The Author’s Notebook

DESERT TRAVELERS MADE OF FIRE

The time is 1913. In the Levant, seethes a crumbling Ottoman Empire, a bubbling cauldron of intrigue, ancient secrets, and death. As events inexorably draw the Great Powers toward world war, two brash American adventurers, Jack Astor, a foreign service agent, and his bodyguard, Captain Edward Bell, late of the Philippine Scouts, travel to Palestine, Arabia, Egypt and beyond. They are looking for oil, gold, and something else. Something so dangerous, so terrifying that even the mysteriously alien and seductive Laila al-Jinn, a desert traveler made of fire, asks their help to find it. They are seeking the burning ray of Archimedes.

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I have always enjoyed reading fiction. As a boy and teenager, I particularly relished adventure stories and consumed them voraciously. The tales I read crossed all genres—westerns, science fiction, historical novels, detective stories, war stories, whatever. Most of the adventures I read and enjoyed as a youth in no way could be considered great literature, although some in fact were.

Looking back, I now realize that the tales I enjoyed most spoke directly to my heart, mind and emotions, and, at the time, seemed to be strongly relevant to my life. That relevance I grasped, to some extent, even as a youngster. The plot that most attracted my attention at that time revolved around the “hero’s journey”. A journey that I myself was on. And, if you believe Campbell and Vogler, this theme results in a story structure with universal appeal and which has existed in human culture down through millennia.

When I began to write HMS Furious some twenty years ago I think I must have been feeling nostalgic for that rather simplistic, old-fashioned adventure story of my youth because that is what I have attempted to craft.

Technically, I think my story might be hard to define since it seems to be a mix of science, nautical, and military fiction. The characters are boldly drawn with not much subtly or nuance. The action is straight-forward. The ship-board culture though placed far in the future is more reminiscent of 18th century Europe particularly as it existed in the British Navy. The plot revolves around intertwined journeys being made by a number of select players or characters. Good is good, and bad is bad. There are some mysterious events but not all is revealed. Finally, the initial impetus for action is, in fact, based upon real events that happened in the South Atlantic about forty years ago. But those events are secondary to the heroes’ journeys which is at the heart of these stories.

In conclusion, this story and its sequels were written for the me that existed as a teenager and young adult many years ago but also for the me that exists now since that youthful me still exists within my mind. Thus, I suppose one could classify these novels as falling into the juvenile book genre but I hope that they may also be of interest to a wider range, younger and older, as well. You know, to tell you a secret, every once in a while I will pick up my copy of HMS Furious and read a few chapters just to remind myself of what I enjoyed so much as a young man…and in fact still do.

JUSTUS ALONZO CALL, the fourth son of Stephen Call, was born in the 1850’s on a farm in Hendricks County, Indiana. His father was my great, great grandfather’s older brother. He spent his early years in that state and then, when still a boy, he traveled with his family to homestead in Howard County (now Chautauqua County), Kansas. He left home at 16 and spent the remainder of his life, or at least, according to him, the best part of his life, in the Indian Territory, later known as Oklahoma, on horseback punching cattle or in courtrooms trying criminal cases.

I had never heard of Justus Alonzo Call until one Sunday in the spring of 1998. I had driven from Oklahoma City to Sedan, Kansas, county seat of Chautauqua County, to attend my great Aunt Cleopha Call’s (everybody called her Aunt Cleo) 100th birthday celebration. Aunt Cleo was my grandfather’s youngest sister and, at that time, was the reining dowager of the Call clan.

I really didn’t know much about Aunt Cleo and still don’t. As a young boy growing up in the 1950s and 60s she had just been one of many older relatives (most with funny sounding names like Uncle Hosie and Aunt Hattie, who weren’t really my aunt and uncle, and Aunt Zelpha and Uncle Doyle, who really were) who periodically showed up at family gatherings during the holidays. I knew she had never married and had been Clerk of Court for the Chautauqua County District Court for more than thirty years before retiring. I knew that she was known to be a strong willed, no nonsense type of person who, even as she neared 100 years of age, continued to write op-ed pieces for the local newspapers.

The fact that she had reached a 100 and was as mentally sharp as she was made her of interest to me. Probably, that was the primary reason for my decision to show up that Sunday; that, plus the fact, that my wife was away on business and I was bored and had nothing better to do.

After going through the receiving line and shaking Aunt Cleo’s hand I mingled with the crowd and reacquainted myself with my many cousins and made small talk with my six aunts and uncles. After that I found a chair in a corner and sat down. Frankly, I was amazed at how many people had shown up, most of whom I didn’t know and had never seen, or even heard of, before. After the lunch was served, the visiting and gossiping continued, most of which I skipped. Frankly, the party, at least for me, had turned out to be a bust.

As boredom crept over me I consoled myself with the thought that I, at least, had done my family duty. As I was waiting for an appropriate moment to make my escape I noticed Aunt Cleo glancing in my direction with a sly look in her eye. When she knew that she had my attention she waived me over with a small jerk of her chin. Puzzled, I made my way through the crowded church basement and sat down beside her.

In her 100 years of life she had never said a thing to me except a “Merry Christmas” or some other such salutation. We had never talked, not even a little bit. In fact, five or ten years might go by before we would run into each other at some family function. It was to be expected I guess. For, to me, she was just one of dwindling number of oldsters; and, I figured, to her, I was just one of an ever-increasing number of offspring, and offspring of offspring, and offspring of those offspring, ad infinitem.

For the really old, it has to be impossible remembering who everyone is. And, after all, I was just one son, of one of her several brothers numerous sons. Such disparate groups rarely have occasion to really talk, or get to know each other. And, on that springtime afternoon, in the basement of a small-town Kansas church, we still didn’t have a conversation. Rather, for about five minutes she talked and I listened.

As a result of that conversation, and in the due course of events, that is Aunt Cleo’s death about a year and a half later, I received a package in the mail. The package contained, as expected, photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, legal documents and hundreds of hand written and typed pages documenting the life of Justus Alonzo Call, my distant cousin from another era.

Apparently, near the end of his life Justus Call had decided to write his memoirs. So, with the same single-mindedness he had apparently lived his life, he had set down in his small apartment in Tulsa and began writing, and churned out page, after page, after page. He began at the beginning and ended at the end. When he was finished he put the documents into a safety deposit box and apparently did nothing more with them except to bequeath them in his will to Aunt Cleo. And, Aunt Cleo had bequeathed them to me.

I did nothing with the documents until near twenty years later in 2016. Then, beginning in January, suddenly I had the time and the desire to spend the weekends in my study, carefully reading Justus Call’s writings and examining the other documents. At times, I had to use a magnifying glass to make out the faded ink script. The typed pages were easier. The more I read the more intrigued I became with the story.

Eventually I decided that Justus Call’s memoirs should be published, but I was in a quandary as to how best to present them–as a biography, a first-person autobiography, or as a story. Finally, I decided on the later plan; thus, the following text. Not the traditional method I know, but I concluded that, perhaps, in story form, more people would read Justus Call’s memoirs and that was my goal. (Nevertheless, I have inserted, here and there in the text, excerpts from Justus Call’s writing, without editing, just to give the reader a taste of the man’s thinking—from the horse’s mouth as it were.) Needless to say, everything you read is true and accurate; at least it is according to what Justus Call wrote more than half a century ago.

In conclusion, I’m not sure why Aunt Cleo gave me Justus Call’s memoirs. However, I know why I’m publishing them–they shed a light on a time I never knew, but wish I had.

Justus Alonzo Call (1856-1940) was a freighter on the Santa Fe trail, a mustanger in Texas, an Indian fighter in the southwest, a cattleman in the Cherokee Outlet, and a criminal defense attorney in Oklahoma.  Before his death he wrote his memoirs detailing his account of everyday life in the violent west of the 1880s through the very early years of the twentieth century.  The first volume introduces the reader to Justus Call and to those early years of cowboy life in the Indian Territory.

The stories of this series derive from academic research I performed in 2014 on an ancient codex, ascribed to Fra Matthew Paris, a medieval chronicler, while I was living for a short while in London. The provenance of this work is far from straightforward. The dog-eared manuscript in the British Library, which I studied that spring and from which the following tales are based, was, in the opinion of the original documented curator Richard James (1592-1638), Sir Robert Cotton’s librarian, neither written nor signed in Matthew Paris’ own hand, but is a contemporary (early thirteenth century) copy, scribed by another. Present day scholars agree.

What I handled, that May, with the cotton gloves provided by the special sections attendant, was a shabby quarto volume of 172 pages, with several folios missing and others in which the copyist had occasionally made nonsense of the text. Nevertheless, as almost all modern researchers allow, it is written in the style of Matthew Paris and signed with his name; but then, as all present and most past scholars concur, the manuscript tells a story far too fantastical to be believed.

So, let’s take a moment and re-examine our inquiry and ask, what do we know of Matthew Paris? Well, we know that he was born in 1200 and died in 1259, was a Benedictine monk, an English historian, an artist in illuminated manuscripts and a cartographer, and that he was based at Saint Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire. We also know that he wrote a number of works, mostly historical, which he scribed and illuminated himself, typically in drawings partly colored with watercolor washes, sometimes called “tinted drawings”. Some of his manuscripts were written in Latin, some in Anglo-Norman, and some in French.

We also know that Matthew Paris was a dedicated historian, in that he attempted to report accurately of the events he wrote, and, that is a most important point, to which everyone, no matter how skeptical of the origin of this particular manuscript, agree. Present day scholars also concur that he derived much of his information from the letters of important people, which he sometime inserted into his writings, but much more from conversation with eyewitnesses of the actual events he discussed. For example, among his informants were Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King Henry III, with whom he appears to have been on intimate terms.

So, to continue our inquiry, what do we know about this specific work’s unique history of ownership? Chemical analysis performed by the British Library in the early 1970’s upon this particular manuscript confirms that both the vellum and inks are authentic to the thirteenth century, as is the scripting technique. However, possessory provenance can only be documented back to Sir Robert Cotton; thus, between the years of 1571 to 1631.

Now, as you may or may not know, it was during the mid-sixteenth century, at the order of Henry VIII, that the Dissolution of Monasteries occurred. As a result, many priceless and ancient manuscripts that had belonged to the various English monastic libraries began to be disseminated among various owners many, if not most, of whom were unaware of the cultural value of such documents. And it was at this point that Sir Robert’s unique skill in finding, purchasing and preserving these ancient documents is so important; and for which the people of England, and, frankly, the whole world, should give thanks, since it was the Cotton library which, the grandson, Sir John Cotton, later donated to Great Britain upon his death in 1702, that became the basis of what is now known as the British Library.

But back to the important question at hand. Is this story some type of hoax, arguably one a little over 800 years old, or is it true, or, as some would argue, just a fable of its time? For it is also well documented that one of the reasons the Cotton library is so important is that it did preserve the only copy of singularly important but nonetheless fantastical texts, two of the most famous being Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Therefore, perhaps, this tale, even if scribed in the thirteenth century by Matthew of Paris, should be considered in a similar light as the two just mentioned above.

In conclusion, I do not know the answer, and, honestly, I am full of doubts. Even so, I have studied this work thoroughly, the hand drawn illuminations, the marginalia, all of it, and, rightly or wrongly, have decided to present it as if it were authentic, although in modern narrative form. I do this, in part, because it is a tale of books and partly because of the intensity and impact of the account. Thus, in the end I leave it to the reader to make his or her final decision as to the tales’ legitimacy and conclude: ut inveniam te in veritate.

John A. Call
Dublin, 2017