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

King Solomon’s Mines

by H. Rider Haggard

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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.)

Adventure classics -- A book made from a map

Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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“Anybody can write a short story -- a bad one, I mean. . but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote. But he puzzled greatly over why, after several years of turning out reams of short stories -- good ones -- poems and essays, he had not achieved a novel.

Maybe he required a certain amount of maturity to write his first novel, Treasure Island. After all, he had only turned 30 the year before beginning the novel in September 1881. It may have required a certain amount of emotional support -- he had also married the previous year, to American divorcee Fanny Vandegrift.

A stay at a Swiss sanatorium had done little either to help Stevenson’s always frail health or his writing ability. But during a Scottish summer vacation in 1881 when, biographer and fellow Scot Ian Bell notes, “The Highland weather did its Highland worst,” Stevenson began to write again.

“On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window, I began,” Stevenson wrote. “I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency.”

It started with a map drawn either by Stevenson or his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd. “The map was the most of the plot,” Bell writes, quoting Stevenson in his biography, Dreams of Exile. The map’s island, “like a fat dragon standing up,” bore the now-classic “X marks the spot,” designation. And it had a young boy hero, Jim Hawkins, to charm Lloyd, Stevenson’s “touchstone” for the things boys liked.

It also had one of Stevenson’s greatest characters, the tall one-legged pirate John Silver, the great mover of the story’s action. “Sometimes it is as though R.L.S. were tempting us to admire this figure whose personality swings like a pendulum,” Bell writes. “But who Long John actually is seems less important that what, by contrast, he shows the others to be.”

Jim Hawkins at last collected his share of treasure and returned safely home, but Stevenson continued to roam the world until he found his own Treasure Island, Upolu in the Samoan Islands, now part of the independent state of Samoa.

He had traveled all over the Pacific, Bell writes, and considered making his home on Hawaii. But even friendships, including the one with King Kalakaua illustrating this post, couldn’t make Stevenson settle down in a land he considered “too civilized.” Instead, he settled on Samoa, at an estate near the village of Vailima in 1893.

He surely would have left it, too, if he had lived longer. But in December 1894 he died, not from the tuberculosis that had afflicted him all his life, but from “apoplexia,” according to the copy of his death certificate at
www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/ .

He was buried on nearby Mount Vaea, under an epitaph from one of his poems, “Home is the sailor, home from the sea. . .”

(Next Wednesday -- In September, Adventure classics turns from the sea to stories with other young protagonists, beginning with L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.)