Week 38: ‘[T]he courage to plunge, wholeheartedly, into a world complex beyond our illusions of comprehension.’

Wonder spawned in: 1786.
Wondered into being by: An apothecary's family in Exeter.
Wonderspan: 3 minutes.

Today, for about £1,000 you can buy a round-the-world airline ticket and call yourself a backpacker who circumnavigated the globe.  Have you ever wondered who was the very first lone, globe-trotting traveller, before aeroplanes and ‘independent travel’ travel agents?

The answer is almost certainly James Holman, who lived in the early part of the 19th Century.  At that time no-one travelled long distances alone.  If people left Britain at all, it was to settle in another country, not go for a holiday.  Or it was for work – in the navy, perhaps, to the Americas, or on a tea clipper to China or India.  People who travelled abroad with return tickets were usually on the Queen’s business; they stayed within the Empire and could afford to be pretty comfortable, thanks to what a few imperial pennies could buy in a subjugated land.  No-one travelled entirely independently, without any protection into hostile lands, into Siberia or the Australian outback, or other kinds of then-untouched wilderness, travelling as a peasant would, hitch-hiking in carts and leaning on the goodwill of the people he met, all the way around the world, but James Holman was not no-one, and he did.

That an individual would travel in this manner and over such large distances would be remarkable even now, but to do so in the early 1800s was an historical achievement.  More remarkable still – indeed truly extraordinary by any standard then or now – is that James Holman, history’s first long-distance lone explorer, was completely blind.  The scale of his achievement is matched only by his baffling obscurity: hardly anyone has ever heard of him.

Thanks to the writer Jason Roberts, something of Holman’s astonishing life is relived in a superb page-turner of a biography, A Sense of the World.  Every page of the book contains a new, ‘No, surely not’ achievement of Holman's.  He learnt to ride a horse by using the clip-clop of horses’ hooves for echolocation, as a bat does.  He climbed Mount Vesuvius’ during its eruption in 1821, reaching the very edge of the erupting crater while the settling hot ash burned the end of the stick that he was using to navigate the slopes.  He traversed Russia, reaching the east of Siberia, and almost died of frostbite there on the back of a cart the hostile authorities used to deport him.  He invented a blind person’s writing machine so he could record everything he encountered and in his lifetime he wrote thousands of pages of text.  He became the world’s leading expert in the flora and fauna of the Indian Ocean, which knowledge Charles Darwin went on to use for The Origin of Species.  Holman, Jason Roberts shows, was feverishly excited about what the world had to reveal; his

‘adventures were neither acts of machismo nor self-aggrandizing stunts – they were, as he put it, a means “to enter into the business of life … communion with the world and its multiplying delights.”’

By his biographer’s estimation, James Holman clocked up a quarter of a million miles of independent travel in his lifetime and contacted over 200 separate cultures on every continent.  Roberts tries hopelessly to give his readers some sense of the scale of the achievement:

‘Alone, sightless, with no prior command of native languages and with only a wisp of funds, he had forged a path equivalent to that to wandering to the moon.’

The loss of any one of our senses is a heavy loss indeed, but Holman’s life was filled with the wonder of existence and all its abundance and diversity.  In this vein, Roberts quotes a paragraph that Holman wrote towards the end of his life using the writing device he invented:

‘On the summit of the precipice, and in the heart of the green woods … there was an intelligence in the winds of the hills, and in the solemn stillness of the buried foliage, that could not be mistaken.  It entered into my heart, and I could have wept, not that I did not see, but that I could not portray all that I felt.’

That, dear wonder-lovers, might be among the most beautiful paragraph of text ever written.  When I heard Jason Roberts read this passage on Radio 4’s Excess Baggage, I went out immediately to buy the book.  Please do the same and read this beautiful, compassionate and thrilling biography: Jason Roberts (2006) A Sense of the World: How a blind man became history’s greatest traveller (London: Simon & Schuster)  (Link goes to Housman’s Online Bookshop, an ethical mail order alternative to bad-egg Amazon.  http://www.shop.housmans.com/BookItem.aspx?item=9780743468053 )

The Holmans of today…

Holman learnt to navigate by tapping his cane and listening to the quality of its echo, which is now called echolocation.  The technique is practised by a growing number of blind people, who typically use their palate to make a high-frequency ‘clicking’ sound from their mouth.  To an attentive and skilled listener, a click’s echo carries information about the nature of surrounding objects, such as their size, shape and movement, and also tells the listener what kind of space they are in.  Just as voices in wood-panelled rooms sound different from the same voices echoing off brick walls, so a proficient echolocator can add an extra dimension to their perception by discerning surface textures.

Human echolocation uses the brain’s visual cortex, which both blind and sighted people use to imagine (i.e. create the experience of) being within a three-dimensional space.  So it’s not surprising, although it is startling, that blind echolocators feel that they can ‘see’ the world around them each time they hear their click’s echo.  When combined with ambient sounds, familiarity, and other intuitive techniques like contextual recognition and dead reckoning, an accomplished echolocator can build up an increasingly detailed ‘image’ of their surroundings and move around freely.

Daniel Kish, a highly skilled echolocator, teaches echolocation from scratch; he even takes young blind people on mountain bike rides through the forest, each with a piece of ticker-ticker-ticker plastic running over the spokes of the front wheel.  Ben Underwood, who lost his eyes to cancer as a toddler, used echolocation to roller-blade, skateboard, and play football, before he died from a recurrence of the disease at 16.  Lucas Murray was just seven years old when the BBC filmed him playing basketball in his Dorset back garden: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/8291720.stm

The emergence of the blind community as a social force in its own right is still recent in Britain.  Their journey -- first for recognition, then for equal rights, a political voice, and a place of belonging among society's diversity -- is not yet done.  The struggle reveals a peculiarly human passion to be, and in this, Holman's determination lives on.  None of us can fully sense and know the world -- what we think we know is always but a torn-off corner of what Nature knows -- but Jason Roberts predicts that 'there will always be people who must summon the courage to plunge, wholeheartedly, into a world complex beyond our illusions of comprehension.'  A question is, can those of us with all our senses intact also learn to do the same?

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