Richard Halliburton


Richard Halliburton was an American travel writer, adventurer, and author who is best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal and paying the lowest toll in its history—36 cents in 1928. His final and fatal adventure, an attempt to sail the Chinese junk Sea Dragon across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California made him legendary.

Early life and education

Richard Halliburton was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, to Wesley Halliburton, a civil engineer and real estate speculator, and Nelle Nance Halliburton. A brother, Wesley Jr., was born in 1903. The family moved to Memphis, where the brothers, who were not close, spent their childhood. Richard attended Memphis University School, where his favorite subjects were geography and history; he also showed promise as a violinist, and was a fair golfer and tennis player. In 1915 he developed a rapid heartbeat and spent some four months in bed before its symptoms were relieved. This included some time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, run by the eccentric and innovative John Harvey Kellogg, whose philosophy of care featured regular exercise, sound nutrition, and frequent enemas. In 1917, family tragedy struck when, following an apparent bout of rheumatic fever, Richard's brother, thought strong and in fine health, suddenly died.
At 5'7" and about 140 pounds, Halliburton was never robust but would seldom complain of sickness or poor stamina. He graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1917, where he was chief editor of The Lawrence. In 1921 he graduated from Princeton University, where he was on the editorial board of The Daily Princetonian and chief editor of The Princetonian Pictorial Magazine. He also attended courses in public speaking and considered a career as a lecturer.

Career

"An even tenor"

Leaving college temporarily during 1919, Halliburton became an ordinary seaman and boarded the freighter Octorara that July, bound from New Orleans to England. He toured historic places in London and Paris, but soon returned to Princeton in early 1920 to finish his schooling. His trip inspired in him a lust for even more travel. Voiced in different ways, seizing the day became his credo. The words of Oscar Wilde, who in works like The Picture of Dorian Gray enjoined experiencing the moment before it vanished, inspired Halliburton to reject marriage, family, a regular job, and conventional respectability as the obvious steps after graduation. He liked bachelorhood, youthful adventure, and the thrill of the unknown. To earn a living he intended to write about his adventures. He dedicated his first book to his Princeton roommates, "...whose sanity, consistency and respectability... drove to this book".
Halliburton's father advised him to get the wanderlust out of his system, return to Memphis and adjust his life to "an even tenor":

"I hate that expression", Richard responded, expressing the view that distinguished his life-style, "and as far as I am able I intend to avoid that condition. When impulse and spontaneity fail to make my way uneven then I shall sit up nights inventing means of making my life as conglomerate and vivid as possible.... And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed."

Lecturer and pioneer of adventure journalism

While Halliburton was attending Princeton, Field and Stream magazine paid him $150 for an article. This initial success encouraged him to choose travel writing as a career. His fortunes changed when a representative of the Feakins Agency heard him deliver a talk, and soon Halliburton was given bookings for lectures. Despite a high-pitched voice and occasional discomfort on the details, Halliburton displayed such enthusiasm and recounted such vivid recreations of his often bizarre foreign encounters that he became popular with audiences. On the strength of his lecturing and increasing celebrity appeal, publisher Bobbs-Merrill, whose editor-in-chief David Laurance Chambers was also a Princeton graduate, accepted Halliburton's first book, The Royal Road to Romance.
Halliburton's first book, published in 1925 by Bobbs-Merrill as The Royal Road to Romance, became a bestseller. Two years later he published The Glorious Adventure, which retraced Ulysses' adventures throughout the Classical Greek world as recounted in Homer's Odyssey, and which included his visiting the grave of English poet Rupert Brooke on the island of Skyros. In 1929, Halliburton published New Worlds To Conquer, which recounted his famous swim of the Panama Canal, his retracing the track of Hernán Cortés' conquest of Mexico, and his cast in the role, in full goat-skin costume, of Robinson Crusoe, "cast away" on the island of Tobago. Animals figure prominently in this and many other of Halliburton's adventures.

Ascent to fame

Halliburton's friends during this time included movie stars, writers, musicians, painters, and politicians, including writers Gertrude Atherton and Kathleen Norris, Senator James Phelan and philanthropist Noël Sullivan, and actors Ramón Novarro and Rod La Rocque. Casual acquaintances were many, as lectures, personal appearances, syndicated columns, and radio broadcasts made him a household name associated with romantic travel.
Halliburton was acquainted with swashbuckling cinema star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who was also a world traveler. Halliburton himself, though several times approached about film versions of his adventures, only appeared in one movie, the Walter Futter-produced semi-documentary India Speaks.

''Flying Carpet'' Expedition

In 1930 Halliburton hired pioneer aviator Moye Stephens on the strength of a handshake for no pay, but unlimited expenses—to fly him around the world in an open cockpit biplane. The modified Stearman C-3B was named the Flying Carpet after the magic carpet of fairy tales, subsequently the title of his 1932 best-seller. They embarked on "one of the most fantastic, extended air journeys ever recorded" taking 18 months to circumnavigate the globe, covering 33,660 miles and visiting 34 countries.
The pair started on Christmas Day 1930, making stops along the way, from Los Angeles to New York City, where they crated the airplane and boarded it on the oceanliner RMS Majestic. They sailed to England, where their extended mission began. They flew to France, then Spain, the British possession of Gibraltar, and on to Africa at Fez, Morocco. They crossed the Atlas mountains and set out across the Sahara to Timbuktu, using the fuel caches of the Shell Oil Company. While in Timbuktu, they were guests of :de:Auguste Dupuis-Yacouba|Pere Yakouba, a French Augustinian monk who had years before fled from the distractions of modern society and become patriarch and a noted scholar of the community. They flew to their destination without mishap, then continued eastward, spending several weeks in Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, and continuing via Cairo and Damascus, with a side trip to Petra.
in Morocco, 1931
In Persia they met German aviator Elly Beinhorn, who was grounded by mechanical problems. They assisted her and then worked out shared itineraries. Later, Halliburton wrote a foreword to her book Flying Girl about these and other of her adventures in the air. Now exhausted, and their plane tiring, Stephens and Halliburton continued their eastward journey. In Persia, Crown Princess Mahin Banu had a ride in the airplane. In neighbouring Iraq, the young Crown Prince Ghazi had a ride; they flew him over his school yard.
In India, Halliburton visited the Taj Mahal, which he had first visited in 1922. In Nepal, as The Flying Carpet flew past Mt. Everest, Halliburton stood up in the open cockpit of the plane and took the first aerial photograph of the mountain. To the delight of an amazed Maharajah of Nepal, Stephens and Beinhorn performed daring aerobatics. In Borneo, Halliburton and Stephens were feted by Sylvia Brett, wife of the White Rajah of Sarawak. They gave her a ride, making Ranee Sylvia the first woman to fly in that country. At the Rajang River, they took the chief of the Dyak head hunters for a flight: he gave them 60 kilos of shrunken heads, which they dared not refuse but dumped as soon as possible. They were the first Americans to fly to the Philippines: after arriving in Manila on April 27, the plane was again loaded onto a ship to cross the ocean. They flew the final leg from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A fictionalized account of his travels in India and Asia was depicted in the 1933 film India Speaks.
Moye Stephens was a skilled pilot. Halliburton, in a reassuring letter to his parents, recited his many flight skills. Stephens, for instance, during one aerobatic display, astutely aborted a slow roll the moment he realized that Halliburton had not fastened his seat belt. Stephens later became chief test pilot of the Northrop Flying Wing, which evolved into today's B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. The around-the-world trip had cost Halliburton over $50,000, plus fuel; in the first year, the book he entitled The Flying Carpet earned him royalties of $100,000, in those depression-era days a remarkably large sum. Barbara H. Schultz's Flying Carpets, Flying Wings – The Biography of Moye Stephens, besides recounting the Flying Carpet Expedition from a flier's viewpoint as well as documenting Stephens' contributions to aviation history, contains Stephens' extended reports of the adventure. With rare glimpses into the travel writer's art, these give historic balance to Halliburton's often romanticized renditions.

Commissioned research travel and feature article writing

Early in 1934 the Bell Syndicate Newspapers contracted with newspapers throughout the United States, beginning with the Boston Globe, to publish weekly feature stories prepared by Halliburton. Of about one thousand words each with pictures, ultimately fifty stories resulted. Among these were stories on the Seri Indians of Southern California; Fort Jefferson, where Dr. Samuel Mudd, convicted of conspiracy in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, was imprisoned; Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson, who deliberately sank his own ship during the Spanish–American War, and the Battle of Santiago de Cuba a month later; Henri Christophe and the Citadelle Laferrière in Haiti; Christopher Columbus, Lord Byron, and "The Girl from Martinique Who Wrecked Napoleon". Paid well, Halliburton traveled extensively to fulfill his end of the deal: to Cuba, Haiti, Martinique, to Miami, Washington, D. C., to New York, to Europe, and ultimately to Russia.
At the height of his popularity and self-fulfillment, he appeared on radio, attended celebrity parties, and, after the purchase of a used Ford roadster, explored the heartland of California and the beauties of the Lake Tahoe area. Other commissions followed: United Artists, producing a movie about Benvenuto Cellini, asked him to do a story on the Renaissance artist's love life. The lectures continued. Halliburton even turned down "job" offers, one of which was for the considerable sum of $500 a week, for 26 weeks, from a radio company "to speak on a beer program". Meanwhile, besides the Memphis Commercial Appeal, newspapers in Milwaukee, Kansas City, Columbus, and Toronto published his syndicated stories.
At the end of the year, he was again in Europe to commence his dream of emulating Hannibal and crossing the Alps on an elephant, one chosen for the task from a Paris zoo and given the name "Miss Dalrymple." The following year Bobbs-Merrill published Halliburton's Seven League Boots, filled with his latest adventures and arguably the last of the great travel works of the classic period.

Hangover House in Laguna Beach, California

In 1937 William Alexander Levy designed a house for Halliburton in Laguna Beach, California, which is now known as "a landmark of modern architecture." Alexander was a novice architect, a recent graduate of the New York University School of Architecture and close friend of Paul Mooney. Mooney managed the construction of the house. The house, built of concrete and steel and fortress-like in appearance, contained a spacious living room, a spacious dining room and three bedrooms: one for Halliburton, which featured a wall-sized map of the world; one for Mooney; and one for Levy. Because of its position, perched 400 feet above a sheer canyon, it was called "Hangover House" by Mooney, and this title was cast into a retaining wall on the site. Writer Ayn Rand, who visited the house in 1937 when she was still an unknown writer, is believed to have based the "Heller House" in The Fountainhead upon Halliburton's home.

''Sea Dragon'' expedition and disappearance

Halliburton and Mooney sailed to Hong Kong in September 1938 aboard, en route to their final voyage, to sail a Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The junk, named Sea Dragon, was a gaudily decorated junk, built to his commission in the shipyards of Kowloon by cartwright Fat Kau. Emblazoned with a colorful dragon and equipped with a diesel engine, the Sea Dragon was intended to make its maiden voyage to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, where it would dock, become part of the exhibition and take fairgoers on sailing cruises of San Francisco Bay.
According to Halliburton's first cousin, who he visited in 1938, the trip was intended to rekindle interest in Halliburton and his writings. Other biographers credit the idea for the voyage to Walter Gaines Swanson, the public relations manager for GGIE and the new San Francisco Bay bridges it was intended to celebrate. Halliburton had little practical navigation experience, so he hired Captain John Wenlock Welch as skipper and Henry Von Fehren as engineer, as detailed in a letter to his subscribers, dated November 20, 1938. He selected the junk based on childhood experiences with a scale model. The crew also included George Barstow III, a 21-year-old student at Juilliard, Velman Fitch of Minnesota, a world traveler who had been given a ride aboard the Sea Dragon, and Dartmouth College senior Robert Chase. Mooney was also aboard for the journey.
At first, Halliburton attempted to purchase a suitable junk in Xiamen, but later contracted the Kowloon shipbuilder. Construction of the junk was marked by cost overruns, delays, and engineering errors, prompting Halliburton to write, "If any one of my readers wishes to be driven rapidly and violently insane, and doesn't know how to go about it, let me make a suggestion: Try building a Chinese junk in a Chinese shipyard during a war with Japan." Corporate sponsors pulled out even as the ship came together; merchants in Chinatown suggested he use a floating casino and Buick refused to be associated with "junk". The ship's construction was partially crowdfunded; the first 2,000 people to pay $1 would be granted admittance to a planned reception for Halliburton at Sacramento in March 1939. In the end, much of the financing for the trip came from Halliburton's wealthy relatives, including the wife of his cousin Erle Halliburton; $14,000 of the $26,500 raised came from the three crewmembers from Dartmouth: Chase, John "Brue" Potter, and Gordon Torrey, all with extensive sailing experience.
A trial run in January 1939 revealed its flaws; the completed Sea Dragon proved to be top heavy yet low-riding and developed alarming rolls in moderate seas. According to Halliburton's subscriber correspondence dated January 27, however, the dry decks proved the ship's sea-worthiness. of concrete ballast were added to improve stability after the shakedown cruise. Bill Alexander pointed out the heavy diesel engine was out of place in the sailing ship. Chief Collins of the noted the masts and sails appeared overly heavy, and the poop deck was approximately higher than a typical junk of its size to accommodate a radio cabin and galley. The first attempted voyage in February was forced to turn back on February 14 after a week at sea, due to an illness among the crew. Potter and Torrey both left the ship after the junk's unsuccessful first voyage and later offered accounts of their experience. The aborted February attempt was caused by an injury to Potter, which he sustained when he was struck by the mainsail boom while handling the -long tiller. Gerry Max speculated that Potter and Torrey may have contracted gonorrhea during their time in Hong Kong. During the same unsuccessful first voyage, Mooney broke an ankle after falling down a ladder. Halliburton sent four letters to subscribers from Hong Kong between November 20, 1938 and February 16, 1939; the fifth, he promised, would be sent from Midway Island en route to San Francisco.
Undaunted, the expedition set out once again on March 4, 1939, and three weeks out to sea, on March 23, the ship encountered a typhoon. The Sea Dragon was approximately west of Midway, where it was due to call on April 3. Evidently closest in vicinity to the junk, perhaps away, was the liner President Coolidge, itself battling mountainous seas some west of Midway Island. The US liner received a cheerful radio message from the junk skipper minutes later, "Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here instead of me." As noted by the Coolidge at the time, waves were estimated at high. The next message was different: "Southerly gale. Heavy Rain Squalls. High sea. Barometer 29.46. True course 100. Speed 5.5 knots. Position 1200 GCT 31.10 north 155.00 east. All well. When closer may we avail ourselves of your direction finder. Regards Welch." That was the last message heard from the junk.
The earliest inklings of trouble began in late March, as Halliburton had been in daily contact with radio stations and trans-Pacific ocean liners until then. At first the Coast Guard at Hawaii delayed searching for the missing ship, possibly thinking Halliburton staged his disappearance as a publicity stunt. After Sea Dragon was overdue to call at Midway by a week, on April 10, friends petitioned the Coast Guard to send a search vessel. A Yugoslavian freighter,, was the first to arrive at the last reported position of Sea Dragon, on April 16. Later in May, an extensive US Navy search with several ships and scout planes, including, scouring over the course of many days, found no trace of the junk or the crew, and the effort was ended. Halliburton's mother abandoned hope that he would be found alive by June. As with Amelia Earhart, many rumors and reports of Halliburton's fate continued to arise over the years, with fans hoping he might yet turn up alive.
The ocean liner passed flotsam in the middle of the Pacific, covered with an estimated one year-old growth of barnacles in 1940 and believed to be from the wreck of the Sea Dragon, perhaps the ship's rudder. In 1945 a 30-foot skeleton of a 150-foot boat of oriental design washed ashore in San Diego California. It was suggested that this was the remains of the Sea Dragon. However, World War II overshadowed the news.
Missing at sea since March 1939, Halliburton was declared dead on October 5, 1939 by the Memphis Chancery Court. His empty grave is at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis at the Halliburton family gravesite. His ghost is reputed to haunt his final residence, Hangover House, completed in 1938 by architect William Alexander Levy in Laguna Beach.

Personal life

Halliburton never married. While young he dated several young women and, as revealed in letters to them, was infatuated with at least two of them. As an adult, his companions were chiefly male. Among those romantically linked to him were film star Ramón Novarro and philanthropist Noël Sullivan, both of whom enjoyed, as Halliburton, a bohemian lifestyle. Halliburton's most enduring relationship was with freelance journalist Paul Mooney, with whom he often shared living quarters and who assisted him with his written work. French police reports, dated 1935, noted the famed traveler's homosexual activity when in Paris at about the time of his planned crossing by elephant over the Alps: "Mr Halliburton is a homosexual well known in some specialized establishments. He is in the habit of soliciting on Saint-Lazare Street".

Private writing

Halliburton admired English poet Rupert Brooke, whose beauty and patriotic verse captivated a generation. Halliburton intended to write his biography and kept ample notes for the task, interviewing in person or corresponding with prominent British literary and salon figures who had known Brooke, including Lady Violet Asquith Bonham-Carter, Walter de la Mare, Cathleen Nesbitt, Noel Olivier, Alec Waugh, and Virginia Woolf. Halliburton never began the book, but his notes were used by Arthur Springer to write Red Wine of Youth—A Biography of Rupert Brooke.
A vigorous correspondent, Halliburton wrote numerous letters to fans, friends, editors, sponsors, and literary acquaintances. To his parents alone, he wrote well over a thousand letters; a large selection of these, edited in part by his father Wesley, was published in 1940 by Bobbs-Merrill as Richard Halliburton: His Story of His Life's Adventure As Told to His Mother and Father.

Character of published work

In his colorful and simply-told travel adventures Halliburton was the "innocent abroad", receptive to new ideas and with a quiet erudition. He displayed a romantic readiness which shone through his best prose, prose at once picturesque, gently informative, extroverted, and personally confiding. He often described his attaching himself to a famous historic person or to a revered place, such as the Taj Mahal. Acting as sort of an emcee, or performing some often cleverly garish stunt, he recalled that person and invoked a place associated with him; by so doing, he escorted readers into a different time and to a different locale, with of course some compelling modern touches. Thus he duplicated Hannibal's crossing of the Alps by elephant – naming the pachyderm he had gotten from a Paris zoo Miss Elysabethe Dalrymple; he emulated Ulysses' myriad adventures in the Mediterranean dressed often as a beach-comber or playboy; he re-enacted Robinson Crusoe's island solitude, adopting a menagerie of domestic pets with names such as Listerine, Kitty and Susie. Examples of the device filled his work and helped define his public image: of further note, he retraced the fateful expedition of Hernando Cortez to the heart of the Aztec Empire; like his hero Lord Byron, he swam the Hellespont, metaphorically bridging Europe and Asia; and he lived among the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. He did not just view legendary places and landscapes, but often embraced them by some athletic feat ultimately intended to thrill armchair travelers as well as to educate them: he swam the Panama Canal, climbed the Matterhorn and Mt. Fuji, and twice he descended into the Mayan Well of Death, the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza. The occasional trouble that he received from authorities only contributed to the drama of his adventures: taking photos of the guns at Gibraltar ; attempting to enter Mecca, which is forbidden to non-Muslims; hiding from gatekeepers on the grounds of the Taj Mahal, to experience in solitude the sunset as well as to swim in the pool facing the tomb under the moonlight.
Halliburton's books were meant for the general reading public. What racial comments Halliburton made, though casual and for his time not unique to him, are unsettling today. Describing a hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains at age twenty, for instance, he commented that his two Indian guides were "as irresponsible as our southern niggers."
Halliburton's love of the world's natural wonders, and such monuments of mankind which seemed best to blend into those wonders, derives in part from the Romanticism of poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As theirs, Halliburton's view of technology was dim, and he gently urged that one see the world's marvels before "modern Progress" obliterated them.
Halliburton was a cultural relativist: he adhered to the credibility of multiple perspectives and believed that "culture was king", stances which may explain his claim of purchasing a slave child in Africa – which did not happen, according to Moye Stephens – or adopting the garb of a particular region to "go native." As a sort of cultural ambassador, he met heads of state from Peruvian dictator Augusto Leguia, to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, to the Last Emperor of China, to King Feisal al Husain of Iraq and his son the Crown Prince.
An early letter expressed his "virulent antipathy for democracy as practiced in America" and a hatred "for the laboring class", but these views contrast with the plight he shared with the downtrodden, as at Devil's Island, and his occasional working with rough-hewn seamen. His last writings, done in collaboration with journalist Paul Mooney, the four letters comprising Letters from the Sea Dragon as well as the fifteen articles comprising The Log of the Sea Dragon--in their descriptions of the displacement of peoples engendered by the Japanese advance, suggest the war-reportorial course his writing might have taken had he lived. A news correspondent's role is also suggested by his skilled interview with the executioner of the Romanovs, the last ruling dynasty of Russia. Distinguished by their readerliness, the essays of historic personages appearing in both his books and newspaper articles, notably of Spanish–American War hero Captain Richard Hobson and of Haitian leader Henri Christophe, show the skills of the natural biographer, and offer further hint of career evolution.

Legacy

Publisher James O'Reilly, who reissued The Royal Road to Romance to celebrate the centenary of Halliburton's birth, characterizes him thus: "From the Jazz Age through the Great Depression to the eve of World War II, he thrilled an entire generation of readers." He was "clever, resourceful, undaunted, cheerful in the face of dreadful odds, ever-optimistic about the world and the people around him, always scheming about his next adventure."
He notes that Halliburton's "manhood spanned the brief interval between the two World Wars" and acclaims him as a "spokesman for the youth of a generation."
Halliburton wanted to be remembered as the most-traveled man who had ever lived. In his day he had few rivals, though Eugene Wright and Martin and Osa Johnson could as equally captivate.
Halliburton influenced his contemporaries Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Corey Ford and Ernest Hemingway. Writers Paul Theroux, Jim Harrison and Susan Sontag, among others, have offered debts of gratitude for his influence on their work. Television news celebrity and author Walter Cronkite, who heard him lecture in the mid-1930s, credited Halliburton with steering him into a career in journalism. As the writer of a succession of bestsellers, and as a popular lecturer, Halliburton figured prominently in educating several generations of young Americans in the rudiments of geography, history and culture, especially through his two Books of Marvels, re-issued in one volume after his death.

Two structures commemorate Halliburton: Hangover House in Laguna Beach, California, and the Memorial Tower at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Architecture historian and writer Ted Wells considers Hangover House, which Halliburton commissioned, one of the "best modern houses in the United States". Nearly a quarter century after Halliburton's disappearance, his father donated $400,000 to build an imposing bell tower. It was dedicated in 1962 as the Richard Halliburton Memorial Tower, and the elder man died the following year at age 95.
In his Second Book of Marvels, Halliburton stated, "Astronomers say that the Great Wall is the only man-made thing on our planet visible to the human eye from the moon." Although untrue, this statement was a possible source for the urban legend that the Great Wall of China could be seen from space.
The Richard Halliburton Papers are held at Princeton University Library and the Richard Halliburton Collection at Paul Barret, Jr. Library at Rhodes College.
Several books have been published about Halliburton. A 2009 book, Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Newsgathering Abroad, has a section devoted to Halliburton and travel writers like him. American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World's First Celebrity Travel Writer was published in 2016.
The World War II Liberty Ship was named in his honor.

Works

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