Sailing in trading ships and little vessels of one sort or another, the adventurer slowly made his way south along the west African shore to the English station of Cape Castle on the Guinea Coast. There Sir R. Mends, commanding the British naval squadron on the African west coast, befriended him and sent him to Benin in His Majesty’s Gunbrig Swinger. On the 20th of October, 1823, the brig arrived off the bar of Benin River.
The brig Providence was lying off Obobi, and Belzoni boarded her at the invitation of her master, Captain John Hodgson. A month later, a “Fantee canoe” belonging to the ship is lowered overside; it contains Hodgson and Belzoni. The poor giant seemed “a little agitated,” particularly when the crew, to each of whom he had made a present, gave him three loud cheers on his stepping out of his vessel. “God bless you, my fine fellows,” cried the explorer, “and send you a happy sight of your country and friends.” He was clad in his eastern dress and turban, and still wore his great, black beard.
A few days later word comes to the sailors that the guest whom they had so cherished, loved, even, as a shipmate, is lying ill at Benin. Good Hodgson hurried inland, and found the giant dying of African dysentery in Benin city. In a palanquin, they hurry him down the river to Gwato, hoping to get him to the coast and the sea air. But the end is at hand, an end calmly envisaged; the last of his strength he spends trying to write a letter to his wife; he entrusts Hodgson with a ring for her and a message full of the most touching affection, then yields the ghost. They buried him at Gwato under a great tree, and there he lies in the dark of Africa.
So ends the tale of the monk who passed from the peace of a monastery to an acrobat’s stage in a village square. The young Italian had accepted his destiny calmly, and made the best of it, yet never bowed his head. Thrust violently from the most retired of lives into the most bohemian, he had remained,—Belzoni. There is something amusing, something rather fine as well, in the way that he sailed through life like a fine ship sent by the fates of the sea on dubious voyages. And what a sense of achievement and honest adventure he had won from it all; it had all been so well worth while.
History will remember him as the first of modern explorer-archæologists. “One of the most remarkable men in the whole history of Egyptology,” says Mr. Howard Carter, who found the Tutankhamen tomb.
Belzoni the giant! What sounds run through his life—the sniping of a barber’s shears, the ringing of convent bells, the talk and endless brook-like chatter of crowds at a fair, the songs of laborers along the Nile, the shuffle of camels in the sand, and the squeak and grind of levers raising the portcullis of Chephren’s pyramid!