Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson

Image from Wikisource.org

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was first published in 1879.  It is Stevenson's account of a twelve day journey he undertook in 1878 through the mountainous and isolated Cévennes region of France.

Stevenson purchases an ill-used donkey called Modestine to be his pack-animal, and he needs a beast of burden because he has a cumbersome sleeping bag of unwieldy proportions that he designed himself.  Modestine, it turns out, has a personality of her own, and Stevenson not only has to deal with the weather, the terrain, the baggage and the locals, he also has a fickle donkey on his hands.  It promises to be an interesting twelve days.

Stevenson knows how to spin a yarn.  He mixes beautiful descriptions of man and nature into his narrative and adds the odd soliloquy here and there about life, the universe and everything.  The following is one of his more inspired passages:

In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome even partial intimacies.  And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God.

The latter part of the book concentrates heavily on the history of the region, which was and is a protestant stronghold in France.  Stevenson goes into a bit of depth as he recounts the villainy and demise of the leader of the Inquisition in that part of the world.  It is the story of a man who, after being rescued from death by the kindness of strangers, makes a career of persecuting his fellow humans, even unto their death.

And throughout it all there is Stevenson's struggles with Modestine, and poor Modestine does suffer for it more than he.  Perhaps folk in the nineteenth century were not as sentimental about animals as we may be today.  Modestine is sold as easily as she was bought, but her absence stings Stevenson and he reviews his feelings:

...I became aware of my bereavement.  I had lost Modestine.  Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but now she was gone, "and, oh! the difference to me!" ... She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.  Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own.  Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion.

Yes, perhaps there is hope for the boy after all.  You may like to read this book if you are interested in seeing the early work of a master story-teller.  Parts of it are rough and callow, but the kernels of talent are there in abundance.  Just be warned that the attitude towards animals was not the same then as it seems to be now (at least in my part of the world).

A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts

The 18th century is my favourite century. It features Captain Cook and his voyages of discoveries, the founding of European Australia, the French Revolution, Voltaire and his smirk, and the comedy commandos Boswell and Johnson. It was also a long century: beginning in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution and ending in 1815 with the demise of Napoleon at Waterloo.

Having said that, Jason Robert's book A Sense of the World takes place mainly in the 19th century, but it ought to have been an 18th century tale. It is Faction par excellence - a true story told with the marriage of the best parts of factual history and the best parts of narrative fiction.

Here is the tale of James Holman (1786-1857) who was once the most renowned traveller of his age but is now virtually unknown. Holman became crippled with rheumatism through his service in the cold fogs of the North Atlantic for the British Royal Navy, and he was suddenly struck blind by a mysterious ailment. All this by the tender age of twenty six.

In order to survive in a world where welfare was almost unknown, Holman suborned his natural adventurous spirit and accepted a stipend as a quasi-religious hermit. Yet he sought a cure for his afflictions. In doing so, Holman hit upon the radical notion that good food - especially lots of fresh fruit and vegetables - combined with generous amounts of physical exercise produces an acute sense of well-being.

Having discovered an new sense of health, Holman gave up his stipend and embarked upon three great journeys on foot that saw him, a blind man, scaling Vesuvius during an eruption, travelling the frozen wastes of Eastern Siberia (where he was arrested by the Russian secret police) and embarking on a circumnavigation of the globe that brought him to Hobart in Tasmania (amongst other places), where he became the toast of the town. Simply put, Holman wanted to be the first person to walk around the world.

Jason Roberts tells James Holman's incredible story with a deft economy of words. The picture is painted in precise but sufficient brushstrokes to produce a narrative that compels the reader to turn the page - and the next, and the next. Roberts gives us detail and pace - a rare combination of literary commodities - while 'illuminating' the world of the blind for us.

I thoroughly recommend this book, if for no other reason than to say: find out how and why a blind man in the 19th century attempted to walk around the world.