It was Peter Fleming who noted a principal difficulty for the traveller in the 20th century. There were no journeys to be made, he said, that had not been made already, and he knew that in anything he chose to do, ‘other, better, men’ would have gone before. Under such circumstances, ‘only the born tourist — happy, goggling, ruminant — can follow in their tracks with the conviction that he is not wasting his time’.
James Holman, the hero of A Sense of the World, was probably happy and possibly ruminant. But what he was most definitely not was goggling. For by the time he set off to travel hither and yon around the world, Holman was blind. His blindness began suddenly in 1787, the summer of his 25th year. At first he hoped — as who would not? — that the affliction was temporary. But by the spring of the following year he accepted that his blindness was permanent. What, then, was a young man of considerable intellect and imposing physique to do?
First he learnt ‘how to be blind’. Jason Roberts describes in sympathetic detail how the young Holman taught himself to navigate not by touch, which was the conventional recourse of blind people at the time, but by sound. He taught himself also to write, and regarded these as the first two steps on the road to his stated goal: self-sufficiency.
To be self-sufficient he needed an income. Partly through good fortune and partly through his own efforts, he was appointed to a little-known sinecure as a ‘Naval Knight’, which afforded him security and the most modest of livings. But Holman was still young and restless. He could not live the cloistered life expected of a Naval Knight and within a year he was making plans — notwithstanding his stubborn blindness — to move on. Which is what he did, more or less, for the rest of his life.
Roberts’ book is an excellent read. There is some hyperbole to quibble with, starting with the introduction, ‘No one, before or since, has experienced our world quite so vividly and completely.’ Really? But there is much more in this engrossing tale to delight us. Holman was a sympathetic and inspirational figure. He travelled at a time when the ‘dominant European notion of overland travel was that it was an ordeal to be endured and therefore best pursued in a headlong rush’, but he soon learnt the gentle art of being both happy and ruminant.
His first journeys were those of an invalid, in search of better air or warmer climes. But once he had the taste for travel, there was no stopping him. And — unlike his peers — he travelled alone and often in pain, discomfort or penury. He climbed Vesuvius while it was erupting and ‘saw’ the eruption through the burning soles of his feet. He travelled to South Africa, Ceylon and Siberia, to Italy (not yet united) and Brazil. Australia, Bucharest, China… The list appears endless. At a time when blind people were ‘routinely warehoused in asylums’, his was an extraordinary tale.
One understands that Roberts feels compelled to assert that the ‘story may at times seem improbable but it is true’. A Sense of the World would be a good read, even if the facts were in dispute, but they aren’t. Holman had an enviable capacity to travel with the conviction that he ‘was not wasting his time’, and we should count him, therefore, as one of the better men who had ‘gone before’. He died in 1857 at the age of 70. A century and a half later his story has found an author with an enviable ability to tell the tale.
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