is the duty of all right thinking people to treat other cultural standards with indulgence: evidently, for Dr Keating, that took care of any questions about Patel’s acquaintance with current practice or his competence compared with properly qualified surgeons in the field. Nevertheless one wonders: are all “other countries” equal where medical qualifications are concerned? Should we include Fiji? Would Dr Keating have happily gone under Dr Patel’s knife himself? (See the case of Dr Naidoo et al below.)

In any case, cultural questions are unavoidably bound up with the use of immigrant doctors trained overseas. As an example one might consider the case of another doctor from the subcontinent who became Patel’s loyal adjutant. This young man, who we shall call Dr K, never doubted the skill and knowledge of his master—however dismal the outcomes and however tragic the deaths. Though closely interrogated at the Commission of Inquiry he defended Patel steadily throughout. It was not his role, he implied, either to question or to judge what the great man said. Instead, apparently, it was to respect, follow, admire, and dutifully do what he was told. The picture that emerged from Dr K’s evidence showed not only a disturbing pattern of behavior—but a very Indian pattern too: it is based on the relation of a young disciple to his guru, and not on any concept of moral responsibility, Hippocratic or other (See Transcript at the Inquiry website for July 28, 2005.)

Whether this points to a wider problem involving doctors from the subcontinent is hard to say. It does suggest, however, that small close-knit partnerships in which they work together may develop an ethos sharply at odds with the medical expectations of the modern world. As the Inquiry progressed, a damning report came in from another part of Queensland. Formally commissioned by the Director-General of Queensland Health, and written by two members of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons, it described another highly unsatisfactory situation where orthopaedic surgery by unqualified personnel was taking place. In some respects what was happening bore a close resemblance to the regime of Dr Patel. (Bundaberg Hospital Commission of Inquiry, Exhibit 38).

At Hervey Bay and Maryborough three men provide orthopaedic services together. Their leader is Dr Morgan Naidoo. “Although Dr Naidoo felt that he was somewhat of an expert in the field of total joint arthroplasty,” write joint authors Dr. Peter Giblin and Dr John North in their report to the Director-General, “serious concern was expressed from a number of quarters about Dr Naidoo’s ability to undertake this procedure.”

Dr Naidoo is assisted at Hervey Bay by two other men, Dr Dinesh Sharma and Dr Damodaran Krishna. The report found that Dr Sharma’s “clinical and surgical skills were poor” and recommended that he “not undertake surgical procedures without having a specialist orthopaedic surgeon in the operating theatre at all times.” As regards Dr Krishna, “staff interviews elicited uniformly poor reports” of his performance, and he was described as “lacking basic surgical and clinical skills.”

In each case we find “surgeons” who are over-confident, under-qualified, and seemingly indifferent to the welfare of their patients. Both Dr Sharma and Dr Krishna are graduates of the Fiji School of Medicine and have only superficial supplementary training. Each of them appears to have been recruited by Dr Naidoo, and “although requested, a copy of Dr Krishna’s referees could not be located.” It was reported in the press that because of Dr Naidoo’s frequent absences at his luxury East Brisbane home, his two Fiji-trained offsiders, neither of whom are qualified to perform orthopaedic surgery, “were left to do as they pleased”. That indeed seems to have been the case. All in all, the medical program at Hervey Bay described by Doctors Giblin and North looks seriously bad for your health.

* * *

Appendix A – Dr Darren Keating

Commissioner (Mr Antony J. H. Morris, QC): What is your full name Dr Keating? — Darren William Keating.

And your occupation? — I’m the Director of Services at the Bundaberg Health Service District.

Are you presently acting in that capacity? — Presently I’m on leave with pay.

Right. What is your professional address, is it the Bundaberg Hospital? — It’s care of the Bundaberg Hospital.

Yes. What are your qualifications, Doctor? — I’ve got a medical degree, so I’ve got a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery. I have a Masters in Health Service Management and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators.

In October last year did you receive from Dr Miach a document he described as an audit of the insertion of catheters by Dr Patel? _ Yes, I did.

And did that disclose a 100% failure or complication rate? — It showed, I think, five or six cases of Dr Patel’s, yes, of peritoneal dialysis catheters had not worked.

In your experience, was that a matter of concern? — It was of concern, Commissioner, but there was also no comparators relatively – in time or with other surgeons.

Well, did you ask Dr Miach? — When he handed me the piece of paper, he handed me the piece of paper. I didn’t ask him after that, no.

Did you take any other steps to ascertain whether it was a matter of serious concern? — No, I didn’t.

Was that the only concern brought to your attention by Dr Miach? — As regards?

As regards the clinical competence of Dr Patel? — At the moment, that’s… is what I can recollect, Commissioner.

At about the same time did it come to your attention that Ms Hoffman had been to see the District Manager and raised with him a series of concerns in relation to the conduct of Dr Patel? — Yes, I was made aware of that.

Was a decision made to conduct an investigation into Dr Patel as a result of those matters? — Yes, yes, that’s correct.

Was that decision made at an executive meeting involving yourself, the Director of Nursing and the District Manager? — I recollect that I’d received an email copy of the complaint from Tony Hoffman and that, thereafter, some further hard copies were required by Mr Leck than an investigation – that this needed to be further investigated.

Did you at any time suggest that it was a matter that didn’t warrant investigation because it was simply a personality conflict? — I – I – I – agreed that it needed to – it needed investigation but I was concerned that there was – several aspects to this complaint, including the personality conflict.

* * *

(asterisks mark elision)

Commissioner: On the 24^th of December, Christmas Eve of last year, did you offer Dr Patel a further four years of employment? — A – a letter was given to Dr Patel with that information.

And that letter was signed by you? — It was signed by me.

So it’s right to say that on the 24^th of December, Christmas Eve, you offered him a further four years of employent? — That is correct.

Why would you be doing that when the man was under investigation? — At that – at that stage there was a number of allegations. I was, at that stage, unaware of the – where that – where Mr Leck was as regards his inquiries with head office.

Did you discus with your District Manager that you were planning to offer him – offer Dr Patel another four years of employment? — he was, he was not aware that that – of that time frame in that letter. That time frame was put in that letter with a view to ensuring that we were able to get sponsorship and a visa for Dr Patel.

I don’t care why it was done. Did you speak to your District Manager before offering a further four years’ employment to a doctor who was then the subject of an investigation? — I spoke to him at – I spoke to him at – a number of occasions about Dr Patel and his ongoing employment.

And did you tell him that you were going to offer Dr Patel another four years’ employment? — That letter of offer was made with a view to – - -

Did you tell him you were going to offer Dr Patel another four years of employment? A very simple question? — Sorry, Commissioner, I don’t recall that I told him about four years.

Is it normal for you to offer extensions of employment to senior medical staff at the hospital without discussing that with the senior District Manager? — It is – I discussed – I said, there was a number of changes I discussed but I didn’t discuss the four-year period with him necessarily but I did discuss ongoing appointments with him as regards the medical staff.

Was it, so far as you were concerned, quite irrelevant that serious issues had been raised by another senior specialist at the hospital regarding Dr Patel’s level of competence? — I did not believe that it was irrelevant, Commissioner, no.

So you were quite happy to have a man on your staff as a senior surgeon who your senior physician regarded as incompetent? — Dr Miach had made me aware of the catheter situation but he had not made me aware of his overall impressions and the measures he’d taken as he described today. (Dr Miach had testified earlier that day.)

In January did you write a letter of, I don’t know how you would describe it, commendation, a sort of gushy letter saying to Dr Patel what a good bloke he was? — I wrote a letter in January. I don’t know exactly what date it is, Commissioner, but I did write a letter in response to a letter from him.

Well, he didn’t ask you for a commendation or a letter of approval or anything of that sort, did he? — He wrote his letter of resignation, saying he would not…

Yes? — He…

What prompted you to write such an effusive letter back to Dr Patel? — At that time – at that time I believed it was a normal response to a letter of resignation.

A normal response when the man resigning is the subject of a pending investigation? — He was – he was the subject of a number of allegations which were to be investigated, amongst the totality of the ICU. In retrospect…

I’m not asking you about retrospect. I’m asking you about at the time? — At the time…

With your knowledge that there were the allegations made by Ms Hoffman, the allegations or the issues raised by Dr Miach, surely it would have been a matter of concern to you? — I was concerned abut, yes, all the issues, including him leaving, and I – I wrote that letter – I wrote that letter.

* * *

Commissioner: It didn’t come to your attention, for example, that nurses were hiding patients from Dr Patel so he couldn’t operate on them? — No.

Didn’t come to your attention again that your senior medical staff were recommending to patients that they seek transfer to Brisbane rather than go under the knife of Dr Patel? — No, Commissioner.

* * *

Commissioner: If the people of Bundaberg were told by your hospital that the man who was wielding the scalpel on them was a surgeon, don’t you think those people were entitled to know that the man wasn’t qualified to be a surgeon under Australian law? — He was registered as a Senior Medical Officer in Surgery.

Well, whether or not you called him a specialist surgeon, don’t you think the people of Bundaberg were entitled to be told before he took the knife to them that this man is not a surgeon by Australian standards or in accordance with Australian law? — He was – yes – if you put it that way, Commissioner, yes, but…

* * *

Commissioner: Could you tell me about the funding system by which the Bundaberg Hospital received extra funding as a result of elective surgery performed by Dr Patel? — I have an understanding of the elective surgery program which included surgery done by Dr Patel and by other surgeons done at the hospital.

Could you explain that program? — It’s an allocation of money by the Minister – by government direction related to the – to the performance of elective surgery with a view to reducing the waiting lists for all elective surgery across the state… There is an incentive scheme which relates to giving you a target of basically a number of patients that get elective surgery and you are funded to achieve that target. If you fail to achieve that target, you do not get all your allocation of funding.

Well, we’ve heard a lot of evidence so far about a procedure called an oesophagectomy. Is that ordinarily classified as elective surgery? — It is

So there was more money coming into Bundaberg Hospital for every oesophagectomy performed by Dr Patel, whether the patient lived or died? — I do not know the exact amount of what they call the waiting for that operation and therefore the amount of funding you would get for an oesophagectomy although it is a complex procedure and are based on… etc.

Appendix B – Mr Peter Leck

Commissioner (Mr Antony J. H. Morris, QC): you knew that Dr Patel wasn’t registered as a surgeon, didn’t you? — No, I didn’t.

I see. No-one told you that? — As – as far as I was aware, he was registered as a surgeon.

I see. And you just didn’t bother to find out? — Well, the responsibility in relation to registration and employment of doctors lies with the Director of Medical Services.

So it was Dr Keating’s fault, was it? — As I indicated earlier, I think Dr Kees Nydam was actually acting as the Director of Medical Services at that time.

Now, Dr Patel’s resignation took effect on the 31^st March of this year? — Yes.

And the following day you approved a payment to him in respect of airfares to the United States and accommodation in Brisbane? — Well, I can’t…

Is that right? — I can’t remember the actual process of approval.

Would you have a look at this document and tell me whether it’s your signature on it. Is that signed by you? — Yes.

Thank you. Hand that back. Now, this only took place six weeks ago. You’re not going to suggest this has gone out of your memory are you? — I recall Dr Kees Nydam…

Are you going to suggest it’s gone out of your memory? — I don’t specifically recall signing the document if that’s what you’re asking, but…

You’re not suggesting the signature is a forgery? — No.

So is it your evidence to this inquiry that you might have signed this document but it’s gone completely out of your mind in the last six weeks? — I sign a number of things every day…

I’m sure that’s right. Is it your evidence to this inquiry that having signed this – at the time when this document was generated? — Yes.

Dr Patel was the subject of considerable controversy wasn’t he? — Yes.

He had been named in the state parliament? — Well, there was certainly publicity around him.

Yes. Dr Molloy had gone on television and spoken about him. He was a very controversial man at the time, wasn’t he? — There – there was publicity.

And yet you’re telling us that you can’t remember signing off on a form to approve over $3,500 worth of air travel for him on the 1^st of April? — I don’t remember specifically signing it, no.

* * *

All right. Who checked Dr Patel’s contract to ascertain that he was entitled to this three and a half thousand dollars? — I don’t know. I didn’t.

You didn’t. Well, you’ve signed the document as a “Certificate of Authorised Expenditure. Approving Officer: I certify (1) that the charge is one which was necessarily required in the provision of an approved departmental service and is cost justified; (2) that the itinerary was approved by the appropriate senior officer; (3) funds are available and voucher is approved.” Do you realise that you certified those things to the Department of Health? — I authorised the expenditure, yep.

And you certified those things as being true to the Department of Health? — Look…

Do you wish to look at your signature again? — No.

* * *

Commissioner: By April you’d been aware for at least six months of serious concerns about Dr Patel, hadn’t you? — Well, I’d had correspondence from Toni Hoffman in late October 2004.

And that raised very serious concerns about Dr Patel, did it not? — Yes, which were under investigation.

When did that investigation start? — The initial correspondence relating…

No. When did the investigation start? I’m not interested in bureaucratic correspondence going back and forth. When did anyone actually start investigating? — I presume that Gerry Fitzgerald started when he received the correspondence, which would have been around mid-January, and he arrived on site on the 14^th of February.

And why did it take from October to mid-January for Dr Fitzgerald to start investigating? — We had been through a process of attempting to identify somebody to conduct the investigation. We’d – there had been several telephone calls. We were then interrupted by the tilt train accident in – on the 16^th of November. So, for a period of a few weeks, myself and all of the executive were tied up in doing that…

What! Were you down sort of wrapping the wounds or helping out these patients? — No, there was…

No, I didn’t think so. So why weren’t you able to find someone to conduct this investigation in less than three months? — Because we were busy doing that. Couldn’t find somebody or…

Doing what? — I was talking to Queensland Rail… There was discussions with staff and how they were coping and what they were doing.

Which staff did you discuss how they were coping? — Sorry?

With what staff did you discuss how they were coping? Did you go down to the wards and speak to the nurses and doctors and ask “How are you getting on?” — For a time, over a period of time, I visited night shift and afternoon shift to talk to staff about how they were doing…

What, two trips to the wards?

* * *

Apart from Dr Patel, who was the leading clinician in your hospital at the time? The most senior doctor who was actually seeing patients? — What – what the structure is, we…

No. No, just answer the question. Who was the most senior doctor who was seeing patients? — There isn’t one. There’s like, several.

Okay, there were several. Who were they? — So, we had – if we’re asking for the directors…

Yes. Who were they? — You’ve got the Director of Medicine, Dr Peter Miach.

All right. Did you ask Dr Miach about the concerns raised by Nurse Hoffman? — No.

Why not? — Because that isn’t my role.

I see. It doesn’t worry you that patients might be dying or that 15-year-old boys might be losing their legs. It’s not your role to see whether there might be some truth in these allegations? — It’s the role of the Director of Medical Services in terms of clinical issues. I’m not a clinician.

Appendix C – Ms Linda Mulligan

Mr MacSporran (Counsel for Ms Mulligan): Ms Mulligan, perhaps the simplest way to deal with this is for you to tell us how in your view you showed leadership in this issue.

Ms Mulligan: All right. Once it was identified and I discussed the options with the staff member in question and she didn’t agree to those options and she suggested an alternative we discussed why that would be appropriate. I agreed to the same. I continued, you know, over months chatting to her. She was progressing that matter. When I went to ICU it was evident, and the issue over that patient’s surgery, what it actually was that the issues weren’t resolving. I met with the District Manager and Director of Medical Services and suggested that we try and attempt to have some formal mediation because at this state it was obvious that these two staff members were not able to sort the problem out themselves and Miss Hoffman had not agreed to sitting down the four of us and having a chat about it. I then basically continued along that. There was a discussion obviously with Dr Keating and Dr Patel and we had a plan to go back to Toni Hoffman and offer her again an opportunity to sit down and try and sort these issues out and I believe that that was appropriate and I believe it showed leadership. Obviously, some people have a different view, but I cannot make staff sit down and talk to another staff member if they disagree and if anyone suggests that I do that that can be considered intimidation, I believe.