Six Months in the Hijaz (Journeys to Makkah and Madinah 1877-1878)

عن الكتاب

Barzan’s reissue of John Keane’s account of his journeys to Makkah and Madinah is the first since it was published in London in 1881. Keane, a young sailor and adventurer, arrived in Jeddah in 1877, jumped ship and became the servant of a rich Indian prince on the Hajj. Keane’s story vividly reveals the extraordinary hazards and hardships of the pilgrimage. His report of meeting in Makkah a stranded Englishwoman, the Lady Venus, caused a sensation when first published in London. Among European accounts of the Muslim pilgrimage, John Keane’s stands out for its freshness and immediacy. As a young man of twenty-two, he had been at sea since the age of twelve, and lacked the academic and scientific background of previous travellers such as Burckhardt and Burton. However, the story of his six months in the Hijaz in 1877–8 is told with such verve and vivid observation, and in such an entertaining style, as to amply compensate for his lack of conventional scholarly attainments. Keane’s career of wild adventure around the globe was to take him from Whitby, where he was born in 1854, to Australia where he was to die in 1937. As a lad he was a born rolling stone, apparently to the despair of his relatives. Fired by his family’s Indian connections, he found life at sea irresistible, and during the course of his wanderings worked as an able seaman, a 2nd mate, a whaler, a cane-cutter, and even, he claims, as an ambulance man in the Ottoman army during the siege of Plevna in 1877. Later in life he took up medicine, journalism in the Far East and, latterly, exploration and farming in Australia. His real talent was as a writer of travel and life at sea in Victorian times. He was continually down and out, and his maritime writings mark him out as the George Orwell of the Jack Tar underclass. Almost nothing has appeared in print on the life of this intriguing character, and much of what has been written centres on the mysterious affair of the “Lady Venus”, who, Keane alleged, was an Englishwoman named Macintosh living in Makkah at the time of his visit. This arresting claim brought him notoriety, and helped to publicise his first two books, Six Months in Meccah and My Journey to Medinah. These are here republished by Barzan for the first time since the 1880s. The reprint includes an introduction by William Facey that tells the story of Keane’s remarkable life, provides a critical appraisal of his journey and places his account of the pilgrimage in the context of other travellers to Islam’s holy places.