“I was granted the privilege of using the gourd telegraph system to send messages to our mission workers, and often availed myself of it. I don’t know a single instance where it failed to deliver its word properly.
“During the Boer War we, who were hundreds of miles from the scene of hostilities, got all the news with surprising rapidity, and I have known of several instances where tidings came by the gourd air-line hours ahead of the message by field-telegraph.
“Who first invented the system nobody knows. It has been in use for centuries. There appears to be no difficulty in sending any kind of a message, and I have known one to travel nearly one thousand miles.”
The Blind Sailor-Explorer.
By MARY CAROLINE CRAWFORD.
Lieutenant James Holman Felt His Way ‘Round the World, Scaled Vesuvius, Hunted Wild Animals, Was a Russian Prisoner, a Guest of Princes, and Wrote His Own Experiences Though Sightless.
An original article written for The Scrap Book.
We of the twentieth century are rather too prone to believe that such remarkable cases of superiority to circumstance as are supplied by the lives of Helen Keller and Thomas Stringer are peculiar to our own time and country. Such, however, is not the case. Certainly no more impressive instance of accomplishment under trying circumstances can anywhere be found than in the travels and the accounts thereof credited to Lieutenant James Holman, who died in London almost fifty years ago, after a full and happy life. Not even the celebrated Baron von Humboldt traveled so far or visited so many countries as did Holman; and von Humboldt had his sight.
Holman offers an extraordinary example of what energy and perseverance may accomplish. Driven out of the naval service of his country by the complete extinction of his sight when twenty-five years of age, he found himself with his youthful passion for travel still unsatisfied, and with what might very probably be a long and dreary life before him. A naval officer who had already seen service in England and America, he now found himself forced to rearrange his life plans entirely. Almost immediately he resorted to Edinburgh University for a term of study, but even the pleasures of a cultivated mind could not reconcile him to a life of inaction. Finding the post of Knight of Windsor, which had been conferred upon him, intolerable, he obtained leave of absence, and prepared to set out on his first journey of exploration.
For more than forty years the blind lieutenant kept continually on the march. He traveled alone, for a valet, in his opinion, was a useless incumbrance. Beginning his travels with a tour of France, Italy, Saxony, Switzerland, and Holland, he next penetrated twenty-five hundred miles beyond the Ural Mountains in Siberia. After returning to Europe, he circumnavigated the globe, visited the west coast of Africa, the gold mines in the Brazils, the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, and the islands between that country and China. In 1840 he again left England—this time to explore the Holy Land, and, incidentally, every country touching the waters of the Mediterranean and adjacent seas.