My wedding day!

‘My wedding day! How simple it is to say and how hard to realize that I am married, no longer a young lady with nothing to think of but myself and nothing to do.’ This is a diary entry by Kate Chopin, an American short story writer of the late 19th century who was born 170 years ago today. Though some of her literary themes were controversial in their day, she is now considered a forerunner of 20th-century feminist authors. Only two of her diaries survive - one from her youth through to the end of her honeymoon, and one from the year 1894.

Catherine (Kate) O’Flaherty was born on 8 February 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas, had immigrated from Ireland, and her mother, Eliza Faris (Thomas’s second wife) was of French heritage. Kate was schooled at the Academy of the Sacred Hearts, graduating in 1868. In 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, settling with him in his home town of New Orleans, and having six children. Oscar Chopin’s business failed in 1879, and the family went to live in Cloutierville, some 200 miles northwest of New Orleans, where he managed several small plantations and a general store. He died three years later, leaving Kate with huge debts. She tried to sustain the business, and eventually sold it before returning with her children to St Louis. Two years later, her mother died, and she was left struggling with depression.

A family doctor and friend suggested writing as a therapy for Kate, and by the early 1890s, she was contributing a variety of articles and stories for local periodicals. Many of these were about the Creole and Cajun people she observed around her. In 1899, she published a novel, The Awakening, which achieved a few favourable reviews but which was also vilified for its treatment of female sexuality and interracial marriage. Chopin, discouraged by this response, returned to short story writing, for example Désirée’s Baby and Madame Celestin’s Divorce. She died in 1904. Although The Awakening remained out of print for many years, it was rediscovered in the 1970s, and is now considered an ‘important early work of the South’ (see Wikipedia). She, herself, has become widely recognised as a forerunner of American feminist literature. Further information is also available from the Kate Chopin International Society, American Literature, Missouri Encyclopedia, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Some of her Chopin’s diary material was first published in Per Seyersted’s A Kate Chopin Miscellany (Northwestern State University, 1979), but a much more comprehensive collection of her previously unpublished writings were put together in 1998 by both Seyersted and Emily Toth as Kate Chopin’s Private Papers (Indiana University Press). Some pages of the latter are available to view on Googlebooks. According to this, only one diary - for 1894 - has survived from her adult years (discovered by her grandson, Robert Hattersley, in the 1960s), but there is also her Commonplace Book which is said to have much in common with the 1894 diary. The Commonplace Book was started when she was just 16, and used for copying out passages of literature that she admired, and for her own early attempts at literature. However, increasingly, it became a depository for her thoughts, serving as a diary through her honeymoon in Europe. Here are several extracts from the Commonplace Book, and one longer one from the 1894 diary.

9 June 1870
‘My wedding day! How simple it is to say and how hard to realize that I am married, no longer a young lady with nothing to think of but myself and nothing to do. We went to holy Communion this morning, my mother with us, and it gave me a double happiness to see so many of my friends at mass for I knew they prayed for me on this happiest day of my life. The whole day seems now like a dream to me; how I awoke early in the morning before the household was stirring and looked out of the window to see whether the sun would shine or not; how I went to mass and could not read the prayers in my book; afterwards how I dressed for my marriage - went to church and found myself married before I could think what I was doing. What kissing of old and young! I never expect to receive as many embraces during the remainder of my life. Oscar has since confessed that he did not know it was customary to kiss and that he conferred that favor on only a very few - I will have to make a most sacred apology for him when I get home. It was very painful to leave my mother and all at home; and it was only at starting that I discovered how much I would miss them and how much I would be missed. We meet several acquaintances on the cars who congratulated us very extensively, and who could not be brought to realize that they must call me Mrs Chopin and not Miss Katy. They joined us however in consuming a few champagne bottles that had escaped the dire destruction of their companions to meet with a more honorable consummation by the bride and groom.’

27 July 1870
‘Left Stuttgart this morning - arriving at Ulm in two hours time; having barely time to dine & visit the handsome Cathedral and fine fortifications, and left for Friedrickshafen which we reached late at night. Took lodgings for a nights rest, and started early in the morning for Constanz. We are anxious to get into Switzerland.’

28 July 1870
‘Took the boat at 10 this morning - day cloudy - but I was glad we had no sun. The “blue lake of Constanz” looked bluer than ever through the mist. Just as we were starting out, a child playing near the boat, fell in the water: we had not time to wait & see if he was rescued, but I fear not as he must have been caught in some of the numerous net work of wooden piles. The scenery was exquisite along the shore, and the hour glided away only too fast.

At Constanz
We set out immediately to “see the town;” taking in the beautiful church of St. Stephens, which belongs to the severe gothic order; saw some beautiful paintings not the less lovely for being new, and then went to the Cathedral - ascending some 5000000 steps (more or less) to reach the tower, but were repaid for our fatigue by the view. I should fancy such scenery - such a beautiful side of nature, would influence these people only for good deeds. Left Constaz at 4 1/2, reaching Schaufhausen at a 7.

Schaufhausen.
The Blue bien Hotel; where we have taken quarters seems to be entirely at our disposal: the war having frightened off all visitors. I trust the landlord will not attempt to make his accounts balance at our expense. We command a charming view of the Rhein falls (the largest in Europe) and will remain here some time, if only our impatient spirits permit.’

29 July 1870
‘Rain! All the day rain. So we could not venture out, and have amused ourselves all day, making mental photographes of the falls.’

22 May 1894
‘I have finished a story of 4800 words and called it “Lilacs." I cannot recall what suggested it. If the story had been written after my visit of last Sunday to the convent, I would not have to seek the impulse far. Those nuns seem to retain or gain a certain beauty with their advancing years which we women in the world are strangers to. The unchanging form of their garments through years and years seems to impart a distinct character to their bodily movements. Liza’s face held a peculiar fascination for me as I sat looking into it enframed in its white rushing. It is more than twenty years since I last saw her; but in less than twenty minutes those twenty years had vanished and she was the Liza of our school days. The same narrow, happy grey eyes with their swollen upper lids; the same delicious upward curves to the corners of her pretty mouth. No little vexatious wrinkles anywhere. Only a few good strong lines giving a touch of character that the younger Liza lacked perhaps. The conditions under which these women live are such as keep them young and fresh in heart and in visage. One day - usually one hey-day of youth they kneel before the altar of a God whom they have learned to worship, and they give themselves wholly - body and spirit into his keeping. They have only to remain faithful through the years, these modern Psyches, to the lover who lavishes all his precious gifts upon them in the darkness - the most precious of which is perpetual youth. I wonder what Liza thought as she looked into my face. I know she was remembering my pink cheeks of more than twenty years ago and my brown hair and innocent young face. I do not know whether she could see that I had loved - lovers who were not divine - and hated and suffered and been glad. She could see, no doubt the stamp which a thousand things had left upon my face, but she could not read it. She, with her lover in the dark. He has not anointed her eyes for perfect vision. She does not need it - in the dark. When we came away, my friend who had gone with me said: “Would you not give anything to have her vocation and happy life!” There was a long beaten path spreading before us; the grass grew along its edges and the branches of trees in their thick rich May garb hung over the path like an arbor, making a long vista that ended in a green blur. An old man - a plain old man leaning on a cane was walking down the path holding a small child by the hand and a little dog was trotting beside them. “I would rather be that dog” I answered her. I know she was disgusted and took it for irreverence and I did not take the trouble to explain that this was a little picture of life and that what we had left was a phantasmagoria.

This is Jean’s birthday - twenty-three years old today! How curiously the past effaces itself for me! I sometimes regret that it is so; for there must be a certain pleasure in retrospection. I cannot live through yesterday or tomorrow. It is why the dead in their character of dead and association with the grave have no hold on me. I cannot connect my mother or husband or any of those I have lots with those mounds of earth out at Calvary Cemetery. I cannot visit graves and stand contemplating them as some people do, and seem to love to do. If it were possible for my husband and my mother to come back to earth, I feel that I would unhesitatingly give up every thing that has come into my life since they left it and join my existence again with theirs. To do that, I would have to forget the past ten years of my growth - my real growth. But I would take back a little wisdom with me; it would the spirit of a perfect acquiescence. This is a long way from Jean, 23 years ago. I can remember yet that hot southern day on Magazine street in New Orleans. The noises of the street coming through the open windows; that heaviness with which I dragged myself about; my husband’s and mother’s solicitude; old Alexandrine the quadroon nurse with her high bandana lignin, her hoop-earrings and placid smile; old Doctor Faget; the smell of chloroform, and then waking at 6 in the evening from out of a stupor to see in my mothers arms a little piece of humanity all dressed in white which told me was my little son!. The sensation with which I touched my lips and finger tips to his soft flesh only comes once to a mother. It must be the pure animal sensation; nothing spiritual could be so real - so poignant.’

The rush of what is said

Jack Kerouac, author of one of America’s most celebrated novels, On the Road, died 50 years ago today. He is remembered particularly for that book, but also as the leader and inspiration for a whole generation of Beat writers. Although he left behind a lifetime of diary and notebook entries, only a limited selection has ever been published, and this was not until 35 years after his death. The New York Times said of his diaries that they ‘rescued Kerouac from the cultists’ and ‘secured his admission to the mainstream hall of fame’. In one particularly apposite entry, Kerouac tells his journal, ‘It’s not the words that count, but the rush of what is said.’

Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachussetts, in 1922. He was recruited to be a student at Columbia University, New York, thanks to his football ability, but stopped playing before long because of a broken leg. He proved uninterested in studying, and quit before the year was out, having already decided to be a writer, and having met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. After travelling around for a while, he joined the Navy but was honourably discharged for having a schizoid personality. Many more jobs followed, including merchant seaman, forester, and railman.

Kerouac’s first novel written in the mid-1940s - The Town and the City - was not published until 1950, but received some literary acclaim. However, dissatisfied with literary conventions, Kerouac developed a new style of writing, spontaneous and free flowing, and it was this that formed the basis of his most famous book, On the Road. Written in 1951, the book was first published by Viking Press in 1957, and brought Kerouac almost instant fame. It tells of several frenetic road trips across the US and is considered, Wikipedia says, ‘a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences’.

Further books followed, such as The Dharma Bums based on Kerouac’s experiences with Buddhism and a mountain climbing trip he took with the poet and essayist Gary Snyder. Kerouac married three times: his first marriage was annulled after a year, the second broke up after two months, and the third - to Joan Haverty - did not last much longer. Haverty left Kerouac while pregnant, in 1951, and it was only nearly a decade later, after a blood test, that he acknowledged Jan Kerouac as his daughter. Kerouac’s early death in 1969 - on 21 October - was caused by a lifetime of too much drinking. The internet is awash with information about Kerouac, one of the most iconic of American writers - try Wikipedia, The Beat Museum, Dharma Beat.

Nearly thirty years after Kerouacs’s death, in 1998, The Atlantic Online ran a story about a hoard of unpublished Kerouac material, including ‘a voluminous diary that [Kerouac] started at the age of fourteen’. It said that ‘the great bulk’ of the writings had been turned over to Douglas Brinkley, director of The Eisenhower Center for American Studies and a professor of history at the University of New Orleans, who plans to produce a multi-volume edition of the Kerouac diaries. The article included a short preview by Brinkley himself. Here is one paragraph from that 1998 preview:

‘While gathering material for On the Road, criss-crossing America, Kerouac stopped in the eastern Montana town of Miles City. Soon Kerouac had one of his many epiphanies. ‘In a drugstore window I saw a book on sale - so beautiful!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Yellowstone Red, a story of a man in the early days of the valley, & his tribulations & triumphs. Is this not better reading in Miles City than the Iliad? - their own epic?’ Kerouac was intent on creating his own Yellowstone Red story - but in a modern context, where existential jazz players and lost highway speedsters would be celebrated as the new vagabond saints.’

A full listing of Kerouac’s diaries and notebooks can be found at the website of the New York Public Library. A single volume edition of the Kerouac diaries, edited by Brinkley, was published in 2004 as Windblown World, with the subtitle The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954. Indeed, it focuses only on Kerouac’s first two novels; and there is no sign of any further volumes from Viking or Brinkley.

‘Wherever novelist Jack Kerouac wandered in his peripatetic life,’ Brinkley writes in his introduction, ‘he usually kept a spiral notebook or railroad brakeman’s ledger with him just in case he wanted to scribble down a spontaneous thought or compose a haiku. This was not an unusual trait for a serious writer. Old-time reporters, in fact, never left home without their cigarettes and notebook, and Kerouac was no different. So Allen Ginsberg knew exactly what he was doing when, in 1953, he snapped the elegiac photograph that adorns this book’s cover. There is the handsome Kerouac on an East Village fire escape, gazing out over a sea of New York buildings, brooding like Montgomery Clift under the tenement-filled sky at dusk. With a “Railroad Brakeman Rules Handbook” protruding out of his jacket pocket, this photograph represents the iconic Kerouac; it’s as if he offered Ginsberg his best Jack London-like pose for posterity to ponder.

Unlike that photograph, there is nothing posed about these journal entries, published here for the first time. The printed text of this volume of journals draws on material entered by Kerouac in ten notebooks from June 1947 to February 1954. Though these journals are presented here as a single entity, the editing has involved minor interweaving between one notebook and the next. Kerouac’s doodles, deadend rants, and marginalia have not been included. But I’ve tried to stay as close to the original journals as possible, correcting Kerouac’s punctuation and spelling only when it was necessary for clarity’s sake. I’ve also inserted occasional footnotes, as unobtrusively as possible, in order to provide context when necessary.’

A review by Publisher’s Weekly, on Amazon.com, explains that the ‘selections from a series of spiral notebooks into which the fledgling author constantly poured story ideas and private thoughts offer an intimate perspective on those novels’ development.’ It goes on to say: ‘Anybody who’s ever started a novel will grasp Kerouac’s obsession with his daily word count and the periodic frustration and self-doubt. ‘I know that I should never have been a writer,’ Kerouac laments at one dark moment; in another, he wonders, ‘Why doesn’t God appear to tell me I’m on the right track?’.’

There’s a longer review, by Walter Kirn in The New York Times. He says the book’s publication may ‘at first strike readers as an attempt to squeeze yet more toothpaste out of Kerouac’s flattened tube’, but that ‘unlike other posthumous volumes that have worn Kerouac’s name, it’s readable’, and tells ‘a story of self-invention, perseverance and breakthrough that should help rescue Kerouac from the cultists and secure his admission to the mainstream hall of fame, where he deserves to rest’.

Here’s a further taste of Kirn’s review: ‘Despite the reputation for self-indulgence that continues to cling to him, Kerouac was a reflective, vigilant artist who constantly, and consciously, strove to overcome his limitations - the chief one being, as he saw it, his own self-critical temperament. ‘I’m going to discover a way,’ he wrote, casting forward to On the Road while he was completing The Town and the City, ‘of preserving the big rushing tremendousness in me and in all poets.’ One could call the effect he was after ‘willed spontaneity’. Verbal diarrhea it was not. The journals show him evolving toward his ideal almost by the month. Released from his monastic labors in his mother’s kitchen, the ascetic, introverted Kerouac took an abrasive dust bath in the real world and emerged a broader, stronger artist, who combined a mind for the transcendental with a feeling for the particular.’

And, a last quote from Kirn: ‘The traditional rap against Kerouac - that he was a sort of half-baked dopehead primitivist who prized sensation over sense - crumbles on a reading of his journals. For every entry concerning a wild night out with his colorful cohort of insomniac poets, opiated philosophers and autodidact ex-cons, there’s a meditation on Mark Twain or a list of favorite Renaissance poets. There’s no way around it: for all his hobo posing, Kerouac began as a New England highbrow. . . He trusted, finally, in his own energy, but it was an energy produced from the finest sources: great books, adventurous friends, high moral purpose and wide experience. ‘It’s not the words that count,’ he wrote, ‘but the rush of what is said.’

Finally, here are several extracts from Windblown World.

16 June 1947
‘Just made one of those great grim decisions of one’s life - not to present my manuscript of “T & C” to any publisher until I’ve completed it, all 380,000-odd words of it. This means seven months of ascetic gloom and labor - although doubt is no longer my devil, just sadness now. I think I will get this immense work done much sooner this way, to face up to it and finish it. Past two years has been work done in a preliminary mood, a mood of beginning and not completing. To complete anything is a horror, an insult to life, but the work of life needs to get done, and art is work - what work!! I’ve read my manuscript for the first time and I find it a veritable Niagara of a novel. This pleases me and moves me, but it’s sorrowful to know that this is not the age for such art. This is an excluding age in art - the leaver-outer [F. Scott] Fitzgeralds prevail in the public imagination over the putter-inner [Thomas] Wolfes. But so what. All I want from this book is a living, enough money to make a living, buy a farm and some land, work it, write some more, travel a little, and so on. But enough of this. The next seven(TEEN) months are joyless to view - but there is as much joy in these things, there is more joy, than in flitting around as I’ve done since early May, when I completed a 100,000-word section (Mood Log). I might as well learn now what it is to see things as they are - and the truth is, nobody cares how I fare in these writings. So I must fare in the grimmest, most efficient way there is, alone, unbidden, diligently again, always. The future has a glorious woman for me, and my own children, I'm certain of that - I must come up to them and meet them a man with things accomplished. I don’t care to be one of those frustrated fathers. Behind me there must be some stupendous deed done - this is the way to marry, the way to prepare for greater deeds and work. So then -‘

27 January 1948
‘Had a fist-fight with my novel and drew 2500-poor-drops-of-blood out of it, and after the smoke of the battle was over, something probably important occurred to me: - to try writing in quick first drafts of just sheer dialogue and sheer description of the action, without pausing to arrange it all in sentence-form, that is, logical and rhythmical and clear. Not that I believe too strongly in clear and logical writing, but I do believe in the kind of writing that give effortless pleasure to the reader. In the end, I am my own greatest reader. Also, I believe in sane writing, as opposed to the psychotic sloppiness of Joyce. Joyce is a man who only gave up trying to communicate to human beings. I myself do that when I’m drunk-weary and full of misery, therefore I know it’s not so honest as it’s spiteful to blurt out in associations without a true human effort to evoke and give significant intelligence to one’s sayings. It’s a kind of scornful idiocy.’

25 July 1948
‘. . . to the beach. We played in the waves for hours, lay in the sun. We had dinner at my house, and then the summernight fields and softness and great stars bending close-pack’t, and odourous darkness, and flowers and hidden gardens, and the whole universe melting and falling down the skies all crumbled and soft, all blurred and transcendental with milky light, all immortal, all sacrificial and sighing, all too impossible to keep and bear so beautiful and so sad. I wonder why our life must quiver between beauty and guilt, consummation and sadness, desire and regret, immortality and tattered moments unknowable, truth and beautiful meaningful lies, knowledge and the genius of illusion, love and chagrin, “Time” and minutes, what-we-do and what-we-want - or - other poles quivering elsewhere in greater, softer darknesses. Later, at night, wandered in the Bowery enjoying a few beers and thinking love-thoughts, then saw Lucien and Barbara and got out-drunk and staggered home in the morning . . . and Allen was crying because he thought nobody wanted to hear his new “silence and transcendence" visions, although, being silent and transcendent, of course, he could not utter them, and we could not utter our understanding, and the Big Error, or (to me) the Big Truth, hovered near touching us almost with its unknown wings. However there was no reason for me to get so drunk. I think I got drunk for the first time simply because I was happy, no other big reason, and because I was in love, in its living room resting.’

31 May 1949 [The printed date is wrong, though I can’t tell whether the source of the error is in Keorouac’s original manuscript, or in its preparation for print. The subsequent entry to this one is dated ‘Wednesday June 1’]
‘Tuesday June 1 - I’m thinking of making On the Road a vast story of those I know as well as a study of rain and rivers. Allen expresses weariness with my “rain-&-rivers” preoccupation now, but I think it’s only because I have not explained manifestly what they mean: as I did in the notebook “Record” on pages covering ‘New Orleans to Tucson.’ That’s clear in my mind.

There is never a real goldstrike, or a real “scientific advance,” only a revelation in the heart on one day or the next, subject to horrible change and further revelation. “Revelation is Revolution,” as Holmes says, insofar of course, as it is a change, miserably from mere day to day.

There is no heaven and no reward, and no judgment either (Allen says his lawyers “will be judged”): - no: - there is only a continuum of living across preordained spaces, followed by the continuum of the Mystery of Death. That death is a Mystery makes Death acceptable therefore; because Mystery never ends but continues.

Still waiting for the family.’

25 November 1948
‘Went to movies in N.Y. with Ma - Stan Kenton, French picture, etc. She wore her best clothes and how I love my mother, my sweet, dear little mother. . . a person like all the other treats I happen to know so accidentally. What thoughts I’ve been having since that binge, from whiskey-sickness which always induces visions. My mother is just “it.” I brood over her with such delight. I think Hal Chase is crazy for mistrusting me . . . I hope Hal comes back to me I love people. I know now how geekish we all feel. I am not worth kissing anybody’s feet, not even that so poseful. Why don’t we all die? Why do we live with such pain of living? Why do I feel pain when I think of Marian, or Lucien, or Burroughs? - a pain that is just “it.” Everything is “it.” It’s got it. We’ll know when . . . When I think of them all, and hateful me in the middle (reason, see, so hateful.) What a big hole in the world! And in that hole, that amputation, there it is . . . why we don’t die. “She will not put motion at rest (that I dislike (or dislove) her) (Marian) until she see you again.” How avid we are! How can I hate anyone as much as I hate myself? - therefore, we all love each other don’t we.

It's not true that you must love yourself to love others, as Ann Brabham said. You must hate yourself with that pain, then you cross the shadow-bridges to the other side of eternity, where their avid faces twitch, pale, gone, gone . . . Above I said “I love people.” What an asinine thing to say. That was self-love. I have no right to be loved, haven’t I? It’s all somewhere around here and it’s the reason why we don't die. For we know superciliousness does not come from a supercilious source . . . and many other things. I’ve lost all my warm consolations. I sit on the hundred fathoms - everybody please love me.’

17 June 1948
‘Madly, painfully lonesome for a woman these June evenings . . . and on I work work. I see them walking outside and I go crazy . . . “no time, no money.” - but my desire for a woman is at its highest pitch right now. If my ego were attached to love, as it should be, instead of to work, I’d have me that woman tonight and forever. “No time, no money . . .”

Or, yet, why is it that a man trying to do big work by himself, alone, poor, cannot find one little wisp of a woman who will give him her love and time? Why is it that a man with money and success has to drive them away . . . or as Hal Chase says, a man with a woman belonging to him, sporting her odor, has to drive them away ... the Lesbians! This experience is going to make me bitter, by God. But an idea just came to me. (Meanwhile, of course, you see, I do believe that ‘feeling sorry’ for oneself is one of the truest things on earth because you can’t deny that someone like me, healthy, sexual, even poetic, slashed, pierced, riven with desire and affection for any pretty girl I see, yet unable because of ‘time and money’ to make love now, now, in youth, as they parade indifferently by my window . . . well Goddamit, you just can’t deny it! It isn’t right! There’s too much aloneness in a world yearning, yearning, yearning . . . and too many whores, real true whores. To hell with them? No . . . the point is, I want them. Someday I’ll go to France, to Paris, that’s what . . . where, like Jean Gabin if you can find a pretty love at the carnival in the night.) (In the night, in the night, in the sky-night and lights, the soft warm knees parting, the breathless clasp, the gasp, the tongue, and best of all, the low murmuring voice and what it says.) Well, as I say, I’m going to be bitter about this. This may be sexual inadequacy (no time, no money), but . . . just wait, woman, just wait.

Went to bed, after irritating work with a faulty typewriter-hand, with a .350 average.’

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 21 October 2009.

Like wolves and hyaenas

’A fortnight ago a party of Bau men pillaged many of the plantations of Verata, & killed several persons: and this week they went in greater numbers, - ravaged part of the territories of the king of Verata, burned two settlements, killed 260 human beings, and brought away many prisoners. For two days they have been tearing and devouring one another like wolves and hyaenas.’ This is the Scottish missionary David Cargill, born 210 years ago today, writing in his diary about life on the island of Fiji in the 1830s.

Cargill was born on 20 June 1809 in Brechin, Forfarshire, Scotland, the second son of a banker. He graduated from King’s College, Aberdeen in 1830. Whilst studying he had joined the Aberdeen Methodist Circuit, and in 1831 he was admitted to the church as a preacher. The following year he got married, to Margaret Smith, and he also received his first missionary appointment for the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, to Tonga, in the South Pacific. Soon after the couple sailed for Australia, and eventually, to Tonga. They worked together there, with another missionary for three years, helping Christian development. The Cargills then moved with their young family and other missionaries to the Fiji Islands, where Christian influence had yet to take hold. David Cargill is credited alongside his co-worker, William Cross, with establishing the first Wesleyan Church in Fiji.

As a trained linguist, Cargill wrote the first grammar and dictionary for a Fijian language and he also supervised the translation of parts of the Bible into Fijian. Margaret died in 1840, and grief stricken, he returned to Britain with his four daughters. He remarried on 27 November 1841, to Augusta Bicknell, and shortly afterwards they all sailed for Hobart, Tasmania. Although his children became seriously ill with measles during the voyage, they all survived. Moreover, Margaret gave birth to a son on board. They spent several months in Tasmania, before heading for Tonga, where Cargill took over the superintendancy of the Vava’u Wesleyan mission. Unfortunately, he was struck down by dengue fever, which led to severe exhaustion and depression. He died of an overdose of laudanum in April 1843. There is a little further information about him available at Mundus. There is also a memoir written by Cargill’s wife, Margaret, and edited by her husband (first published in 1841 as Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Cargill). A modern edition of this can be previewed at Amazon.

However, it was not until the 1970s that Cargill’s diaries were edited (by Albert J. Schulz) and published by the Australian National University as The Diaries and Correspondence of David Cargill, 1832-1843. This work can be freely read online at the university website or at Docbox. H. E. Maude in his preface says this: ‘Some missionaries [. . .] appear to have been compulsive diarists, and many were required by the rules of the societies which sent them into the field to submit reports which could be published in whole or part for the delectation of their supporters back home, who somewhat naturally liked to feel that they were getting their money’s worth. In any case, whatever their motivation, they wrote too much for immediate use and there is still a wealth of data of value to anthropologists and historians to be found in their manuscript journals and letters, and particularly in those of the earlier missionaries, who lived among the Pacific Islanders at a time when local cultures were still functioning virtually unchanged. The diaries and correspondence of David
Cargill have long been recognised as among the most valuable of this still unpublished material, since Cargill was not only the first university educated Methodist to be assigned to the islands but also, with William Cross, the first European missionary to live in Fiji.’

And here is a sample of entries from the published diaries.

27 March 1833
‘It is probable that we shall have to remain 3 or 4 months in Sydney. Mrs Cargill is much weakened by the voyage. There have been many hinderances in the way of improvement in Sydney, so that religion seems to be at a low ebb. There is however the appearance of a little cloud in the heavens. The congregations though small are very attentive to the word. O Lord, I beseech Thee, send now prosperity. I feel determined through divine grace to be entirely devoted to the work in which I am engaged. May the Lord qualify me for usefulness.

It is not likely that we shall meet with anyone in this place qualified to teach us the Tonga language. Mr Orton has furnished us with a few translations: they will perhaps assist me in [     ] myself master of a small vocabulary; till I shall [have] better facilities for acquiring the language.

During the voyage we made but little progress in the acquisition of Greek. Mr Whiteley, I think, advanced as far as the end of the first conjugation. What he has acquired, he seems to understand. Mr Tucker could translate the first 12 verses of the 1st ch. of John.’

20 June 1833
‘This day I have lived twenty-four years. My life has been hitherto a life of many mercies. I feel condemned for my ingratitude, & the small progress I have made in divine things. I have indeed been a cumberer of the ground. O Lord, revive thy work in my heart! Enable me to make an unreserved dedication of the members of my body & the faculties of my soul to thy service.

Most of the inhabitants of this Colony are sunk very low in the mire of iniquity. And even the piety of professing Christians is very superficial. The profligacy of the wicked, & the lukewarmness of professors, call loudly for divine vengeance. There are but few encouragements for the labourer in this part of the vineyard. To use the expression of the venerable & respected Mr McAllum, preaching to the Majority of the inhabitants, is like ‘plowing among rocks.’ But although the society do not appear to consider one another to provoke one another to love and good works, it is nevertheless to be expected that some of the seeds of grace are sown in good ground. There are a few who possess a leaven of piety & love. But their ardour is so damped by the prevailing lukewarmness, that they are entirely thrown into the background. May the happy day soon dawn when the inhabitants of this Colony shall have been raised from their moral degradation!

I am engaged in attending to Mr Orton’s appointments during his absence: And have frequently to preach 5 or 6 times in Sydney during the week. The Lord has been pleased so far to honour me as to make my services useful in the conviction & conversion of two or three persons who it is hoped, will be living stones in the temple of God. My time is chiefly occupied in preparing for the pulpit, & visiting the people, so that I have had but little time to improve my stock of general knowledge . . .’

4 September 1833
‘Rode about 26 miles through ‘the bush’ in company with Mr. Orton to visit the people residing in the vicinity of Botany Bay. Some of them are in a deplorable and wretched condition; We fell in with a small village on the beach, inhabited by fishermen, who not only neglect and violate the Christian Sabbath by pursuing their usual employment, but seem destitute of even the form of godliness, & we have reason to suspect, are living in concubinage with aboriginal women. One of the women, however, expressed a desire to learn to read: & there was an air of cleanliness about the huts wh. ill accorded with their heathenish depravity. Does not the condition of such pitiable beings prove, that man without the Gospel is foolish, & is prone to say, ‘There is no God?’ Returned home about 1/2 past 5 P.M. and @ 7 - preached in Macquarie St. Chapel from - ‘behold I stand @ the door and knock’ &c.’

20 October 1833
‘Mrs. C. exhibited symptoms of inflammation wh. induced Dr. Bland to draw a considerable quantity of blood from her; The disagreeable symptoms were removed, & she experienced great relief. Baby is doing well.’

17 November 1833
‘This morning our lovely infant was baptized in Marquarie St Ch. by the Revd W. Simpson. May the Lord spare her life and grant her grace to be a comfort & blessing to us. She is named Jane Smith out of respect to her grandmother.’

12 February 1834
‘This afternoon attended divine service in the chapel. After Bro. T’s address to the congregation, we witnessed an interesting sight in the marriage of four couples: including the King & Queen of a small island about 40 miles from Vavau. Native teachers have been sent to instruct them. With the divine blessing on their labours, the people about 60 in number have led resolved to abandon idolatry & embrace Christianity. The King & some of his subjects have come to Vavau to be married & baptized. The rest of the people of the island are expected when the wind is favourable to the sailing of the canoes. And thus one island after another is deserting the ranks of idolatry, & Satan’s empire is becoming less extensive & powerful. O that the day may soon dawn when not only every island in this vast ocean shall have been christianized, but when the friends of religion shall triumphantly sing -
Jesus the Conqueror reigns,
In glorious strength array’d;
His Kingdom over all maintains
And bids the earth be glad.’

29 August 1836
‘This day I finished my translation of the three epistles of John into the Tonguese language: May the Lord make them a blessing to all who may read or hear them.’

20 July 1838
‘About 2 O.C. this morning our fifth child - a stout girl - was born. We have had none but natives to assist us at this critical juncture, but the Lord has been better to us than all our fears. Our native female servant has been very attentive and kind on this occasion. Mrs C is much better. . . than we could have expected her to be. May she and I have grace to dedicate ourselves afresh to the service of God.’

23 July 1838
This forenoon our people under the direction of Uiliami Lajike began to build a new chapel. We held divine service at the erecting of the posts which are to support the building. The scene was very interesting and I trust profitable to the souls of many. A large congregation was present, and many tears of joy were shed. The Feejeeans and the Tonguese seem to be desirous of outstripping one another in this labour of love. All have engaged in the undertaking with great alacrity and goodwill. Several heathens have volunteered their services in rearing this Christian temple. Lua - the quondam persecutor of the Christians - has very kindly presented us with several large skeins of cynet [plaited straw or similar], and has tendered his assistance in the preparation of the various materials for the house of prayer. Soroangkali - the king’s brother has presented the Chief of the Christian party with a large roll of cynet. The chapel when finished will probably hold between 500 & 600 persons. May it be the birthplace of many immortal souls.’

8 August 1839
‘The Capn took the vessel to Koro to buy yams. Koro is an island about forty miles from Somosomo. The inhabitants have had but little intercourse with foreigners, and are in a very barbarous state. A few weeks ago the male inhabitants of one town were treacherously decoyed by the inhabitants of another into a yam plantation, and all put to death. The women and children are enslaved. As we approached that part of the island where the Capn expected to find a harbour, the vessel was nearly on a reef. In five seconds more she would probably have struck, but she instantly obeyed the helm; and thus to all appearance we were saved from a watery grave. The Capn steered to another part of the island, and there dropped anchor.’

1 November 1839
‘This morning a little after break of day, I was surprised to hear the sound of voices talking very loudly, near the front fence of the Mission premises, and going out to ascertain the cause of their noise found a human head in our garden. This was the head of the old man whose body had been abused on the beach. The arm of the body had been broken by a bullet, wh. passed through the bone near the shoulder, & the upper part of the skull had been knocked off with a club. The head had been thrown into our garden during the night, with the intention no doubt of annoying us and shocking our feelings. The victims of war were brought from Verata, & were killed by the Bau people. 260 human beings were killed & brought away by victors to be roasted and eaten. Many women & children were taken alive to be kept for slaves. About 30 living children were hoisted up to the mast head as flags of triumph. The motions of the canoes when sailing soon killed the helpless creatures, & silenced their piercing cries. Other children were taken alive to Bau that the boys might learn the art of Fijian warfare by firing arrows @ them and beating them with clubs.

As far as I can learn, the war originated with the Bau people. Some time ago they killed three Verata men as sacrifices during the building of a temple. The Verata men revenged the injury by killing five Bau men. And thus the war commenced. A fortnight ago a party of Bau men pillaged many of the plantations of Verata, & killed several persons: and this week they went in greater numbers, - ravaged part of the territories of the king of Verata, burned two settlements, killed 260 human beings, and brought away many prisoners. For two days they have been tearing and devouring one another like wolves and hyaenas. O that a door of usefulness were opened in these parts of Feejee, that we might publish the glad tidings of the advent of the Prince of Peace. In the meanwhile, they will not listen to our report. But they are in the hands of God. . .’

Many little matters

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of David Elisha Davy, an antiquarian who spent the most part of his life travelling around the English county of Suffolk in order to collect detailed information on the county’s history. Although he never wrote that history, the collection of his manuscripts in the British Library today constitute a unique resource of materials for modern Suffolk historians. More than a century after his death, a pocket diary he kept while on his travels was found in a second hand bookshop. In it, Davy wrote about how his little book should be a ‘Companion in my Excursions’ so that ‘many little matters will then be preserved’.

Davy was born on 16 June 1769 the son of a farmer in Suffolk. His uncle, Eleazar Davy of Yoxford, sheriff of the county in 1770, who had no children of his own, paid for his education. He was schooled at Bungay grammar, and then at Yoxford under Samuel Forster. He matriculated from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1785, graduated in 1790, and was ordained deacon in 1792. Although he worked for a while as a curate, he abandoned the church; in 1803, on the death of his uncle, he took over his estates, based at Yoxford, borrowing money to hold onto the debt-laden properties. He served as a local magistrate and as deputy lieutenant.

However, around 1805, Davy took up what would become his life’s work, gathering an immense collection of antiquarian and genealogical details for a history of Suffolk. Together with his friend Henry Jermyn, he painstakingly toured the country, taking notes and issuing questionnaires. Mounting debts led him to place his estate in the hands of a bank, thereafter he decamped from Yoxford to a friend’s house at Ufford, near Woodbridge. When Jermyn died in 1820, Davy took up with the Revd John Wareyn Darby as companion.

Although Davy published a few historical works anonymously, he never actually published a history of Suffolk. Nevertheless, it is the large collection (131 manuscript volumes) of information he amassed that remains his abiding legacy. He died in 1851, not having married; almost all of his manuscripts (and much correspondence) were soon to find their way to the British Museum (along with those written by Jermyn which had been given to the museum in 1830). There is not much further information about Davy online, other than at Wikipedia and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required).

Davy also left behind a diary. This was found in 1979 by John Blatchly, headmaster of Ipswich School and a noted Suffolk historian, in a secondhand bookshop. He published an article on the diary in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Arcaeology and History in 1981 (which can be read online). The following year the diary was published, as edited by Blatchly for the Suffolk Records Society, with the title A Journal of Excursions Through the County of Suffolk, 1823–1844 (The Boydell Press). In his introduction, Blatchly explains more about the diary:

‘My discovery of Davy’s Journal on a North Norfolk bookseller’s shelves in October 1979 was, I like to think, providential. Its beginning coincides with that of its author’s exile from his inherited estate and home, The Grove, Yoxford. He had not kept a diary during the years of his travels with Henry Jermyn of Sibton, and the preface written in 1823 tells of a conscious decision that this little book should be ‘Companion in my Excursions’ so that ‘many little matters will then be preserved’ which would not otherwise find a place in his Collections. And so it accompanied him for more than 4,000 miles. Davy was not one to allow a personal preference or opinion to intruded into his formal work but the Journal is quite different; private feelings are not excluded and we are permitted more than a glimpse of a man who, after his resignation from public office, lived very privately. In reading the Journal we are far from feeling that we are trespassing, but we do gain a revealing insight into his methods of work and travel, his family and friendship, and the reception he enjoyed from acquaintances. We learn much, too, about the temperament and madders of this gentleman antiquary whose work should and may still earn him greater fame than hitherto; his reticence only is to blame for any neglect hitherto.’

And here is a sample of the kind of daily entries Davy made into his pocket diary.

29 March 1823
‘Barlee sent me in his gig to Pakefield Church, 6 Miles. I there took some additional Notes both in the church, & churchyard, copying the Verses in the latter, & rubbing off the two brasses still remaining in the former. I had not time to examine the Registers; but compleated the church notes for this Parish.’
 
8 April 1823
‘Went from Wrentham by the Mail Coach to Kirkley, where I took full church notes, not forgetting to examine the church chest, which I found the key of. Did not meet with the Registers, & had not time to enquire after them.

Went again into Pakefield Church to compleat rubbing off the brass of J. Bowff, which I had before left incompleat: So that I shall not have occasion to visit this church again.

Walked back to Wrentham. 7 Miles.’

10 April 1823
‘Walked from Wrentham to Brampton Church 4 Miles. Went into the church, took some few notes, before omitted, & from the head stones in the churchyard:

Returned by Uggeshall 1 1/2 Mile, to look again at the inscription on the Steeple, & to see whether I had copied it correctly. To Wrentham 3 Miles.’

17 April 1823
‘Went from Wrentham by the Mail Coach to Kirkley, 6 Miles; walked from thence by Mutford Bridge to Oulton Church, 3 Miles; Took full notes there, both inside & out, & rubbed off the three brasses in the Chancel, in completing which I was near 5 hours employed. Had not time to enquire after the Registers & Terrier. In my way through the Village of Oulton, I observed on a low building on the left hand side of the way a shield of Arms cut in stone, but they seem to have been lately coloured over with black & white, & I took no account of them. These must be examined & enquired into, when I go after the Registers & Terrier. They probably belong to some School or
Almshouse.

Walked back to Wrentham, 8 Miles.’

18 April 1823
‘Went in Barlee’s gig with my sister to Southwold, & took the opportunity of being there, to copy the Inscriptions on the Head stones in the churchyard. I had intended to go into the church to take some further notes there, & to rub off again the brass there, that which I now have, been very imperfect, but I had not time.’
 
17 May 1823
‘Having occasion to see Mr. Robinson, I walked to his new House on the Heath, which he has lately built in a most singular situation. It stands in Dunwich, on the bare heath, about a quarter of a Mile from the Sea, & on so bad a Soil & so bleak a spot, that none of the trees, of which he had planted many, have hitherto grown. From thence I went to Dunwich, & took a few notes, all that were necessary, of the remains of All Sts. Church there. Distance there & back 8 Miles.’

22 September 1827
‘At the Parsonage at Hoxne. Walked to Syleham Church, to get the brasses there, & to pick up any other small matters I might have left at my former visit, & what might have been placed there since.

From Syleham Church walked to Brockdish Church, to see whether there was any thing in the churchyard which might be useful. I did not go into the church. From Brockdish, I walked on to Thorp Abbot’s; went into the church there, but found not a single memorial within, nor anything in my way without the church. Returned to Hoxne by the Water Mill.’

24 September 1827
‘Doughty drove me to Wingfield Church, where I found a great treat; & having the whole morning to myself, I employed it in the church, from I obtained full notes.

I afterwards walked to the Castle, which I had not seen years for more than 30 years; but had only time to reconnoitre the outsid

The Incumbent of Wingfield resides at Hoxne & has the Registers with him there. I was therefore obliged to postpone the examination of them.’

25 September 1827
‘Went, with Doughty to Denham, where I got some few further notes from the church there. I afterwards borrowed my friend’s gig, & went to Horham & Redlingfield Churches, to reexamine & pick up what I could there. I was rather surprized to find all the by roads in that neighbourhood so good.’

14 July 1831
‘I went by the Mail this morning to Little Glemham, having agreed to meet Darby there to proceed with him on to Iken & Snape. Arriving at Glemham before 7 o’clock, I had a good opportunity of visiting the church, which I had not seen for more than 20 years: besides I was very anxious to get impressions of the 3 brasses, in the Dormitory, upon the Glemhams. These I obtained, together with such other notes as I found, beyond my former ones. I was more than 2 hours in doing all this, & had then to wait half an hour for my companion, who at last arrived, when we proceeded on thro’ Blaxhall, where we stopped opposite to the Ship Public house there to look at a coat of arms carved on Oak, & fixed to the front of a cottage: these were formerly in Sudborn Hall; it was bought by the present owner abt. 30 years ago at an auction in the parish; & contains the arms & quarterings of Sr. Michael Stanhope Knt. a former owner of the Hall. We found the road from hence to Iken very heavy & bad, & were obliged to walk a good part of the way, & when we got to Iken, had some distance to go to obtain the key of the church, for which we were ill repaid, for the church contains not a single inscription, or monumental memorial of any kind: we found a few inscriptions in the churchyard: the building stands in a singular situation; on an elevated bank by the side of the river, far away from any house, & in the most inconvenient position for the population, which fortunately is but small.’

7 July 1833
‘Being resident for a few days at Aldeburgh, I of course paid a visit to the church, where I found several new monuments &c. as well within as without. In the churchyard I found considerable gleanings: the names on the head stones I had not before taken.’

Life on an ocean steamer

‘This is a very fine steamer, and the ocean is so quick - at times today, as smooth a sea as I ever saw any where - that we dont seem to realize at all that we are on a rolling billowy sea - We have pretty good times, too, and dont think much about the way time goes. There is nothing quite like life on an ocean steamer.’ This is from a short lively journal kept by Cornelia Maria Clapp, born 170 years ago today, when travelling by steamboat across the Atlantic. She was one of North America’s first women marine biologists, and is remembered for being an inspirational teacher.

Clapp was born on 17 March 1849 in Montague, Massachusetts, the oldest child of two teachers. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (the forerunner of today’s Mount Holyoke College) in 1871 before becoming a Latin teacher at a boarding school in Andalusia, Pennsylvania. On returning to teach at Mount Holyoke from 1872, she became increasingly focused on zoology and is credited with developing a laboratory method of instruction that was highly effective.

Clapp went on numerous field trips; and she furthered her own education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Syracuse (New York) University, where she received a Ph.D. degree in 1889 (her dissertation on toadfish was published in the Journal of Morphology), and at the University of Chicago, where she took a second doctorate in 1896. That same year, she helped Mount Holyoke (by this time a college) start a department of zoology, and in 1904 she was promoted to professor of zoology - a position she held until retiring in 1916.

Clapp was also involved, from 1888, in the work of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, particularly in the field of embryology. She was the first woman to be given a research post at the institution, and she went on to serve as librarian between 1893 and 1907 and as the first woman trustee from 1897 until 1901 and again in 1910 until her death in 1934. Although she published little during her career, she is considered to have exerted a major influence in helping women to extend scientific knowledge and opportunity through education. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Women’s Museum of California,

Donna Albino, a student of Mount Holyoke College in the 1980s, has collected a large amount of textual and pictorial information about her alma mater. Some of this has been published in a book of historic postcards, and some can be found online. Among the handwritten books she lists on her web pages is a short travel journal kept by Cornelia Clapp in 1886. It consists of just 11 entries during a voyage by steamboat from New York City to Antwerp, Belgium, accompanied by other Mount Holyoke professors and students. Albino has transcribed the text of the journal; here are two of the entries.

30 June 1886
‘The biggest thing to record to-day is the visit to the lower regions of our floating world. Stone challenged me to go down to the fires and I went. Down, down down until we came to a horrid torrid climate, where 24 fires are constantly kept going, and there is an apparatus that records each pulse beat of the engine. It now stands 369524 and it will stand when we reach Antwerp 900000 -

The machinery is beautiful & we saw & went nearly the whole length of the shaft that runs the screw way down in the lower regions - This is a very fine steamer, and the ocean is so quick - at times today, as smooth a sea as I ever saw any where - that we dont seem to realize at all that we are on a rolling billowy sea - We have pretty good times, too, and dont think much about the way time goes. There is nothing quite like life on an ocean steamer.

Alice Bartholomew sketches, and we have become acquainted with an artist on his way over to study art, who is trying his hand on sketching some members of the party. There is a regular crew of teachers on board - Vassar & Smith are well represented besides Holyoke, of course ladies predominate - We have been reading Mark Twain’s description of the German language & Kingsley’s Water Babies. [. . .]

I am at this writing perched in my (upper) berth & ready to drop off to sleep at any moment - Goodnight.’

3 July 1886
‘The sensation to-day is the visit to the Steerage - The Capt. himself accompanied us - took us into the store room at the stern, & showed us the immense wine lockers, & the place where they carry the mails & money - This steamer is capable of carrying 1500 steerage passengers, but at present there are only about 300 passengers in all on board. (- cargo in steerage going East.)

This morning is the most beautiful one yet. Not a cloud in the sky, & the air so balmy & warm that not a wrap is thought of -

We are beginning to talk of land now. Next Monday even. at 9. P.M. we are expecting to see the Lizard light. There will be a crowd on deck then I surmise.

I found Mr. Williamson knew Brayton of Indianapolis & we have been talking him up this morning. He calls him a regular Bohemian - happy-go-lucky fellow - agrees with me in his ideas of him - I have been reading in “The Ocean Wave” this morn. and the following paragraph is awfully true - “Men of the highest genius seem to be transformed as soon as they get at a distance from land in a rolling vessel. There is an inability to control the mind while at sea, a difficulty in concentrating the attention on the task of even writing in one’s diary or reading even the most trifling fiction.”

No one of the party is the least big sea sick, and we now range over this great boat from stem to stern whiling the time away -

Last evening the regular dance on deck took place - gymnastic feats - leap frog & the like - a set of young men with the banjos have taken to serenading in the passage ways -, as it is difficult to get outside the windows!

The table waiter said to day that he never saw such a passage as this before - He has had us to wait on most regularly - not more than three have lost a single meal - It is simply delightful. (I repeat it again lest I should not have put it on every sheet of paper written.)

We sight ships occasionally - a single stroke of the bell in the bow gives the signal - but none have been within speaking distance. We take an extremely southern route - thus avoiding fogs off Newfoundland, icebergs and such! and certainly we must have struck one of the dry, still times in mid ocean -

At lunch to-day Miss Stevens gave me an account of the Reception at the Sem. I had not thought to ask her about it before & she told me of her pleasure in meeting my brother & Miss Metcalf - the first intimation that I have had that these persons were present in that occasion. What prizes were taken, I heard of some by a graduate of Ag. Coll. Stone remarked the other day that he wished my brother was aboard. He seems supremely happy - Miss Bartholomew has a fine sketch of him. A Wellesley teacher has turned up now on board - such a boat of school marms! -

We have just now come upon a steamer going the same way - It is about five or six miles away, I suppose but it seems quite like having company along - No. Ger. Lloyd. One week ago this hour we set sail - left the lovely New York harbor - on that charming afternoon.

The distance in the last 24 hours has been 335 miles. We have been guessing on it & Bryan & Carter hit it right -

Miss Hooker & I are talking of fees - We shall soon have to begin to live again - spend money that means - We take quite a rent [?] on ship board - Now I must start & read German with Miss Pettee - Clara Stevens talks of going to the German cities -’

Trungpa’s escape from Tibet

Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan monk who became a renowned lay teacher of Buddhist teachings in the United States and founded the Shambhala organisation, was born 80 years ago today. When the Chinese invaded Tibet, he was no more than 20 years old. At first he went into hiding, but then took part in an heroic expedition across the Himalayas to escape into India. For a few weeks during the latter part of that journey, he kept a diary which he included in his first autobiographical work, Born in Tibet.

Trungpa was born in the Nangchen region of Tibet on 5 March 1939, and was eleventh in the line of Trungpa tülkus, of the Kagyu lineage, one of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism. He was trained in the Kagyu tradition, receiving his degree at the same time as Thrangu Rinpoche (who would go on to become another important Buddhist figure in the West). Trungpa was also trained in the Nyingma tradition, the oldest of the four schools. 

In 1958, aged only 19, Trungpa’s home monastery was occupied by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and so he spent the winter in hiding. The following year, he started out with Akong Tulku and a small group of other monastics to escape China. As they travelled, often through mountain wildernesses, others joined them swelling the group to some 300 refugees. They eventually reached the  Brahmaputra River. Under heavy gunfire, about 70 managed to cross it, but they then had to climb 19,000 feet over the Himalayas, with little food, before reaching the safety of Pema Ko. On reaching India, in early 1960, the party was flown to a refugee camp. The full story has been told by Grant McLean’s in his 2016 book From Lion’s Jaws: Chogyam Trungpa’s Epic Escape To The West.

In India, Trungpa had one son (who is today the head of Shambala network) with a nun he had met on the journey. He set about learning English, and by 1963 had won a scholarship to study comparative religion at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. In 1967, he and Akong were invited to take over Johnstone House Trust in Scotland to run a meditation centre, which then became Samye Ling, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the West. Around 1969, he married Diana Judith Pybus, a wealthy rebellious 16 year old, with whom he had at least one son. He also had a car accident which left him partially paralysed for the rest of his life. When Trungpa split with Akong, in 1970, the former moved to the United States. By then, he had dispensed with his monastic way of life (allowing himself to be promiscuous and drink heavily), and set course as a lay teacher. He travelled widely around North America, gaining renown for his ability to present the essence of the highest Buddhist teachings in a form readily understandable to Western students, in particular he introduced and opened up, to the West, the esoteric practices of the Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism.

Trungpa soon began to establish many meditation centres and retreats, all managed by an umbrella organisation, Vajradhatu, based in Boulder, Colorado. Also in Boulder, he found the Naropa Institute which would become the first accredited Buddhist university in North America. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were hired at one point to teach poetry and literature respectively. (Joni Mitchell even sang about Trungpa in Refuge of the Roads, on the Hejira album.) From 1976, he began a series of secular teachings, some of which were gathered and presented as the Shambhala Training, inspired by his vision, when younger, of the legendary Kingdom of Shambhala. His whole organisation eventually took on the Shambala name.

In 1981, Trungpa hosted a visit by the 14th Dalai Lama to Boulder. In 1983, he established Gampo Abbey, a Karma Kagyü monastery in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada; the following year, he observed a yearlong retreat in a rural community in Nova Scotia, and in 1986 he moved his home and international headquarters to Halifax. However, he was, by this time, suffering failing health; after a heart attack in 1986, he died in 1987. Further information can be found at Shambhala, Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or Stripping the Gurus.

A diary kept by Trungpa for a few weeks during his heroic escape to India was first published by George Allen & Unwin in 1966 as part of the autobiographical Born in Tibet (as told to Esmé Cramer Roberts). This has been republished several times, and can be previewed at Googlebooks. Born in Tibet is also included in the first volume of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian, and published by Shambala in 2003. Furthermore, the diary itself can be found online at The Chronicles, ‘a repository of teachings, articles, interviews, news and podcasts pertaining to the life and teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’.

Here are several extracts (as found at The Chronicles).

‘With the morning light we started off and walked down the slope and as we turned uphill again we met the peasant husband carrying a large bag of tsampa. To our amazement he said that he and Tsepa had overtaken Akong Tulku’s elder brother in company with Dorje Tsering’s wife and three nuns and they had given him the tsampa to tide over our immediate needs. They told him how they had been captured by the Chinese near the backwater, but managed to escape from the headquarters where they were being held and had afterward joined up with some Kongpo peasants who were also escaping. The party had heard Tsepa’s gun the night before and had been so frightened that they had rushed away. It appeared that the gun had only been fired to scare a wild animal which seemed as if it might attack. Tsepa had sent the peasant husband back to us while he himself went up to the village on the mountainside to buy provisions. He sent us a message saying that we were to go to a cave below that place where the other party was waiting for us; he would join us there later with the food. We soon reached the cave and spent a very happy morning telling each other of our experiences. They told us that a group of them had crossed the river and the backwater and had tried to follow us; however, they had lost their way and after lying hidden in the long grass for a time they reached the village. When the Chinese discovered them, there was no fighting; all the refugees were taken prisoner and removed to a village which was a local Chinese headquarters, on the south side of the Brahmaputra. Their baggage was thoroughly searched; all the contents of their amulet boxes were thrown out and all religious books were immediately destroyed. Each person was privately questioned to find out if their stories tallied; they were asked where they came from and where they were going. Most of them said that they were trying to escape to India, though a few said that they were going on pilgrimage to that country. The lamas and leaders were separated from the rest and put under guard to be interrogated more closely. They were given the most menial work to do, such as cleaning out latrines. One of the lamas despaired and hanged himself, he had already escaped from one prison camp in Derge and this was the second time that he had been captured. As other prisoners were brought into the camp all our party were relieved to find that no members of our little group were among them; but when the Chinese could not trace Akong Tulku, Yak Tulku, or me among the senior prisoners, they thought we might be lurking disguised among the crowd, since they knew that we had been the leaders of the party; so the prisoners were checked again, especially the younger ones.

At night everyone was locked up together in a single room, but women and the less important men were allowed to go out into the village during the day: They were, however, called in for individual questioning from time to time. The Chinese would then tell them that now that Lhasa was liberated they could go there whenever they wished to, there would be no trouble on the roads; but of course there were more useful things to be done than wandering off on pilgrimages, which were indeed only superstition. The prisoners were even told that should they wish to go to India for this purpose, the Chinese administration were quite ready to let them out; however, such a journey would be exceedingly dangerous, for anyone might die of starvation or fall ill from the hot climate there.

When a rumor went round the camp that all the able-bodied refugees were shortly to be sent north to join labor camps on the other side of the Brahmaputra and that the senior people and those too old for work were to be sent to concentration camps, one of the nuns contrived to buy food for herself and Akong Tulku’s brother, she also obtained information about the best way to reach Doshong Pass. Dorje Tsering’s wife and two other nuns were also able to procure some food and all five managed to escape together. They stopped in a wood the first night and crossed the Doshong Pass the following day. Here they met the family from Kongpo who knew the country and were also making their escape, so they joined forces.

The Kongpo family were camping in a valley below our cave and the man came up to see me, bringing a jug of soup made of meat and barley which was much appreciated. He told me how he and his people had escaped: It had been very difficult to get out of their village as permits were only given to visit friends in the near neighborhood and when the visit was over the holder had to apply to the local authorities for permission to return to his own home. Having obtained the permits to leave his village, our friend and his family took the opposite direction toward the mountains to the south. A number of the villagers had wanted to do the same thing, but knowing the danger they would have to encounter in crossing the snowbound Doshong Pass, they had not dared to undertake the journey.

Some refugee lamas from Lower Kongpo were sheltering in the small monastery in the village above our cave. A monk came down with Tsepa to request me to conduct a devotional service for them as well as for the villagers. I was surprised to see him wearing a long dagger which looked somehow wrong for a monk. He was particularly friendly and invited us all to stay in the monastery. However, we felt that this village was too near Lower Kongpo and might not be a safe place for us so, seeing that one could not get to the monastery and back again that same afternoon, we stayed where we were in and around the cave. We had an excellent meal with some pork the villagers had supplied and made dumplings with their wheat flour which they also gave us. We tried the local dish of millet, but found this difficult to swallow.

23 January 1960
‘No one knew how we could get to India proper, for there was a waiting list for the few airplanes flying to and fro. However, we no longer felt anxious: We were free at last and were able to wander about the town at will. I was struck by the fact that people here were much gayer and more cheerful than in the Communist-controlled Tibetan towns. As we were having our midday meal, a messenger came to tell us to go down to the airport, as there was every possibility that we would get a lift that same evening. A tractor arrived with a trailer behind it, into which we all bundled. The winding road led through a valley and we came to the gate of the airport. It was built in decorative Tibetan style, surmounted by the ashoka emblem. We disembarked and waited. No one knew of any airplanes likely to arrive that day. The evening drew in and it was quite dark. A jeep came to take me to see the local district administrator; he gave me a bag of rice and a few vegetables and apologized that supplies were so scanty and the accommodation so limited. However, he was sure that the plane would come the next day. He asked me to leave my blessing in the place, that things should go well. I thanked him and presented him with a white scarf. We spent that night in the hut.’

24 January 1960
‘In the morning an official came and read out a list of our names. He told us that we would be given priority on the next plane. It arrived that morning and, since it was a transport plane, its cargo of building material was first taken off and seats screwed in afterward. There was only room for six of us: myself, my own attendant, Yak Tulku and his attendant, Tsethar, and Yunten; the rest of the party followed in a second plane that same day.

This, our first flight, was a strange new experience, skimming over cloud-covered mountains, seeing far below us the small villages and footpaths leading up to them; only by the moving shadow of the plane on the ground could we gauge how fast we were traveling.

We thought about the teaching of impermanence; this was a complete severance of all that had been Tibet and we were traveling by mechanized transport. As the moments passed, the mountain range was left behind, and the view changed to the misty space of the Indian plains stretching out in front of us.’

Breaking the speed laws

‘Taking full advantage of the downward slope and a lack of traffic, I push Mule along at a good clip. I figure I’ve now broken the speed laws in every state we’ve touched so far.’ This is Michael Joseph Farrell Jr. - 80 years old today - writing in a journal he kept while on a five week tour of the United States. He is best known for his role as Captain B. J. Hunnicutt in the long running American TV satire M*A*S*H. I doubt he would describe himself as a diarist, but he does keep journals when travelling, either for himself or for any organisation he’s representing at the time. Some of these are available online at the official Mike Farrell website (now archived).

Farrell, one of four children, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 6 February 1939, but after a couple of years the family moved to Hollywood where his father worked as a film studio carpenter. He was schooled locally, and then joined the United States Marine Corps serving at Camp Hansen, Okinawa. In 1963, he married the actress Judy Hayden, and they had two children. By the late 1960s, he was regularly working as an actor, for movies and television series, gaining ever more significant parts, such as a role in the soap Days of Our Lives. His big break came in 1975, when he was recruited for the fourth season of M*A*S*H to play the new role of B. J. Hunnicutt. He remained with the programme for the rest of its eight-year run, writing a handful of episodes, and directing another four.

Farrell went on to host several National Geographic Presents programmes, and to star in TV movies, including Memorial Day (which he co-produced). Having divorced Judy, he married another actress Shirley Fabares in 1984. In 1985, he joined up with television producer Marvin Mintoff to make, mostly, TV films, but also a few feature films. Their partnership lasted 25 years, until Mintoff’s death in 2009. He was elected first vice-president of the Screen Actor’s Guild in 2002 and served for three years. He has always been an active campaigner for various causes, not least for advancing human rights and opposing the death penalty. In 2004 he received the Donald Wright Award from California Attorneys for Criminal Justice. Further information is available form Wikipedia or from the official Mike Farrell website (though this is now archived and no longer being maintained).

When travelling, Farrell tends to keep a journal. His website explains: ‘Throughout the years Mike has been to many countries for organizations such as Concern America, the Committee on U.S./Central American Relations, Projects for Planetary Peace, Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East, Human Rights Watch, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The Christian Children’s Fund, Death Penalty Focus, and, the Center for International Policy. For each trip he has written a journal, either for personal purposes or to inform the organizations he’s travelled for, of the situation in the areas.’ Seven or eight of these journals (some are more notes or reflections than diaries) are available on the same website.

In 2007, Farrell published a first book, an autobiography Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist. In May 2008, he undertook a long (five weeks, 9,000 miles) tour across the country to publicise the autobiography, but networking with political groups and friends as he went. He travelled alone in a rental car - a Prius nicknamed Mule - and kept a detailed diary of the whole trip. This led to his second book, published the following the year by Akashic Books as Of Mule and Man. Some pages can be previewed at Amazon and Googlebooks.

Here is one extract (reduced from the six pages of printed text).

16 May 2008
‘Up early again. Have to cover a lot of distance today and there’s a telephone interview to do first, this with a woman at the Iowa Press-Citizen, in anticipation of my arrival there (weeks from now, I assume).

The next gig is in Austin, Texas, almost 800 miles away, so I won’t plan to get there tonight, but want to take a good bite out of it in order to get into the city relatively early tomorrow. I’ve not been to Austin and am looking forward to it. I keep hearing that it’s the “Berkeley of Texas,” a bastion of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state.

With thanks to Bobby and Eugenie for their gracious hospitality I head back into Santa Fe, through the narrow lanes of that lovely town, and finally to U.S. Highway 285, which runs a pretty straight shot southeast to West Texas.

It’s beautiful heading down out of the highlands under a bright blue sky pebbled with cottony white clouds. Driving up from El Paso on Tuesday, the climb from Las Cruces to Santa Fe was so gradual as to not be obvious, but a climb it was. Like El Paso, Las Cruces is less than 4,000 feet above sea level (actually higher than I had thought), while Santa Fe is nearly 7,500, so Mule had work to do - and did it without complaint. It was a “beepless” day, thank heaven, without great panicky moments.

I filled up the tank in Taos last night despite the fact that I still had two squares showing on the gas gauge and could probably have easily made the sixty-five miles back down to Santa Fe, but since it was very dark and there wasn’t a lot of civilization until we got close to Bobby and Eugenie’s, I decided not to test Mule. And again this morning the gauge says it’s still full.

As we race southward the mesas become less prominent and the land flattens out. It’s interesting to watch the outside temperature rise (the one thing I can understand on the dash screen so full of complex diagrams and information) as our altitude falls. From the time we left Los Angeles and hit the desert, the outside temperature has been in the high nineties, only dropping into the high eighties in El Paso. Once we pushed up to Santa Fe it got into the sixties and fifties, dropping one morning into the forties, so having the connection between altitude and temperature spelled out before me is interesting. Taking full advantage of the downward slope and a lack of traffic, I push Mule along at a good clip. I figure I’ve now broken the speed laws in every state we’ve touched so far. [. . . several paragraphs follow about ‘President Stupid’ - George W. Bush]

Here we are in southeastern New Mexico, zipping along under the now-less-cloudy blue sky. The flat, scrub-covered land stretches as far as one can see on each side, and when I look to the left I note the entrance to a vast, fenced piece of property with a sign over the gate that reads, Victor Perez Ranch. When I say vast, I mean that the road under the gate runs straight away from the highway and disappears over the horizon without a single structure in sight. Somewhere off in the far distance beyond the edge of the earth I envision a huge, elaborate ranch house and attendant structures looking like something out of the movie Giant.

Considering this as we roll along gets me thinking about the whole idea of owning property. As a city boy from a working-class background, I know the satisfaction that comes from owning a home and a piece of property, but thinking of Victor Perez and his rancho, or people like the characters in Giant, or so many others with huge landholdings - the kind of acreage that makes one understand the use of the word “spread” - gives me pause. It brings to mind the Native American concept of living in harmony with the land, perhaps as a visitor, or as one who is granted a kind of stewardship over it because it cannot be owned, as such; one lives in partnership with it.

Closing in on the Texas border we pass through the New Mexican town of Encino. Unlike the wealthy San Fernando Valley community of the same name, this Encino (meaning evergreen or a kind of oak tree) is a shambles. A virtual ghost town, to say it has fallen on hard times is to understate it by miles. Shuttered stores, overgrown yards, huge weeds covering the front of what was once a filling station mark some kind of tragedy in the lives of the people who once resided here - and the few who perhaps still do. Very sad to see this; shocking, in a way. And, not to make Victor Perez out to be a villain, because he’s probably a nice man who worked hard for what he has, the disparity between some lives and others in this country is writ large for me in these two sets of circumstances.

Crossing into Texas the clouds have come together and turned gray. Soon there is a steady sprinkle on us that continues down to and through the town of Pecos, Home of the World’s First Rodeo, per the signs. And as we cross the Pecos River I note that Mule and I are no longer “west of the Pecos.” [There follows a lengthy anecdote - inc. a conversation with the Mule - about nearly running out of petrol.]’

Suffragists of every religion

‘I almost had to pinch myself to make sure that I was alive. Really this day has been one of the happiest of my life - now I have shaken the hands of Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian suffragists, and I’ve seen many a Christian missionary show contempt for the cause. [. . .] And I am in China - China!!!.’ Carrie Chapman Catt, born 160 years ago today, was a powerful figure in the American women’s right movement, leading up to adoption of women’s suffrage in 1920. She was also an important figure in the international movement for women’s suffrage, travelling widely, not least to China. She kept diaries on these travels, none of which have been published, although one biography does contain some extracts.

Carrie Lane was born on 9 January 1859 (though some sources give 9 February) in Ripon, Wisconsin, but moved to Charles City, Iowa, when seven. She studied at Iowa Agricultural College (now the state university), where she joined the Crescent Literary Society and helped bring about a change to the rules so as to allow women to speak. She also started an all-female debating club. She graduated with science degree in 1880, becoming a teacher and then a superintendent of schools in Mason City, the first woman to take that role in the district. In 1885, she married Leo Chapman, a newspaper editor, though he died the following year of typhoid. Subsequently, she worked as a reporter in San Francisco, again the first woman to do so in the city.

In 1887, Catt returned to Charles City; and in 1890, she married George Catt, a wealthy engineer, who supported her campaigning for women’s suffrage. She served as state organiser for the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, and then began working nationally for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In 1892, she was asked by Susan B. Anthony to address Congress on proposed changes to woman’s suffrage. Catt, herself, was twice elected president of NAWSA, in 1900-1904 (she resigned early due to her husband’s ill health - he died in 1905) and 1915-1920. During her second term especially, Catt successfully led NAWSA and the suffrage movement in general to win support from President Woodrow Wilson in 1918, and to the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which prohibits US states and federal government from denying the right to vote to US citizens on the basis of sex) in 1920.

In 1902, Catt had helped found the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, and was its president from 1904 to 1923. Thereafter, she continued to remain an active campaigner for women’s suffrage internationally. In the 1920s and 1930, she embraced the peace movement, and turned her focus towards anti-war causes, being particularly active in campaigning to change immigration laws so that Jews, being persecuted in Germany, could more easily take refuge in the US. For her efforts she was rewarded with the American Hebrew Medal. In 1941, she received the Chi Omega award at the White House from her longtime friend Eleanor Roosevelt. After the death of her second husband, Catt had two long-term close friendships with, first, Mollie Hay, and then Alda Wilson. Catt died in 1947. Further information is readily available online, from Wikipedia, Wisconsin Historical Society, Carrie Lane Chapman Catt Girlhood Home and Interpretive Center, Historical Dictionary of the 1940s, and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some pages of Kristin Thoennes Keller’s biography, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Voice for Women (Compass Point Books, 2006) can be previewed at Googlebooks.

Catt seems to have been a busy diarist when travelling. The Library of Congress has some of her diaries, but those from her 1911-1912 round-the-world trip are held by University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. The latter gives the following summary of its holdings: ‘Diaries of Carrie Chapman Catt, a noted leader in the woman suffrage movement, written during a trip around the world. Included are descriptions of places, people, and activities, including meetings with women's suffrage groups and their leaders; details of daily life; and commentary on area politics. The diaries are especially detailed for Catt’s visits to Palestine, South Africa, Ceylon, India, the East Indies, the Philippines, China, Korea, and Japan. Most of the diaries are original with some typewritten copies and some summaries written later by Catt.’

The only source online I can find for information on these diaries is Jacqueline Van Voris’s biography, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (The Feminist Press, 1987). This can be previewed at Googlebooks and Amazon. Van Voris makes the following general comment: ‘Running through Catt’s diary is a startled appreciation at discovering women who had been fighting bigotry and sex prejudice all their lives. She was gratified to find feminists everywhere: often the women were not aware that they were part of a worldwide movement.’

In one annotation, Van Voris explains: ‘There are eight typewritten diaries of varying lengths covering Catt’s trip around the world in 1911-12. The diaries are neatly typed on standard 8½" by 11" paper. Throughout Catt pasted postcards, some newspaper clippings, and a few snapshots. [. . .] The collection consists of 589 pages as follows: 1. South Africa, 181 pages; 2. the Holy Land, 55 pages; 3. Ceylon, 31 pages; 4. India and Sumatra, 46 pages; 5. Java, 98 pages; 6. the Philippines, 39 pages; 7. China, 95 pages; 8. Korea, Japan, and Hawaii, 44 pages.’ Elsewhere, in another annotation, Van Voris records: ‘Catt kept a diary of her travels in Europe and South America from October 8, 1922 to March 17, 1923. It had apparently been started in 1917 (although she later misdated it 1916) but had only three days’ entries. Catt had come across it when she was cleaning out her apartment and decided to keep it on this trip.’

Here is one extract from Catt’s diary quoted by Van Voris. ‘We met nine splendid, sweet, refined, enthusiastic, hopeful, lovable young women, and three equally splendid young men. We told them about the Alliance and that we wanted to have China join it. We asked them what they had done and were doing. What a splendid story they told us. I almost had to pinch myself to make sure that I was alive. Really this day has been one of the happiest of my life - now I have shaken the hands of Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian suffragists, and I’ve seen many a Christian missionary show contempt for the cause. How curious is the plan for the onward march of the world’s army of humans! Now my dear Chinese suffragists are going to give me a reception. And I am in China - China!!!.’ Van Voris adds this comment; ‘Catt did not use exclamation points often but in her excitement she splattered her diary with them.’