A Sense of the World | Further Reading

James Holman’s life brought him in contact with many other extraordinary, adventurous individuals. Here are a few whose own exploits are well worth seeking out.

Basil Hall
(1788-1844)
Holman’s dashed dreams of becoming an intrepid naval captain were lived out by Hall, his fellow midshipman on the H.M.S. Leander. Making lieutenant in 1808, Hall soon left the North Atlantic Station behind, drawing assignments that placed him in increasingly exotic locales. By 1813 he was plying the waters of Borneo and Java. In 1816 he was one of the first westerners to document a visit to “Great Loo-Choo Island” (Okinawa). His journeys there and to “Corea” became the topic of his first book, published in 1817 to considerable acclaim, despite the fact that the narrative often displays Hall’s pronounced credulity. Even Napoleon Bonaparte expressed skepticism about the book’s central claim, which was that Okinawan society “not only used no money, but possessed also no lethal weapon, not even a poniard [small dagger] or arrow.”

Bonaparte was right; Hall had been hoaxed by the natives. Far from a pacifist utopia, the Okinawa of that era was a hotbed of armed piracy. Still, the book’s success allowed Hall to maintain dual careers as naval officer and author. His later works include Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili (sic), Peru, and Mexico, in the years 1820, 1821, and 1822, as well as his most ambitious work, the three-volume Travels in North America, for which he logged more than 9,000 miles of personal travel in the United States, then still mostly wilderness. That work stirred a massive uproar in its subject country, whose citizens took offense at observations like, “In all my travels, both amongst Heathens and amongst Christians, I have never encountered any people by whom I found it nearly so difficult to make myself understood as by the Americans.”

Recommended: The Log-Book of a Midshipman (London, 1831); Fragments of Voyages and Travels (Edinburgh, 1831).

Thomas Cochrane
(1775-1860)
It’s easy to see why John Dundas Cochrane, the Pedestrian Traveler, was so determined to cut an intrepid figure. His cousin Thomas Cochrane, Holman’s colleague in the Raleigh Club, was the most famous (and controversial) British mariner of the age. A masterful tactician with no qualms about deceiving the enemy, this Cochrane’s brilliant early career would have marked him as a successor to Admiral Nelson, except for his Achilles heel: a particularly thorny, combative personality, which alienated his superiors and stifled his rise. He once attended a costume ball dressed as a common sailor, then initiated a duel when he was mistaken for one. After imprudently criticizing his fleet commander in public, he found himself without a ship to command.

Fortunately, foreign navies were eager for the services of the man Napoleon himself had dubbed le Loup de Mer, the Sea Wolf. Cochrane eventually commanded the sea forces of four countries--Chile, Brazil, Peru and Greece--with varying degrees of success, but always with audacity and improvisation. It’s no wonder that he inspired two of the most popular heroes in seafaring fiction--C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey.

Recommended: Robert Harvey, Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001).

James Brooke
(1803-1868)
The young man who marveled at Holman in the streets of Canton, finding his “conversation both copious and instructive”, went on to lead one of the most singular lives of the century. James Brooke carved out a country of his own in the South China Sea, established himself as monarch and founded a dynasty of “white rajahs” that lasted until the end of World War II. Born to an English father and a Scottish mother, Brooke had been something of an international underachiever until the age of 32, halfheartedly pursuing careers as a soldier in Burma (serving in the army of the quasi-governmental British East India Company), and as a less-than-successful trader in various points of the Far East. But in 1835, when he inherited 30,000 pounds upon the death of his father, he boldly spent it on a most unusual private acquisition: The Royalist, a well-armed schooner formally attached to the Royal Yacht Squadron. At the helm of his personal warship (still flying British colors), Brooke sailed for the Sultanate of Brunei, on the island of Borneo.

He arrived in time to quell a rebellion brewing in the Sultanate, although the Sultan soon realized the warship’s high-powered presence in the region constituted a threat of its own. As an act of “gratitude,” he ceded a large portion of his realm to Brooke, creating him the Sultan of Sarawak. It was mostly dense jungle, populated by headhunters in the interior and pirates on the coast, but the new monarch transformed it into a strategic presence on the world stage.

Recommended: Nigel Barley, White Rajah: A Biography of Sir James Brooke (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003).