or not Dr. Fergusson would be formally introduced.
“The doctor is at the gathering’s disposal,” Sir Francis M——answered.
“Bring him in! Bring him in!” they exclaimed. “A fellow as daring as all that is a sight worth seeing!”
“Maybe,” said a palsied old commodore, “this unbelievable proposal of his is just a prank he’s playing on us.”
“What if there’s no such person as Dr. Fergusson?” a roguish voice exclaimed.
“Then we’d have to invent him!” replied a humorous member of this solemn Society.
“Have Dr. Fergusson come in,” Sir Francis M——merely said.
And the doctor came in to thunderous applause, but not the least bit impressed by any of it.
He was some forty years old, a man of average height and build; his dark-hued complexion hinted at an assertive personality; he had a poker face with regular features and a strong nose, a nose like a ship’s prow for a man predestined to be a discoverer; his eyes were quite gentle, shrewd rather than bold, and lent real charm to his facial expressions; his arms were long, and he planted his feet on the ground with the confidence of somebody who takes everything in stride.
The doctor’s entire person gave off a calm dignity, and you couldn’t imagine him playing even the most innocent prank.
Accordingly, the hoorays and applause didn’t let up until Dr. Fergusson called for silence with a genial wave of the hand. He headed over to the chair set out for his presentation; then, still on his feet, not moving, his eyes resolute, he pointed his right index finger at the sky, opened his mouth, and uttered this single word:
“Excelsior!”2
No surprise motion from Messrs. Bright and Cobden, no plea by Lord Palmerston for more money to fortify England’s coasts, had ever created such a sensation! Sir Francis M——’s speech was left in the dust. At one go the doctor came off as enlightened, masterful, clearheaded, and temperate; he had said the word for the day:
“Excelsior!”
Completely won over by this unusual man, the old commodore moved that Fergusson’s communication be inserted “in its entirety” into the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London.3
So who was this doctor, and what undertaking was he about to embark on?
During Fergusson’s youth his father had been a gallant captain in the Royal Navy, and from his son’s earliest years, he had acquainted the boy with the dangers and risks of his profession. The worthy lad seemed untouched by fear, quickly gave evidence of sharp wits, a questing intelligence, and a remarkable bent for scientific research; what’s more, he revealed uncommon coping skills; nothing was ever awkward for him, not even using a fork for the first time, a test that youngsters generally fail.
Soon he was reading about bold undertakings, exploratory voyages, and they fired his imagination; he got all caught up in the discoveries that marked the first part of the nineteenth century; he daydreamed of the glory earned by Mungo Park, Bruce, Caillié, Levaillant—and even, I suspect, by Selkirk, who equaled them in his eyes. How many well-used hours he spent with that real-life Robinson Crusoe on his Juan Fernández Islands! Often he saw eye to eye with that marooned sailor; sometimes he disagreed with his plans and objectives; he would have acted differently and maybe done better—or, no doubt, at least as well! But one thing he was sure of—he never would have left that blissful island, where Selkirk had been as happy as a king without subjects … no, not even if he were to become First Lord of the Admiralty!
I’ll let you decide if these tendencies blossomed during an adventurous youth that took him to the four corners of the world. His father was an educated man who never missed a chance to sharpen his son’s keen intelligence with in-depth studies in hydrography, physics, and mechanics, plus a smattering of botany, medicine, and astronomy.
When the worthy captain passed away, Samuel Fergusson was twenty-two years old and had already traveled around the globe; he enlisted in the Bengal Corps of Engineers and gave a good account of himself in several skirmishes; but this life of soldiering didn’t agree with him; he had little interest in commanding, so he wasn’t keen on obeying. He submitted his resignation and set out for the northern regions of India’s peninsula, crossing it from Calcutta to Surat, surviving as both hunter and gatherer. A mere pleasure trip.
From Surat we see him traveling to Australia and in 1845 taking part in Captain Charles Sturt’s expedition, whose mission was to push inland and find that second Caspian Sea thought to exist deep in that continent then known as New Holland.
Samuel Fergusson went back to England around 1850; the demon of discovery possessed him more than ever, and until 1853 he accom panied Captain McClure on an expedition that skirted the American continent from Bering Strait to Cape Farewell in Greenland.
Despite exertions of every kind and in every climate, Fergusson’s sturdy constitution held up marvelously; he was at home with the most hopeless hardships; he was the very model of your ideal traveler whose belly contracts or expands at will, whose legs grow longer or shorter depending on the bed improvised for the occasion, who can fall asleep at any hour of the day and wake up at any hour of the night.
After that, from 1855 to 1857, nothing could be less surprising than to find our tireless traveler visiting all of western Tibet along with the Schlagintweit brothers, then bringing back some intriguing cultural data from their investigations.
During these various journeys, Samuel Fergusson was the liveliest and most interesting correspondent on the Daily Telegraph, that one-penny newspaper whose daily circulation runs as high as 140,000 copies, barely enough for its several million readers. Accordingly, he was well known, this doctor, although he wasn’t a member of any scholarly organization, neither the royal geographical societies of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or St. Petersburg, nor the Travelers Club, nor even the Royal Polytechnic Institute, lorded over by his friend Cockburn the statistician.4
This sage actually proposed one day, as a friendly gesture, to solve the following problem for him: given the number of miles the doctor had covered in his journeys around the world, how many more miles had his head traveled than his feet, due to its greater radius? Or rather, supplied with the different mileages for the doctor’s head and feet, what was his exact height to the nearest twelfth of an inch?
But Fergusson gave scholarly bodies a wide berth, being a member of the church of doers rather than talkers; his time was better spent in discovering than discussing, seeking than squabbling.
The story goes that an Englishman once visited Geneva intending to see the lake; they put him aboard one of those old-time carriages where the seats are mounted sideways and face out, as they do on the roof of an omnibus: now then, by chance our Englishman ended up in a seat that looked away from the lake; the carriage serenely circled it without the fellow thinking to turn around one single time, and he went back to London speechless over Lake Geneva.5
Dr. Fergusson, however, had turned around, and more than once during his travels, with the result that he had seen plenty. In this, moreover, he was just doing what came naturally, and we have grounds for thinking that he was a bit of a fatalist, but it was a very conservative sort of fatalism where he relied on himself and even on Providence; in his journeys he saw himself as pushed rather than pulled, as traveling the world like a railroad engine, which isn’t steered but goes where the tracks do.
“I don’t look for my path,” he often said. “My path looks for me.”
So nobody will be surprised by his composure as he received the Royal Society’s applause; he was above such petty concerns, had no pride and even less vanity; he saw the proposal he had presented to Sir Francis M——as perfectly simple and didn’t even notice the immense effect it produced.
After the meeting, they took the doctor to the Travelers Club on Pall Mall; there he found a superb feast laid out for him; the dimensions of the dishes served were commensurate