Of the Russians, certainly, he learned a great deal during this journey. His estimation of their character appears to be singularly shrewd, and, for a blind man, wonderfully penetrating.
“Their natural quickness of mind and sensibility of feeling,” he says, “gives them the appearance of being a cheerful, amiable, and open-hearted people; but alas! under this exterior are concealed so much disingenuousness and artful policy as to diminish materially, on closer acquaintance, that estimation to which they would otherwise be justly entitled.”
Seventy-five years before Kipling’s “Truce of the Bear” was penned, another Englishman had perceived the close resemblance between the ursine and the human—in Russia.
The way in which the traveler overcame the material difficulties of journeying alone in a strange land is full of interest. He tells us that he kept his money in various bags, each of which contained a definite number of coins of different values. He was also provided with tea and sugar, a teapot, cups, and all that was necessary for the afternoon refreshment so dear to the English heart. Yet he did not spare himself when he wished to cover a stipulated distance.
The man’s force of character was never put to a severer test than when he was made a Russian state prisoner on suspicion of having assumed the pose of “Blind Traveler” in order that he might spy more effectively upon Russian politics.
The Czar had sent an aide-de-camp to arrest him and put him over the frontier without loss of time. During the ensuing sledge journey, which continued day and night for four thousand miles, and of which he was himself compelled to bear the expense, Holman became utterly worn out.
Then he took matters into his own hands; he decided that he needed a day’s rest, and told his courier-guards that he intended to take it. The Czar’s representatives, including the Governor of Moscow, ordered otherwise.
Holman defied them all—if he felt better next day, he would go with them; but not before. A long and angry altercation followed, but in the end he, a sightless stranger among bigoted enemies, won by sheer force of moral strength. They finally left him a free man on the border of the little republic of Cracow.
Of Holman’s seven books, the later volumes are considerably less intimate and vivid than those written in the first flush of his triumph over circumstances. Nevertheless his adventures and research among the gold mines of South Africa, his description of an entertainment given for him by a rajah of the East, his emotions as he climbed a mast for the sake of exercise, and the thrill which came to him while hunting elephants make reading of more than ordinary interest. The sailor’s keen delight in a voyage, and the Englishman’s unfailing weakness for riding, never deserted this extraordinary man. One of the best pen-pictures we have of him, indeed, is astride a horse.
“At the English consul’s,” writes Francis Parkman from Girgenti, Sicily, under the date, January, 1844, “I met a blind traveler, a Mr. Holman, who has been over Siberia, New Holland, and other remote regions, for the most part alone, and has written seven volumes of his travels. Traveling, he told me, was a passion with him. He could not sit at home.