Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum
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A true story of empire set in the Crimea, Sudan, Ceylon and Egypt – beautifully written and shot through with real psychological and historical insight.'Victorian Britain, that seemingly most conformist of ages, was in fact teeming with eccentrics. The fabulous Baker Brothers were eccentric in a conformist way for the time: Sir Samuel searched for the source of the Nile; Baker Pasha became leader of the Ottoman army. But it was that epitome of empire, and epitome of the Christian English gentleman, who was the most peculiar of them all: 'Chinese' Gordon is finally depicted as the anarchist he really was as he marched to his death against the Mahdi. It is Thompson's triumph that he gives these characters, straitjacketed first by their time, and then by history, the freedom to dance across the page once more.' JUDITH FLANDERSImperial Vanities is an adventure story in the high tradition, ranging from the Upper Nile, to Ceylon, Egypt and the slave markets of the Balkans. Livingstone, Speke and Burton also make an appearance, with the shadowy and elusive Laurence Oliphant spying from the sidelines. Written with Thompson's masterly touch, this is history at its best.'A tale of Empire at its most eccentric. Part biography, part history, part adventure yarn, Imperial Vanities is an ingeniously enjoyable read.' Fergus Fleming
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The Adventures
of the Baker Brothers and
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Haafner’s sensibilities were essentially eighteenth century: what he could not name left him in superstitious dread. For him the world was huge and had no edges, the dark led into the dark; and only among other white men was there any sense of place or purpose. Adrift in the Ceylon jungle, Haafner always looked to a town as his ideal destination – somewhere furnishing lights, recognisable and familiar cuts of meat, wine and white men’s conversation. His feeble explorations had taken him to the foothills of what was later called the Great Wilderness of the Peak – that is, Adam’s Peak, the highest point on the island, where a rock was said to bear the imprint of the first man. Even in Sam Baker’s time, the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, founded in 1827, had in print a map of Ceylon in which the site of the supposed biblical Paradise was indicated, regretfully, as ‘unknown mountainous region’.
Having arrived to shoot big game, Sam found himself instead exploring the empty spaces of a map. It suited his personality to be first, to set his foot where no white man had been before. The Great Wilderness (which, after all, existed on an island only 280 miles long) held no fears for him but, rather, encouraged a native obstinacy. His explorations also cocked a snook at received opinion on the island. He had a young man’s pride of life, which included in his case a marked anti-authoritarianism; but there was more to him than this. Haafner could never have sat in patience beside a jungle track and let his mind wander as fruitfully as these words indicate:
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