The Dangerous Book of Heroes Read online

  The Dangerous Book of Heroes

  Conn Iggulden & David Iggulden

  In memory of John Hall and John Hunt,

  who in their different ways lived life to the full

  PEOPLE WHO LOSE THEIR HISTORY, LOSE THEIR SOUL.

  —AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL SAYING

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  George Washington

  Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton

  Daniel Boone

  The Few: The Royal Air Force Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain

  The Magna Carta Barons

  Oliver Cromwell

  Helen Keller

  James Cook

  Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

  The Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire: Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Buxton

  Tatanka Iyotake—Sitting Bull

  Edith Cavell

  Thomas Paine and Rights of Man

  The Women of SOE: Setting Europe Ablaze

  The Siege of the Alamo

  Sir Henry Morgan: Buccaneer

  Lawrence of Arabia

  Florence Nightingale

  Flight 93

  Winston Churchill

  The Gurkhas

  Horatio Nelson: The Immortal Memory

  The Marines at Iwo Jima

  Billy Bishop: The Courage of the Early Morning

  Bletchley Park and the First Computers

  William Bligh’s Boat Voyage

  Apollo 11: Landing on the Moon

  Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

  Alcock and Brown: Transatlantic, Nonstop

  Sir Walter Ralegh and Sir Francis Drake

  Harry Houdini: Escapologist

  Scott of the Antarctic

  The Men of Colditz

  The Unknown Warrior

  Martin Luther King Jr.

  Heroes

  Searchable Terms

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  There is a moment in some lives when the world grows still and a decision must be made. Colonel Travis knew it when he drew a line in the dust at the Alamo. George Washington knew it when he marched against Cornwallis at Yorktown. At such moments, there is no one to save you. The decision is yours alone.

  The heroes in this book are from a variety of centuries. Mainly, they are taken from that common history of Britain and America, as well as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. That constriction was no hardship, as it left a gold-bearing seam of hundreds of wonderful, inspiring lives.

  We have not gone too far back into history, so no Boadicea, though the Magna Carta barons are in. We’ve avoided the stories of monarchs, sportsmen, saints, and scientists. Once started, those would easily fill a book to the exclusion of all else. Politicians, too, have not made the cut, with the exception of men like Washington and Winston Churchill, who deserve their places for other reasons. No collection of heroes can be utterly definitive, and there will always be too little space for every great tale. Courage is perhaps the first requirement for inclusion here. Courage, determination, and some dash.

  Some of the heroes in this book are more rogue than angel—and one or two are absolute devils. Yet in their brief existence they showed what can be done with a life, one single span of decades in the light. We have not judged them by modern standards. They would have scorned such judgment.

  When you tire of humanity’s flaws, perhaps you will read a few chapters and be reminded that we can also be inspiring. Fortune played its part, of course, but there was always that moment when the world fell still and the searchlights of Colditz Castle drifted silently across the yard. They did not falter then—and their lives should be known to all.

  —Conn and David Iggulden

  And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, “What is the use?” For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal.

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard,

  The Worst Journey in the World

  George Washington

  George Washington was not a great soldier. He was not even a great farmer, yet he was in the right place, at the right time, several vital times. His greatness was thrust upon him, so now it appears that, of all men, George Washington alone was destined to be the founding father of the United States of America.

  His family traces its roots to Northamptonshire in England and a land grant by Henry VIII. Colonel John Washington sailed to the Virginia colony in 1657 to farm. The links with Britain were maintained, however, and George’s father, Augustine, was educated there. He briefly went to sea before returning to Virginia, where he farmed, built mills, was involved in iron-ore mining, acquired more land, and married twice. George was the eldest of Augustine’s second wife, Mary’s, six children. He was born at Popes Creek on February 22, 1732.

  Three years later Augustine moved his family farther up the Potomac River to his land at Little Hunting Creek, and three years after that to Ferry Farm plantation on the Rappahannock River. It’s there that red-haired George Washington was brought up, haphazardly educated at home and at the small local school. There are many tales of his childhood—the chopping of the cherry tree, throwing a silver dollar across the mile-wide Potomac—and all are myths. He was a Virginia farmer’s boy with an inclination to arithmetic, measurement, and trigonometry.

  His father died when George was eleven, and his eldest half-brother, Lawrence, became a surrogate father to the boy. Lawrence suggested in 1746 that George enlist in the Royal Navy as midshipman. The navy then was becoming fashionable. All Britain, the colonies, and Europe were talking about the recent four-year voyage around the world by Commodore Anson, a voyage from which he returned to Portsmouth laden with fabulous treasure. George’s aptitude for mathematics might have made him a natural navigator, but his mother vetoed that career.

  A nearby British landowner, Lord Fairfax, instead offered young George an assistant’s position in a survey he was financing. At sixteen years of age George trekked through the wilderness to the Shenandoah Valley, where he helped survey and plot some of Fairfax’s five million acres.

  His diary of the 1748 journey records the experience of sleeping under a “thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas & c.” Along the way they met a Native American war party bearing someone’s scalp. George Washington’s dislike of Native Americans surfaces early in his derogatory comment about central European immigrants: “As ignorant a set of people as the Indians they would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch.”

  Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

  Washington made an impression in the Shenandoah survey. The next year he helped plan the town of Belhaven (Alexandria) and Lord Fairfax sponsored him to become surveyor of Culpeper County. For two years he traveled and camped through Culpeper and other Virginian counties, surveying and mapping the wilderness. It was during this time that Washington’s lifelong interest in western land development began. He saved money and purchased “unclaimed” Virginian land.

  However, his surveying career ended abruptly in 1851 when Lawrence sailed to the colony of Barbados in a desperate attempt to treat his tuberculosis. George went w
ith his half-brother, but it did neither any physical good. Lawrence died the following year, while George contracted smallpox, which left him with facial scars. Lawrence’s daughter died within two months of her father, leaving George to inherit the Little Hunting Creek (Mount Vernon) plantation on the Potomac River.

  At twenty, an established and capable surveyor, Washington instead became farmer of a tobacco plantation of two thousand acres with eighteen slaves. The boy had become a large man, six feet two inches tall, with a large nose, big hands, wide hips, and narrow shoulders. His height gave him a commanding presence, made more impressive when his red hair was powdered fashionably white. He never wore a wig.

  Washington also applied for Lawrence’s vacant commission in the Virginia militia, despite a complete lack of military training and experience, and was appointed major. He concentrated on farming Mount Vernon, gradually purchasing more land and attempting to increase the quality and quantity of his tobacco. In the free London market, Mount Vernon leaf was marked as mediocre.

  West of the Appalachians, meanwhile, trouble was brewing. In defiance of the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, French soldiers and settlers had moved back into the Hudson Bay area in the far north and into the Ohio Valley in the west. Successive timber forts marked the French expansion south to the Forks of the Ohio (then Virginia), a strategic gateway into the Ohio Valley. In December 1754, Virginia lieutenant governor Robert Dinwiddie asked Major Washington to deliver an official letter to the French demanding that they leave the area and return north.

  Washington recruited a friend of the family who spoke French, Jacob Van Braam, and with a guide and four backwoodsmen set off for Fort Le Boeuf (Beef Fort, now Waterford, Pennsylvania). With Mingo chief Tanaghrisson and three warriors, the small party arrived at the French fort in a heavy snowstorm and Washington delivered the diplomatic letter.

  Dinwiddie concluded his letter: “It becomes my duty to require your peaceable departure; and that you would forbear prosecuting a purpose so interruptive of the harmony and good understanding, which his Majesty [George II] is desirous to continue and cultivate with the most Christian King [Louis XV].” Such was the courtesy of the era, when both war and diplomacy were considered two of the gentlemanly arts. The reply, rejecting any withdrawal and in fact announcing further advances, was almost as polite.

  It took a month for Washington to return to Williamsburg in Virginia, a harsh, urgent journey through heavy snow and icy rivers. Dinwiddie immediately brought forward the planned construction of Fort Prince George at the Forks of the Ohio. The basic structure was almost completed by April 1755, when a large French military force arrived. The forty British volunteers and carpenters, faced by five hundred French soldiers and eighteen cannons, were threatened with death or withdrawal. They withdrew. The French destroyed the fort and built their own Fort Duquesne.

  Washington was promoted lieutenant colonel, commissioned to recruit and train two hundred men and reinforce Fort Prince George. The Virginia colonists were not enthusiastic, so with only 160 men half-trained in the use of their Brown Bess muskets, Washington again crossed into the Ohio Valley in late April. Because of what happened, Dinwiddie’s orders to Washington are important. He wrote: “You are to act on the Difensive, but in Case any Attempts are made to obstruct the Works or interrupt our Settlemts by any Persons whatsoever, You are to restrain all such Offenders, & in Case of resistance to make Prisoners of or kill & destroy them.” Washington learned of the destruction of Fort Pitt during his march and decided to continue.

  As Washington’s force advanced toward the Forks of the Ohio, the French commander of Fort Duquesne sent a scouting and emissary party of thirty-five men under the command of Ensign de Jumonville. Jumonville carried an emissary summons written in French. Chief Tanaghrisson and several Mingo warriors intercepted Washington’s force at Great Meadows with the news of the French party.

  At dawn on May 28, Tanaghrisson, Washington, and forty-seven of his militia reached the hollow where Jumonville had camped. Washington and Tanaghrisson conferred. According to Washington, they “concluded that we should fall on them together” and surrounded the hollow. As the first light filtered through the tangled trees, the French soldiers awoke.

  Who fired first is not certain. Washington’s report accuses the French; several militia reports and that of a Mingo who deserted to the French agree. An escaped French soldier accused the Virginians. In two volleys from the colonials several French soldiers were killed and eleven wounded. In the exchange of fire a militiaman was killed before an injured Jumonville surrendered to Washington. Jumonville handed Washington the summons, but Washington had little success in his attempt to translate it. French-speaking Van Braam was not with him that morning.

  In the smoky hollow, Chief Tanaghrisson slipped up to Jumonville. Saying in French, “Thou art not yet dead, my father,” he smashed in his head with a tomahawk. He then dipped in his hands and drew out Jumonville’s brains. A third of the body’s blood supply is in the head; the scene must have been horrific for the un-bloodied Washington and the Virginians. The other Mingo warriors fell upon the wounded French prisoners. Eleven were murdered and scalped before Washington could bring order to the scene and protect the twenty-two surviving soldiers with his militia. One of the French soldiers was decapitated and his head impaled upon a stake.

  The French claimed that the British had intentionally massacred a peaceful emissary, strictly contrary to the rules of war, but there is no possibility that Washington could have known that Jumonville was an emissary. The earlier French action against Fort Prince George had been aggressive, yet nevertheless Washington had exceeded his orders. He might easily have sent a militiaman to Jumonville bearing a white flag.

  Instead began the French and Indian War of North America, which escalated into the Seven Years’ War—the first true world war. Fighting spread to Europe, the Philippines, Africa, India, the Caribbean, South America, the Mediterranean, and all the seas between. Horace Walpole, MP, son of Britain’s first prime minister, remarked: “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the back woods of America set the world on fire.”

  Washington returned to Great Meadows, where he built a circular, wooden palisade defense he named Fort Necessity. There, no doubt, he also reflected upon his first military action. He thought Fort Necessity could withstand “the attack of 500 men,” but it was poorly sited, overlooked from sixty yards, enfiladed on three sides, and lay in a waterlogged creek. Following an aborted advance toward Fort Duquesne and a nightmare return, Washington’s four hundred men at Necessity were surrounded by the French that July.

  After a day’s siege in pouring rain, where the militiamen protected themselves in overflowing trenches, Washington had lost a quarter of his troops, killed or wounded. The position was already desperate when his men broke into the rum supply; soon half were drunk. The French offered a parley at 8 P.M.

  Washington accepted an offer of withdrawal rather than certain defeat and imprisonment and signed a document written in French. In it he committed Virginia to withdrawal from the Ohio Valley and to not build any more forts for a year. Further, despite Van Braam being present to translate, Washington admitted to the murder of Ensign Jumonville, although he claimed the word had been explained as “death” rather than “murder.” Washington and his men were disarmed and allowed to return to eastern Virginia, where the majority deserted.

  The French published the Jumonville admission in Europe, while Washington further remarked in a letter to his brother: “I heard the bullets whistle and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”

  Back in Williamsburg the twenty-two-year-old George Washington resigned his commission, then returned to Mount Vernon. To say he went home to lick his wounds may be strong, but he must surely have reflected upon his first military experiences with dismay. He’d not been able to prevent a massacre of wounded French surrendered to his care; he’d suffered humiliating defeat and desertion by his men; and he’d signed an incriminati
ng document.

  Major General Edward Braddock and two regiments of foot were sent from Britain to defeat the French in the Ohio. The initial campaign was supported by all the colonies and might have succeeded, for the colonialists had no desire for French rule. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin introduced themselves to Braddock near Frederick Town (Maryland) in April 1755 and volunteered their services. For his local knowledge Braddock invited Washington to serve as aide-de-camp, while Franklin acted as Braddock’s commissariat, ably and quickly securing wagons, draft horses, and packhorses.

  Following the London plans, Braddock advanced 110 miles toward Fort Duquesne along Washington’s earlier road. Only it wasn’t a road, as believed in London, merely a trail. From a single-file footpath the soldiers and militiamen had to hack out a road so that the supply wagons could pass. It was slow going. Washington, who knew the track and the terrain, proposed splitting the army into two: sending the Virginian militia and half the British soldiers forward quickly and leaving the remaining half with the supply wagons to prepare the road. Braddock agreed.

  By July 9, the forward half was only ten miles from Duquesne, but it was sixty miles ahead of its supplies and the rear half. Splitting an advancing army’s force is always risky, and as the commanding officer, Braddock must accept that responsibility. The question remains why Washington suggested it at all. Perhaps his dislike of the Native Americans with the French made him regard them as poor fighters. Frontiersman Daniel Boone, driving one of the supply wagons, could have told him otherwise. Braddock, of course, had no experience of the special effectiveness of Native American warriors and their tactics in American terrain. He relied upon Washington for such local knowledge.