Richard Halliburton and the Voyage of the Sea Dragon
Autor Gerald Maxen Limba Engleză Hardback – 5 oct 2020
Set against the backdrop of a China devastated by invading Japanese armies and the storm clouds of world war gathering in Europe, Halliburton and a crew of fourteen set out to build and sail the Sea Dragon—a junk or ancient sailing ship—from Hong Kong to San Francisco for the Golden Gate International Exposition. After battling through crew conflicts and frequent delays, the Sea Dragon set sail on March 4, 1939. Three weeks after embarking, the ship encountered a typhoon and disappeared without a trace.
Richly enhanced with historic photographs, Richard Halliburton and the Voyage of the Sea Dragon follows the dramatic arc of this ill-fated expedition in fine detail. Gerry Max artfully unpacks the tensions between Halliburton and his captain, John Wenlock Welch (owing much to Welch’s homophobia and Halliburton’s unconcealed homosexuality). And while Max naturally explores the trials and tribulations of preparing, constructing, and finally launching the Sea Dragon, he also punctuates the story with the invasion of China by the Japanese, as Halliburton and his letters home reveal an excellent wartime reporter. Max mines these documents, many of which have only recently come to light, as well as additional letters from Halliburton and his crew to family and friends, photographs, films, and tape recordings, to paint an intricate portrait of Halliburton’s final expedition from inception to tragic end.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781621905769
ISBN-10: 1621905764
Pagini: 496
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 38 mm
Greutate: 0.85 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN-10: 1621905764
Pagini: 496
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 38 mm
Greutate: 0.85 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
Notă biografică
GERRY MAX has taught a number of humanities-related courses at both Lakeland College and the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Horizon Chasers: The Lives and Adventures of Richard Halliburton and Paul Mooney.
Extras
In the spring of 1939, just as World War II was about to begin, Richard Halliburton and a crew of fourteen attempted to sail a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, across the Pacific from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Two thousand miles out to sea, the little ship ran into a powerful storm and perished; there were no survivors, and no wreckage was found. Besides dramatizing a confrontation with one of man’s worst fears—death by drowning—the event showed that rogue adventurers, as in the classic days of ocean voyaging, could still sail off the edge of the earth and never be heard from again. News of the disappearance swiftly reached America. To Halliburton’s many fans, it seemed an unfortunate yet fitting end for a soldier of fortune who had visited every corner of the globe and by his often reckless daring had cheated death so many times.
What was called the Sea Dragon Expedition had failed. The whole project was an artificial concoction, the caprice of one man; it didn’t have to be done, nor was its conception prompted by historical necessity. Still, Halliburton never publicly doubted the merits of what would be the crowning achievement of his life. Large-scale endeavors featuring mergers fascinated him. In envisioning not many nations but one borderless Pangaea, the barriers separating lands and peoples seemed to him superficial. His sailing a Chinese junk across the Pacific would symbolically unite two continents and bridge what cultural and political divides existed between them. Although he lived in the pre-jet age, when travel to distant locales was tedious, slow, and often over water, Halliburton moved faster than the wire services that reported his feats. He also lived in a pre-digital age when television was just emerging, and radio was the main medium of communication. Curious about new trends in technology, he would have thought the noiseless portable typewriter or hand-held walkietalkie “cool,” but suborbital space flights and space tourism were the stuff of dreams. His books, once long out of print, have been reissued as a generation of readers has discovered him to be not only amusing but also a worthy topic of inquiry and a pleasant escort into a bygone era. As interest in Halliburton grows, the search for materials related to his life and times has intensified. Documents buried in library archives or kept in private hands—some items repressed, others dislocated—have surfaced. Adding significantly to the record is the emergence of lost or buried letters, news clippings, newsreels, scrapbooks, sound recordings, photographs, and witness testimonials.
Several biographies of Halliburton have appeared since the publication in 1965 of Jonathan Root’s Halliburton—The Magnificent Myth. All ably orient the reader to the life and times of their subject and vividly portray Halliburton himself. In these works, the Sea Dragon Expedition is offered as a last chapter in Halliburton’s life, and the emergence of the craft as a personality in itself becomes a secondary player in the chapter. Little space is devoted to the Golden Gate International Exposition, even less space to the “American book” Halliburton intended to write. Sino-American relationships have served chiefly as a colorful backdrop to the Sea Dragon drama, while Hong Kong’s role in these relationships has been seen as an incidental part of the Halliburton story and not the Asian story. For a fuller picture both stories need to be integrated with Hong Kong receiving enhanced focus. Usually noted are the tensions that arose among some crew members over the crossing’s achievability in a Chinese junk—better built and equipped ships had, after all, met disaster; not noted, however, are the evening debaucheries of these same crew members, report of which Halliburton himself suppressed. The members of the crew, at any rate, seldom saw eye to eye, and brought into close proximity—and to a city about to be besieged—these strangers in a strange land were bound to clash.
Besides extended treatment of these tensions, scant coverage is generally given to the ever-widening rift between the Sea Dragon’s captain, John Wenlock Welch, and Halliburton with Welch often appearing the brute and Halliburton the tormented angel. Theirs was an uneasy partnership. Out of boredom and by nature, Welch was designing, but not preface repulsive. A case could be made that he was a peeping Tom, but generally he minded his own business. A taskmaster, he was willing to be hated if harsh measures meant a common good. Halliburton was mild-mannered, poetic, childlike. A doting mother’s boy, he was a devout father’s son. Although he often wandered far from home, he never wandered far from his knowing their love for him, and though, in time, he learned to live without their guidance, he never overcame a need for their approval. To those who met the acclaimed travel writer, neither his manner nor his speech matched his essentially manly public image. Unknown was his homosexuality and preference for same-sex relationships. Until well-committed to the Sea Dragon Expedition, Welch had only a faint inkling from hearsay that this was the case. Once his suspicions were sealed, he couldn’t let the matter rest and soon he concluded that Halliburton was a “fairy.” If Halliburton was, as he himself claimed, a “bachelor . . . with no sons of his own,” Welch saw him as a deviant who sought the company only of young men. In his correspondence, he referred to Halliburton as “the gorgeous one,” “the Fairy queen,” and “the sweet one,” persistently dismissing him as an effeminate fop. Behind his back he called him “Hallidear” and “Halliburger” and used the pronouns “she” or “her” to further belittle his manhood. How Halliburton was able to ignore Welch’s innuendos is a point of wonder. Halliburton saw at once that Welch was a conventional seaman who had been given an unconventional command where conventional nautical wisdom didn’t apply. Tough-minded and paternal, he also had to be soft-hearted and have a touch of the poet. Because Halliburton is the central figure in any story by and about Richard Halliburton, it is easy to make Welch out to be the heavy—an autocratic, unbending man who was always wrong and a dream-killer who was consistently mean. Yet, to offer just one example that opposes the view, Welch’s kindly reappraisal of crew member Paul Mooney, whom he called “a decent chap,” proved him a man of fair play. He had the courage of his convictions, narrow though these convictions often were. To his dubious credit, Welch did not allow his prejudices to detract from his opinion that Mooney was the hardest worker of the crew or that Halliburton was at least determined in his quest. Still, while he liked Mooney somewhat, he merely tolerated Halliburton.
Although challenged by vexing and often tantalizing gaps in its short history, the Sea Dragon Expedition is basically well documented. The “Log of the Sea Dragon,” a series of dispatches, with photo insets, concerning Halliburton’s and the crew’s last days in China, appeared in the San Francisco News and other syndicated newspapers from 1938 to 1939. Nearly duplicate companion pieces from “Letters from the Sea Dragon” were sent independently to paid subscribers. Of note, the articles in the “Log” were published weeks after the events they described, while the “Letters” to subscribers reported events within days of their occurrence. Chronological vagueness characterizes the accounts, which occasionally conflate a series of events occurring over several days, weeks, or even months into a single event. Despite this, the reports are masterpieces of pictorial realism. Several of them could join the ranks of articles produced by war correspondents Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, and Floyd Gibbons, pivotal figures “associated with the development of sensational news-reporting.” Highly readable, these pieces were meant to feed the public’s appetite for the exotic East, Halliburton’s latest adventures, and, now, countries engaged in a bloody war. As records of history in the making, they are often momentous. In one instance Halliburton watched events unfold from his hotel rooftop during a nearby air raid attack, perhaps recalling in our own time CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer on the rooftop of the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad during the First Gulf War.
The dispatches plainly form the public record of Halliburton’s last adventure. The three main bodies of personal letters—those of Halliburton, Welch, and Mooney, while they often agree, more often each contains details omitted by the others, which must lead to the conclusion that there are some details their authors may very well have overlooked. In the final analysis, one hopes that black and white, and the gray between them, comfortably co-exist. Besides write letters, Paul Mooney kept notebooks; deplorably, however, these are lost. Added to the major epistolary sources are the recollections, many long after-the-fact or incidental, of the Sea Dragon’s crew. Aspiring writer George Barstow wrote letters home and may also have left a notebook. Survivors John Potter and Gordon Torrey left written and tape-recorded accounts of their time in Hong Kong. Various other crew members wrote letters home as well. A couple films and numerous photographs exist, and we know from letters and surviving pictures that Welch, radioman George Petrich, Mooney, and Barstow snapped pictures. While photos taken by Mooney, Chase, and Potter exist in part, those taken by Barstow, Petrich, and Welch so far remain undiscovered. Two sides to a story put together do not always equal a truthful whole, as is the case with the testimonies of crewmen Potter and Gordon. Their accounts, nonetheless, provide lively details and reflections about Halliburton’s final days not found in the other major sources. Wrote Halliburton in The Royal Road to Romance, “There is so much material for psychologists in the association of thought and events. How much does thought influence events? How much does fear of danger encourage it, or ignorance of danger discourage?” Although he never meant to deceive, Halliburton, until his last fling as a war correspondent—an accidental one, characteristically wrote of himself in glowing terms, adding just enough winsome self-deprecation to give his narratives a measure of reality. Although he never meant to deceive, Halliburton garbed events in the glitter of romance until his last fling as an accidental war correspondent. That he wanted to write an “autobiography” was itself a confession that there was a truth to him which neither his books nor lectures conveyed. While one could wish that that autobiography existed, it is intended that the following text be in general agreement with existing sources, balance opposing views, and faithfully recreate the events and persons that form their context.
While the sources for Halliburton’s last days are often contradictory, partial and incomplete, those examining the adventurer image he cultivated over twenty years are of a fixed theme, telling us that he was the paragon of the well-traveled man, a romantic imbued with a sense of wonder. At the height of his fame, Halliburton in fact boasted that he would one day be remembered as the most traveled man in history. Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair, possibly the last person to speak to him before he sailed off, called him “the most charming, the most successful, and in some ways the least understood” of the day’s many travel writers. Sea Dragon crew member John Potter, who “watched most of the building of the junk,” noted Halliburton’s “humane side” as well as his “unique ability to see the commonplace as provocative and interesting.” Fellow adventurer Carveth Wells also paid him high tribute: “Richard Halliburton was a most extraordinary personality,” he wrote, “charming, arrogant, witty, extraordinarily impertinent, eccentric and courageous. He was full of the most original and fantastic ideas that, owing to his substantial income from books and lectures, he was able to carry out despite not infrequent official opposition.” Although Halliburton earned acclaim from others, and, for the sake of livelihood, welcomed it, he was himself humble and demure, perhaps coyly so. At one of his lectures, to illustrate, the event coordinator introduced him by enumerating his many accomplishments. Trotting up to the stage, Halliburton smiled, then said, “I’m none of those things. I’m just a little boy playing Indian.”
What was called the Sea Dragon Expedition had failed. The whole project was an artificial concoction, the caprice of one man; it didn’t have to be done, nor was its conception prompted by historical necessity. Still, Halliburton never publicly doubted the merits of what would be the crowning achievement of his life. Large-scale endeavors featuring mergers fascinated him. In envisioning not many nations but one borderless Pangaea, the barriers separating lands and peoples seemed to him superficial. His sailing a Chinese junk across the Pacific would symbolically unite two continents and bridge what cultural and political divides existed between them. Although he lived in the pre-jet age, when travel to distant locales was tedious, slow, and often over water, Halliburton moved faster than the wire services that reported his feats. He also lived in a pre-digital age when television was just emerging, and radio was the main medium of communication. Curious about new trends in technology, he would have thought the noiseless portable typewriter or hand-held walkietalkie “cool,” but suborbital space flights and space tourism were the stuff of dreams. His books, once long out of print, have been reissued as a generation of readers has discovered him to be not only amusing but also a worthy topic of inquiry and a pleasant escort into a bygone era. As interest in Halliburton grows, the search for materials related to his life and times has intensified. Documents buried in library archives or kept in private hands—some items repressed, others dislocated—have surfaced. Adding significantly to the record is the emergence of lost or buried letters, news clippings, newsreels, scrapbooks, sound recordings, photographs, and witness testimonials.
Several biographies of Halliburton have appeared since the publication in 1965 of Jonathan Root’s Halliburton—The Magnificent Myth. All ably orient the reader to the life and times of their subject and vividly portray Halliburton himself. In these works, the Sea Dragon Expedition is offered as a last chapter in Halliburton’s life, and the emergence of the craft as a personality in itself becomes a secondary player in the chapter. Little space is devoted to the Golden Gate International Exposition, even less space to the “American book” Halliburton intended to write. Sino-American relationships have served chiefly as a colorful backdrop to the Sea Dragon drama, while Hong Kong’s role in these relationships has been seen as an incidental part of the Halliburton story and not the Asian story. For a fuller picture both stories need to be integrated with Hong Kong receiving enhanced focus. Usually noted are the tensions that arose among some crew members over the crossing’s achievability in a Chinese junk—better built and equipped ships had, after all, met disaster; not noted, however, are the evening debaucheries of these same crew members, report of which Halliburton himself suppressed. The members of the crew, at any rate, seldom saw eye to eye, and brought into close proximity—and to a city about to be besieged—these strangers in a strange land were bound to clash.
Besides extended treatment of these tensions, scant coverage is generally given to the ever-widening rift between the Sea Dragon’s captain, John Wenlock Welch, and Halliburton with Welch often appearing the brute and Halliburton the tormented angel. Theirs was an uneasy partnership. Out of boredom and by nature, Welch was designing, but not preface repulsive. A case could be made that he was a peeping Tom, but generally he minded his own business. A taskmaster, he was willing to be hated if harsh measures meant a common good. Halliburton was mild-mannered, poetic, childlike. A doting mother’s boy, he was a devout father’s son. Although he often wandered far from home, he never wandered far from his knowing their love for him, and though, in time, he learned to live without their guidance, he never overcame a need for their approval. To those who met the acclaimed travel writer, neither his manner nor his speech matched his essentially manly public image. Unknown was his homosexuality and preference for same-sex relationships. Until well-committed to the Sea Dragon Expedition, Welch had only a faint inkling from hearsay that this was the case. Once his suspicions were sealed, he couldn’t let the matter rest and soon he concluded that Halliburton was a “fairy.” If Halliburton was, as he himself claimed, a “bachelor . . . with no sons of his own,” Welch saw him as a deviant who sought the company only of young men. In his correspondence, he referred to Halliburton as “the gorgeous one,” “the Fairy queen,” and “the sweet one,” persistently dismissing him as an effeminate fop. Behind his back he called him “Hallidear” and “Halliburger” and used the pronouns “she” or “her” to further belittle his manhood. How Halliburton was able to ignore Welch’s innuendos is a point of wonder. Halliburton saw at once that Welch was a conventional seaman who had been given an unconventional command where conventional nautical wisdom didn’t apply. Tough-minded and paternal, he also had to be soft-hearted and have a touch of the poet. Because Halliburton is the central figure in any story by and about Richard Halliburton, it is easy to make Welch out to be the heavy—an autocratic, unbending man who was always wrong and a dream-killer who was consistently mean. Yet, to offer just one example that opposes the view, Welch’s kindly reappraisal of crew member Paul Mooney, whom he called “a decent chap,” proved him a man of fair play. He had the courage of his convictions, narrow though these convictions often were. To his dubious credit, Welch did not allow his prejudices to detract from his opinion that Mooney was the hardest worker of the crew or that Halliburton was at least determined in his quest. Still, while he liked Mooney somewhat, he merely tolerated Halliburton.
Although challenged by vexing and often tantalizing gaps in its short history, the Sea Dragon Expedition is basically well documented. The “Log of the Sea Dragon,” a series of dispatches, with photo insets, concerning Halliburton’s and the crew’s last days in China, appeared in the San Francisco News and other syndicated newspapers from 1938 to 1939. Nearly duplicate companion pieces from “Letters from the Sea Dragon” were sent independently to paid subscribers. Of note, the articles in the “Log” were published weeks after the events they described, while the “Letters” to subscribers reported events within days of their occurrence. Chronological vagueness characterizes the accounts, which occasionally conflate a series of events occurring over several days, weeks, or even months into a single event. Despite this, the reports are masterpieces of pictorial realism. Several of them could join the ranks of articles produced by war correspondents Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, and Floyd Gibbons, pivotal figures “associated with the development of sensational news-reporting.” Highly readable, these pieces were meant to feed the public’s appetite for the exotic East, Halliburton’s latest adventures, and, now, countries engaged in a bloody war. As records of history in the making, they are often momentous. In one instance Halliburton watched events unfold from his hotel rooftop during a nearby air raid attack, perhaps recalling in our own time CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer on the rooftop of the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad during the First Gulf War.
The dispatches plainly form the public record of Halliburton’s last adventure. The three main bodies of personal letters—those of Halliburton, Welch, and Mooney, while they often agree, more often each contains details omitted by the others, which must lead to the conclusion that there are some details their authors may very well have overlooked. In the final analysis, one hopes that black and white, and the gray between them, comfortably co-exist. Besides write letters, Paul Mooney kept notebooks; deplorably, however, these are lost. Added to the major epistolary sources are the recollections, many long after-the-fact or incidental, of the Sea Dragon’s crew. Aspiring writer George Barstow wrote letters home and may also have left a notebook. Survivors John Potter and Gordon Torrey left written and tape-recorded accounts of their time in Hong Kong. Various other crew members wrote letters home as well. A couple films and numerous photographs exist, and we know from letters and surviving pictures that Welch, radioman George Petrich, Mooney, and Barstow snapped pictures. While photos taken by Mooney, Chase, and Potter exist in part, those taken by Barstow, Petrich, and Welch so far remain undiscovered. Two sides to a story put together do not always equal a truthful whole, as is the case with the testimonies of crewmen Potter and Gordon. Their accounts, nonetheless, provide lively details and reflections about Halliburton’s final days not found in the other major sources. Wrote Halliburton in The Royal Road to Romance, “There is so much material for psychologists in the association of thought and events. How much does thought influence events? How much does fear of danger encourage it, or ignorance of danger discourage?” Although he never meant to deceive, Halliburton, until his last fling as a war correspondent—an accidental one, characteristically wrote of himself in glowing terms, adding just enough winsome self-deprecation to give his narratives a measure of reality. Although he never meant to deceive, Halliburton garbed events in the glitter of romance until his last fling as an accidental war correspondent. That he wanted to write an “autobiography” was itself a confession that there was a truth to him which neither his books nor lectures conveyed. While one could wish that that autobiography existed, it is intended that the following text be in general agreement with existing sources, balance opposing views, and faithfully recreate the events and persons that form their context.
While the sources for Halliburton’s last days are often contradictory, partial and incomplete, those examining the adventurer image he cultivated over twenty years are of a fixed theme, telling us that he was the paragon of the well-traveled man, a romantic imbued with a sense of wonder. At the height of his fame, Halliburton in fact boasted that he would one day be remembered as the most traveled man in history. Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair, possibly the last person to speak to him before he sailed off, called him “the most charming, the most successful, and in some ways the least understood” of the day’s many travel writers. Sea Dragon crew member John Potter, who “watched most of the building of the junk,” noted Halliburton’s “humane side” as well as his “unique ability to see the commonplace as provocative and interesting.” Fellow adventurer Carveth Wells also paid him high tribute: “Richard Halliburton was a most extraordinary personality,” he wrote, “charming, arrogant, witty, extraordinarily impertinent, eccentric and courageous. He was full of the most original and fantastic ideas that, owing to his substantial income from books and lectures, he was able to carry out despite not infrequent official opposition.” Although Halliburton earned acclaim from others, and, for the sake of livelihood, welcomed it, he was himself humble and demure, perhaps coyly so. At one of his lectures, to illustrate, the event coordinator introduced him by enumerating his many accomplishments. Trotting up to the stage, Halliburton smiled, then said, “I’m none of those things. I’m just a little boy playing Indian.”