Mad Travelers by Dave Seminara

Author:Dave Seminara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Left Behind

Home is so sad. It stays as we left it.

—Philip Larkin

On April 7, 1838, the Victorian-era naturalist Charles Darwin made a list of the pros and cons of marriage. His first line was “If not marry, Travel.” And his first point under the heading “Not Marry” was “freedom to go where one liked.” (He also fretted that if he married he might become fat, have less money for books, and would waste time visiting relatives, among other concerns.) Darwin was only two years removed from his epic five-year-long journey around the world on board the HMS Beagle, an expedition that would later prove pivotal in helping him formulate his theory of evolution.

Despite his reservations, Darwin married Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, nine months after penning the list. The couple went on to have ten children together, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Darwin suffered from depression and a host of undiagnosed medical problems throughout his adult life. He traveled here and there during his more than forty years of marriage, but didn’t stray too far from Britain for the most part. Married life was probably good for Darwin. Perhaps he needed to settle down in order to make sense of what he experienced in his travels. But did his youthful concerns that marriage might inhibit his ability to explore ever resurface? We don’t know.

Sir Henry Morton Stanley, a journalist and explorer who was famous for his exploration of Central Africa and his search for the source of the Nile, bonded with the missionary and explorer David Livingstone, when he found him near Lake Tanganyika in 1871, over the costs imposed by their peripatetic lives.

“I have lost a great deal of happiness by these wanderings,” Stanley said of his extensive forays across Africa. According to Tim Jeal’s book Explorers of the Nile, Stanley’s nomadic life as a journalist was “a kind of exile [that] had cost him the love of the woman he hoped to marry.”

Stanley had met and become smitten with Alice Pike when he was thirty-three and she seventeen, just months before his (second) groundbreaking expedition to Central Africa. Her parents didn’t approve of the relationship and Stanley seemed to have a sixth sense that the match was doomed. “I shall fall in love with her, which may not perhaps be very conducive to my happiness, for she is the opposite of my ideal wife,” Stanley wrote in his diary, according to Jeal’s biography, Stanley. Nevertheless, the couple agreed to marry before he departed for what he said would be a two-year journey.

Months later, when Stanley wrote to inform her that his trip might be closer to three years, he received a scathing reply. “And suppose you are not home then, where will you be?” Pike wrote. “Dead or still seeking the Nile?”

Jeal reports that the “crushing” sense of disappointment Stanley felt from Pike’s ultimate rejection made the immense fame that followed later seem “hollow and absurd.” He channeled his loneliness into a frenzy of writing, producing a 1,092-page two-volume book about his African expedition in just eighty days.

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