 First edition | |
| Author | John Buchan |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | T Nelson & Sons [1] |
Publication date | 1915 [1] |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 397 [1] |
Salute to Adventurers is a 1915 historical adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. Largely set among the newly-settled Virginia plantations of the late 17th century, the novel includes a number of historical characters and events, including the wild and radical preaching of John Gibb, founder of the Sweet Singers sect.
The novel opens in 1685 Scotland, with the 18 year old Andrew Garvald losing his way in the rain and seeking directions at a remote mansion where he hears Elspeth Blair, a girl of about 16, singing a stirring song. Continuing his journey across the moor he stumbles across the Sweet-Singers, a group of religious fanatics led by the zealot Muckle John Gib. When Elspeth rides up to recover one of her servants who has run away, matters take a violent turn and both Garvald and Gib are arrested by a passing troop of dragoons and thrown into Edinburgh’s Canongate Tollbooth. Elspeth secures Garvald’s release, and Muckle John is sentenced to transportation to the American plantations.
Some years later, Garvald sails to Virginia to look after his uncle’s tobacco-trading interests there. Finding fair trade impossible due to the illegal monopolies and violent actions of the English merchants, Garvald seeks the advice of the Governor, Francis Nicholson. Nicholson declares himself powerless to assist, and suggests that Garvald should use the same tactics himself. Garvald warns Nicholson that the white-settled area called the Tidewater is vulnerable to Indian attack, but is unable to persuade him to raise a militia.
Finding he has no option but to take matters into his own hands, Garvald seeks out Ninian Campbell, an adventurer he had first met in Scotland. He finds that Campbell, now known as Red Ringan, is an outlaw and leader of a band called the Free Companions. Ringan offers to help protect Garvald’s trade and, at one with him about the need to protect the Tidewater, co-opts Garvald into his plan to establish a covert militia. There are suggestions that there may be a white leader behind some of the Indian incursions.
Elspeth, now also in Virginia, is pursued by a youth called Charles Grey who is arrogantly offensive to Garvald. The two men fight a duel, with Garvald emerging the victor but sparing Grey’s life. At a dinner at the Governor’s, Nicholson quite unexpectedly announces that having won a large tract of unsettled land to the West in a wager, he intends to give it to Elspeth as a birthday present. He asks that she appoint a 'champion' who will travel to the mountains to retrieve a powder horn buried there in 1672, twenty years before, by an old hunter. Both Garvald and Grey step forward, much to Elspeth’s shame and horror. Garvald recognises that this fool’s errand will serve as cover for a reconnaissance to the Western mountains to check the strength of the Indian tribes and to find out who is leading them. Garvald and Ringan lead the party which includes Grey (his former arrogance now a thing of the past), Shalah, a sympathetic high-born Indian, and three of the local settlers.
As the group reaches the mountains, they narrowly avoid capture by a raiding party of hundreds of Cherokees heading down towards the Tidewater. There, in a very dangerous position, they run into Elspeth who has ill-advisedly ridden West in order to take a look at her birthday land. The party find the hidden horn and present it to Elspeth. Unable to retreat, they build a stockade, and are attacked.
Desperate to get word of the coming invasion back to the Tidewater, Garvald and Ringan leave the stockade and set off on foot. The pair are soon cornered, Ringan killed, and Garvald captured and tortured. Impressed with his courage, Garvald’s captors allow him the chance to save his life in single combat, from which he emerges victorious. When he returns to their camp he finds that Shalah has appeared and has taken charge: as a high-born Indian from a famous tribe he out-ranks all others.
Shalah guides Garvald though the mountains to the headquarters of the main Indian force, where Garvald confronts their charismatic leader – the religious maniac John Gib. He convinces Gib to lead his followers over the mountains, to seek a new home far to the West. Shalah follows, his kingly destiny being eventually to rule the Western peoples. Garvald returns to the Tidewater and marries Elspeth.
The novel includes an author's introductory note: [2]
The reader is asked to believe that most of the characters in this tale and many of the incidents have good historical warrant. The figure of Muckle John Gib will be familiar to the readers of Patrick Walker.
John Gibb (or Gib) was the founder of the radical Sweet Singers or Gibbite sect, an account of which was set down by the Edinburgh antiquarian Patrick Walker in 1732. Gibb's wild preaching posed a threat to the established Scottish order, and in 1681 he and several of his followers were arrested at their encampment by a troop of dragoons and were imprisoned in the Edinburgh Tollbooth, where Gibb's 'demented howlings and ravings' disturbed the other inmates. Sentenced to transportation to America, he continued to preach even after his period of indentured labour came to an end. His spiritual powers impressed the Native American peoples, and he led them in sacrifices and ritual celebrations. [3]
David Daniell, in The Interpreter's House (1975), said that "Those who love Buchan regard this book with special affection." He considered it to be very fine and written with assurance, with language beautifully modulated to the period. [4]
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was a Scottish novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.
The Buchanites were the late 18th-century followers of Elspeth Buchan, a Scottish woman who claimed to be the Woman Clothed with the Sun, one of the figures named in the Book of Revelation.
William Daniell (1769–1837) was an English landscape and marine painter, and printmaker, notable for his work in aquatint. He travelled extensively in India in the company of his uncle Thomas Daniell, with whom he collaborated on one of the finest illustrated works of the period – Oriental Scenery. He later travelled around the coastline of Britain to paint watercolours for the equally ambitious book A Voyage Round Great Britain. His work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution and he became a Royal Academician in 1822.
Elspeth Buchan (1738–1791) was the founder of a Scottish religious sect known as the Buchanites.
The Courts of the Morning is a 1929 adventure novel by John Buchan, featuring his character Sandy Arbuthnot. The prologue is narrated by Richard Hannay, so the novel is sometimes included in Buchan's Hannay series. The action is set in Olifa, a fictional country on the west coast of South America.
St Ninian's Cathedral in Perth is a cathedral of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the Diocese of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane.
Huntingtower is a 1922 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, initially serialised in Popular Magazine between August and September 1921. It is the first of his three Dickson McCunn books, the action taking place in the district of Carrick in Galloway, Scotland.
John Norman Stuart Buchan, 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir CBE, CD, FRSE, FRSA, commonly called Johnnie Buchan, was a British peer and the son of the novelist John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir. He was a colonial administrator, naturalist, and adventurer. He has been described as a "brilliant fisherman and naturalist, a gallant soldier and fine writer of English, an explorer, colonial administrator and man of business."
Ninian Cockburn was a Scottish soldier and officer of the Garde Écossaise, a company which guarded the French king. He had an ambiguous role in political relations between Scotland, France and England during the war of the Rough Wooing and the Scottish Reformation.
Jean Gardner or later Jean Hill, was "a young woman of very surpassing beauty," with a "light foot and an ensnaring eye," but she may have been thirteen years older than Robert Burns with whom she was on friendly or 'intimate' terms. A strong local tradition in Irvine links her with Robert Burns, however no contemporary written evidence records this relationship and Burns himself is not thought to have written about her, other than a disputed use of her given name as the 'darling Jean' of Burns's 'Epistle to Davie', and most recent writers have considered the reference to be to Jean Armour.
The Half-Hearted is a 1900 novel of romance and adventure by the Scottish author John Buchan. It was Buchan's first novel in a modern setting and was written when he was 24 while working for an All-Souls fellowship and reading for the bar.
The Southside Community Centre is a community centre in the Southside, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom. The centre opened in 1986 and occupies the former Nicolson Street Church, which was completed in 1820.
The Free Fishers is a 1934 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, his last work of historical fiction. The novel is set during the period of the Naploeonic wars and follows the adventures of Anthony Lammas, a young professor at St Andrews, who is drawn into a plot to kill the prime minister. He is aided by The Free Fishers, a secret mutual aid organisation.
The Woman Clothed with the Sun; being The Confession of John McHaffie concerning his sojourn in the Wilderness among the folk called the Buchanites, is a historical novella by the British writer F. L. Lucas. It purports to be an account, written in 1814 by a Scottish minister of the Kirk in middle age and published posthumously, of his youthful bewitchment by Elspeth Buchan and of the time he spent in the 1780s among the Buchanites. First published in 1937, it was Lucas's second historical novella, the first being The Wild Tulip (1932); he had also published a prize-winning historical novel, Cécile (1930).
John Gibb of Knock and Carribber (c.1550–1628) was a Scottish landowner and courtier.
The Muckle Hart of Benmore was the name given to a red deer stag that was stalked (hunted) by the 19th-century naturalist and hunter Charles William George St John. In his book Short Sketches of the Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands, he described the continuous hunt of the stag for six days and five nights, culminating in its dramatic demise on 1 October 1833. St John's account of the stalk was widely republished, and the deer has been described as "the most famous red stag to be recorded in the annals of British sport".
Elizabeth or Elspeth Gibb was a Scottish courtier.
The Watcher by the Threshold, and other tales is a collection of early novellas and stories, most with supernatural elements, by the Scottish author John Buchan. When first published in the UK in 1902 the collection included five stories, mainly set in the Scottish Borders. The collection was republished for the US market in 1918 under the title The Watcher by the Threshold, with four of the original stories and four new ones.
George Buchan was a civil servant who was shipwrecked on his first passage to India as a teenager. Born into an elite family, his career progressed in the Indian Civil Service rising to the rank of Chief Secretary. After retiral he came home to Scotland and had a Christian conversion. After several years as an elder in the Church of Scotland, he left at the Disruption and joined the Free Church of Scotland. He was an author writing about shipwrecks, Madras and about duelling as well as about church-state relations. He also wrote about God's providence illustrated from his own biography. Buchan was also an office bearer for a number of charity organisations.