Introduction
One equal temper of
heroic hearts,
Made weak by time
and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek,
to find, and not to yield.
From Ulysses,
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
About this Book
In selecting my particular adventurers, I have
had to find limits. The first has been to confine my selection to men and women
who are (at least loosely), British and, even then, service and adoption have
sometimes, as with Krystyna Skarbek-Granville (Christine Granville), taken the
place of birth, and I have chosen to ignore such things as competing national
claims for Tenzing Norgay. The second limit that I have set myself is generally
to exclude heroic adventurers in battle, simply because there is (rightly), so
much already written about them, but I have found place for certain
(representative) female secret agents of the Second World War, whose acts (in
voluntary service, beyond the call of simple duty), surely took them out of the
arena of straight-forward battle and into the realm of the most individual and
courageous adventure. They were, moreover, the first modern, female British
warriors, not just on the front line
but behind it on the enemy’s own
turf, long, long before any calls on the grounds of ‘sex equality’ put modern
women into battle.
The result of my decisions remains to be
judged but the overall objective has been to renew interest in the lives of
some of our real heroes and heroines, as representative of the many others that
there are; in an age in which contemporary sporting and pop art ‘heroes’
dominate the news and provide the only readily evident ‘inspiration’, and also
an age in which addiction to the computer screen nearly robs the young of
memories and dreams of the high adventure; of which ripping yarns are made.
The third limit is a limit of time: this
speaks for itself; otherwise how would Drake and Raleigh, Clive of India, General
Woolf and Captain Cook not have found their places? There have to be such
limits. The final limit has been to exclude those who are widely famed already:
what more is there to say, in a book of this size, of General Gordon or Dr
David Livingstone; of Charles Darwin; of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Captain
Laurence Oates; of Ernest Shackleton; of T E ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, even though
what has been said should never be forgotten? Moreover, although Sir Edmund
Hillary is acknowledged as the first conqueror of Mount Everest; Tenzing Norgay
was there with him and what of George Mallory who, sometime before, had died,
either going up or coming down?
I also cover the adventurous spirit in
different degrees, just because it exists in different degrees: Sir Richard
Burton’s daring in making the Hajj pilgrimage is of quite a different kind from
Thomas Lipton’s gentler adventures, in the nature of trade, in seeking out
sources of, and markets for, tea. Yet each made a memorable contribution to the
world.
As will be seen, some of my subjects were
very, very good; some of them were very, very bad; some, as I have come to know
them better, I like very much and some I do not like at all; yet they all share
the characteristics of: originality; a sense of self-determination, unfettered
by the diktats of Tin-Hitlers; a thirst for living; perseverance and
persistence, even defiance; many of them showed bravery, some of them to a
truly exceptional degree and, I think, they all lived without the wish to have
lived more quietly. In short, they shared a rage for life and yet also managed
to see beyond themselves and the times in which they lived.
To those who might accuse me of having been at
all obscure, in my choices, I just plead that my purpose has been to bring back
into ready remembrance certain men and women, many of them not widely fêted now, who had great impact upon the accrual of knowledge of: other
peoples, their customs, their traditions and their countries; or who have
striven, often against various obstacles (including the odds), to promote exploration
and trade and, sometimes, even to preserve life and liberty for others. To the
erudite, who might say that I shed little new light, I plead, in mitigation of
sentence, that my principal purpose has been to remind of worthy lives that
might still stir our blood; and to bring them together, as representatives of
our adventurous people, in one handy volume.
Finally,
for the avoidance of doubt, the initials ‘RGS’ stand for ‘Royal Geographical
Society’, and the initials ‘SOE’ stand for ‘Special Operations Executive’,
which is first described in the entry for Krystyna Skarbek-Granville.And here is the link to Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-British-Adventurers-Nicholas-Storey/dp/1844681300/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337273232&sr=8-1
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