Of the five senses, our sight is the one we most value and the one it is hardest to imagine doing without. So the story of James Holman who was born in 1786, went blind at the age of twenty-five and, undaunted, studied literature and medicine at Edinburgh University and became an inveterate traveller is immediately intriguing. Holman promptly gained notoriety as the “Blind Traveller” and the first of his seven volumes of travelogue were well received, but later he and his work were scorned. He must be quietly exulting in the firmament that, thanks to Jason Roberts, his day has come.

Volume One is available on-line at Roberts’s own website through the Gutenberg Project, and a perusal reveals two things: that minimum narrative skills were required of an early nineteenth-century travel writer and that it took tremendous skill to extrapolate on the salient facts and produce this enthralling book.

In brief, Holman, who became a Volunteer Seaman at the age of twelve, contracted a form of rheumatism from the long freezing hours of keeping watch during his six years in Halifax. He recuperated in Bath, where he mostly regained the use of his limbs but lost his sight in a matter of days. This was disastrous for a man relying on a meager and uncertain income from the Navy. Ever resourceful, he secured life tenure as one of the Seven Naval Knights of Windsor, which granted him an annual stipend and accommodation within the Castle so long as he daily attended chapel. After months of what became to Holman an agonizing tedium, he infuriated his Governors by spending the rest of his life on the move, eventually achieving his goal of circumnavigating the world. He was the first to do so before the age of steam.

Holman was undoubtedly audacious, but it was either that or a stifling hermetic routine, or worse. A man must have, as he eloquently put it, a way to “enter into the business of life”. In order to do so, he had to teach himself to use his walking stick as a visual tool, and Roberts’s explanation of how he managed it is worth the price of the book alone (and owes much to his research with an American organisation called World Access for the Blind): “Where vision gulps, tactility sips. In the haptic world, an object yields up its qualities not all at once … but successively over time”. Holman’s sonar navigation, based on the tapping of his metal ferrule, enabled him, some forty odd years later, to make his way unaided to a friend’s table in a busy hotel dining room. He had overheard a conspiratorial whisper: “Be quiet; see what he will do.”

Holman only once hooked up with a travelling companion, an old friend called Colebrook who had gone deaf. “The circumstance is somewhat droll”, noted Holman. They journeyed through Europe together, with Holman enjoying the reliable descriptions of his friend as to a woman’s dress, or beauty, or the colour of a sunset; and as a team they were better able to defend themselves from the unscrupulous. Yet, tellingly, Holman resolved never to repeat the experience. As Roberts points out, the art of discovery was less nourishing than the art of survival: “comfort was the enemy”.

In 1827 he joined the British expedition to establish an anti-slavery campaign base on the island of Fernando Po, off the coast of Liberia, which lost all but 12 of 135 men to malaria. Holman was a fervent supporter, although he was skeptical of missionary attempts to provide schooling in Africa: “If we would have our efforts to improve their condition, really effective, we should deal with them as with foundlings” – a comment from Volume One of his Travels which reminds us in the face of Roberts’s marvellously vivid and sympathetic portrait that Holman was unusual but not enlightened.

In his introduction, Roberts fancifully claims that “no one, before or since, has experienced our world quite so vividly and completely”; more accurately, Holman’s achievement was unique. It is a shame that he felt compelled to describe vistas he could not have perceived in a haptic way – an account based solely on what he sensed would have been extraordinary too.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.