The Dangerous Book of Heroes (6 page)

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

In 1848 war with the Sikhs broke out again. Burton was passed over for duties as an interpreter, a decision he later claimed was due to his report on the brothel. Ill and thin, he decided to return to Eu
rope in 1849 after seven years in India. He made a partial recovery on the voyage, but poor health continued to plague him. He traveled to Italy and settled for a time in France, where he began further study of sword work, becoming a renowned master of the blade. In one exhibition he disarmed a French master seven times in a row.

In the relative peace of France, Burton completed many of the manuscripts that survive today, such as
Falconry in the Valley of the Indus
and
A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise.
In Boulogne he met the woman who would become his wife, Isabel Arundell. She was beautiful, of an ancient English family, and nineteen years old. Perhaps surprisingly, he would remain faithful to her always. She wrote in her diary: “Where are the men who inspired the ‘grandes passions' of bygone days? Is the race extinct? Is Richard the last of them?” Burton adored her, but at the same time, the world of France and England was too small for him. He was given a year's leave from the East India Company for a journey to Arabia, where he would need all the skill and knowledge he had won in India to survive. The Royal Geographical Society backed him, and he set off in 1853. Once again he fell into the role of a Muslim, even working under the guise as a doctor in Alexandria for a month. He traveled from Cairo to Suez, the number of his companions growing to a large party as he met others making journeys to Medina, where the tomb of Muhammad lies. Burton was not impressed by the place, finding it “mean and tawdry” after great expectations. He took notes on everything he saw and learned, from folklore and the prices of slaves to the practice of female circumcision. The discovery of such notes would have meant his death, and he kept them in numbered squares that only he could reassemble.

From Medina he traveled to Mecca itself. Burton saw the fabled black stone there, deciding to his own satisfaction that it was a meteorite. He completed the tour of the pilgrim sites and got out alive. He was due back in Bombay by 1854 and was not able to return to London in time, though he would have been lionized there for his achievement.

After Mecca, Burton became famous and his exploits were widely
reported. He had a free hand in choosing other expeditions. With company approval, he visited the fabled Ethiopian city of Harar, where he was held prisoner for ten days. Around that time, in 1855, his brother was badly wounded by natives in Ceylon. Though Edward recovered for a time, he lost his health and sanity and spent his last forty years in a sanatorium in Surrey, a sad end for the less turbulent Burton brother.

Meanwhile, Richard Burton went from triumph to triumph. At that time, Africa was truly “the Dark Continent,” a place of mystery, strange animals, and vast unknown lands. With John Speke, Burton attempted a trip into the continental interior, known as the “Mountains of the Moon,” but was badly wounded by a Somali spear. Speke was wounded in eleven places, and they were lucky to survive. However, Burton was still the man of choice when the Royal Geographical Society wanted to organize an expedition to find the fabled “inner sea” of Africa and the source of the Nile in 1856. He became secretly engaged to Isabel before he and Speke became the first white men to see Lake Tanganyika. Speke went on to find what is now known as Lake Victoria, though the journey almost killed both men. It was Burton's most celebrated exploration, though he fell out publicly with Speke afterward. On their return to London, Burton and Speke wrote viciously about each other, each one claiming the glory for himself and ignoring the other's contribution.

In 1861, Burton married Isabel at last in a Catholic ceremony, though with his history, it is likely to have been merely expedient. He continued to explore West Africa after his marriage and became consul in Damascus for a time. He also continued to write and in 1863 founded the Anthropological Society of London. By then an establishment figure, he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886.

He is perhaps best known for his translation into English of the
Kama Sutra,
an Indian sexual manual, as well as
Arabian Nights, The Perfumed Garden,
and
Vikram and the Vampire,
a collection of Hindu stories. He died in 1890 of a heart attack, and his wife had the Catholic last rites performed for him. Sadly, she then burned all his surviving notes and manuscripts, just as Byron's were burned before
him. It was a truly great loss to both literature and culture. There are some men who rise above the period of their lives and the cultures in which they are born. Burton was a man of insatiable curiosity and endless wonder. His example has inspired many explorers after him, both of the world and the spirit. He and his wife are buried together in a tomb shaped like a Bedouin tent in Mortlake, near Richmond in London.

Recommended

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography
by Edward Rice
A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton
by Mary S. Lovell

D
aniel Boone is
the
iconic backwoods frontiersman. A mixture of fact, legend, and mythology, the story of this colonial adventurer and explorer who blazed trails from the coastal plains into the interior makes him the first folk hero of modern America. The popular images of the real-life Davy Crockett and the fictional Hawkeye—their exploits, their fame, even their clothes—are based upon Daniel Boone.

Boone's family was from Devonshire, in the southwest of England. Daniel's father, Squire, and grandfather George were among those who took that adventurous step to start a new life in the colonies. Squire arrived in Philadelphia in early 1713, followed by George in 1717. The family worshipped with the Society of Friends, so it was natural for them to settle in Pennsylvania as did many other Quakers. Thomas Paine was another, sixty years later.

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

Quaker William Penn had founded Pennsylvania in 1681. Using a land grant from Charles II, he established a colony where all religions could worship freely. Very few people then imagined what might be the future of the many British colonies in America, but Penn got it right when he predicted: “Colonies…are the seedlings of nations.” Squire Boone married a Welsh Quaker, Sarah Morgan, in 1720 and ten years later bought 158
acres near Reading in Berks County. In the sparsely populated Oley Valley he felled trees and built a simple log cabin—just one room above a cellar and spring. The two-story stone addition with a front porch that remains today was built later. In the original cabin, the sixth of their eleven children was born in 1734. They named him Daniel for the biblical hero. According to the family Bible, when grandparents George and Mary died, they left seventy descendants: eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. There are now many Boones across the United States.

Daniel and his siblings spoke with the broad, soft Devonshire accent of their father, overlaid by their mother's Welsh lilt. Their childhood in and around the Oley Valley was peaceful, for the Quakers had a treaty of friendship with the Delaware and Susquehannock nations that lasted into the 1760s. Daniel helped his father with the farming, fished, trapped, and hunted with a crude spear for food. He received his first squirrel gun when he was twelve. He learned his reading and writing skills from his family and his woodcraft and hunting skills from Native Americans.

One early story tells of Daniel and other boys hunting in the wilderness when they were attacked by a puma. All the boys except Daniel scattered. He stood his ground, cocked his gun, and, as the puma leaped toward him, shot it through the heart.

In 1750, Squire Boone sold his land to relative William Maugridge and moved south. His eldest son, Israel, had married a “world-ling,” a non-Quaker, and as a result had been “read out” of the local meeting. By refusing to criticize his son's conduct Squire was also read out. So the family made the long trek down the Owatin Creek, through Maryland and Virginia. Plodding oxen hauled the wooden wagons for more than a year until they reached North Carolina. The Boone family built their new homes in the Yadkin Valley, a few miles west of Mocksville.

Back in the Oley Valley, Maugridge moved on to the first Boone farm but soon landed in debt. He was forced to mortgage the property for two hundred pounds to an insurance friend in Philadelphia—Benjamin Franklin.

Adventure in the shape of the French and Indian War (internationally, the Seven Years' War) beckoned the young Daniel Boone, and he left home in early 1755 at age twenty. He became a wagon driver in Major General Braddock's unsuccessful campaign to clear the French from the Ohio country. It was here that he first met volunteer Colonel George Washington of the Virginia militia. Having returned home, Boone married neighbor Rebecca Bryan a year later. On his father's farm, like his father before him, they built a log cabin for their home.

Victories at Quebec and Montreal in 1759 turned the war in Britain's favor. However, a pointless conflict arose in the Carolinas between settlers and their Cherokee allies. When Cherokee warriors raided Yadkin Valley in 1759—in retaliation for British executions—the Boone family and others moved north to Culpeper County in Virginia. Boone remained to serve with the North Carolina militia, for which he traveled west across the Appalachian Mountains into Tanasi (Tennessee) country. This journey set the pattern for the rest of his life.

Through the passes of the Alleghenies, the Cumberlands, and the Shenandoah Valley lay a great unspoiled wilderness of woods and forests, hills and plains, clear streams and broad rivers. In Britain and Europe no one had been able to step through such a door for centuries. It offered both a geographic and a spiritual freedom, though a freedom with its own particular dangers and its own requirements for survival. Boone was enchanted. Still in Tennessee today is a tree bearing the deeply carved inscription:
D. BOON CILLED A. BAR ON TREE IN THE YEAR
1760. He didn't return home for two years.

A truce and peace was arranged between the Cherokee and the colonies in 1762; three Cherokee chiefs visited Britain, and the Boones returned to their Carolina homes. The following year, the Peace of Paris saw the end of the French and Indian War, the French being forced to withdraw from most of North America so that Canada, the American colonies, and Florida were all British.

The Carolinas were peaceful, but a northern alliance of Native Americans led by Ottawa chief Pontiac successfully rebelled against
further white settlement westward. The British government saw their argument, and George III's 1763 Royal Proclamation banned colonization west of the Appalachian Mountains. This proclamation remains today the legal baseline for Native American claims in Canada and the United States.

Daniel Boone continued commercial hunting and trapping to feed a family that eventually numbered ten children. In winter he'd travel for many months along the riverbanks, trapping beaver and otter, then returning in the spring with packhorses laden with furs. In summer he'd farm maize and, with a single-shot musket, hunt deer for their meat and skins. The buckskins, simply called bucks, were bartered and sold for cash, so that the question was asked, “How many bucks for a pound?”
Buck
became slang for the pound and later the dollar. Boone and the other frontiersmen were known as Long Knives and Long Hunters.

During these trips from home, Boone repaired and made his own clothes from what was available to him. Sewn moccasins replaced his English leather boots, buckskin leggings replaced threadbare breeches, and a fringed hide top replaced his torn woolen shirts. Although only the head of Chester Harding's full-length portrait of Boone survives, an engraving of the original painting shows Boone in these distinctive hunting clothes. He didn't wear a coonskin cap; he wore a beaver hat, as did Davy Crockett later.

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

Boone's father died in 1765, and Daniel traveled south to investigate the new colony of Florida as a future home. Florida was rejected, so Daniel and Rebecca moved farther up the remote Yadkin Valley. Historical interpretations of him always seeking a life far from
villages and towns annoyed him. Years later he said: “Nothing embitters my old age as much as the circulation of absurd stories that I retire as civilization advances.” In his saddlebags he usually packed his Bible and
Gulliver's Travels,
and at night he often read to other frontiersmen by the light of the campfire.

Boone and his brother Squire explored farther west into the Appalachians, into the borders of the Kentucke country (Kentucky and West Virginia). The land then was abundant with wild game, but preserving the meat was the key to survival. Daniel fortunately had a knack for finding salt pans and brine creeks wherever he hunted—it was said he could smell salt from thirty miles—so that in the winter of 1767 the brothers camped at Salt Springs. Around the fire they talked about the Kentucke country west of the mountains, where the Iroquois and Shawnee hunted.

By the 1768 treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Iroquois allowed British settlers to hunt in Kentucke. Very soon the trader John Findley visited Boone's home. He was arranging a hunting and trading expedition across the Appalachians and asked Boone to join. On May 1, 1769, a five-man expedition left for the Appalachians, intending to explore and hunt for two years. Passing through the 1,665-foot-high Cumberland Gap and into Kentucke proper, they found wild turkey, deer, buffalo, and green pastures ideal for farming. Yet it was also Shawnee land, and their chiefs had not signed the Fort Stanwix treaty.

Boone and another man were captured by Shawnee in December. Their furs were confiscated and they were ordered to leave. Boone, however, doubled back to remain until 1771, exploring and hunting as far west as the Forks of the Ohio (Louisville). Under a ledge in the Great Smoky Mountains there is still a tiny backwoods hut, only four feet high, in which Boone spent one winter. He was so impressed with the Kentucke country that he returned again in 1772. He was thinking of settlement.

He sold his idea to settlers in the Carolinas, and in September 1773, he led his family and fifty others westward in the first attempt at settlement of Kentucke. The Shawnee, Delaware, and Cherokee
met them in October in the Cumberland Gap. One of Boone's sons and another settler's son were captured and tortured to death. The expedition turned back.

Early the following spring, surveyors who were unaware of the attack entered Kentucke. Boone and a companion traveled some eight hundred miles that summer to warn them of their danger. A brief local war developed during which Boone helped defend settlements in Virginia. He was made a captain in the militia. His fame was spreading with colonists as well as with Native Americans, and developer Richard Henderson hired him to travel to the Cherokee villages to arrange a trade meeting. In 1775 Henderson bought from the Cherokee much of modern Kentucky for ten thousand pounds' worth of goods. He then hired Boone to blaze a road for settlers.

Boone and thirty woodsmen marked and built a trail through the Cumberland Gap and onward to the Kentucky River, deep into the heart of Kentucke. It is the famous Wilderness Road, nearly three hundred miles long. By the end of the century, some two hundred thousand settlers had traveled on it across the mountains. On the Kentucky River, Boone established the settlement he named Boonesborough and moved his family there that September.

This movement of settlers west of the Appalachians was in complete breach of the 1763 proclamation. Native Americans were not pleased about it. Neither was the British government, but short of garrisoning the long border with soldiers, there was little it could do. The independent-minded colonists simply ignored the law; in those days London was several months away.

Discontent had thus been simmering for several years. Many settlers saw the proclamation as an unjustifiable interference in their travel, trade, and search for wealth. In addition, it was argued that if British soldiers garrisoned in North America were not going to protect the settlers in their move westward, there was no point in having them.

In Massachusetts, open rebellion broke out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, with a surprise attack on the British garrisons
there. A second attack on Boston in June was defeated at Bunker Hill, and the American Revolutionary War was begun.

Named the American War of Independence on the other side of the Atlantic, in fact it was a civil war—Britons fighting Britons, colonists fighting colonists. All civil wars create more than usually strong passions, and between 1775 and 1782, each side vented its frustrations and anger. Daniel Boone's personal experience is typical of these divisions: he was charged with collaborating with the enemy.

His first daughter, Jemima, and two other teenage girls were captured by Shawnee outside Boonesborough, ten days after the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Like the majority of Native Americans, the Shawnee supported Britain. Boone and two other men set off in pursuit. For two days he tracked the Shawnee warriors westward through the wilderness, until he caught up to them, ambushed them, rescued the girls, and returned safely to Boonesborough. James Fenimore Cooper fictionalized the event in
The Last of the Mohicans,
Hawkeye taking the part of Daniel Boone.