Current Literature
WE do not know what will be the feelings of our Scottish readers when they find in Mr. Clennell Wilkinson's The English Adventurers (Longman, 9s. fid.) James Bruce of Abyssinian fame specifically called an Englishman and hear that Livingstone was, " like many Scots, more English than the English." But perhaps they will -forgive him -these affronts to their nationalism in view of the jolly, witty, stirring contents of the rest of his book, and his understanding sympathy with adventurers. For in adventurers Scotland has always been prolific—Montrose, Admiral Cochrane, the Scots mercenaries in Russian and German armies, the Hudson Bay fur-factors, and many others; there was so little to eat at home that the Scot had perforce to seek sustenance abroad and adventure came in the search. The author does not attempt to define an adventurer ; he merely gives quick sketches of dozens of him, and the reader can make his own definition if he wants to. An eighteenth-century privateers- man's estimate of himself and his fellows partly fills the bill : " By God, we are men of strict honour, but we love money and a joke, the two best things in the world next to a whore and fighting." Except possibly with the earliest Crusaders, whatever else shines through in an adventurer's life, the pure loge of the game does. From Hawkwood ,of the fourteenth century, the mercenary cutthroat whose name the scourged Italians appropriately mispronounced Acuto • through Drake and Hawkins, patriots and pirates, through Halduyt's Elizabethans (and they begat the Buccaneers and the Buccaneers begat the Skull and Crossbones), through Indian soldiers of fortune like Colonel Skinner, who had fourteen wives and several religions—we can trace the game played for th'e genie's sake right down to Selous and Kaid Maclean' of Morocco, -to -Lawrence of Arabia, and to Aloysius Horn, who knew the heart of Africa, and who descended to peddle kitchen-ware from a Johannesburg doss-house and to become known among the film-studios of Hollywood.
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