John Gimlette on John Gabriel Stedman

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John Gimlette on John Gabriel Stedman

28 Oct 2010

Speakers: John Gimlette

Opening with the tale of a Newfoundland farmer who once fought off a polar bear armed only with a poker and a goat, Gimlette continues in this vein, delighting in the quirky tales of unlikely heroes and unexpected failures throughout the history of great exploration. As every explorer knows, he says, ‘the road to greatness is strewn with wrong turns’ - and his speech is devoted to exploring where these unplanned paths led to, for good or ill. He has crossed paths with ‘both the great and the goofy,’ from cannibalistic barristers in Labrador to an over-confident and deluded Sir Walter Raleigh searching for the non-existent golden city of Minoa in Guyana.

One of Gimlette’s favourite travellers is ‘a man who was everything an explorer shouldn’t be, and yet whose legacy is a delight to behold’: John Gabriel Stedman. An ex-soldier and prizefighter, Stedman is nevertheless praised as a great explore because he was also a self-taught naturalist, a painter who recorded the world he discovered, and who strayed from his duties in search of science. His accounts of brutality committed against slaves, and his inability to stay with his wife, who was a slave, because he could not afford to buy her, became instrumental in inspiring the abolitionist cause. And so, out of unpromising beginnings, came a triumph for humankind.

Speaker

John Gimlette

Prize-winning author whose travels have taken him from Laos to Eritrea, and through most of Latin America. He practises as a barrister in London