Map and title page of Bent’s bestseller on the Cyclades (1885) (archive.org).
“The Islands of the Aegean Sea offer plenty of scope for the study of Hellenic archaeology, but they are more particularly rich in the preservation of manners and customs which have survived the lapse of years, and the result of a special study of both these points, made during two winters passed by my wife and myself amongst the islanders, in their distant hamlets, and in their towns by the sea-coast, I here place before the public.” (From Bent’s Preface, page v) note 1
“… Mr. Theodore Bent’s excellent book on the ‘Cyclades’, the only recent book which is really serviceable to teach ordinary readers the details of the subject.” (Prof. Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, Irish classicist, in Good Words, 1888: Vol. 29, 305 ff.)
Detail from a raised-relief map of Greece (Glyn Griffiths 2024).
Theodore Bent’s evergreen (ever-blue perhaps?) account of two winters happily spent island-hopping in the Greek Cyclades was published on 28 February 1885 in London by Longman, Green and Co. The Cyclades, or Life Among the Insular Greeks was the first such travelogue to appear in English and to this day features regularly in the bibliographies of those writing about these iconic islands.
Reviews spanning the century:
“Mr. Bent’s book deserves all success, for it is the result of researches pursued in the most laudable manner. When an educated man selects for his field of observation an interesting and little-explored area of country, and, after learning the language, spends a considerable part of two winters there, living among all classes of people so as to familiarise himself with the details of their life, and to become intimately acquainted with their ideas and modes of thought, he deserves the title of an enthusiastic investigator.” Academy 27, Jan/June 1885, p. 322.
“It is the classic of Aegean travel in English and will never be superseded, for one good reason that Bent was lucky enough to visit the islands when they were still, as it were, intact and only just waking out of the sleep of centuries.” Ernle Bradford, The Companion Guide to the Greek Islands (1983, Collins, London, p. 156).
“James Theodore Bent (1852-1897), author of The Cyclades (London, 1885), much the most valuable book on the Aegean.” (Robert Liddell, Aegean Greece, London, 1954, p.107, n.1)
“Seriphos and Siphnos sound like Heavenly Twins, and are very similar in size and scope. Kimolos and Sikinos are hard to visit, and harder to escape from… frankly it is not worth the trouble to do so, unless you are as determined and thorough about your Aegean as old Theodore Bent – who wrote the real classic on the area.” (Lawrence Durrell, The Greek Islands, London, 1980, p.254)
Reading The Cyclades
As an audiobook of The Cyclades has yet to appear, to mark its 140th anniversary (2025) we have asked ‘Cycladists’, those with affinities to the islands, to read memorable extracts from Bent’s guide for us.
The order of appearance is in accordance with how Bent sequenced them, not as the couple actually visited them – for this you need to see the diary of his wife, Mabel, for the winter of 1883/4. The dates given, where possible, of when they made their visits are from this diary – and not always reliable. The Bents’ first winter in the area, 1882/3, is unchronicled by Mabel, seeming to have been limited to a few Easter weeks, taking in Tinos and Amorgos. The diarist notes on their return to London in the Spring of 1884 that “though we like good food and beds and ease and comfort as well as others, we think the pleasure we have had quite pays for all the pains”. (The Travel Chronicles of Mrs J. Theodore Bent, Vol. 1, Oxford, 2006, p. 61)
The tsabouna played by Yannis Pantazis of Santorini.
Most readings begin with a short melody on the island bagpipes (tsabouna) played by Yannis Pantazis of Santorini. The Bents would have been very familiar with this sound, even acquiring their own instrument (now in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford).
So, πάμε, click on an audio file below to transport yourself to the Bents’ Cyclades as they found them in 1883/4 (zoom out on the map below to slowly reveal the islands). Further reader contributions will be added, of course, as they sail in, σιγά-σιγά! note 2
(All rights remain with the individual readers, 2025-)
The Readings
Introduction and Bent’s Preface (pp. v-viii), dated November 1884
An introduction to ‘Reading “The Cyclades”‘, followed by Bent’s Preface to the first edition, providing a little background and his main objectives in visiting the islands over the course of two winters…
Serifos [Bent’s Ch. 1: Saturday 1st December – Tuesday 4th December 1883]
“The Church of St. Athanasius was worth seeing, being round with two little apses. It has a lovely iconostasis… carved in wood, with vine tendrils, and festoons, and niches for twenty eikons…” Metropolitan Church of Agios Athanasios, Ano Chora, Serifos (C. Messier, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0).
After a short stay on Syros, Siphnos was the first island the couple visited on their second winter tour, with Bent also choosing to begin his travelogue here. This ‘very pretty island’, as Mabel calls it, still makes the perfect overture to Bent’s Cycladic idyll, introducing us to all the themes that reappear throughout his work – ‘Zorba’-like characters, myths and legends, food and drink, custom and costume, antiquities, the ups and downs of travel, everyday life ‘among insular Greeks’ indeed… Our first reader is Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, author, inter alia, of The Aegean Islands Insight Pocket Guide: Mykonos and Santorini, publishing-editor of Weekly Hubris, and Cycladophile.
Melos [Bent’s Ch. 4: Saturday 15th December – Friday 21 December 1883]
View of the ancient theatre of Melos (330 x 558 mm, graphite, pen and ink, and watercolour) by James Skene, c. 1841 (CC Trustees of the British Museum (asset number 1280633001)).
Anafi [Bent’s Ch. 5: Wednesday, 9 January 1884 – Friday, January 11 1884 or Saturday, 12 January 1884]
A photo from the early 1940s giving some idea of what Anafi’s harbour jetty might have looked like 100 years after the Bents sailed from the island (Margaret Kenna).
Bent’s entire chapter read by social anthropologist and Anafi specialist Margaret Kenna (Professor Emerita, Swansea University), who has spent 50 years researching in Greece, most of it focussed on the islanders and migrants of Anafi, spending a year on the island doing fieldwork for her doctorate in 1966 (Greek Island Life: Fieldwork on Anafi, Sean Kingston Publishing, 2017).
Santorini [Bent’s Ch. 6: Monday 7th January – Wednesday 23 January 1884]
Travel writer Jennifer Barclay reads the Bents on Santorini (photo = Ian smith).
Travel writer and Tilos resident Jennifer Barclay first got to know the Bents a few years back when they went with her some of the way on her breezy Dodecanese travelogue Wild Abandon (Bradt Guides 2020); she wrote an article for us about the adventure too (In the Footsteps of Theodore and Mabel). Needless to say, we’re now very happy she has agreed to sail a little west from Tilos into the Cyclades to read a few of her favourite extracts from Bent’s visit to Santorini (no introduction required there, of course), where she spent a summer in the early 1990s. And if you think you can hear cicadas in the background now and then, you can; Jennifer has her window open as she reads…
Ios [Bent’s Ch. 7: Wednesday 23 January – Sunday 27 January 1884]
P.M. Iannetta; Ios harbour in the 1930s (after Liddell 1954); Ekaterina Lorenziadis’ costume (National Historical Museum, Athens); Ios, the Chora today (Joshua Doubek: Wikipedia).
English language teacher and island-hopper P.M. Iannetta narrates the Bents’ landing on Ios – ‘Little Malta’ – and their first impressions of the main town. We meet mayor Lorenziadis and his family and are treated to a fashion show by his daughter Ekaterina – the dress she is modelling is now on display at the National Historical Museum, Athens.
Delos [from Bent’s Ch. 10, Mykonos (as ‘Note II – The Excavations at Delos’): Saturday, 1 March 1884]
Delos – bases and monuments north of Theophrastos’ Agora, the ‘Hypostyle Hall’, photographed in 1908, i.e. 25 years or so only after the Bents’ visit. The photographer is unknown (CC Archimage).
Rather like today’s tourists, the Bents spent a day on Delos, legendary birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, at the end of their visit to Mykonos. Then as now, excavations on this island, the heart of the Cyclades, are under the aegis of L’École Française D’Athènes in coordination with the Greek State. Bent, of course, finds the remains tantalising. His archaeological thoughts are read by Catherine Bouras, Secrétaire de rédaction pour La Chronique des fouilles en ligne, l’EFA.
Naxos [Bent’s Ch. 14: Sunday, 23 December 1883 – Monday, 7 January 1884]
Portara, the large portal of the Sanctuary of Delian Apollo, Naxos (C. Messier, Wikipedia).
An early extract from Bent’s chapter on Naxos (‘The Town of Naxia’), where the couple spend Christmas, 1883. The passage – referencing the famous islet off the main town and its trademark temple remains that still salute every arrival by sea – is read by our friend the cartographer Glyn Griffiths, who has kindly provided many maps for our website and publications over the last twenty years, and for whose work we are most happy to thank here.
Revis Cruttenden, “Island Chapel” (detail, 2010, oil on board, 35.5 x 20.5).
A second extract from Bent’s Naxos chapter (‘In the Mountains of Naxos’) takes us inland and up into the mountains by paths still traceable among the picture-book villages of the interior region of Potamia. It is read by garden-designer/artist Revis Cruttenden, Cycladic traveller and erstwhile Mani resident. (Mabel’s diary gives the date of the rainy mule ride as 29 December 1883.)
notes
Note 1: In terms of contemporary English visitors (tourists) to the region, Bent would have found little in the way of popular literature. There exists a superficial, anonymous, article that he most probably would have read, written by a young male(?) traveller who decided to make a short sail from Athens in February 1880, ‘to woo the sea breezes among the Cyclades’. His tour takes in Syros, Tinos, Delos, Naxos, Paros, and Antiparos. On Tinos he makes reference to the famous annual pilgrimage – an event that draws Bent there in the spring of 1883. The article, barely recommendable, is A Cruise in Greek Waters (The St. James’s Magazine and United Empire Review, v.39 (12) JY-D (1880), pp.39-46). Curiously, its title is identical to the earlier (1870) travelogue by the affable maverick Frederick Trench Townshend. This is well worth the trouble of finding, although the Cyclades are not included. Return from Note 1
Note 2: More readings will be added as and when they appear. For details of how to participate, contact info[at]thebentarchive[dot]com Return from Note 2
The very rare portrait of Theodore Bent from his obituary in ‘St. James’s Budget’, 14 May 1897 (Bent died on 5 May 1897). The studio of J. Russell & Sons, pre 1895. (From the British Library Collection, shelfmark MFM.MLD32, 14/05/1897, page 15, reproduced with permission).
That invaluable resource The British Newspaper Archive regularly adds new and arcane material. Recently (Summer 2025), they included in their collection the St James’s Budget (a weekly digest of the St James’s Gazette, a London evening newspaper for the middle classes), and the issue of 14 May 1897 (p. 15) carried an obituary of Theodore Bent, who had died on 5 May.
The obituary (see our anthology) includes a very rare photograph of Bent, from the studio of J. Russell & Sons, the establishment’s photographer of choice: a photograph that in all likelihood has not been reproduced since 1897.
We don’t know for the moment the date of the photograph, but it probably comes from a session in the Baker Street branch of Russell’s, shot, possibly, as late as the Spring of 1895 – a session that might also have resulted in some other iconic images we have of the Bents, including the one of Theodore – with whip and topee – that Mabel selected for her husband’s obituary in the Illustrated London News of 15 May 1897 (p. 669), which is well known.
Also from the Russell studio (pre 1895), Theodore, with whip and topee, an image Mabel selected for her husband’s obituary in the ‘Illustrated London News’ of 15 May 1897 (p. 669).
Accordingly, we now have four images of the Bents from Russell’s, two of Theodore and two of Mabel, probably taken at the same time. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of a Russell photograph showing the couple together. The Bents’ travel schedule, and commitments in Britain, would have made arranging a studio session complicated.
Mabel Bent dressed for travel. (Photo taken (pre 1895) in the studios of society-photographers, J. Russell & Sons).
The fourth Russell image is of Mabel, standing confidently by the side of one of her own cameras – she had become expedition photographer as early as 1885.
Dr Marielle Risse now lives in Cambridge, MA. She taught cultural studies, literature and pedagogy for 21 years on the Arabian Peninsula at the American University of Sharjah (UAE), the University of Sharjah-Woman’s (UAE) and Dhofar University (Oman). Her research areas are Arabian Peninsula cultures and intercultural communication. Her previous books are Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Foodways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2021) and Houseways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2023). Her most recent book is Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions (2025, Palgrave Macmillan).
General map of Arabia marked with the areas of interest to the Bents in the 1890s (‘Southern Arabia’ 1900).
Theodore and Mabel Bent journeyed to Oman in the winter of 1894/5, and, having seen many references to the explorers in Marielle’s work, we asked her if she would care to write something for us, of her choice, weaving the Bents into the landscape she loves…
Cite from this article, please, as: Marielle Risse, ‘Ya Mabel’ and the Duchess: A Victorian but Modern, Female Traveller and a Modern but Victorian, Female Traveller in Southern Oman. An article in The Bent Archive website, August 2025 [http://tambent.com/2025/08/07/ya-mabel-and-the-duchess-by-marielle-risse/]
‘Ya Mabel’ and the Duchess: A Victorian but Modern, Female Traveller and a Modern but Victorian, Female Traveller in Southern Oman
By Marielle Risse, August 2025
Abstract
Wadi Dabat, eastern sector of Jabal al Qara, Dhofar highlands (Wikipedia, credit: Shifabeg, Sept. 2018).
Has travel writing moved with the times, shedding racism, colonialism, ‘othering,’ and metro-centric points of view? What are the conditions in which ‘imagination and humility necessary to climb into the head of people who live by a very different set of assumptions’ is created? Later travellers to southern Oman have seen and reported only what was most unusual, most foreign and more recent books about the Dhofar region show less understanding of the culture than articles and books written in the 1800s. We will discuss two specific examples of this odd juxtaposition: a Victorian, female traveller who is more accurate about Dhofaris than a modern, female traveller.
Keywords: Dhofar, Mabel Bent, Oman, Qara Mountains, Theodore Bent, travel writing; Jan Morris, Suzanna St. Albans, Wilfred Thesiger
Introduction
My starting question for this research is: has travel writing moved with the times, shedding racism, colonialism, ‘othering,’ and metro-centric points of view? Thinking specifically about southern Arabia, why would Thesiger, now described as ‘a fond old blimp in cavalry-twills’ write about inhabitants of the southern Dhofar region with understanding and respect while writers from the late 20th and early 21st centuries stay stuck in the ‘exoticizing’ mode? note 1
Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is widely acclaimed as a great travel book; it is also an accurate travel book. note 2 He not only wrote what he observed, he wrote the explanations for the actions and attitudes he observed. He had the rare advantage of time, but even if his work is set aside, the earlier explorers/surveyors of the Dhofar had, within the blinkers of their ‘imperial gaze’, an ability to observe and report accurately. note 3
Many later travellers to southern Oman saw and reported only what was most unusual, most foreign. These more recent books about the Dhofar region show less understanding of the culture than articles and books written in the 1800s. I will discuss two specific examples of this odd juxtaposition: a Victorian, female traveller who is more accurate about Dhofaris than a modern, female traveller.
Theodore (1852-1897) and Mabel (1847-1929) Bent, quintessential Victorians, explored the coast and the mountains of southern Oman in 1894. A few years later, Theodore having died four days after their return to England from Aden in 1897, an account of their travels in the wider region feature in Southern Arabia (1900), compiled by Mabel. note 4 With reference to Oman, although there are plenty of acidic comments [‘Merbat [Mirbat] is uncongenial’ with ‘no points of interest’], Mabel also includes careful documentation of the tribespeople living in the Qara Mountains (232). She was not pleased that the Qara men addressed her only as ‘Ya Mabel’ instead of ‘Mrs. Bent’ but she was capable of insights such as ‘Travelers like ourselves must be a great nuisance drinking up the scanty supply of water’.
I will compare her work to another Western woman who has written about the same area, including the Qara mountains, the Duchess of St. Albans, who was, surprisingly, less perceptive. In Where Time Stood Still: A Portrait of Oman (1980) St. Albans writes of the ‘primitive’ tribespeople who ‘have never worked with their hands’. How would ‘primitive’ people living in caves and herding flocks have survived if they had ‘never worked with their hands’?
The Bents
Theodore and Mabel had already explored in Italy, Greece, Bahrain, South Africa, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen when they arrived in Oman. Their trip to Dhofar began when they left ‘Maskat’ (Muscat) 17 December 1894 and travelled by ship south along the coast, arriving in Mirbat on 20 December. After travelling along the coast and up into the mountains, they left the Dhofar region from Al Hafa (part of modern-day Salalah) on 23 January 1894. I believe they are the first Westerners to visit the Dhofar mountains to write a description of it.
Although the Bents were not in the employ of the British government, they were quintessential Victorian-age travellers who, in their writing, specifically support British imperialism in their Southern Arabia (1900/2005). The book, as mentioned above, written by Mabel after Theodore died soon after returning to England from Yemen in 1897, viewed all landscapes through the perspective of how the land might be useful to the Empire:
‘If this tract of country comes into the hands of a civilizing nation, it will be capable of great and useful development… and a health resort for the inhabitants [i.e. British inhabitants] of the burnt-up centres of Arabian commerce, Aden and Maskat (274).
Southern Arabia is a book with plenty of spleen – it’s impossible to say how much is caused by Mabel Bent’s mourning for her dead spouse or her natural disposition. In either case, it is amusing to come across her acid opinions: Mirbat has a ‘malarious-looking swamp’ and ‘Our boat was one of the dirtiest I have ever travelled on’ (232). She is clearly a forerunner to the Theroux/Naipaul/Granta/ ‘I hate the natives’ school of travel writing: ‘The Bedouin are rather clever at impromptu verses, and when we were in Wadi Ser they made night hideous by dancing in our camp’; ‘There is no law, order, authority, honor, honesty, or hospitality, and as to the people, I can only describe them as hateful and hating each other’; ‘it appears that a very wicked branch of the Hamoumi tribe hold a portion of this valley’; and she refers to one of the men she travelled with as ‘that horrid little Saleh Hassan’ (128, 175, 177, 217).
The Qara men she travelled with always addressed her, to her anger, only as ‘Mabel’ (258), with the local prefix when calling a person ‘ya’ – as in ‘Ya Mabel!’ They informed the Bents that ‘they did not wish us to give them orders of any kind as they were sheikhs’ and ‘We are gentlemen’ (258, 266). The mountain people of Dhofar, Mabel Bent writes, are:
‘… endowed with a spirit of independence which makes him resent the slightest approach to legal supervision… They would not march longer than they liked; they would only take us where they wished… and if we asked them not to sing at night and disturb our rest, they always set to work with greater vigour (248).
But she always includes a fair amount of real information, taking the time, for example, to explain how indigo is used to dye clothes (145). She also kindly gives hints to future travellers, i.e. warning future geologists that they must tell the camel men ahead of time they will carry rocks and that anthropologists should investigate the religion of the mountains (212, 261). She describes the scenery with careful attention to plants, rock formations, distances, etc. (e.g. Wadi Ghersid, 256; Wadi Nahast, 265) and, noticing that the language spoken in the ‘Gara’ [Qara] mountains was not a dialect, she includes a few words (275). Some of her information is still current. She mentions, for example, that oaths ‘to divorce a favourite wife, are really good’ (180) and the technique of cooking on stones (250), which I have seen practised several times.
The Bents eventually stop struggling to control and ‘we gave up any attempt to guide our own footsteps, but left ourselves entirely in his [Sheik Sehel] hands, to take us whether he would and spend as long about it as he liked’ (257).
Her summation is typical of British Victorian-era travellers: ‘We had discovered a real Paradise in the wilderness, which will be a rich prize for the civilized nation which is enterprising enough to appropriate it’ (276). Within the limited, imperialistic, point-of-view, a reader gets a clear sense of the place and the people. The Bents have a diamond-hard sense of self self-assurance, but they are able to describe accurately and write in a way which effectively gives you the information you need: as you understand the author’s prejudices, you can understand the places and people described and you can thus make your own judgment about both.
Morris
It is rather a surprise, after the gradually lowering racist/condescending tone seen in the arc from the Bents through Thesiger, to read Jan Morris’ Sultan in Oman (2008/1957) a smug, complacent, and judgmental book. note 5 She begins by widely overstating her achievement, declaring that she undertook the ‘… last classic journeys of the Arabian peninsula’, as if being driven in a jeep from Salalah to Muscat in 1956 was on par with Dougherty or Philby (1). To drive home the (moribund) English tradition, she notes that ‘Curzon and Gertrude Bell rose with us approvingly’ (2).
The descriptions illuminate more about Morris’ travels than Oman, i.e. Risut is like ‘… a bay in Cornwall or northern California’ (20); ‘The deeper we penetrated into these Qara foothills, the more lifeless and unearthly the country seemed… It was like an empty Lebanon’; the ‘abyss of Dahaq’ is compared to ‘Boulder or Grand Coulee’; and the Qara mountains ‘felt like England without the churches, or Kentucky without the white palings’ (27, 27, 38). A small lake is ‘“Better than the Backs”, said my companion, “not so many undergraduates”’, which only makes sense if the reader knows this is a term referring to the place where several Cambridge colleges back onto the River Cam (30).
The people have ‘obscure rituals, taboos, and prejudices’ (31). In keeping with the general tone of relegating the inhabitants to prehistoric times, there is no mention of guns. The people ‘hurl in the general direction of their neighbours the heavy throwing sticks (less scientific than boomerangs) with which they were sometimes quaintly armed’ (40). It is clear even in Thesiger’s texts that the men of this region had access to and knowledge of guns. In fact, the cover of one edition is one of Thesiger’s photos showing Bin Ghabaisha holding a rifle.
The Dhofar War
I need to segue to briefly describe the war, from 1965-1975, in order to make my critique of St. Albans. The Dhofar War began as a result of widespread dissatisfaction with the rule of Said bin Taimur, which has been ‘characterized as a desperate attempt to keep the Fifteenth century from being contaminated by the Twentieth’. note 6
Various groups of Dhofaris, primarily from the mountains, and angry at the lack of schools, clinics, electricity, etc., began to attack Oman’s small military forces, the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF). These groups coalesced into the Dhofar Liberation Front in 1964, which was then re-named, in 1968, People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf, and ‘a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary program was adopted for the rebellion’. note 7 Its goals included: ‘the liberation of slaves’; ‘the equality of women’ (which included the elimination of polygamy); ‘demolition of the tribal system’; and ‘the unity of all revolutionary forces in the Gulf’. note 8
The SAF did not have enough men or equipment to cope with the insurgency, but the Sultan refused to spend money for the army, nor did he show any understanding or mercy towards the rebels’ demands. The result was that by 1970, the rebels controlled almost all of the Dhofar region. In the same year, in a bloodless coup d’etat, Sultan Qaboos took over control of his father’s government and immediately started a two-front counterattack. He increased the military presence and initiated a hearts and minds campaign to assure the rebels that he intended to meet their demands for modernization.
Soldiers who left the rebels were treated as ‘returning sons’; they were interviewed and immediately released, not jailed. note 9 Sultan Qaboos also ‘emphasized that the past practices of indiscriminate reprisals against civilians on the Jebel had to end.’ note 10
The military who fought the rebels held them in respect as fighters; the enemy was ‘extremely good at seizing the initiative and had a wonderful eye for ground… once outflanked, they tended to melt away’. note 11 Their praise of the rebels is all the clearer when comparing the rebels to fighters from other countries who fought for the Sultan; Iranian and Jordanian soldiers are not accorded the same respect.
As firqat (civil militia) units were created, British soldiers then had the experience of fighting with men who had previously fought with the rebels. Although Jeapes, who wrote one of the first books about the war, often shows his impatience with Dhofaris, he and the other foreign writers have an overall positive impression. Gardiner writes: ‘Omanis were wonderful people to live with. They were superbly honest… They were generous to a fault and… they didn’t take themselves too seriously… [they] wished to be at peace with any man who was ready to be at peace with them.’ note 12
St. Albans
St. Albans’ travel book recounts her extended visit to Oman in the late 1970s. She was clearly no average tourist; her first ‘thank you’ in her Acknowledgements section is to Brigadier Peter Thwaites. The second is ‘The Sultan’s Armed Forces provided transport where I wanted to go’ (ix). Most of the other people mentioned are also British and military. She has done some reading about the history of Oman, but her opinions reflect no ability to understand the reality of the people. One example, of many, is her assertion that:
‘There is a company in England which manufactures florescent braces to make camels visible in the dark, but no Bedu in his right mind will go to the expense and trouble of importing this equipment for his animals. It is very much to his advantage anyway to get them killed on the roads, as the compensation for such a casualty is £500 each.’ (146)
How would desert-dwellers in Oman in the late 1970s have access to information about companies in England? How would they have access to things such as post-office boxes and credit cards to enable such a transaction? It is not to a camel owner’s ‘advantage’ to have his livestock killed by a car, the meat cannot be eaten, and as camels wander far afield, the owner may never know which vehicle killed the camel, not to mention the fact that camel owners grow attached to their animals.
When she arrives in Salalah, her statements become quite difficult to understand. She states that there are ‘nine illiterate tribes of primitive aborigines in the Qara [Mountains]’ (152). note 13 These ‘primitive aborigines’ had just waged a ten-year war with the Omani government in which they had close contact with not only the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, but Russia, China, Cuba, and various Arab countries.
Musallim bin Nafl, the first leader of this revolution, is dismissed by the Duchess as ‘a useless loafer’ and a ‘shiftless, bitter, dissatisfied layabout’, but when she visits mountain villages she is appalled at the conditions (155, 156).
She never connects the revolution encouraged by Musallim and the desperate poverty endured by his people. She writes that the ‘entire population of the Jebel were forced to co-operate’ in the war (157), without understanding that the disease and lack of food she sees in the late 1970s would have been worse in the late 1960s. The difficulties of daily life she herself witnessed encouraged the mountain people to fight against their government – which denied them the basic amenities of modern life such as schools and electricity. note 14
In reading her autobiography Mango and Mimosa (2000), which recounts her work for the British military in World War Two, you might explain that her apathy towards the mountain fighters was generated (maybe sub-consciously) because they fought the British – but even the British who fought the Dhofaris were more realistic/understanding of their situation.
St. Albans describes the Bait Kathiri tribe as ‘nimble as goats’ and says that ‘like our own distant ancestors, they frequently paint themselves blue all over’ (168). Comparing men to animals is grossly insulting in Dhofar and the men do not paint themselves blue. Men and women traditionally wore indigo-dyed fabric which turned the skin blue, an important difference.
These small mistakes create a vision of an ancient, primitive people which erases the reality of the Dhofar region in the late 1970s. St. Albans only carefully describes the life of a small percentage of the inhabitants, living in caves and rough dwellings in the mountains. She discusses ‘witch doctors’ but not the many mosques or daily religious practices of Dhofaris (154). In Salalah at this time there was an airport, Holiday Inn, ‘shops and offices and ultra-modern television centre’, and a hospital (180), but she never shows Omanis interacting in/working in these modern surroundings. The ‘comfortable seaside bungalow’ she stays in is owned by British ex-pats, who are described, but when visiting the ‘model farm’, there is no reference to Omanis who work there (163, 164).
Discussion
In the modern books, the emphasis is firmly placed on the ‘exotic’; where both the Bents and Haines (1845) are able to discern that the people’s ‘skins are discoloured by the dye from their dress, which is composed of blue cotton’ (112), St. Albans sees people who paint themselves.
Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘It was fun thirty-five years ago to travel far and in great discomfort to meet people whose entire conception of life and manner of expression were alien. Now one has only to leave one’s gate. All fates are worse than death.’ note 15 I think that ‘leaving one’s gate’ is no longer ‘alien’ enough – modern travel writers have an up-hill battle trying to show that they are doing/discovering something new, hence the emphasis on the unusual.
Mabel Bent and her husband were looking for land that would be of benefit for their country; St. Albans was looking for bizarre stories to tell. It is striking how the more recent writers show less understanding and less respect than British writers for the imperialistic era, given the modern emphasis on equality and multi-cultural education. note 16 Gardiner writes that:
‘The patience and tolerance to live harmoniously in an unfamiliar culture; the fortitude to be content with less than comfortable circumstances for prolonged periods; an understanding of and sympathy with a foreign history and religion; a willingness to learn a new language; the flexibility, imagination and humility necessary to climb into the head of people who live by a very different set of assumptions; none of these are found automatically in our modern developed Euro-Atlantic culture.’ note 17
The question remains: What are the conditions in which ‘imagination and humility necessary to climb into the head of people who live by a very different set of assumptions’ is created?
References
Belanger, Kelly 1997. ‘James Theodore Bent and Mabel Virginia Anna Bent’. British Travel Writers: 1876-1909: 31-40. Detroit: Gale Research.
Bent, James Theodore 1895. ‘Exploration of the Frankincense Country, Southern Arabia’. The Geographical Journal 6.2: 109-33.
Bent, James Thedore and Mabel Bent 2005 [1900]. Southern Arabia. London: Elibron.
Bent, Mabel 2010. The Travel Chronicles of Mrs. J. Theodore Bent, Volume III: Deserts of Vast Eternity, Southern Arabia and Persia. Gerald Brisch (ed.). Oxford: Archaeopress.
Haines, Stafford 1845. ‘Memoir of the South and East Coasts of Arabia: Part II’. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 15: 104-160.
Morris, Jan 2008 [1957]. Sultan in Oman. London: Eland.
St. Albans, Suzanne (Duchess) 2000. Mango and Mimosa. London: Virago.
— 1980. Where Time Stood Still: A Portrait of Oman. London: Quartet Books Ltd.
Thesiger, Wilfred 1991 [1959]. Arabian Sands. New York: Penguin.
— 1950. ‘The Badu of Southern Arabia’. Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society 37: 53-61.
— 1950. ‘Desert Borderlands of Oman’. Geographical Journal 116: 137-171.
— 1949. ‘A Further Journey across the Empty Quarter’. Geographical Journal 113: 21-46.
— 1948. ‘Across the Empty Quarter’. Geographical Journal 111: 1-21.
— 1946. ‘A New Journey in Southern Arabia’. Geographical Journal 108: 129-145.
Endnotes
Note 1: Ian Thomson, ‘Continental – Books’, The Times (23 Oct. 1994). Return from Note 1
Note 2: Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands. I lived in Salalah for 19 years and am using my personal experiences, extensive research on the culture/history of the region and countless wide-ranging discussions with Dhofar men and women (friends, colleagues and members of my research group) to judge ‘accuracy’. Return from Note 2
Note 3: I am using Mary Louise Pratt’s concept from Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2007). Return from Note 3
Note 6: Fawwaz Trabulsi, ‘The Liberation of Dhofar’, MERIP Reports 6 (1972): 3-11. 5. Return from Note 6
Note 7: J.B. Kelly, ‘Hadramaut, Oman, Dhufar: The Experience Of Revolution’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 12.2 (1976): 213-30. 224. Return from Note 7
Note 9: Tony Jeapes, SAS: Operation Oman (Nashville: The Battery Press, 1980). 37. Return from Note 9
Note 10: Walter Ladwig, ‘Supporting Allies In Counterinsurgency: Britain and the Dhofar Rebellion’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 19.1 (2008). 71, 72. Return from Note 10
Note 11: Ian Gardiner, In the Service of the Sultan: A First-hand Account of the Dhofar Insurgency (South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Military, 2007). 50. Return from Note 11
Note 13: These comments are representative of her attitude towards Dhofaris; she frequently writes sentences which highlight the ‘foreignness’ of the region but are not accurate. For example she states that the ‘Bait Kathi’ ‘employ as slaves the last three hundred aborigines of the eastern range’ (152). The term ‘slaves’ in Dhofar referred to Africans/African-Omanis from Africa, never people from Omani mountain tribes. In the past, some tribes were classified as ‘weak’: the men were not allowed to carry weapons or marry women from the ‘strong’ tribes. These weak tribes were seen as ‘clients’ to stronger tribes and were protected in return for services such as herding animals, but the people were in no way owned or indentured, see Salim Bakhit Tabook, Tribal Practices and Folklore of Dhofar, Sultanate of Oman. Unpublished PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts, Exeter University, 1997. 44, 55-60, 77-82. Return from Note 13
Note 14: The only other writer who shares St Albans’ point of view is Tremayne, who visited the area during the war and later wrote: ‘The Dhofar War as not a revolution; it was an insurgency and it was foreign; that is, it was sustained from outside Oman, from the PDRY, and paid for by China and USSR. Its objectives were not those of the population. Its hard-core men were mostly Dhofaris removed from Dhofar as children, education in the PDRY as revolutionary Marxists and trained in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere as guerrilla fighters. They were in fact not in the least representative of the people whom they sought to lead, nor concerned with the country’s own welfare.’ Penelope Tremayne, ‘End of A Ten Years War’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies 122.1 (1977): 44-8. 47.
This attitude is not shared by any of the soldiers who fought in the war, or other researchers. The alternate view can be seen in Trabulsi: ‘He [Sultan Said] introduced oil companies into the Sultanate and he wanted to obliterate any social, political, or cultural effect they might incur. Furthermore, he wanted to monopolize the oil revenue and retain the old economic basis of his system: extortion of the economic surplus through taxation and levies. He was determined not to share a penny with a hungry, undernourished and unemployed population what was discovering, through emigration, the fabulous economic possibilities of the oil economy.’ ‘The Liberation of Dhofar’, 8. Return from Note 14
Note 15: Evelyn Waugh, Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Michael Davie, ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1976). 791. Return from Note 15
Note 16: ‘Students in most English-speaking countries are asked to read against the grain of what they are now regularly taught to see, at least at the post-secondary level, as situated and ideological texts, and they are also enabled to study a wider range of texts, produced by a wider range of authors and “cultures” than they had before.’ May Bain Campbell, ‘Travel Writing and its Theory’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2002): 262-78. 262. Return from Note 16
Title page from the first edition (1885) of Bent’s “The Cyclades; or Life Among the Insular Greeks”.
“Though Mr. Bent is an Oxford man, he knows some Greek, and has managed somehow to retain or acquire a profound interest in things Hellenic. That is always something, for Greece is a country towards which, in spite of our education, we all possess somewhat of a filial affection: but Mr. Bent does more than this – he takes an active interest in the living Greeks, his ways and modes of thinking, largely tempered by the modern anthropological and sociological point of view, too often wholly wanting or absolutely repellent to the confirmed Hellenist. If there is one form of savant left on earth upon whose ears the echo of the sociological revolution falls dull and muffled, it is your old-fashioned classical scholar, hermetically sealed in his own sturdy with his grammar and his lexicon, his editions and manuscripts. For him, Lubbock and Tylor are not: the Folk-lore Society sings to him like a siren, all in vain: no savage myth rises vague upon his narrow horizon: no dim memory of forgotten barbarism shines faintly on him from the storied pages of Plato or Pausanias. His world begins with the First Olympiad: his history finishes with the death of Odoacer. Not of such as these is Mr. Bent. A folk-lorist to the backbone, eager to discover and compare while yet they survive the lingering relics of native Hellenic popular mythology, he has spent two winters hard at work among the almost unbroken ground of the Cyclades, and has finally recorded his net results for us in this pleasant, amusing, and instructive volume.
A detail from Bent’s map of the Cyclades from his 1885 edition.
“[Bernhard] Schmidt had been beforehand with him, it is true, on the Greek mainland; but then, the Greek mainland is largely Albanian, and its folk-lore is largely tinctured with alien elements. The islands, on the other hand, have been always Greek, and, practically speaking, always free. So hither Mr. Bent went with his wife, in search of habits and manners, and dwelling among the people in their own hamlets, collected a goodly store of facts and fancies, which he knows how to detail for us with a cunning pen. At first he studied his human subjects with the aid of a dragoman; but as time went on, and as he began to acquire fluency in the language which we are all supposed to have learned at school, he went direct to the fountain head, and extorted from the not unwilling lips of demarchs and priests and hostesses and pretty Greek maidens innumerable tales of Fates and Nereids, of Boreas and St. Demetrius, of ancient god and Christian martyr, in the picturesque confusion of medieval Europe. The nymphs of the fountain take the place, among the Cyclades, of our northern fairies; Dionysus has got himself thinly Christianized as St. Dionysius; and Charon, properly baptised no doubt for the occasion, still ferries over orthodox Greeks to their last resting-place, as he used to do rightminded Pagans of old to the realms of Hades. Nowhere does the thin veneer of the new religion lie more lightly over the solid and enduring substructure of the old than among the Greek Islands. Essentially pagan still in all his underlying mythological conceptions, the insular Hellene remains a living relic of ages far earlier than even those of the Attic dramatists – he goes back in part to the most primitive stratum of European belief and philosophy. We could have wished that Mr. Bent had given us a little more of actual description of these beautiful and barren islands, but we recognize at the same time how much his book gains from its unique devotion to a difficult, elusive, and fascinating pursuit.
Detail from the front page of the “Pall Mall Budget” for 17 April 1885.
“Sometimes, indeed, as in the episode of the ardent collector waiting patiently at Myconos till somebody should die, and inquiring with sinister anxiety after the health of the various failing invalids, in order that he might be present at one of the death-wails which form the staple product and pride of the island – the eagerness of the folk-lorist becomes positively weird and gruesome in its intensity. A modern story-teller might improve upon the position by making the single-hearted inquirer poison his host so as to provide a victim for the wailing women in the interests of science. We present the hint gratuitously as a valuable property to Mr. Wilkie Collins. If we have repeated none of Mr. Bent’s own good stories, it is only in order that we may send our readers direct to his amusing pages in search of them at first hand. There is matter enough in this little volume to stock half a dozen ordinary bookmakers’ fat notebooks.”
* “The Cyclades.” By J. Theodore Bent. 12s. 6d. (London: Longmans.)
……………………..
Anonymous review of Bent’s The Cyclades; or Life Among the Insular Greeks, from the Pall Mall Budget – 17 April 1885, page 28.
While travel for some in ‘Persia’ is still clearly so precarious, why not ride instead, south-north through Iran, with the Bents – on mules, ponies, camels, oxen, and in assorted carts and carriages?
Announcing: “‘Then and there’ – Theodore and Mabel Bent in Persia, 1889″ (forthcoming 2026)
Extracts will appear from time to time on this page
Mabel’s pond at Manzaria/Manzarieh, 30 km north of Qom, Iran (Google Maps).
Mabel writes in her Chronicle: Tuesday, 9 April 1889, Manzaria/ Manzarieh, 30 km north of Qom [34.89018460145364, 50.82060309976168]: “After this, let me say that we had a very pleasant afternoon of peace and contemplation of a round pond with a stone coping on which numerous travellers sat on their heels for hours and hours like so many big frogs just got out of the water…”
Happy Birthday greetings to celebrity explorer Theodore Bent (30/3/1852, d. 1897), who just so happens to share the day with one Vincent Van Gogh (30/3/1853, d. 1890), who, of course, had a brother called Theo…
The trouble with travel … is that you miss your birthdays – just look where Theodore was on 30 March for these frantic years of the Bents’ travels together: 1884 = Kea (Cyclades); 1885 = Karpathos (Dodecanese); 1886 = Samos; 1887 = Thasos; 1888 = Patara (Antalya province, Turkey); 1889 = Kurd-i-Bala, Iran; 1890 = Mersin area, Turkey; 1891 = en route for ‘Great Zimbabwe’; 1892 = UK; 1893 = Aksum area, Ethiopia; 1894 = Aden, Yemen; 1895 = UK; 1896 = returning from Athens to UK; 1897 (his 45th and last) = Aden, Yemen.
As an example of what he was up to, we have this extract from his notes of 30 March 1889, written up and presented a couple of years later. Taken from Theodore and Mabel’s cavalcade through Iran, south-north, we have Persia with all her fascination; it is written in his best, jaunty style: illustrative, informative, energetic, engaged and engaging. Classic Bent.
“Certainly, Persia, off the main line of route, is as different as possible from the Persia that the ordinary traveller sees. For two days after leaving Nejifabad we passed through villages nestling in fertility. Each village is, or rather was, protected by its mud fort, built on a hill, around which the cottages cluster – cottages which dazzle the eye with their continuity of mud domes and brown walls. Wapusht looked like a nest of cottage beehives stuck together. Within, the houses were comfortable enough, and bore every appearance of prosperity, for here they are off the routes which soldiers and governors of provinces pass over, and when free from Government extortions Persia prospers.
“On ascending to higher ground we came across a cold and barren district; the howling wind from the snow mountains made us again love those furs which we had considered unnecessary burdens when leaving Ispahan. These sudden changes of temperature are the bane of the Persian traveller, and woe to those who are not provided with artificial warmth. On reaching Kurd-i-Bala [March 30, 1899. The settlement is near modern Varposht, n-w of Najafabad], the first of the manna villages, we found ourselves in Armenian society. Of late years the Armenians in Persia, by foreign intervention, have had their condition greatly ameliorated, and if this state of things is allowed to continue they are likely once more to become the most prosperous of the Shah’s subjects. I was glad enough to warm myself by taking a brisk walk on reaching our destination, and accepted gladly the offices of the Karapiet, the Reis or headman of the village, and our host, who volunteered to take me up the mountain side and show me the manna shrub.
“In the fields around the village the Armenian women were tilling the ground. On their heads they wore tall head-dresses, with flat crowns and silver chains dangling therefrom – very uncomfortable gear for purposes of husbandry – and beneath their bright red skirts peeped drawers with embroidered edges. Armenian women hide only the lower part of the face, deeming it unseemly that the mouth should be shown to members of the opposite sex.
Bala khana at Yezd-i-Khast. Etching by H. Gedan, based on a Persian photograph by Mabel Bent, in J. T. Bent’s article ‘New Year’s Day in a Persian Village’. ‘English Illustrated Magazine’, 1890, Vol. 76 (Jan), 326-31 (private collection).
“Kurd-i-Bala is a great village for manna, the ‘gez-angebeen’, as the Persians call it. About twenty minutes’ walk brought us to a gorge in the mountains where acres of the shrub grow. The ‘gez’ tree is a low and parasol-shaped plant of the Tamarisk tribe, never reaching more than 3ft. in height; its leaves are small and sombre in colour, and it has all over it long prickly thorns. On these leaves there comes a small insect, which is red at first, like a harvest bug; later on it turns into a sort of louse, and finally becomes a tiny moth, which, before it flies off, produces a thin white thread, about half an inch long, which hangs on the bushes. This is the manna collectors shake off on to trays, which are put below for the purpose, and the material thus collected they call ‘gez’. They say the insect appears fifteen days before the hot weather begins, and disappears fifteen days before the cold season sets in. Every third day during a term of forty days about August they collect this species of honey from the trees, which forms itself into a white gelatinous mass, and the leaves become covered again with surprising rapidity…”
(From: J. Theodore Bent, Village Life in Persia, ‘The New Review’, 5:29 (1891/Oct.): 355-359)
Happy birthday Theodore!
A review of Bent birthdays based on Mabel Bent’s Chronicles, 1884-1897
The accompanying interactive map below plots these birthdays: Mabel in green, Theodore in blue. (NB: London [13 Great Cumberland Place] stands in for unknown locations in Great Britain; the couple could have been away visiting family and friends in Ireland or England, including at their property ‘Sutton Hall’, outside of Macclesfield.)
There were 28 Bent birthday events (2 x 14) between 1884–1897 (the years covered by Mabel Bent’s diaries). Of these 28, only 5 (18%) were not spent in the field, and only 7 times (25%) does Mabel refer to a birthday in her notebooks directly. In the above Table, column 1 gives the year and ages of the Bents on their birthdays; columns 2 and 3 give their birthday locations. Events in red are when Mabel refers directly to their birthdays. ‘London’ is standing in for unknown locations in Great Britain. If not at their main residence (13 Great Cumberland Place), the couple could have been visiting family and friends in Ireland and England, including at their property Sutton Hall, outside of Macclesfield.
Map and title page of Bent’s bestseller on the Cyclades (1885) (archive.org)
2025 brings the 25th anniversary of our researches into the lives and travels of celebrity explorers Theodore and Mabel Bent, studies that began with a reprint (Oxford, 2002) of Bent’s The Cyclades (now 140 years old in 2025).
Over these twenty-five years of following the Bents (five more than they were granted for their travels together) in the Levant, Africa, and Arabia, a number of questions remain unanswered – awaiting the discoveries of future explorers. Our want list in fact:
No. 1) The Missing Chronicle – Ethiopia 1893?
Mabel Bent’s ‘Chronicles’ in the archives of the Hellenic Society, London. All except for the missing notebook covering the Bents’ trip to ‘Abyssinia’ in 1893 (the Bent Archive).
“When I returned, after inspecting the convent, to my dismay [Mabel] was gone, and what happened she thus tells in her Chronicle…”
Where is Mabel Bent’s missing travel diary (‘Chronicle’) covering the couple’s journey to ‘Abyssinia’ in 1893? We know from Bent that it provided material for his book on the area – The Sacred City of the Ethiopians (1893, see especially pp. 45, 47 for the quote above; and see Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent, Vol. 3(Oxford, 2012, pp. 175-207)). It consists, probably, of a single notebook as the couple’s trip there was curtailed; it is the only one apparently not with the others in the archives of the Hellenic Society, London (presented before or after Mabel’s death (1929) by her niece Violet Ethel folliott (1882-1932)). Its interest to students of the region cannot be overstated, but the chances are as slim as Mabel’s notebooks themselves that it will ever turn up, but who knows?
No. 2) The fabled clay ‘Bethel Seal/Stamp’?
The clay stamp/seal acquired by the Bents in the Wadi Hadramaut in 1894 (Bent Archive).
Where is the fabled clay seal/stamp bought by the Bents in the Wadi Hadramaut in 1894, and which possibly Mabel later concealed at ‘Bethel’ (Beitin, West Bank, 5 km northeast of Ramallah) in the early 1900s in Theodore’s honour? For Mabel, Bethel represented the terminus of one of the frankincense trails from Yemen and Oman, via the Wadi Hadramaut, regions that inspired the couple from 1894 until Bent’s death in 1897. What more appropriate gesture by his grieving widow than to bury the seal (presumably a trader’s mark on a consignment of resin) as a tribute and private memorial (see their Southern Arabia (1900, London, Chapters VI-XXII) and Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent, Vol. 3 (2010, Oxford, pp. 129-237)). Found (or its double), by archaeologists in the 1950s, where is it now?
No. 3) When Mabel met Theodore?
Mabel Bent in her wedding dress, by T. Fall, 9 Baker Street, Portman Square, London. (If the photo predates the August 1877 ceremony, unlikely, she would still be Mabel Virginia Anna Hall-Dare) (Bent Archive).
“Before she was married she travelled in many countries including Spain and Italy, and met her husband in the Arctic region – i.e., Norway; from her earliest years having a wish to see those distant lands where the ordinary traveller fears to tread, ‘And how fortunate that my husband’s tastes should be exactly the same as my own,’ said Mrs. Bent, as we talked of the days when she had no idea her wishes would be so fully gratified.” (The Gentlewoman – The Illustrated Weekly Journal for Gentlewomen, No. 175, Vol. VII, Saturday, 11 November 1893, pp. 621-622)
How, when, and where exactly in Norway did the young Theodore and Mabel meet? They were distant cousins via the Lambarts of Yorkshire and County Meath. No documentation has surfaced, we only have a throwaway line from Mabel saying that’s where they set eyes on each other first. It would have been in the early 1870s, Theodore having come down from Oxford. They were married fairly soon thereafter in the little church of Staplestown, Co. Carlow, Ireland, on 2 August 1877, and began their 20 years of travel together (Levant, Africa, Arabia) with a honeymoon in Italy.
No. 4) Bent’s unpublished watercolours?
‘Kalenzia, Isle of Socotra, 1897’. Watercolour (detail), by Theodore Bent (private collection, reproduced with permission).
How can the known, but unpublished, Bent watercolours (of ‘Mashonaland’, the Greek Islands, Arabia, etc.) be preserved and exhibited? Important historical records, they should be made accessible to the scholar-traveller. They do turn up from time to time. One, of a scene from Socotra, was auctioned recently and is now in a private collection and reproduced with kind permission.
No. 5) Mabel’s photographs?
A unique photograph (1890) taken by Mabel Bent in Cilicia. It was found inside one of her notebooks (The Hellenic Society).
Where are all Mabel’s photographs? Beginning in 1885, Mabel was the expedition photographer on the couple’s adventures. Of the thousands of plates/prints, all that remain are the images reproduced in Bent’s three monographs (1892, 1893, 1900) and some few of his published articles. Mabel’s work did get transferred to lantern slides for Bent’s lectures and they were stored in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, London, before being discarded in the 1950s, being (then) beyond the powers of conservation – a huge loss. Tantalizingly, there is a paper print of a monument from Turkey’s western coastal area, tucked inside one of Mabel’s notebooks.
No. 6) ‘The Bent Turkish Embroidery Bequest’?
Detail from Bent Collection embroideries – PRSMG 1970.4 (Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston).
The Bents were great collectors of costumes, fabrics, and embroideries (to keep or sell). A mystery today is the provenance of the ‘Bent Turkish Embroidery Bequest‘ (more modest than it sounds) in the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston (UK). It would be fascinating to discover how the items found their way from the Eastern Mediterranean to Lancashire. (Only 80 km southeast of Preston is the Bents’ country house – Sutton Hall, Sutton; perhaps an answer lies in this direction.)
Tuesday, 18 December 1883: “Met Mr. Swan who more than fulfilled our warmest hopes.” (Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent, Vol. 1 (p. 21; Oxford, 2006). Is there a photograph anywhere of the Bents’ great friend Robert M.W. Swan? The couple met the latter when he was a mining engineer on the Cycladic island of Antiparos in 1883. In 1891 he joined the travellers for their investigations at Great Zimbabwe, where he undertook surveying duties, contributing a chapter to Bent’s Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892) (and see Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent, Vol. 2 (2012, Oxford, pp. 17-175)). A decade later he was working for various mining companies on the Malay Peninsular, only to die of complications following liver surgery in Kuala Lumpur in 1904 (c. 45 years, the same age as Bent on his death coincidentally). No archive seems to have a likeness of this driven, capable Scotsman and we would like very much to see him, or learn of his final resting place.
Some of Mabel Bent’s ‘Chronicles’ in the archive of the Hellenic Society, London (photo: the Bent Archive).
[Unless otherwise referenced, original Mabel Bent material courtesy of The Hellenic Society/School of Advanced Study, University of London (reproduced under Creative Commons: Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0)]
The Hellenic Society’s holdings of the notebooks and Chronicles of celebrity explorers Theodore and Mabel Bent have now been digitised and are available here via the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
The Bents had almost twenty years of travel adventures together (1877-1897), being interested in many fields of ethnology, archaeology, and geography in the Levant, Africa, and Arabia.
What follows is a quick glance at the subfusc covers of Mabel’s diaries (or ‘Chronicles’ as she called them) 1883-1897. Not all of them, however, i.e. her (alas lost?) diary of the pair’s trip to Ethiopia in 1893, and Mabel’s solo journey to Egypt in 1898, as a widow, depressively labelled by her: ‘A lonely useless journey’. (Click for the full itineraries and details of all the couple’s travels together.)
Mabel Bent’s travel notebooks:
Plate 1: Mabel Bent’s ‘Chronicle’ covers: 1883/4 to 1897 (upper: 1, 2; lower: 3, 4) (The Hellenic Society).
1) The Cyclades: beginning “Mabel Bent, her Chronicle in The Kyklades 1883-4. Dedicated to my Sisters and my Aunts”, the first of Mabel’s Chronicles (and the only one not to have a pasted front label) is written in a dark-red leather, lined and columned, accounts book (£.s.d.); it has marbled endpapers and edges and measures 175 x 110 mm. Mabel completes 94 of its 130 leaves. note 1
2) The Dodecanese: beginning “Mabel V.A. Bent her Chronicle in the Sporades, etc. 1885”, the second of Mabel’s Chronicles is written in a blue marbled, board covered notebook (185 x 120 mm) with marbled endpapers and edges. Mabel’s initials are inked on the front. There are 170 lined pages and Mabel fills 115 of them. The pasted cover label reads: ‘Egypt Greece 1885 –’.
3) The Eastern Aegean: inexplicably beginning “My Fourth Chronicle 1886”, the third of Mabel’s travel diaries is written in a dark-red leather notebook (180 x 115 mm) with marbled endpapers and edges. near the edges of the covers there are two parallel and scored lines. There are 192 lined pages and Mabel uses all but 10 of them. The pasted cover label reads: ‘Istambul [sic] Greek Islands 1886 –’. note 2
4) The Northern Aegean: beginning simply “1887”, Mabel’s fourth Chronicle is written in a dark-red leather notebook (180 x 115 mm) with marbled endpapers and edges. near the edges of the covers there are two parallel and scored lines, the corners including a stylized clover design. There are 85 lined pages and Mabel has covered 75 of them. The pasted cover label reads: ‘Greece 1887’. note 3 Plate 2: Mabel Bent’s ‘Chronicle’ covers: 1888 and 1889 (upper: 5, 6; lower: 7, 8) (The Hellenic Society).
5) The Turkish coast: beginning “My fifth Chronicle” (the correct numbering is restored), Mabel’s 1888 diary is written in a dark-red leather book (180 x 115 mm), with gold lines on the spine and covers; the endpapers and edges are marbled. Near the edges of the covers there are two parallel and scored lines. There are 192 pages of lined paper, of which Mabel has used 182. This expedition involved a happy cruise along Turkey’s south-western shores – “…a paradise for archaeologists and tortoises…” The pasted cover label reads: ‘Turkey Russia 1888’.
6, 7, 8) Bahrain and Iran (in 3 vols): beginning “Persia 1889”, this adventure, including a marathon ride, south-north, through present-day Iran, and well deserving of a documentary on its own, necessitated three notebooks. Mabel adds in the third volume (8) that it is her 6th Chronicle. Notebook 6 is plain and bound in dark-red leather (180 x 115 mm). The endpapers and edges are marbled; near the edges of the covers there are two parallel and scored lines. There are 148 lined pages, of which Mabel has used all, including the endpapers. Notebook 7, perhaps from the same retailer, is also a plain, dark-red leather volume (180 x 115 mm); the endpapers and edges are marbled; there are 148 pages, of which Mabel has used all, including the endpapers. Notebook 8 is from a different source; it is a plain, dark-red, leathered-covered book (170 x 110 mm); there are 184 pages, plus endpapers, of which Mabel has used 50; the edges are speckled with blue wavy lines. The three pasted cover labels read: ‘1889 no 1 –’; ‘Persia 1889 (2)’; ‘1889 No. 3’. note 4 Plate 3: Mabel Bent’s ‘Chronicle’ covers: 1890 and 1891 (upper: 9, 10; lower: 11, 12) (The Hellenic Society).
9) Turkey: beginning “My Seventh Chronicle ‘Rugged Cilicia’ 1890”, this Chronicle is written in a dark-red leather book (185 x 120 mm). The endpapers and edges are marbled. The paper is lined; there are 90 pages and Mabel has filled 89 of them. Near the edges of the covers there are two parallel and scored lines. The pasted cover label reads: ‘Cilicia 1890’. note 5
10, 11) South Africa: beginning “1891. My Eigth [sic] Chronicle To Zimbabye in Mashonaland”, Mabel uses two notebooks for the couple’s notorious 1891 travels to and from South Africa, occupying the energetic duo for most of 1891. Notebook 1 (10) is a plain, dark-red leather volume (180 x 120 mm). The endpapers and edges are marbled. The paper is lined; there are 180 pages, plus endpapers, of which Mabel has used all. The volume ends in early August 1891 as the party approaches the year-old Fort Salisbury (modern Harare, where Theodore’s watercolours of the trip are now seemingly inaccessible in the Archives). The second notebook narrates the homeward journey, via Umtali (Mutare) and the Pungwe River to Beira in Mozambique. The second volume (11) does not quite match its predecessor; it is plain and in dark-red leather (175 x 115 mm). The endpapers and edges are marbled. The paper is lined; near the edges of the covers of both books are two parallel and scored lines. There are 164 pages, of which Mabel has used all but six. The pasted cover labels read, respectively: ‘Central Africa No 1’ and ‘1891 No 2 Africa Central’. note 6
[Mabel’s notebooks, for what would have been her ‘9th Chronicle’, relating their subsequent expedition in 1893 to Ethiopia, are, alas, lost]
12) Wadi Hadramaut (Yemen): beginning, defiantly, ‘Hadramout’, with no Chronicle number (it would be No. 10), Mabel uses two notebooks to narrate their famous 1893-4 travels to the Wadi Hadramaut in Yemen, Southern Arabia (the start of a trio of ill-fated expeditions). The first volume includes the party’s preparations in Aden (December 1893). It is a plain, dark-red leather volume (180 x 115 mm); near the edges of the covers of both books are two parallel and scored lines. The endpapers and edges are marbled. The paper is lined; there are 146 pages, plus endpapers, of which Mabel has used all. The pasted cover label reads: ‘Hadramaut 1893 to 94 No 1 A’.
Plate 4: Mabel Bent’s ‘Chronicle’ covers: 1894 to 1897 (upper: 13, 14; lower: 15, 16) (The Hellenic Society).
13) Wadi Hadramaut (Yemen): beginning “Continuation of My Chronicle in the only very moderately Blest Arabia 1894”, Mabel’s second notebook here concludes their curtailed trek into the Wadi Hadramaut, and sees the pair reach London again in April 1894. It is a plain, dark-red leather volume (180 x 115 mm). The endpapers and edges are marbled. Near the edges of the covers there are two parallel and scored lines. The paper is lined; there are 146 pages, of which Mabel has used just 34. The cover label reads: ‘Hadramaut – no 2. A 1894 -’. (It appears that the year has been altered from ‘1884’.)
14) Muscat and Dhofar: beginning just “Saturday 15th December, 1894. The Residency, Muscat”, Mabel again gives no Chronicle number (it would be No. 11) to this notebook covering the couple’s aborted and dispiriting expedition into the Wadi Hadramaut, this time from the east. It is a dark-red leather volume with gilt bordering (180 x 115 mm). The endpapers and edges are marbled. The paper is lined; there are 172 pages, plus endpapers, of which Mabel has used just 68, indicating a frustrated expedition. The pasted cover label reads (confusingly): ‘1894-5 Hadramaut’.
15) Red Sea (west coast): beginning “1895 The Chronicle of my Thirteenth Journey”, although in fact, and ominously, it should be referenced her as her twelfth, this penultimate adventure has the couple travelling from Suez, south to Massowa (Mitsiwa) and back, by dhow. On the way home, via Athens, they attend the first modern Olympic Games. Mabel keeps her diary in a lined, dark-red leather book (175 x 115 mm), near the edges of the covers there are two parallel and scored lines. The endpapers are marbled; there are 152 pages in the notebook but Mabel only completes 62. The cover label reads: ‘1895-6 Suez Kourbat Athens’. note 7
16) Sokotra, Aden: Beginning (with the ‘c’ altered to a ‘k’) “The Island of Sokotra 1896-7”, Mabel’s unnumbered diary (it is, in fact, the unlucky 13th Chronicle) details the couple’s final journey together, and is to witness them at the end both desperately ill with malaria (Theodore dies in London a few days after their return in May 1897, ending nearly twenty years of hitherto inseparable travel). The notebook is a dark-red leather volume (180 x 115 mm), with gold edging to the spine and covers. The endpapers and edges are marbled. The paper is lined; there are 178 pages, plus endpapers, of which Mabel has used 146. The pasted cover label reads: ‘Isle [of] Socotra 1896-7’. note 8
Notes
Four of Mabel’s opening flourishes to her ‘Chronicles’. The 1895 notebook was actually the account her 12th journey, making the ‘Sokotra’ journal her unlucky 13th – Theodore died of malarial complications a few days after returning to London, 5th May 1897. (The Hellenic Society).
Note 1: The Bents had first toured the Eastern Mediterranean, and some of the Greek and Turkish islands, including the Cyclades, in early 1883, but it seems Mabel did not keep a travel diary at that time, more’s the pity, although her later diaries make reference to it (i.e. see The Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent, Vol.1, 2006, Oxford, p.52). Mabel’s first diary notebook was, in fact, one of Theodore’s, he has written in the back ‘J.T. Bent. Acct. Book. Oct. 13th 1871’: he would have been nineteen and about to go up Wadham College, Oxford, to read history. Perhaps, just before setting out for their second trip to Greece in November 1883, one of the couple hit upon the idea that Mabel should keep a record of the trip, and a simple, dark-red leather notebook that has been lying around for twelve summers is the first thing that comes to hand. But from this inconsequential idea flows a nearly twenty-year stream of travel diaries, unparalleled in their scope, and addictive in their appeal. Return from Note 1
Note 2: Still inside this volume is a letter from Mabel’s friend, Mrs H.R. Graham, who writes: “Why oh why don’t you publish it? It simply bristles with epigrams and I am certain would be a great success! You ought to blend the Chronicles into one and I am sure everyone would buy it.’ (This is now possible of course.). The H.R. Grahams were old friends, Graham seconding Theodore’s application for election as a Royal Geographical Society Fellow on 16 June 1890. Return from Note 2
Note 3: Included in the little volume remains a melancholy letter from the unhappy wife of a minor functionary in Skopje. She implores Mabel to visit: ‘Monday morning. My dear Madam, You would really do me a great favour if you would spend an hour or two with me today. Ours is rather a rough kind of home, but I can offer you a cup of tea. I think if you only knew how hard it is for an educated woman to be in exile at such a place as Uskub [Skopje], without either congenial society or habitual surroundings, you would come out of charity. May I fetch you about 4? With compliments to your husband, Faithfully yours, Florence K. Berger’”. Presumably by the end of tea Mabel would have learned that Mrs Berger was herself, in fact, a published author, having written about an earlier stay in Bucharest – A Winter in the City of Pleasure(London, 1877). Return from Note 3
Note 4: The first in the trilogy of notebooks elucidating the Bents’ journey from London, via Karachi and Bushire, to Bahrain; then their extraordinary overland ride, zigzagging north-south, through Persia (Iran). The second volume is a record from just north of Persepolis as far as modern Tabriz. Inside the cover Mabel has written her name and address (as she does for most of her notebooks): “Mabel V.A. Bent, 13 Great Cumberland Place, W., 1889”, and has the following note: “The state of the edge of this book is caused by a mule’s rolling in the saddlebags, which broke the butter tin so that the melted butter got into everything.” It seems that Mabel only set out with these two notebooks; aware of space problems, she contracted her usually neat handwriting, making the transcription of these volumes difficult in places. The third volume tells of the journey home – from Tabriz to London. This third book was bought locally (in Tabriz) and is of poorer quality than the other two that came from London. The binding is poor and some sheets are loose. Tucked into this book is a miscellaneous bill from the ‘Hôtel de l’Europe’, Vladikavkas (capital of North Ossetia-Alania, Russia). Return from Note 4
The ‘Mandragora’ leaf (M. officinarum) Mabel pins to a page within her 1890 notebook (her 5th Chronicle) during the couple’s travels along the Turkish littoral. (The Hellenic Society)
Note 5: This was another of the Bents’ enjoyable, carefree even, expeditions (1890, in which they famously discover the ancient site of Olbaalong the way). On several occasions in this Chronicle (but in no other within the 15-year series) Mabel has leaves occasional spreads of blank pages “for meditations”, suggesting rare hints of intimacy, girlishness too – “Theodore says I can keep the pages I have left out for meditations!” As an example, a ‘mandragora’ leaf remains pinned to one of her pages: “This is said to be a leaf of mandragora or mandrake. I have been given some roots and seen a good many, which are certainly most extraordinary, but I cannot help thinking they are helped into their human form with a knife and then earthed over. Some say after being cut they are planted again to grow a little but as they grow very deep I do not think that likely. I shall believe in them better when I have seen one dug up.” Importantly, this notebook also has tucked within it an extremely rare paper print from one of Mabel’s photographs in the field; no others have appeared to date. Return from Note 5
An extremely rare paper print of a photograph taken in 1890 by Mabel Bent at the site of an inaccessible inscription near Olba in Cilicia; it was tucked into her notebook of that year: “A ladder was needed to read this [inscription], so one had to be built and very cleverly it was managed… a couple of trees were cut and notches cut in the back of them and then some large sticks just laced on with one loop which hitched into the notches. As one side was about a foot and a half longer than the other it had a queer and dangerous twist.” (‘Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent’, Vol. 1. Oxford, 2006, p.281) (photo: The Hellenic Society).
Note 6: This notebook records the couple’s homeward journey from Great Zimbabwe, via Fort Salisbury (modern Harare) and the Pungwe River to Beira in Mozambique. The volume differs from its predecessor; it was perhaps obtained from a stationer’s en route. The top of page two is stained and Mabel has written next to it ‘Hydrochloric Acid’ – presumably part of the photographic paraphernalia from her mobile ‘darkroom’; she was again expedition photographer. Return from Note 6
Note 7: By ‘Kourbat’ Mabel is referring to the Wadi Kurbab district on the southern Sudanese coast, including the so-called Halaib Triangle. Appointed by the British authorities in Cairo to keep an eye on the expedition was the young Capt. N.M. Smyth (1868-1941) (later Major General Sir Nevill Maskelyne Smyth, VC, KCB). Also with the party, paying his way, was Hugh Alfred Cholmley (1876-1944) of Place Newton, Rillington, Yorkshire; Hugh was a shooter on the trip – photographs and wildlife, especially birds: “While here [near Sawakin al-Qadim] we got a few Sand-Grouse, two young Shrikes, and an Egyptian Goatsucker. One day while near the sea I saw two black Ducks, which I am sure were Velvet Scoters – the large yellow beak and black plumage showed distinctly, but they were too far off for a shot.” (Cholmley, A.J. (1897). ‘Notes on the Birds of the Western Coast of the Red Sea’, Ibis 39(2): 196-209). The last four pages of this diary narrate the couple’s short stay in Athens on the way home, including a visit to the first Olympic Games of the modern era (April 6–15, 1896). The notebook has its cost price written in pencil in the front: one shilling (c. £2.50). Return from Note 7
The Bents’ hospital bill from Aden, 1897. Folded into her notebook of that year, it is signed by their Goanese physician, Dr Dias (The Hellenic Society).
Note 8: Also, as a (paying) guest, on this trip to Sokotra was (later Sir) Ernest Nathaniel Bennett (1865-1947), academic, politician, explorer and writer; he made the sensible decision not to join the party’s onward trek into the Aden hinterlands. Assisting the Bents on this journey was their long-term dragoman, and friend, Mathew Simos from the Cycladic island of Anafi; from the time they met (the winter of 1883/4) there were only three adventures in which he did not take part: 1889 (Persia), 1891 (Great Zimbabwe), and 1895 (the Bents’ second visit to the Hadramaut). Noteworthy in this Chronicle are several rare inclusions: a unique ‘contract’ for the party’s passage from Socotra back up to Aden; a hospital bill; and a letter from the Aden authorities regarding their onward journey. Mabel was too ill to update her diary for their last few days east of Aden, but she made an effort, the relaxed style of the experienced traveller in the Sokotra sections contrasting with the feverishness and despair of what she was able to write. Her last diary entry in the field was 16 March 1897. She concluded her memoir later, but does not indicate where or when, ending her final journey with Theodore with the lines: “At last a M.M. [steamer] came from Madagascar with room for us, so one afternoon I was taken up and an ambulance litter was brought beside my bed and I was laid in it and carried down to the sea…” Return from Note 8
[A note on the labels pasted on the front covers. All Mabel’s Chronicles shown above, except for the 1883/4 volume (The Cyclades), appear to be cut from printed paper featuring a distinctive, narrow strip of zigzags. This is curious (as the notebooks cover a period of fifteen years or so), suggesting perhaps that the labels were pasted on at a later date – at around the same time? The handwriting could be Mabel’s, or that of her niece Violet Ethel ffolliott (1882-1932), who gave the notebooks to the Hellenic Society (Mabel died in 1929), or even a cataloguer at the Hellenic Society.]
“Swan was a big Scotchman, rather quiet and not a bad kind of chap” (L.C. Meredith, quoted from R.H. Wood, ‘Llewellyn Cambria Meredith 1866-1942’, in Heritage of Zimbabwe 16 (1997), pp. 55-66)
Our temporary (we hope ) stand-in for the Bents’ friend R.M.W. Wilson Swan (an anonymous silhouette from a late 19th-century group of prospectors in Rhodesia).
Tuesday, 18 December 1883: “Met Mr. Swan who more than fulfilled our warmest hopes.” (Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent, Vol. 1 (p. 21; Oxford, 2006), writes Mabel Bent after the couple met Swan when he was a mining engineer on the Cycladic island of Antiparos in 1883. They hit it off immediately, and later (in 1891) he was invited to join the Bents for their investigations at Great Zimbabwe, where he undertook surveying duties, contributing a chapter to Bent’s monograph on the remains: The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892). A decade later he was working for various mining companies on the Malay Peninsula, only to die of complications following liver surgery in Kuala Lumpur in 1904 (c. 45 years, the same age as Bent on his death coincidentally). He appears to have been the General Manager of the Malaysian Company Ltd. at the time of his death.
A detail from Bent’s map of the Cyclades taken from his 1885 book of the same name.
It appears that Swan was mining in the Cyclades on behalf of his father’s company, David Swan & Co., Glasgow, perhaps in conjunction with a French mining concern in Greece from the early 1880s, it was his first major responsibility (his brother John joining him) after a period of further training in Spain. By 1882 he had travelled enough in the region to compile a minerological report which appeared in The Glasgow Herald (Tuesday, November 21, 1882) – we see he has also been appointed ‘Consular Agent’ (he was 25 years old): “Mr Consular Agent Swan, at Antiparos, reports on the minerals in the Cyclades (Greece) as follows:- ‘The Cyclades are more remarkable for the number than value of their mineral deposits, and in nearly all of the islands ores of several of the commoner metals are found. In Macronisi calamine has been found, and from Zea and Thermia I have got samples of galens and carbonate of copper. In Siphnos, famed among the ancients for its production of gold, a concession has lately been granted for mining lead and zinc. Calamine is believed to exist in quantity there, and in a similar manner to that in which it occurs on the mainland at Laurium – viz., at the contact between marble and mica-schist. The large deposits of iron ore (haematite and magnetic oxide) in Ser[i]phos have been worked in open quarries, but operations there have been discontinued for some years. Milo is famed for its millstone and sulphur mines, and traces of copper, and recently also manganese oxide, have been found. In Polykandro, Sikino and Santorin veins of galena and carbonate of copper have been discovered, but I am aware that these ores exist there in workable quantities. From Anaphe I have got samples of asbestos, but of poor quality. Naxos is also well known for its production of emery, which mineral has also been found, but in small quantity, on the coast of Paros. Mining in modern times has been more extensively carried on in Antiparos than in any other of the Cyclades.'”
The Duke of Sutherland’s Yacht ‘Sans Peur’ on which R.M.W. Swan sailed to Siam in 1888 (archive.org).
After leaving Greece in the mid 1880s, the next reference we have for Swan is in a memoire by Florence Caddy, To Siam and Malaya in the Duke of Sutherland’s Yacht ‘Sans Peur’(London, 1889). Swan is in the Far East, it seems acting as an engineer, surveyor for various railway companies. On Monday, 13 February 1888 he is in Singapore with a friend from Cyprus called Cobham (p.222). The latter knows Sutherland, apparently, and the pair hitch a lift on the Sans Peur – in which Florence Caddy is also a guest: ‘Mr. Cobham, one of Her Majesty’s commissioners in Cyprus, whom the Duke had invited to travel with him, came on board with his friend, Mr. Swan, the engineer who was to accompany his Grace to Siam to consider the country for the proposed railway there’. The book has several references to the engineer, in which he comes over as a dapper, man-about-town, perhaps even flirtatious: ‘We lunched at the Raffles Hotel, where a Malay luncheon had been ordered for us. Mr. Swan, who knew Malayan customs, told us what to choose and how to eat it, and peeled mangosteens for us.'” (p.279) Florence is sorry to leave him behind: ‘Farewell to the Sultan, princes and datos, and to Mr. Swan, who is going to remain behind constructing Malayan railways. We shall miss him much. Friends may come and friends may go, but we go on for ever, we feel, as the Sans Peur weighs her anchor, and “we go on our way, and we see them no more”… The last we have heard of Mr. Swan was by letter, wherein he mentions his cook having been eaten by a tiger.’ (p.263)
It was in the Far East that Swan took and interest in neolithic finds. He donated a collection of stone implements from the Malay Peninsular to the British Museum in the early 1900s, one of which is illustrated below. There note on him reads: “Engineer. Educated Glasgow University. Worked in Spain and Greece, as well as Western Australia, Tasmania, Siam (Thailand), and the Malay Peninsula. Accompanied Royal Geographical Society expeditions to Africa.”
No archive seems to have a likeness of this driven, capable Scotsman and we would like very much to see him, or learn of his final resting place. If you can help, please get in touch.
“Robert Macnair Wilson Swan died at Pahang in the Malaysian Peninsula in January, 1905 [sic]. He was born February 8, 1858, at Maryhill, near Glasgow, Scotland, and, without regular technical education, began work in May, 1876, sampling and assaying ores in various parts of Spain for D. Swan & Co., at which he continued until February, 1878. From September, 1878, to February, 1885, he was engaged in managing Calamine mines in the Island of Antiparos, Greece, for the same concern. From April, 1888, to May, 1894, he was examining mining properties in Mashonaland for the Magar Syndicate. May, 1894, to September, 1896, found him Manager of the Glasgow Mashonaland Syndicate and the Northern Gold Fields of Mashonaland; and from September, 1896, to May, 1897, Manager of the Glasgow Explorers’ Syndicate in Western Australia. During parts of 1897-98 he was reporting on mines in Siam for the Areacan Co., of London, and in 1900, when he joined this Institute, he was Manager of the Malaysian Co., of Bombay, engaged in directing operations at their mine on the Tui, in Pahang, and in exploring mines for them elsewhere in Malaysia and Siam. He was still in the management of this company’s practical affairs at the time of his decease. Mr. Swan, besides his connection with the Institute, which began in 1900, was a member of the Chemical Society, the Geological Society, and the Royal Geographical Society, all of London.” (Bi-monthly bulletin of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, 1905, pp. 871-2, New York, N.Y. : American Institute of Mining Engineers)
A curious image chosen by Swan to illustrate his article on Great Zimbabwe for the Glasgow Archaeological Society (1893). It may well be based on a photograph taken by Mabel Bent and it might even represent Swan himself (archive.org).
“Swan, R.M.W. [Robert McNair Wilson]: We regret to record the death, which took place on March 26th [sic] last, of Mr. R. M. W. Swan, well known for his share in the earlier investigations of the ruins of Mashonaland. Mr. Swan was born in 1858, and after receiving a technical training in Glasgow University and in the laboratory of Mr. R. Tattock, went out to Spain in 1878 in the capacity of a mining expert. In 1879 he went to Greece, and the next seven years were spent in mining work, principally in Antiparos and neighbouring islands. In addition to his professional employment, he devoted much attention to archæology, publishing several papers on his researches, and sending many specimens to the British Museum. It was during this period that he first made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Bent, whom he accompanied during their visits to several of the islands, afterwards taking part in the expedition to Mashonaland, carried out by them in 1891, for the examination of the Zimbabwe and other ruins. During this expedition he undertook the cartographic portion of the work, executing for the first time a careful plan of the ruins, besides mapping the country along the routes followed, and fixing the positions of a number of points astronomically. When, after his return to this country, Mr. Bent described the results of his journey before the Society, Mr. Swan added some notes on the geography and meteorology of Mashonaland, and subsequently contributed to the “Proceedings” (May, 1892), a short paper on the orientation of the ruins, showing in a striking way the close connection which existed between the arrangement of the structures and the astronomical phenomena to which, as sun-worshippers, their builders had paid so much attention. The subject was more fully discussed in the section which he contributed to Mr. Bent’s “Ruined Cities of Mashonaland”. The theory which he developed was subjected to some criticism; but on returning to South Africa to continue his investigations, he collected “data”, which, as he claimed, fully bore out his ideas. During this journey, carried out in 1893, he examined various ruins, till then undescribed, besides doing something to improve the mapping of the country along his route, which led inland by way of the Limpopo.
“This visit to South Africa lasted about two years, spent in part in geological and mining work. In 1896 he examined the mining districts of Western Australia and Tasmania, and in 1898 went to Siam with a similar object, leaving again, after a short visit to this country, for the Malay Peninsula, where he was engaged in mining work until his death, which took place at Kuala Lumpur after an operation for abscess of the liver. Here, as in South Africa, he did much careful cartographical and geological work.
“Mr. Swan was an expert linguist, and from his residence in Greece had acquired a great love for the classics. He possessed a large store of knowledge on varied subjects, which he was always anxious to share with others. He was a Fellow of the Geological and Chemical Societies, as well as of our own, which he joined in 1893, having received the Murchison Grant in 1892. “(Royal Society’s Journal, May, 1904)
The title page of J.T. Bent’s “Ruined Cities of Mashonaland” (3rd edn, 1895), featuring Swan’s contribution.
“Anthropology has… to regret the loss during the past year [March 1904] of the following workers and pioneers in unexplored fields, who, although they were not actually Fellows of the Institute, have done much to further the interests of the science which the Institute represents in the country:- Mr. R. M. W. Swan was well known for his researches in Mashonaland. In 1891 he accompanied Mr. Theodore Bent, and undertook the topographical part of the work, the maps and plans of the ruined cities being due to his researches. Shortly before his death, which took place in Malacca, he contributed to the Institute a paper on Stone Implements from Pahang, which appeared in Man.” (Report of the Council for the Year 1904. (1905). The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 35, 2-5; the paper referred to is: Swan, R. M. W. (1904). 34. Note on Stone Implements from Pahang. Man, 4, 54-56)
Supplement to the Perak Government Gazette, 1st July, 1904, p.1 (originally in “Preliminary Report”, No. 4, Kuala Lumpur, 15th May, 1904): “Pahang has suffered a severe loss in the death of Mr. R.M.W. Swan, the Manager of the Malaysian Company’s property. How far Mr. Swan’s death will affect the gold-mining industry in Pahang may not be realised for some time; meanwhile, the loss of one who had at heart so truly the welfare of the State, of one who in spite of failure worked on confident of ultimate success, will be keenly felt. My acquaintance with Mr. Swan was but of brief duration; yet, although I do not wish to emphasize my own sorrow while knowing that others feel his death as bitterly, I must add that apart from his personal charms, his enthusiasm for geological study was such that the loss of his co-operation will be greatly regretted. Before I left Lipis, it had been arranged that we should at a future date work over certain areas together; and it was on his way to join Mr. Warnford Lock and myself in an expedition to Tui that Mr. Swan was first taken ill. As the pioneer of geological study in Pahang; and as one who, having formed his conclusions from the observation of natural features, did not hesitate to attempt to turn them to account. Mr. Swan will always be remembered by me with respect.” (John Brooke Scrivenor, F.M.S. (1876-1950))
The Straits Echo of Friday, 1 April 1904, also records Swan’s passing: “Kuala Lumpur, 26 Mar. – Mr R. M. W. Swan, F.C.S., F.G.S., F.R.G.S., General Manager of the Malaysian Company, Ltd., Sepan, Pahang, died here today, the cause of death being abscess of the liver.” [He was 46 years old]
Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1905 (page 3)
“Anthropology has also to regret the loss during the past year of the following workers and pioneers in unexplored fields, who, although they were not actually Fellows of the Institute, have done much to further the interests of the science which the Institute represents in this country :—
“Mr. R. M. W. Swan was well known for his researches in Mashonaland. In 1891, he accompanied Mr. Theodore Bent, and undertook the topographical part of the work, the maps and plans of the ruined cities being due to bis researches. Shortly before his death, which took place in Malacca, he contributed to the Institute a paper on Stone Implements from Pahang, which appeared in Man.”
Select Bibliography
1892: Orientation And Mensuration Of The Temples, in J. Theodore Bent, The Ruined cities of Mashonaland, London, 1892, pp. 141-178
1904: Note on Stone Implements from Pahang, in Man(4): 54-56 (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland).
An early issue of ‘Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’ (Wikipedia).
Bent’s scores of published articles can be usefully divided into three main categories: 1) Academic (written for his peers, i.e. archaeologists, geographers, ethnologists, anthropologists, inter alia); 2) middlebrow (catering to an educated market, but penned to engage and entertain); and 3) popular (aimed at the general reader, light in tone and readily accessible – the author was not beyond including fictitious elements, and this needs to be borne in mind when enjoying them).
Falling into the second category were the four pieces Bent wrote for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a well-respected journal launched by the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh with an April issue in 1817. In 1905, after Bent’s time, the magazine transferred its main office to London and, rebadging as Blackwood’s Magazine, continued publishing right up until 1980 – boasting of remaining within Blackwood family hands for its entire existence.
William Blackwood, in charge of the firm during Bent’s dealings with them, primarily in the 1880s (Wikipedia).
At the firm’s helm at the start of Bent’s submissions to the company was founder William Blackwood’s son, John (1818-1879), and at the time of Bent’s death, 1897, another William, John’s nephew. Bent never addressed his letters to any particular individual, and the names of the various junior editors responsible for regular correspondence with our celebrity explorer require further delving.
For references, David Finkelstein has published a monograph: The House of Blackwood. Author–Publisher Relations in the Victorian Age (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); and there is an earlier account by Margaret Oliphant and Mary Porter – Annals of a publishing house: William Blackwood and his sons, their magazine and friends (published by Blackwood’s themselves in three volumes: Vol. 1 = 1897; Vol. 2 = 1897; Vol. 3 = 1898).
Much of the company’s archives is now curated by the National Library of Scotland (NLS; see below for references); there are over 30 known letters (1878-1892) surviving from Bent to the firm. The contents are typical of dealings between author and publisher, i.e. submission ideas, editorial advice, chasing for replies and payment, returning proofs, etc. It is clear that Bent was in the habit of approaching several publishers at the same time with the same article – hoping that if one rejected, another might accept. (Bent’s own papers, with copies of his dealings with his many publishers, alas, have never surfaced.) The correspondence with Messrs Blackwood ends in 1892, possibly because the editors turned down Bent’s ‘Mashonaland’ material (including what was to be his bestselling monograph) and the explorer then thought better of submitting anything in future. Perhaps the competition paid better too! We will never know, but the Edinburgh firm was to miss out on Bent’s most sensational work.
Many of the issues of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine are freely available online. Their contents were often syndicated abroad, i.e. the link to Bent’s ‘Patmos’ article above leads to the Littell’s Living Age version (USA, Vol. 173 (1887), pp. 243ff).
Not to Blackwood’s but a specimen of Bent’s letterhead, 13 Great Cumberland Place, London, from a letter to Rider Haggard. Sutton Hall was the Bents’ country residence, outside Macclesfield (Bent Archive).
What now follows are short summaries of Bent’s correspondence with Messrs Blackwood between 1878 and 1892. Here and there, a line or two of Bent’s text is included to bring him directly into the picture. The NLS shelfmarks are provided throughout. We are extremely grateful to Dr Kirsty McHugh and Lynsey Halliday of the National Library of Scotland for their kind help in this research and for permission to quote from the correspondence.
Key: e.g. “(1878) NGS MS.4368 ff.149-150: 6 Dec 1878 (from Florence)” = letter year; NLS shelfmark/reference; date of letter; sent from
Page 200 from Bent’s “San Marino” (1879), one of his own sketches. Blackwood’s turned the book down (archive.org).
(1878) NLS MS.4368 ff.149-150: 6 Dec 1878 (from Florence): Bent offers his first monograph (on San Marino) to the firm; it is rejected and subsequently published (1879) by Longmans. “For reference I may state that my name appears in the Honour school of History, Class II, Oxford, Mods, 1875… I have a series of watercolour sketches [done] on the spot if you think them desirable.”
(1885) NLS MS.4466 ff.266: 12 Jul 1885 (from GCP): Returning from what are now the Greek Dodecanese, Bent offers an article ‘On a far-off island’ [Karpathos]. “I wonder if you would care for a short paper on modern Greek life and folklore as compared with the antient?”
(1885) NLS MS.4466 ff.270: undated, after 12 Jul 1885 (from GCP): Bent chases firm for a reply and they obviously accept the article. On Bent’s original letter is a notable (and quotable) editorial comment in another, anonymous, hand: “Very readable & interesting. I don’t think any good description of Karpathos & its people has ever appeared before. The customs are primitive and quaint in the interior; and although the writer has evidently not a keen sense for the picturesque, the paper is sure to be read & quoted.” One might take issue; Bent, presumably, never saw the note.
Bent’s friend from the British Museum, Sir Charles Newton (Wikipedia).
(1885) NLS MS.4466 ff.268: 14 Nov 1885 (from GCP): Bent is returning the proof of his Karpathos article. He makes a reference to his eminent acquaintance Sir Charles Newton (1816-1894): “It was with a view to excavating and collecting folklore that Mr. Newton advised me to go to Karpathos last winter.”
(1886) NLS MS.4481 f.34: 11 Feb 1886 (from Constantinople): Bent sends thanks for payment (cheque) for his Karpathos article; the amount unspecified (see below, MS.4495 ff.235-6: 29 Jun 1887). The article (Bent’s first of four with BEM) appeared as: ‘On a far-off island’ ( Vol. 139, Feb 1886, pp. 233-244).
(1886) NLS MS.4481 f.36: 26 Sep 1886 (from York): Bent offers an article on Samos and refers to an earlier one on Astypalaea that he sent “about 2 months ago” (this letter untraced). “My dear Sir – I have put together a paper on some of our experiences on the island of Samos, which I think would go very well with the paper I sent you on Astypalaea about 2 months ago.”
Detail from Bent’s map of the Cyclades from his 1885 guide showing the isles of the Eastern Aegean, including Samos, Patmos, and Astypalaea (Bent Archive).
(1886) NLS MS.4495 ff.240-1: 28 Sep 1886 [NGS have it filed as 1887] (from GCP): Clearly with no reply to his previous letter (26 Sep 1886), Bent submits the Samos article he refers to anyway (see NGS MS.4481 f.36: 26 Sep 1886). He suggests a pair (later a trio) of articles (Samos, Astypalaea, Patmos). The final sentence in the following passage indicates that Bent had flexible arrangements with his other publishers: “I send you herewith the paper on Samos; my idea was that perhaps that you might be able to publish one or two of my Greek articles consecutively, as when spread over many magazines they rather lose their point. I wish I had sent you one I wrote on Patmos but if you saw your way to publishing consecutively I think I could get it back… I daresay you would not object to publishing my name with the article as I have rather associated myself with Greek exploration when working for the British Museum & Hellenic Society. I send for your inspection a few of the photos my wife took during our last tour under extreme difficulties.” The Samos and Astypalaea articles were declined; the Patmos one was ultimately accepted (see below, MS.4495 f.227: 15 Jan 1887). The reference to Mabel Bent’s photographs is intriguing, as almost none of her original prints seem to have survived or surfaced. Very unfortunately, the prints Bent is referring to are not catalogued within the Blackwood archive at the NLS (pers. comm).
(1886) NLS MS.4495 f.244: 18 Nov 1886 [NGS have it filed as 1887] (from GCP): Still hearing nothing, Bent writes to chase news of his Samos and Astypalaea articles. “I should be obliged to hear from you respecting the two articles of mine you have.”
(1886) NLS MS.4481 ff.38-9: 2 Dec 1886 (from GCP): Doggedly, Bent chases yet again, this time including the MS of his Patmos article, which he must have retrieved from another publisher (see NGS MS.4495 ff.240-1: 28 Sep 1886 above). “I send for your perusal the third article [of a proposed trio] on Patmos which I proposed, if you see your way to publishing the 3 [on] Greek life on Aegean islands: (1) The Principality of Samos; (2) Revelations from Patmos; (3) Astypalaea. This will cover the whole of our tour last winter & it would be preferable to me to have them consecutively printed. I should be much obliged for an early answer…”
(1886) NLS MS.4481 f.40: 23 Dec 1886 (from GCP): Bent has still not had a reply, five months after submitting his first proposal. “I should be much obliged if you will let me know what your opinion is with regard to the 3 articles I sent you on Samos, Patmos and Astypalaea.” It seems, finally, that BEM did agree within weeks (over Christmas and the New Year) to publish Bent’s Patmos article, but not the other two. As for Samos, Bent had already published six articles with other journals (see Bibliography) referring to this island and BEM probably thought this was enough. (The Bents first visited Samos over the winter 0f 1882/3.) The Astypalaea piece did appear in The Gentleman’s Magazinein March 1887 (Vol. 262, pp. 253-65).
(1887) NLS MS.4495 f.227: 15 Jan 1887 (from GCP): Bent asks for a proof of his Patmos article quickly as the couple are about to start another expedition soon (to the Eastern Mediterranean) to indulge his “anthropological propensities”. He regrets his trio of Greek articles will not appear. “I am sorry you do not see your way to publishing the 3 papers consecutively… My work this year is taking me to Salonika & some of the Turkish towns on the Macedonian coast, where I hope I may come in contact with people which will give a wider field for my anthropological propensities.”
(1887) NLS MS.4495 f.229: 25 Jan 1887 (from GCP): Bent has been asked to add some detail to his Patmos article, he does so. BEM’s policy was generally not to print the author’s name at the article’s end, Bent asks them to make an exception, and they do so. “I have as you suggest added a few things respecting the books in the library & the legendary life of St John on Patmos… I think as you are only publishing one of my papers you will not refuse to put my name at the end of it, as I have more or less associated myself with the subject I prefer its being known who has written the article.” (Bent was not acknowledged in his Karpathos article, but he was for the other three BEM pieces.)
(1887) NLS MS.4495 ff.231-2: 2 Jun 1887 (from GCP; Bent’s headed stationery here is black-lined, the deceased is unknown): Bent writes chasing payment for his Patmos contribution and seeking a copy of the relevant issue. He again mentions that he is preparing an article on the Jews of Salonika (see NGS MS.4495 f.227: 15 Jan 1887 above). “I have just returned home from Greece & not finding a copy of the March magazine or a cheque for my contribution I conclude you have acted more wisely than some others & awaited my return to send them.” The article (Bent’s second of four with BEM) appeared as: ‘Revelations from Patmos’ (Vol. 141, Mar 1887, pp. 368-379). [A further Patmos article – ‘What St. John Saw on Patmos’ – appears in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 24 (142) (1888, Dec), pp. 813-821.]
(1887) NLS MS.4495 f.233: 16 Jun 1887 (from GCP. Bent’s stationery is black-lined, the deceased is unknown): Bent is again asking, perhaps tetchily, for payment for his Patmos article. “I wrote to tell you the other day that I have received no cheque for the article I wrote in your March number. As I have only just returned from the East there is always a fear of its having got lost so I should be much obliged if you would let me know if one has been sent or not.”
(1887) NLS MS.4495 ff.235-6: 29 Jun 1887 (from GCP): Bent has received payment for his Patmos article but still not a complimentary copy. Surely he must have acquired a copy elsewhere but is just making his point! His payment was £14 (c. £750 today), which we can assume was around the going rate; the article was c. 8500 words (see also NGS MS.4546 f.241: 3 Nov 1890 and NLS MS.4546 f.241: 3 Nov 1890).
(1887) NLS MS.4495 f.237: 25 Jul 1887 (from GCP): Despite having no reply to his offer of an article on the Jews of Salonika (see MS.4495 ff.231-2: 2 Jun 1887), Bent sends his text in nevertheless. It is rejected but appears as ‘A Peculiar People’ in Longman’s Magazine in November 1887 (Vol. 11 (61) (Nov), pp. 24-36).
(1887) NLS MS.4495 f.238: 27 July 1887 (from GCP): Speculatively, as is his wont now it seems, Bent submits an article stemming from their Spring 1887 trip to the Northern Aegean, including substantial excavations on Thasos and a tour of Samothraki. “I send you herewith a paper on some of our Greek island experiences of last spring. I have made it short & only introduced material that I thought would interest. If you would care for it longer I could easily extend it.” BEM decline, but Bent publishes five scholarly pieces on Thasos and his more general article on ‘Samothrace’ was accepted by The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1888 (Vol. 264 (Jan), pp. 86-98).
(1887) NLS MS.4495 f.242: 30 Sep 1887 (from GCP): Remarkably prolific, Bent submits a further piece. “My excuse for sending you another Greek Island paper must be that I think this Teliote [Tilos] wedding therein related the most interesting of all our adventures in the Aegean Sea.” BEM, perhaps wisely, turned it down. This article was a tour-de-force of imagination and one of the main indicators we must cite when illustrating that Bent did not always report on what he actually saw. The account of this wedding outlasts the time spent on the island, as recorded in his wife’s diary, and neither does she refer to it. The episode is made up of extant Greek wedding practice and custom, but Bent never witnessed them on Tilos. Nevertheless, the article was published as ‘A Protracted Wedding’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1888 (Vol. 265 (Oct), pp. 331-341. Intriguingly, a slightly different version was to appear under the same title in the English Illustrated Magazine years later, in June 1891 (Vol. 93 (Jun), pp. 672-677), while the Bents were in South Africa!
Portrait of John Covel by C.L. Guynier (1716). Bent was responsible for bringing Covel’s diaries to public attention (Wikipedia).
(1887) NLS MS.4495 f.246: 1 Dec 1887 (from GCP): As noted, Blackwood’s were also book publishers and Bent now tries to interest them in the important diaries of John Covel (1638-1722) – English ambassador in Constantinople. “In the British Museum I came across a voluminous M.S. being the diary of Dr. Covel, chaplain to our ambassador at Constantinople 1670-7. This diary has never been printed.” The firm decline it. Bent published an introductory article, ‘Dr. John Covel’s Diary’, in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1890 (Vol. 268 (May), 470-489). The work was successfully edited by Bent and published in 1893 as ‘Extracts from the diaries of John Covel (1870-1879)’ in Bent’s Early voyages and travels in the Levant (London: Hakluyt Society, pp. 99-287). The work is still available.
(1888) NLS MS.4511 f.156: 1 Jan 1888 (from GCP): Bent writes for a reply to his proposal to publish John Covel’s diary (see previous letter, MS.4495 f.246: 1 Dec 1887).
(1888) NLS MS.4511 f.158: 1 Aug 1888 (from GCP): Bent submits an article based on their Spring 1888 explorations along the Turkish coast. “Last winter I undertook for 2 societies excavations in Turkey & being unable to get satisfactory terms from the govt I made this cruise of which the enclosed is the account.” BEM turn it town, but the piece, among Bent’s most enjoyable, was published in November 1888 as ‘A Piratical F.S.A.’ in the Cornhill Magazine (Vol. 58 (11), pp. 620-635).
(1889) NLS MS.4528 f.236: 31 Jul 1889 (from GCP): Bent submits an article based on their visit into Armenia (as they were riding south-north through Persia in the Spring of 1889).
(1889) NLS MS.4528 f.238: 4 Oct 1889 (from GCP): Bent chases for a reply to his letter 31 July 1889 concerning an article on Armenia.
(1889) NLS MS.4528 f.240: 5 Dec 1889 (from GCP): Again, Bent chases for a reply to about his Armenia piece. BEM are clearly not interested. It is not until 1896 that an article on Armenia does appear, published in the Contemporary Review as ‘Travels amongst the Armenians’ (Vol. 70 (Jul/Dec), pp. 695-709). This is a good example of Bent’s tenacity and his loathness to ‘waste’ a perfectly good article – and a source of income.
(1889) NLS MS.4528 f.242: 17 Dec 1889 (from GCP): Bent submits his article ‘Under British Protection’ based on their visit to Bahrein in the early months of 1889. BEM turn it down and it is published in 1893 by The Fortnightly Review (Vol. 60 (54) (Sep), pp. 365-376). See comment above about Bent’s tenacity – are there perhaps articles of his that never saw the light of day?
(1890) NLS MS.4546 f.237: 7 Aug 1890 (from GCP): Bent sends an article on Tarsus, following their explorations in the area in the Spring of that year. BEM agree to publish it and it will be Bent’s third article for them: ‘Tarsus Past and Present’ (Vol. 148 (Nov 1890), pp. 616-625).
Bent’s map of some of the area of the Turkish littoral visited by the couple in 1890. Plate XII, J.T. Bent, ‘A Journey in Cilicia Tracheia’, ‘The Journal of Hellenic Studies’, Vol. 12, 1891 (archive.org).
(1890) NLS MS.4546 ff.239-40: 12 Oct 1890 (from GCP): Bent returns his Tarsus proof and other material to support an idea for a further piece: “I return the proof of “Tarsus past & present” corrected herewith… I am also sending you a reprint of the paper I read before the Geographical Society in the summer. It occurs to me that perhaps you would like a popular article on our wanderings & adventures amongst the nomads of the Taurus.” A BEM editor has written a note on Bent’s letter: “A very popular paper might be made out of Mr Bent’s reports to the Geographical & Hellenic Societies. I would invite him to submit to us a paper giving a brief general account of the condition of Cilicia, and accounts of his wanderings, and a description of the more striking natural features of the country, especially the Corycian caves, the passes, the Taurus range and the rivers. The Yuruk tribes are interesting and should be fully dealt with. The article should wind up with a general survey of the archaeological results, [word illegible] with reference to the history of the Province.” This suggestion is to result shortly in Bent’s fourth article for BEM: ‘Archæological Nomads in Rugged Cilicia’.
(1890) NLS MS.4546 f.241: 3 Nov 1890 (from GCP): Bent writes with thanks for the fee of £12 (c. £500 today) for his Tarsus article, which appears later in November. He confirms that he has finished his article on “the nomads of the Taurus & have sent it to be type written” (a reference to recent advances in publishing technology!).
(1890) NLS MS.4546 f.243: 6 Nov 1890 (from GCP): The Taurus article is back from being typed up and Bent sends it off. “I send you herewith the paper on our wanderings in the Taurus. I am not quite sure that I like the title perhaps you could suggest a better one.”
(1890) NLS MS.4546 ff.245-246: 5 Dec 1890 (from GCP): Bent returns his Taurus proofs and makes a reference to a possible expedition to ‘Mashonaland’: “I have received a joint overture from the R.G.S. and the British South Africa Company requesting me to undertake the examination and excavation of the recently discovered ruins in Mashonaland… The matter requires a little more thought etc. but I fancy will end in our going, in which case we shall be away 8 or 9 months but shall have material of a decidedly novel nature to communicate. I have not mentioned the fact to any other publisher, thinking perhaps you might like to undertake an account of that country either in journal or book form.” This letter is of genuine significance. Information on the early background to the Bents’ famous expedition to Great Zimbabwe in 1891 is scanty. The offer of a publication is noteworthy, as the eventual monograph, published by Longman’s, was a bestseller. Blackwood’s turned it down, as did John Murray (NLS MS.40087 f.101: 19 Feb 1892).
(1891) NLS MS.4566 ff.206-207: 13 Jan 1891 (from GCP): The preparations for ‘Mashonaland’ have been completed in a matter of weeks – a huge achievement given the scale of the project. Bent asks whether BEM would care to pay for his Tarsus piece before they set sail. “I am starting for Mashonaland on the 29th of this month [January 1891] & if it in no way interferes with your arrangements I should deem it a favour if you will send the cheque for my article [‘Archæological Nomads in Rugged Cilicia’, Vol. 149 (Mar 191), pp. 377-391] before then as I understand postal arrangements will be very difficult.” There is a note on Bent’s letter confirming that a cheque was posted to Bent on 15 Jan 1891; the amount is not specified.
(1892) NLS MS.4584 ff.156-157: 6 Feb 1892 (from GCP): The Bents are back from South Africa, again Bent enquires whether the firm would be interested in his material from this expedition. Cleary he had not contracted it to another publisher at this date. “We have returned from our trip to Mashonaland & our excavations at Zimbabwe both which though far longer than anticipation [sic] have been attended with highly satisfactory results… I am going to ask if you would care to give me an offer for my material, a portion to run through your magazine and the bulk to be produced in a well-illustrated volume… I am anxious if possible to come to an arrangement of this sort with one publisher and not to scatter my material as I have done before… Of course, having only been home a week or 10 days I have nothing ready to place before you, but hope soon to have my ideas collected & start work… An early reply will oblige.” This letter (and see NGS MS.4546 ff.245-246: 5 Dec 1890) is of genuine significance. Information on the early background to the Bents’ expedition to Great Zimbabwe in 1891 is scanty. Bent writes to John Murray (NLS MS.40087 f.101) on 19 Feb 1892 (and perhaps others as well) enquiring whether they might be interested, but the eventual monograph, The Ruined Cities of Mashonalandis published by Longman’s in 1892, and is an immediate bestseller. Bent’s Mashonaland material is subsequently disseminated in a score of articles – academic, middlebrow, and popular (see Bibliography).
The Blackwood’s archive in Edinburgh has no further Bent correspondence, it seems, after 6 February 1892, and the celebrity explorer placed his articles with other periodicals. It is speculation, but perhaps Bent was disappointed or upset with Blackwood’s response to his South African findings, which soon brought him considerable fame and provided a platform for his last great sphere of activity (and cause of his early death) – Southern Arabia.
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It is to be hoped that the archives of some of the other periodicals Bent wrote for can be traced and accessed. The archives of one of his book publishers, Longmans, Green & Co., are today with the University of Reading, Special Collections (Berkshire, UK) (ref: GB 6 RUL MS 1393). The material contains production and sales information but not actual correspondence, apart from, and uniquely, Bent’s signed contract (ref: MS 1393/3/1974) for his The sacred city of the Ethiopians (1893).
An introduction to ‘Reading “The Cyclades”‘, followed by Bent’s Preface to the first edition, providing a little background and his main objectives in visiting the islands over the course of two winters…
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