"Everest Through The Lens" - Exhibition Review

 

Climbing Mount Everest. Under the auspices of the Mt. Everest Committee: the cinematograph record of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922. EE/6/5/60 (RGS-IBG Collection)

Exhibition Review: Everest through the lens (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR, UK: 5 October 2022-20 January 2023) - this review was originally written for the Other Everests Research Network. 

NB - the exhibition is currently back on display at the RGS from 20 January 2025 - 15 April 2025 (10.00am-5.00pm, Monday-Friday), free entry. Click here for more information.

Everest through the lens was an exhibition marking the centenary of the first two British attempts to climb the world’s highest mountain in 1922 and 1924. It examined the expeditions as seen through the lens of official expedition cinematographer, Captain John Noel. Focussing on the two films he made, Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924), the exhibition set out ‘to unpick the uncomfortable and complex social, racial and geopolitical dynamics that shaped the expeditions – from their beginning to enduring legacy.’ Utilising a range of photographic and documentary sources, as well as a handful of well-chosen objects – such as a kinomatograph camera, similar to the one Noel used at high altitude, and Noel’s own Remington portable typewriter – exhibition visitors were guided through the various stages of the two expeditions, from their meticulous preparation, through their actual execution, to their final presentation in both print and film media.

 

As a documentary filmmaker, Noel’s lens was far from an objective one. The narrative of both films gives a distinctly colonialist view of the ‘heroic’ exploits of the British climbers, whilst the far larger entourage of local porters and other indigenous labourers who were key to enabling the endeavour are lost somewhere in the flickering side-lines, obscured by the simultaneous glare of the white snows and the reflected imperial glory bestowed upon the films’ British protagonists. Viewing the expeditions in the context of their times, this was a period when empires and nations vied to best one another in epic feats of exploration in harsh and extreme environments. Notably the British had lost out in the races to be the first to reach the North and South Poles, hence the summit of the world’s highest mountain – or the ‘Third Pole’ as it was then dubbed – represented a last chance at attaining pre-eminence. Together, the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club formed the Mount Everest Committee, which tasked itself with recruiting a team of elite mountaineers and geographers. Naturally these men were all British born and bred, privately educated and recruited through a network of mutual contacts. Letters and medical appraisals show that social considerations of class and military background counted as much as aptitude and experience in mountaineering. We are told that George Finch, as an Australian, was a lone exception to this rule, but that consequently he ‘was looked down on by some team members.’

 

A far more overtly condescending view was expressed with regard to the indigenous communities whom the expeditions encountered as they made their way through Tibet. An intertitle card from one of Noel’s films gives a clear example, stating that: ‘The men and women exist from the cradle to the stone slab, on which their dead bodies are hacked to pieces, without a wash the whole of their lives.’ The British expedition members were genuinely fascinated by the cultures they encountered in the Himalaya. Noel filmed scenes described in another intertitle as: ‘the weird and fantastic devil dances at the sacred monastery of the Rongbuk.’ A Tibetan cymbal brought back by the expedition leader, Brigadier-General Charles Bruce in 1922, included in the exhibition, shows how the British climbers were particularly struck by Tibetan music which must have seemed very different to their unaccustomed ears. Climber and surgeon, Howard Somervell transcribed Tibetan folk songs into Western musical notation, and Noel later had bands perform this music as an evocative accompaniment to the screenings of his silent films.

 

Trailer for Noel's "The Epic of Everest" (BFI)

              

Social hierarchies shaped the expeditions. Base Camp was effectively a small village, run by the British along familiar colonial lines, with clear demarcations according to social, racial and class considerations. The selection process for local porters may have been less careful to note down details, but everyone recruited – ‘from bootmakers to botanists’ – had a role with set expectations and was renumerated accordingly. Ranked highest in this hierarchy were the high-altitude porters, who were very skilled and often more adept mountaineers than the British, who nicknamed them ‘tigers.’ It is notable in many of the photographs of the expedition that there is a marked discrepancy in the size and weight of the loads which these men were charged with carrying compared to the British members of the team. Without their efforts, lugging huge quantities of supplies, equipment and oxygen tanks to the various camps ascending the mountain, the British climbers would have struggled in their attempts to reach the summit. These efforts were not without genuine risk, as a disaster in 1922 made only too apparent. Seven porters – six Sherpa, Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya, Pema, and one Bhotiya, Norbu – lost their lives in an avalanche. George Mallory, seen as the hero of Noel’s films, felt himself responsible. Writing to a friend, he stated that the men who died were ‘ignorant of mountain dangers, like children in our care. And I am to blame.’ However, the loss of these men’s lives was dealt with in a bureaucratic manner, with their families in Tibet, Nepal and Darjeeling being financially ‘compensated.’

 

In Noel’s film, the disaster was edited out of the final cut for fear of a negative backlash from viewers. A poignant memorial of this fact is embodied in a small bronze figure of the goddess Tara, which was on display in the exhibition. This was given to the British climbers on their return from Everest by Dzatrul Rinpoche, the Head Lama of Rongbuk Monastery, to commemorate the lives of the seven men who died. This action was filmed by Noel, but in the final version of his film Noel edited and placed these scenes at the start, representing the exchange as though it were a gift given to bless the expedition when it was first setting out.

 

Similarly, Noel appears to have had no qualms about appropriating an image of a deity depicted in a mural at the monastery in order to accentuate the sense of drama. A deity which the British stylised as ‘a mountain goddess angrily destroying the bodies of white climbers.’ As it is well-known, the 1924 expedition resulted in the loss of the lives of climbers, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who disappeared from view while making a bid to reach the summit and never returned.

 

The names of Mallory and Irvine, like those of Robert Falcon Scott and his men in Antarctica, were of course duly added to the roster of ‘heroic defeats’ which now characterise the annals of British Imperial exploration. A vision of heroism and self-sacrifice which Noel’s films did much to crystallise. As the final sections of the exhibition showed, this was not without controversy however.

 

Noel very actively sensationalised Tibetan culture as a marketing ploy for his films. He was personally invested in them, having funded much of the 1924 expedition himself in order to retain the rights to his footage. He hired and brought to London a troupe of seven Tibetan dancers to perform at screenings. These ‘dancing lamas’ were in fact Tibetan novice monks rather than lamas. The publicity stunt deeply offended the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government, such that they banned all Westerners from entering Tibet to climb Everest for the next ten years. Despite the fact the British mountaineering community knew that the controversy of the ‘dancing lamas’ was the real cause of the ban, the Everest expeditions were meticulously stage-managed operations, consequently they drew ranks and found a convenient scapegoat in John Hazard, who undertook an unauthorised survey expedition in Tibet also in 1924, pinning the blame on his activities instead.

 

For a small exhibition, Everest through the lens, explored a number of less well-known faces of the two earliest attempts by British mountaineers to ‘conquer’ the world’s highest peak very effectively. It elucidated a number of often overlooked themes, incorporating a rich array of written and visual documentation; particularly Noel’s film, The Epic of Everest, which was screened on a continuous loop as part of the exhibition. Shining a light on the lives of those whose names are well-known to history, such as Mallory and Noel, but more importantly it also highlighted the indigenous team members who have stood, obscured in the background for far too long. Recovering some of those names which otherwise might have been lost to history in the panel and label texts, as well as listing them in the leaflet accompanying the exhibition. In doing so, Everest through the lens showed that there is still much to be learned about cultures of imperial exploration. By taking a closer look, information which has lain hidden in the archival shadows cast by the official record which the two British expeditions carefully created as their own legacy can begin to emerge. Much like the unnamed Sherpa who can be seen steadying the camera tripod, if one looks very carefully, at the well-known photograph of John Noel, seated on a kit box, shooting the first of his films at high altitude in 1922.

Captain Noel kinematographing the ascent of Mt. Everest from the Chang La [one of his Sherpa porters can be seen steadying the tripod] MEE22/0602 (RGS-IBG Collections)

~

'Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds' Edited by Paul Gilchrist, Peter H. Hansen & Jonathan Westaway (MUP, 2024)

For more information on my involvement with the 'Other Everests' Research Network, and my chapter in the forthcoming (open access) edited volume of essays which the network will publish in 2024, see here.

Also on 'Waymarks'

'Other Everests' - A New Research Network

Himalaya - The Heart of Eurasia

Betrayal in the High Himalaya

The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957)

Exploring "Other Everests" - One Mountain, Many Worlds

Research Note - Kalon Lama Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (1870–1923)

 

Kalon Lama Champa Tendar, from 'China in Turmoil' by L.M. King (1927)

This post is intended to be a useful note for Tibet Researchers interested in the Kalön Lama Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923).

 

I noticed a photograph posted recently on Twitter (10 May 2023; see here) which mistakenly identifies the Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Tenpa Jamyang (Bstan pa ’jam dyangs, 1888–1944) as Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923).

 

The photograph was sourced from The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet, 1920-1950, which is a fantastic on-line resource jointly created quite a number of years ago now (c.2006?) by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the British Museum in London. It seems likely that the error was derived from the biographical record which is incorrectly connected to the image on the Tibet Album website. None of the eight images associated with this biographical record are of Champa Tendar, who died in 1923. They all appear to be of Tenpa Jamyang, who succeeded him as Kalon Lama, as the range of dates given for each photo (between 1936-1937 & 1940-1941) on the Tibet Album would seem to suggest. None of the records/transcriptions given alongside these images actually specifies which Kalon Lama they depict, although, the ‘Glossary of Terms’ which they all link to (see here) states: “Kalon Lama. He was the ecclesiastical Cabinet Minister in the Tibetan government. The post was held by Jampa Tendar at the time of the 1936 mission.” – which, given Champa Tendar/Jampa Tendar’s date of death (1923), is evidently incorrect.

 

I first noticed this error several years ago and I did mention it to Frank Drauschke, from whom the Tibet Album’s biographical information for Champa Tendar was derived, and also to my former colleagues at the British Museum, who were involved with the creation of the Tibet Album, but no one at that particular time seemed to know who was then maintaining the website.

 

So, having been reminded of it by seeing this error pop up again recently, I thought I would post some information here in the hope that it might act as a useful signpost to researchers who are interested in the lives and biographies of these two Kalon Lamas, mainly in order to point such researchers in the direction of a relatively recently published paper which gives the best information on these two individuals, and so thereby help to clarify their identities. The article is titled: Monk Officials as Military Officers in the Tibetan Ganden Phodrang Army (1895–1959), by Alice Travers in Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, Vol. 27 (2018), pp. 211-242 (See, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/asie.2018.1512 | JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26756586) – NB: the article is in English, and is freely accessible on-line (via the DOI link).

 

In posting this short research note here on my blog I do not mean to criticise or detract in any way at all from the hard work and great effort which many people far more qualified and knowledgeable than myself contributed to the AHRC funded Tibet Visual History 1920-1950 project. Indeed, the Tibet Album, as I have acknowledged above, is a truly fantastic and authoritative resource which is and continues to be immensely useful to Tibet researchers everywhere. And it has certainly been a great help to me in my own research. Nor do I wish to criticise the Twitter account that I have referred to above, which also posts very valuable information concerning the visual history of Tibet via that social media site. It is clear that the errors of association and attribution which I point out here were unintentional mistakes.

 

My own interest in the Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923) derive from two angles; firstly, from my PhD research concerning Western explorers in East Tibet, and, secondly, from my family connection to Tibetan writer, Rinchen Lhamo (1900-1928) and her husband, British Consul, Louis Magrath King (1886-1949). King knew Champa Tendar personally and wrote about him in China in Turmoil: Studies in Personality (London: Heath Cranton, 1927) – Chapter 15: A Frontier Incident, as Travers discusses in her article, along with a number of other primary and secondary sources regarding both Kalon Lamas. Travers also correctly identifies the images of Tenpa Jamyang on the Tibet Album, reproducing one as part of her article, and includes three very clear images of Champa Tendar sourced from books by Eric Teichman, Rinchen Lhamo and Louis Magrath King. This makes it very easy to distinguish the respective visual likenesses of the two Kalon Lamas.

 

Kalon Lama Jampa Tendar (via Wikimedia Commons)

See also: Jamyang Norbu's "Shadow Tibet" - 'Black Annals' (19 July 2008)

& Alice Travers, Marching into View: The Tibetan Army in Historic Photographs 1895–1959 (Tethys, 2022), p. 64, Plate 39

 

Related posts on ‘Waymarks’

China & Tibet – Through Western Eyes

Rinchen Lhamo – A Woman of Kham

 

And information on my PhD research & related publications:

"Empirical Adventurers: Science and Imperial Exploration in East Tibet, 1900-1949"

Tim Chamberlain – Birkbeck College, University of London (2015 onwards)

Edge of Empires, The British Museum Magazine (2010)

Books of Change, Journal of the RAS China (2013)

'Other Everests' - A New Research Network

 

This week saw the start of Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024 – a research network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). A two-day symposium hosted by convenors, Dr Jonathan Westaway (University of Central Lancashire) and Dr Paul Gilchrist (University of Brighton), was held at the Royal Geographical Society in London (5-6 July 2022). Other Everests is a new interdisciplinary network that takes as its starting point the centenary of the post-war British Everest campaigns of 1921-1924. Its aim is to bring together international scholars, archivists, curators, learned and professional societies and the UK mountaineering community to critically assess the legacy of the Everest expeditions and to re-evaluate the symbolic, political and cultural status of Everest in the contemporary world. The symposium brought together some of the members of the network in order to share and discuss their research, as well as pooling ideas about how the network might develop over the next two years through new events and an open access publication.

 

Jonathan Westaway & Paul Gilchrist opening the 'Other Everests' Symposium, 5-6 July 2022 (photo by Peter H. Hansen)

“Other Everests will take a once-in-a-100-year opportunity to critically reassess the legacy of Everest and its meaning in contemporary culture and society. It will make its findings widely accessible in an Open-Access collection of critical essays that address key themes highlighted by the network and it will work with our project partners at the Kendal Mountain Festival to develop public lectures and events that translate contemporary scholarship into publicly accessible formats.”

 

The symposium began with a ‘hands on’ look at archive material and artefacts related to the exploration of Everest held by the Royal Geographical Society. A fascinating display consisting of a number of original documents, photographs, objects and silent film footage which had been selected by members of the group was laid out in the RGS’s Foyle Reading Room, with each member saying something about why they had chosen their particular item and the significance it had to their research interests. The rest of the two days was devoted to a series of plenary talks, as well as presentations and roundtable discussions, and a session in which the group discussed the ways in which arts and cultural collaborations with artists and project partners might be used in order to help reimagine archival images and texts through new creative partnerships in order to think about how acts of commemoration might be made more meaningful and resonant in a post-colonial context.

 

George Mallory's match box, recovered from Everest 70 years after his death (photo by Jonathan Pitches)

For me, the symposium was a wonderful forum in which to meet a wide range of people with linked interests, as well as finally getting to meet several friends and academics whom I’d only ever corresponded with on-line from different parts of the world. It was fascinating to hear about the potentials of new research projects, some of which were still only in their early stages, whilst others were at more advanced stages of development, yet all dazzled by the breadth of their scope and the depth of their detail. There were so many inspiring insights and interesting ideas to take away from the two days that my head is still buzzing! – It is really hard to single out my main highlights from the event, but if I had to pick just two elements from each day: Jonathan Westaway’s presentation about his work on the ethnographic photographs of Major C. J. Morris, and Sarah Pickman’s insights into the material culture of provisioning and equipping expeditions on the first day; along with Nokmedemla Lemtur’s researches into German mountaineering archives as part of the Modern India in German Archives, 1706-1989 project, along with Peter Hansen’s truly excellent plenary talk, examining ‘The Whiteness of Mount Everest’, which closed the second day of the symposium – all four of these chimed closely with my own personal interests.

 

The biggest revelation or ‘eye-opener’ for me though was Jenny Hall’s presentation on the Japanese climber, Junko Tabei – whom I’m ashamed to say I’d not heard of before. She was the first female climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1975. Sadly though, the sexism and racism she encountered was not so much of a surprise. But it was fascinating to learn more about Tabei in the context of other female climbers who have subsequently pushed physical and social boundaries in the Himalaya. Hence why these interdisciplinary exchanges are so important for broadening our understanding of the regions which we choose to study. It’s the connections and correspondences which such meetings enable which ultimately prove to be some of the most fruitful and efficacious outcomes of such events.

 

Viewing the 'Other Everests' co-curated display (photo by Peter H. Hansen)

And lastly, but by no means least, the stand-out object of interest for me in the co-curated display of archive material (although all the objects were fascinating!) was a photograph of a man named Lewa, a Sherpa, who was ‘sirdar’ (head porter) on the British Everest expedition of 1933, and likewise on the ill-fated German Nanga Parbat expedition of 1934. The reason this item stood out for me was because Lewa was a familiar face. He was someone whom I’d encountered in my own on-going PhD research into early twentieth-century explorers in East Tibet. In this context, far removed from the more famous locale of Everest, Lewa was again ‘sirdar’ accompanying Ronald Kaulback and John Hanbury-Tracy during their 1936 journey along the River Salween. Lewa features as quite a prominent and very amiable character in John Hanbury-Tracy’s travelogue, Black River of Tibet (1938), where he is described as:

“Lewa, he of the square jowl and barking voice, […] a Sherpa from Nepal. He has not seen his village since he was fourteen, when he came to Darjeeling to work for Englishmen who like to climb hills, the great hills he has always lived among. A rugged character and great powers of endurance set him much in demand as a porter. He was one of the "Tigers" of Everest. He has travelled the Himalaya from Sikkim to Kashmir, and has hauled more than one famous mountaineer up the last steps of a climb. He has been sirdar on several trips, and helped to save the remnants of the disastrous German expedition to Nanga Parbat in 1934. Now he is our sirdar – a rough-and-ready sergeant-major. He has a fine reputation, and means to keep it up.” (p.9)

 

Lewa photographed in John Hanbury-Tracy's "Black River of Tibet" (1938)

Lewa was also mentioned on both days of the symposium, in the talks given by Jonathan Westaway and Peter Hansen.

 

The two-day symposium at the Royal Geographical Society was certainly a successful start to what looks set to be a very interesting and engaging research network. It’s certainly one to watch for anyone interested in the current and forthcoming Everest centenaries, and the exploration of mountain environments, as well as art and culture in the Himalaya.

  

Further Information

 

Other Everests – Research Network – Official Website

Other Everests – Research Network – on Twitter:

@OtherEverests | #OtherEverests

Other Everests on YouTube

  

Also on ‘Waymarks’

 

Himalaya – The Heart of Eurasia

"Everest Through The Lens" - Exhibition Review

Salween – Black River of Tibet

Ludlow & Sherriff’s “Botanical Endeavours”

My contributions to Other Everests:

Exhibition Review: "Everest Through the Lens" (RGS-IBG, October 2022-January 2023)

Book Chapter: "Far Away Frontiers and Spiritual Sanctuaries: Occidental Escapism in the High Himalaya" (Manchester University Press, 2024)

'Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds' Edited by Paul Gilchrist, Peter Hansen & Jonathan Westaway (MUP, 2024)

Deeper Than Indigo - Transcending Time

Deeper than Indigo: Tracing Thomas Machell, Forgotten Explorer

By Jenny Balfour Paul

(Medina, 2015)

I’d wager that most historians are hooked on history primarily for the thrill of research, leafing through archives, puzzling over old photographs, wandering down side-streets in obscure places in search of long forgotten buildings where the events or people we are researching once happened or inhabited. Publication in the form of articles or books, and presentations in the form of talks or conference papers can be rewarding, but, for me at any rate, they don’t come anywhere close to the feeling of actively being engaged in digging down to find the bedrock of research which belies all our work. It’s a thrill which we often discuss amongst ourselves. It’s quite common for historians on Twitter to post photographs of the doorways to libraries or archives they are about to enter, with a gleeful note of anticipation – saying they are entering for a day of trawling through the archives. “I maybe sometime …” No need to send a search party if I don’t emerge, because I’m happily immersed in my element. The past is a foreign country, and many of us would be more than happy to permanently emigrate there! 

In that sense archives can be addictive. Even if we have reached saturation point, thinking we’ve had enough of one particular project – more often than not we find a little overlooked thread which just needs pulling, and, more often than not, that little thread turns into a great unravelling which manages to consume us once again, and so the process starts all over afresh. This is exactly what happened to Jenny Balfour Paul, an academic specialising in the study of indigo, the natural blue dye derived from indigo plants, when a librarian introduced her to Thomas Machell and his travel journals. 

The initial link was the fact that Thomas Machell had worked for a time as an indigo planter in Bengal during the nineteenth century, overseeing the processing of the plant into solid blue bricks of dye which could be traded and shipped across the British Empire and to other parts of the globe. But Machell’s life and career was far more varied than that fact alone. Machell, like Jenny Balfour Paul, was also a traveller and an artist. Born the son of a country vicar in Yorkshire, his wanderlust struck early on when as young boys he and his brother ran away from home one night and travelled on foot to the south coast of England before returning home. In many respects that journey was a rite of passage for the globe wandering life he was to lead later on. From Yorkshire, via the Marquesas and South America, to Afghanistan and India. Making his way in the colonial world and all the while charting and recording his progress in colourful, illustrated journals which he wrote as extended letters home to his father (these journals now reside in the British Library, see here). He collected many trinkets and souvenirs along the way which he sent back home in order to form the basis of a small personal museum intended to entertain, amuse, and educate his family and friends. 

Jenny Balfour Paul connected with this creative side of Thomas Machell and finding him a kindred spirit she ended up falling for him in a big way. A traveller herself from an early age, she joined up with a band of friends to follow the hippy trail to India, after which she responded to a job advert that read simply: “Interesting job in a warm agreeable country. Applicant must be graduate with wide interests and a driving licence.” Her application was successful and so she found herself living and working in Jordan, where she met and later married the British diplomat, Glencairn Balfour Paul. The couple spent many happy years travelling the world together. In later years these journeys were to be very much influenced by Jenny’s inadvertent meeting with Thomas Machell. Indeed, the journals of Thomas Machell were more than enough to inspire her to follow in his footsteps in an attempt to track this man down and find out more about who he was and how his story ended. The itinerary was a broad one, ranging from Egypt and India to Patagonia and Polynesia, then back to Afghanistan and India again, with recurring visits to his family homes in Yorkshire and Cumbria as well. In all this travelling Machell became a kind of time-travelling intimate friend to Balfour Paul, always a couple of steps ahead of her, beckoning her onwards – follow me to find out more, he always seemed to be saying. And the connection ran so deep she found herself compelled to write letters to him, even going so far as to send him a fax on one occasion! … (How many historians wish we could invent a time-travelling steam punk telegraph which might enable us to talk directly to the denizens of the past?!)

A postcard to the past ...

But as with all such research, as the project expanded and one link lead to another the story of Machell’s life which Balfour Paul was amassing began to beg its own question – how was all of this going to come together in the end? – And when it did, what was she to do with it all? ... (It’s a question I can relate to intimately. When I first began researching the lives of my brother-in-law’s grandparents I had no idea that several years down the line it would turn out to be a little project which had somehow substantially transmuted through an MA dissertation into the starting point for a much larger theme for a full PhD thesis!) ... It occurred to Jenny that the project of tracing Machell’s life path kept crossing and intertwining with her own, such that she was finding it hard to pull the two apart when attempting to put it all down in words – so, as a friend suggested to her, why not go with that aspect of the research? Why not let the two stories permeate and saturate into one another as they were clearly indelibly linked? The result is a wonderfully hybrid work, titled Deeper Than Indigo – combining all the best aspects of lucidly described travel writing, grounded by narrative history, and carried along by an evocative retelling of the research process itself. It is a narrative in which the research itself becomes a kind of quest, lending the book a remarkably personal and pacy quality, almost like a thriller. Once engrossed in the first few pages I found it very hard to put this book down! – It reminded me of A. S. Byatt’s novel, Possession; skilfully capturing the thrill of the academic quest to unravel a mystery of a lost life story, yet (happily) without a baddie in hot pursuit, even though the quest itself was not without its perils – perhaps most notably in dealing with distinctly dodgy taxi drivers, suspiciously skeptical policemen, and even modern day Somali pirates!

Parallel pages from Thomas and Jenny's travel journals

One of the most magical sections of the book for me was when Machell and Balfour Paul visit the Marquesas; somewhere which I would deeply love to visit myself some day. Haunted by the shades of Paul Gauguin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson (a distant relative of Jenny’s husband), Arthur Grimble, Thor Heyerdahl, and even the young boys in R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Joseph Conrad’s Caspar Almayer and Axel Heist, I’ve often dreamed of visiting distant Pacific Islands (I’ve only managed to get to one so far, see here). As Balfour Paul relates it, Thomas Machell’s experience in the Marquesas, where he fell in love for the one and only time in his life (he never married) with the daughter of a local chieftain, gives a frank and clear voice through his journals to the kinds of boundary crossing which I suspect equally seduced other European travellers before him; men like Joseph Banks and Fletcher Christian in Tahiti, causing them to transgress the social norms of their own societies and experience the world through the cultural norms of another people entirely opposite to their own. An experience which I suspect can hardly be comprehended by us today, even though all instances of travel still to this day require this kind of openness and inquisitiveness in order to be fully appreciated, albeit perhaps to a lesser degree of removal. The world is still a vast and varied place, but our relative perceptions of it have perhaps narrowed in these present times given that all parts of the world are now seemingly connected and made similar by association. Yet if you strive to look that little bit deeper, there are still discoveries of your own to be made. Delving into the self there are often personal depths to plumb "full fathom five" beyond the reefs and familiar coastlines we are normally content to cling to, especially when travelling abroad.

Parallel pages from Thomas and Jenny's travel journals

Deeper Than Indigo is quite definitely one of the best books I’ve read, period. It joins my list of absolute favourites – the handful of books I’d take with me to my desert island, the books I want to spend the rest of my life with, revisiting them from time to time like reconnecting with an old friend, because that’s what the best books ultimately are. As a historian I found I could really connect with the way that at times, as Balfour Paul describes exquisitely well, how our research seems to take on a life-force of its own, in which it ends up guiding us according to its own ends. Those are the moments when research becomes almost magical. Often there are many instances within this process of a kind of ‘harmonic convergence’ – something which transcends a mere coincidence; something which is more akin almost to a shepherding at the behest of the Fates. It’s all about that moment when you feel like you are almost communing with your subject directly across time. Coincidences which are too uncanny to be merely coincidences, and the effects of which can sometimes seem seriously spooky. 

I’ve written about some of these instances which have occurred to me before on this blog. Often the deeper you get into a research project the more frequently these uncanny alignments seem to occur. I remember once when I’d spent ages searching a library catalogue for a register of missionaries who’d been sent to China in the nineteenth century. I didn’t have the full publication details of this register, and so, in repeatedly clicking the search box I tried every permutation of search terms I could think of in order to tease it out of the computer catalogue system (a skill you learn from working in museums and archives over many years!), but alas, on this particular occasion, it was all to no avail. I even went to the long section of bookshelves in the library which contained all the books on China missionaries and scanned the book spines one-by-one in a David and Goliath-like effort to find the register, yet once again this little David was ultimately defeated by the immense size of the library. In the end I gave up and so turned my attention to other things. I spent next few hours installed at a desk, working on other books, making notes, thinking of other things. Eventually, once I was finished for the evening and had packed up my things I decided to look up a different book on my way out – a book entirely unrelated to my research (it was actually Robert Drury’s journal, which I wrote about here). This book the computer told me was located several floors down in the Africa section; so on my way out of the library I stopped off at this different floor and found the relevant bookstacks, and began to peruse the shelves, following the classmarks until I came to the book I was looking for, and, as I reached out to take it from the shelf, my eye was caught by the title of the second spine to the right – it was the register of missionaries which I’d been looking for! … Unbeknownst to me this particular Mission had sent missionaries to China and Africa. Hence the register had been shelved here in what I suspect was a 50/50 coin flip of a chance between the China and the Africa sections. But what were the chances of that? Like a needle in a haystack, on this very same occasion of my searching for it, to find it in that huge labyrinth of a university library by a complete stroke of luck? – At such moments it’s hard not to feel like there is some sort of serendipitous hand guiding you sometimes ... Jenny Balfour Paul’s Deeper Than Indigo is the only book I’ve found which has come close to capturing this feeling. That almost preternatural sense of what it is like to be in the full flow of research, flying on an exhilarating ride, forging a deep connection to the past; when everything feels like it is simply falling into place for you.

The framing of Deeper Than Indigo also struck another chord with me too. Balfour Paul’s decision, as the researcher / writer, to actively include herself in the narrative to the extent she does is an unusual one. You sometimes find historians breaking that textual fourth wall to address the reader directly, for instance, by serendipitously regaling us with an anecdote about visiting a certain place which they are writing about. One thinks of William Dalrymple’s books which are masterworks of the historian as informed guide. But Jenny Balfour Paul has taken this device to another level in the writing of Deeper Than Indigo. And it is something I admire because it shows how the imagination is very necessarily an active part of the process of doing historical research. It’s impossible to write history without attempting to inhabit the people and the times we are writing about, empathy comes from an informed process of imagining. But the key is to always remain open to the infinite possibilities which exist until we find the evidence by which we can be certain of our facts, and even then to weigh them as to whether or not we feel they may have been dressed or couched towards a particular agenda.

This kind of analysis is what makes time-travel in such books possible. All too often though I’ve opened history books, mostly those published in the last few decades, which confidently assert that on such-and-such a day “Admiral so-and-so scratched his elbow and shifted from foot to foot on the deck of such-and-such a ship, his brow furrowed and deeply pensive …” Such descriptions aim at the evocative, but they always fall flat with me unless they come with a footnote to direct me to the source for those very facts. Who saw him looking pensive? Who saw him shifting uneasily from foot to foot? Who did he tell he was feeling pensive? Did he write it down himself in a letter or a journal? – Or is it completely made-up simply for dramatic effect? It’s not pathos, it is pretence. And it bugs me no end! And as a writerly technique it is so easily solved as well, i.e.: “It is easy to imagine Admiral Itchy Elbow shifting pensively from foot to foot on the deck of HMS Assumption on the eve of the great battle …”

For me this is Jenny Balfour Paul’s greatest skill. She is wholly open to the imaginative (and even the rather more unorthodox spiritual side) of her quest. She is able to present her fictional conjectures as part of, and alongside the genuine facts she has been able to ascertain without ever fully succumbing to the unknowable certainties of such suppositions. As any historian knows there’s an enormous and ever present hazard of becoming convinced of your own educated guesses sometimes, and if you let yourself this tendency can derail your entire endeavour. But in Deeper Than Indigo the two tales of Thomas Machell and Jenny Balfour Paul’s journeys are skilfully told, switching from Thomas Machell’s past to Jenny Balfour Paul’s present and back again; each time leaving you wanting to know more so that you are relieved to switch back to take up the initial thread again, but simultaneously sad to let go of the parallel story for a while. It is a gentle yet compelling alternation between warp and weft. Very neatly all these strands are drawn together in the end when the book reaches a joint sense of homecoming, both for Thomas and for Jenny. 

Putting this magical book down after turning the final page you are sure to feel glad you have come know Thomas Machell and Jenny Balfour Paul so intimately. It’s as if you too had been their anonymous travelling companion, experiencing the world through their eyes and their words. If the best history books bring the past evocatively to life, Deeper Than Indigo does more than this – it lends the past a soul. It is often said of such books that they are love letters to the past, this book is certainly that. It’s a love letter on more than one level. As multi-layered as the experiences of travelling slowly, seeing, recording, and reflecting on the passage from here to there and back again, from then to now, the past and its ties to the present. It’s exactly what history and travel is all about. “An odyssey, set on the edges of time.” It’s a book to be treasured.

Find out more about Jenny Balfour Paul and her work here

Jenny Balfour Paul on 'Deeper Than Indigo' - ILHAM Gallery, 2018.

Read an interview with Jenny Balfour Paul | The Wild Dyery, 2019