[NFBMT] James Holman from Wikipedia

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James Holman

Born 15 October 1786

Died 29 July 1857 (aged 70)

James Holman FRS (15 October 1786 – 29 July 1857), known as the "Blind
Traveller," was a British adventurer, author and social observer, best known
for his writings on his extensive travels. Completely blind and suffering
from debilitating pain and limited mobility, he undertook a series of solo
journeys that were unprecedented both in their extent of geography and method
of "human echolocation". In 1866, the journalist William Jerdan wrote that
"From Marco Polo to Mungo Park, no three of the most famous travellers,
grouped together, would exceed the extent and variety of countries traversed
by our blind countryman." In 1832, Holman became the first blind person to
circumnavigate the globe. He continued travelling, and by October 1846 had
visited every inhabited continent.

Holman was born in Exeter, the son of an apothecary. He entered the British
Royal Navy in 1798 as first-class volunteer, and was appointed lieutenant in
April 1807. In 1810, while on the Guerriere off the coast of the Americas, he
was invalided by an illness that first afflicted his joints, then finally his
vision. At the age of 25, he was rendered totally and permanently blind.

In recognition of the fact that his affliction was duty-related, he was in
1812 appointed to the Naval Knights of Windsor, with a lifetime grant of care
in Windsor Castle. This position demanded he attend church service twice
daily as his only duty in return for room and board, but the quietness of
such a life harmonized so poorly with his active habits and keen interests,
physically making him ill, that he requested multiple leaves of absence on
health grounds, first to study medicine and literature at the University of
Edinburgh, then to go abroad on a Grand Tour from 1819 to 1821 when he
journeyed through France, Italy, Switzerland, the parts of Germany bordering
on the Rhine, Belgium and the Netherlands. On his return he published The
Narrative of a Journey through France, etc. (London, 1822).

He again set out in 1822 with the incredible design of making the circuit of
the world from west to east, something which at the time was almost unheard
of by a lone traveller, blind or not - but he travelled through Russia as far
east as the Mongolian frontier of Irkutsk. There he was suspected by the Czar
of being a spy who might publicize the extensive activities of the Russian
American Company should he travel further east, and was conducted back
forcibly to the frontiers of Poland. He returned home by Austria, Saxony,
Prussia and Hanover, when he then published Travels through Russia, Siberia,
etc. (London, 1825).

Shortly afterwards he again set out to accomplish by a somewhat different
method the design which had been frustrated by the Russian authorities; and
an account of his remarkable achievement was published in four volumes in
1834-1835, under the title of A Voyage Round the World, including Travels in
Africa, Asia, Australasia, America, etc., from 1827 to 1832.

Holman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), and of the Linnaean
Society (UK). Charles Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, cited Holman's
writings as a source on the flora of the Indian Ocean. On Fernando Po Island,
now part of Equatorial Guinea, the British Government named the Holman River
in his honor, commemorating his contributions to fighting the slave trade in
the region during the 1820s.

His last journeys were through Spain, Portugal, Moldavia, Montenegro, Syria
and Turkey. Within a week after finishing an autobiography, Holman's
Narratives of His Travels, he died in London on 29 July 1857. This last work
was never published, and likely has not survived.

While his early works were generally well received, only partially as a
novelty, over time competitors and skeptics introduced doubt into the public
consciousness about the reliability of Holman's "observations". In a time
when blind people were thought to be almost totally helpless, and usually
given a bowl to beg with, Holman's ability to sense his surroundings by the
reverberations of a tapped cane or horse's hoof-beats was unfathomable.

See also

O'Byrne, William Richard (1849). 

"Wikisource link to Holman, James". 

Wikisource link to A Naval Biographical Dictionary. 

John Murray. Wikisource.

References

Roberts, Jason (2006). A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's
Greatest Traveler, HarperCollins Publishing, New York, NY, 2006 ISBN
0-00-716106-9  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
public domain: 

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Holman, James". Encyclopædia Britannica. 13
(11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 616.

External links

       Wikiquote has quotations related to: James Holman

       Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article
Holman, James.

Works by James Holman at Project Gutenberg

Works by or about James Holman at Internet Archive

A Holman site on Jason Roberts' web-site

Audio excerpts of Roberts' book

"Tales of a Blind Traveler" on NPR 19 August 2006 (includes audio)

Joy Breslauer, President

National Federation of the Blind of Montana 

Web Site: http://www.nfbofmt.org <http://www.nfbofmt.org/> 

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