The Blind Traveller
1–20–17, Lefko
Lieutenant James Holman is one of the OG travel legends. He’s the traveling gentleman we desperately need, but don’t deserve. Over the course of his life he racked up over a quarter million miles, all while wearing his Royal Navy uniform and brandishing his trusty metal-tipped cane, because *drumroll please* he was blind. (bonus FF: that makes his navy uniform the most well-travelled article of clothing in history). To put that into perspective, 250,000 miles is roughly 10 times around the equator, or one trip to the moon, while walking. I bet this dude told the best stories (turns out he did…they became best sellers).
But I’m getting ahead of myself…who really was James Holman?
Jamie H was born in 1786 and joined the British Royal Navy by the naive age of 12. He spent his days on the ships traversing the Atlantic right up until the War of 1812, when he began suffering from what seems to have been an acute form of rheumatism (at the time they termed it “flying gout” — a meaningless catchall term doctors used to describe similar situations when they had no idea what was going on. gg). The tremendous weather fluctuations from Nova Scotia to the caribbean while patrolling, coupled with the poor dietary conditions only made his condition worse, which eventually deteriorated to his eyes. Over time it felt like daggers getting dragged through his corneas until he couldn’t see at all. By the age of 25 Jolman was forced to retire, but was fortunate to receive a cushy post as a Naval Knight at Windsor Castle. In theory his post was coast AF, all he had to was be at the castle and attend chapel twice a day. In practice, it was an existential boredom like no other. Lest we forget, he couldn’t see, so he quickly became unbelievably bored, and his lack of stimulation worsened his condition.
Claiming that it would improve his health (to be fair, it did help his health and spirits tremendously to be actively traveling), castle doctors were able to secure the guards’ blessing for James to go on a “short” adventure (knights were only technically allowed 10 days of travel per year). Holman’s meager salary couldn’t quite afford the extravagant cruise that the docs had in mind, so he decided to yolo it on his own and prance around France for the year. The guards weren’t too happy with Holman well overstaying his leave, but he quickly deteriorated upon his return to Windsor. Within no time, he was traveling again. Naturally, these trips quickly escalated from short trips to multi-year journeys. He took so many trips that it would take too long to chronicle here, but I encourage you to read the full stories here.
Some of my favorite anecdotes from these trips are how he managed to travel so cheaply. He had some basic tricks, but his trusty move was to barter amusement for travel. He would often sail free with the crew in exchange for his storytelling, like Homer of old. He would also entertain the crew with his courage and immunity to vertigo (remember he couldn’t see anything, so his sense of balance was keen but not sensitive to incongruencies that happen when your eyes can also see the world). Holman would quickly hand his cane to someone, remove his coat, and climb up the rigging of the mainmast to “ride the ship like a bucking bronco” — apparently this is called skylarking, and it quickly demonstrated that Holman wasn’t a wimp.
He also liked to tell the story of his 1,400 mile journey with his deaf Navy pal. Indeed, they were the butt of a joke more than once. Imagine a blind and deaf dude trying to travel the world? I surely couldn’t do it, but evidently they were up to the challenge. They met up in Naples and traveled through Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands.
My favorite one of his travel stories actually happened immediately before the blind-deaf duo of debauchery. In Rome, James climbed to the inside dome of St. Peter’s basilica and almost exited a window to explore the roof. From there, he hiked to the top of Mount Vesuvius…while it was erupting (he was definitely the first blind person to summit). Apparently he got so close to the active crater that he burned his walking stick and melted his shoes.
Another way he subsidized his nut[ty trips] was by writing travel books. He would ramble from soy sauce recipes on one page to kangaroo hunting strategies on the next, and they quickly became best sellers. By the time they hit the shelves, Holman was off again on his next adventure.
During another one of the earlier trips, James decided he would cross Siberia (who wouldn’t?). He packed his bags with as many non-perishables as he could find, found a decent guide, and hopped in a wooden cart. Imagine Siberia in the 18th century, though. The roads were so bad that it was more comfortable for James to hop out of the cart and walk alongside, tugged ever forward by a string attached to the cart. He made it sooooo close to the Pacific, to the capital city of Irkutsk in Eastern Siberia, and was immediately arrested and sent back as a spy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On other trips he “chased down slave traders; mapped the Australian Outback; negotiated with headhunters; dodged forest fires; traveled into war zones; and crossed the indian ocean on a ship carrying a cargo of sugar and champagne…he earned a reputation as quite the ladies man (the ladies found it rather sensual that he ‘felt’ their appearance so literally) and he did good enough scientific work (on the drifting of seeds between islands) to get elected to the Royal Society and cited by Charles Darwin” (Sweet jesus what a baller. Also, how do you takes notes about anything related to seeds without seeing them?)
Anyway, I do want to round this FF out with a bit of the neuroscience that explains how Holman made this possible. When he went blind at such a young age, the regions of his brain that were usually used for vision became unused territory, ripe for annexation by other nearby overactive areas (this is called neural plasticity). You know how they say that blind or deaf people have heightened senses elsewhere? That’s true. Their other senses take over the unused space and get far more sensitive. That’s what happened with Holman. His hearing improved to the point that he could essentially echolocate and use that strategy to walk.
Notably, modern scientists have used a similar strategy to help people regain lost senses. That is, they manage to co-opt the natural use of one sense to regain an old one. For example, Paul Bach-y-Rita and his team devoted their careers to neuroprostheses (and this is a topic for an entire other FF, but I’m going to give a quick example here), and one of their great innovations was restoring “sight” to a blind man. The general design was a camera affixed to glasses which translated the image to a digital signal that then stimulated a stimulator patch on the man’s tongue — sort of like the camera receive the data from the world and projected it onto a TV screen, only now the TV was a man’s tongue and the pixels were slight electrical shocks. Within weeks the man began to “see” with his tongue. Wilder yet, they scanned his brain and the areas most active when “seeing?” His vision areas.
The team has gone on to apply this use of neural plasticity in other areas too, from balance to sexual rehabilitation. Anyway, neural prostheses are a huge deal and they’re only going to get better in the future. I’ll learn y’all some more at a later date.
Notably absent from his travels? Detroit. Also, Cleveland. There’s still hope for you to out-travel him, @@@SecretaryOfMeht.
Sources:
“The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons…”
