Adventure classics – The treasure Solomon never owned

King Solomon’s Mines

by H. Rider Haggard

***

Without African diamonds, would there ever have been an H. Rider Haggard? At the least, without the discovery of diamonds in South Africa in 1868, Haggard would have never written his most famous adventure story, King Solomon’s Mines, and would only be remembered, at best, as a footnote in history for his work in agriculture.

And to think, King Solomon probably never owned a diamond in his life.

One of several sons of an English country squire, Henry Rider Haggard was “seen as unpromising by his family,” biographer Benjamin Ivry writes in his introduction to the Barnes & Nobel Classics edition of Haggard’s 1885 tale. No great scholar, he didn’t attend university, and after he failed the army entrance examination, his no doubt desperate family shipped the then teenaged Haggard off to Natal, South Africa, where he got a job as secretary to the colony’s governor. Probably to everyone’s surprise, Africa agreed immensely with the backward young man Haggard advanced in his work. More important for the future of adventure literature, he witnessed wars, mixed with a wide variety of people, and hunted the continent’s big game. And he heard about the diamonds, discovered only a few years before his arrival.

In antiquity, the only known sources for the heartbreakingly hard stones were Indian mines, such as those near Golconda depicted in this post's illustration. They were incredibly rare, and too expensive to be possessed by any but royalty. The 19^th century African discovery changed that, making diamonds not only current news, but riches even members of the middle class could aspire to.

It’s probable King Solomon himself didn’t have any diamonds among his treasures, given differences of opinion as to whether the jewels whose name in the Bible is translated in English as “diamond” actually were that purest form of carbon. But Haggard’s inspired pairing of the recent diamond rush with the legendarily wealthy king gave his 1885 story instant cachet.

As the tale opens, professional big game hunter Allan Quartermain is returning by ship from Cape Town to his home in Natal when he falls into conversation with two other passengers, Sir Henry Curtis and half pay Royal Navy captain John Good. Curtis and Good are searching for Curtis’s brother, who disappeared mysteriously into the African interior after meeting Quartermain and hearing a legend that the mines which produced King Solomon’s wealth were located in that continent.

Quartermain admits hearing a story about the mines, and passes on a scrap of map given to him by a failed prospector. At first reluctant, Quartermain finally agrees to guide Good and Curtis in a search for Curtis’s brother. Among the servants the trio hire for the journey is a strange young man calling himself Umbopa, who came to the country as a child and now wants to return home.

After a harrowing journey, with more killings of elephants than modern readers will enjoy hearing about, the group reaches twin mountains marked on the old map as “Sheba’s Breasts” (a titillating description for Victorian readers), and finally to a wonderful land beyond the mountains, in Umbopa’s words, “a land of witchcraft and beautiful things; a land of brave people, and of trees, and streams, and white mountains, and of a great white road.”

Umbopa’s real name, he divulges, is Ignosi, and he is the disinherited king of the country of the diamond mines, returned to claim his own inheritance.

It takes a war of the kind Haggard had witnessed in Zululand to reinstate the king, with the help of Quartermain, Curtis and Good. But Curtis’s lost brother is nowhere to be found, and the only diamond the adventurers have seen is a single uncut one in the king’s traditional crown. Where is the lost brother? And where, oh where, are the diamonds? And who is the mysterious, evil, and incredibly ancient sorceress Gagaoola, a possible forerunner of the equally ancient, mysterious and possibly evil She, who Haggard would immortalize in a later book?

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes a March of thrills with H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and what came after.)

Adventure classics – Uncrowned king of Solomon’s treasure

King Solomon’s Mines

by H. Rider Haggard

***

One of the delights of writing these Adventure classics posts has been seeing how stories written decades, even centuries ago, linger in our cultural imagination. One of the banes of writing these posts has been the not infrequent squirminess of running headlong into old prejudices. And the even squirmier sensation of realizing how much of those prejudices still lingers.

Last Friday I discussed the way H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 bestseller, King Solomon’s Mines, rediscovered – actually, reinvented – the preoccupation with lost civilizations that had intrigued storytellers and their listeners for centuries earlier, and how its fascination continues. The post was illustrated with a film poster of the British 1937 film (and the first movie version) of Haggard’s story, and anybody who looked closely enough may have noticed that one of the stars listed by name was Paul Robeson. (If you want to take another look, the illustration is online here.) What is even less obvious is that, of the dozens of named native African characters in Haggard’s story, only one merits a starring credit in the film poster, Paul Robeson.

(The blonde heroine pictured in the poster never appears in Haggard’s version, although the British-American actress Anna Lee who played the love interest set a precedent that subsequent versions of the story followed.)

Back to Robeson, and how an African-American actor in the 1930’s received a starring role in a British adventure film. And how Haggard’s story, despite exhibiting the prejudices of its era, could have given scope for such a role.

As biographer Benjamin Ivry points out in his introduction to the 2004 Barnes & Noble Classics edition I’m reading, “At the start of the book, (narrator Allan) Quartermain announces that he doesn’t like calling natives by the term that today has become known as ‘the –word’ and yet he abundantly uses another term, kafir, which in South Africa is hardly less offensive…yet the nobility of Umbopa/Ignosi (the character portrayed by Paul Robeson) as depicted in King Solomon’s Mines is undeniable,” adding with possibly unintended humor, “ Haggard does not have a uniformly low opinion of Africans, at least not much lower than his view of humanity in general.”

It is the nobility of Umbopa (who will later reveal his true name of Ignosi) that prompted the casting of Robeson as the rightful king of the land where the fabled mines lay. Robeson, an African-American, was, rather amazingly, among the ten most popular actors in England in the late 1930’s.

A native of Princeton, New Jersey, he won an academic scholarship to Rutgers College. He later graduated from the Columbia Law school and worked briefly as a lawyer before beginning a theatrical career with the encouragement of his wife (and later agent), Essie Goode. It was while performing in the London production of the musical Show Boat that Robeson became a popular actor in England, leading among other roles, to his casting in King Solomon’s Mines. (He could also portray less noble rulers as he did in The Emperor Jones, a role originated by Charles Sidney Gilpin.)

However, Robeson’s increasing political activism in the late 1930’s eventually led to his blacklisting during the McCarthy era and a subsequent physical breakdown in the early 1960’s that lasted until his death in 1976.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics finally gets around to discussing the plot of King Solomon’s Mines. You’ll be ahead of the game by reading the story first, which is available online here and most likely at a library near you.)

Adventure classics – Blast to the past: lost lands & riches

King Solomon’s Mines

by H. Rider Haggard

***

So here I am, clickety-clacking away at a story about lost tribes that I could swear had never been done before when I realize—I’m channeling H. Rider Haggard! That’s right, the Victorian writer whose 1885 breakout novel, King Solomon’s Mines, singlehandedly created the “Lost Civilization” genre of adventure fiction.

At least I’m in good company. Haggard’s most famous fictions, King Solomon’s Mines and 1887’s She: A History of Adventure,  have been influencing writers from Rudyard Kipling to Edgar Rice Burroughs to James Hilton and Michael Crichton, as well as giving rise to a slew of movie adaptations and knockoffs. (Indiana Jones, anyone?)

It’s not that the concept of recovering civilizations believed to be lost hadn’t been knocking around the world for a while. Probably Plato no sooner wrote his myth of lost Atlantis than people started to wonder about the possibility of Atlantean survivors. Medieval Europeans dreamed of discovering Prester John’s lost kingdom. The whole lost civilization mythos got an unexpected blast of reality when Spanish conquistadors stumbled across the amazing New World kingdoms of the Aztecs and Incas, and the remains of the still more ancient Mayan civilization. Beyond every horizon lay the possibility of cultures older, wiser and wealthier than even the most ardent dreamers could imagine.

Still, fast forward a few centuries, and as the blank spaces on the map were filled in, hopes of finding such lost civilizations ebbed. That is, until the younger son of a country barrister, after failing the army entrance exam, finally managed to get a job as secretary to the governor of Britain’s Natal colony in South Africa.

Although Henry Rider Haggard’s stay in Africa lasted only four years, they were years that changed his life, and with it, the lives of countless readers and dreamers after him. It was the down to earth vividness of his African experiences, the language of hunters and farmers, the sounds and sights and scents of ox-drawn wagons and lions and elephants described by such apparently down to earth narrators as King Solomon’s Mines’ Allan Quartermain that made his fantastic dreams of lost treasure and lost civilizations come alive.

But that was still in the future when Haggard returned to England. He married and returned briefly to Africa with his wife before settling back in England to study law and dabble in writing fiction.

He had a couple of not very successful (and now little-read) novels under his belt in the early 1880’s when one of his brothers bet him he couldn’t write anything as exciting (or successful) as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. (Or in another version, Henry Rider was the one who bet his brother that he could write something better.)

The result, written in six weeks (or possibly sixteen weeks—the mythologizing had already begun), was at first rejected by baffled publishers. But when once published, it became 1885’s best seller. And adventure stories have never been the same since.

Although Haggard dedicated the story to “all the big and little boys who read it”, girls have always liked it too. Out of copyright, it’s readily available online, although I’m currently get reacquainted with it, after an initial reading decades ago, through the Barnes & Noble Classics edition from the Dallas Public Library and available at Amazon. I recommend reading the original before checking out the numerous movie versions, including the 1937 version whose poster illustrates this post.

(Next Friday, plot, characters and controversies in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.)