Conn Iggulden - The Dangerous Book of Heroes

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In memory of John Hall and John Hunt,
who in their different ways lived life to the full

P EOPLE WHO LOSE THEIR HISTORY, LOSE THEIR SOUL .

A USTRALIAN A BORIGINAL SAYING

T here is a moment in some lives when the world grows still and a decision must be made. Colonel Travis knew it when he drew a line in the dust at the Alamo. George Washington knew it when he marched against Cornwallis at Yorktown. At such moments, there is no one to save you . The decision is yours alone.

The heroes in this book are from a variety of centuries. Mainly, they are taken from that common history of Britain and America, as well as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. That constriction was no hardship, as it left a gold-bearing seam of hundreds of wonderful, inspiring lives.

We have not gone too far back into history, so no Boadicea, though the Magna Carta barons are in. Weve avoided the stories of monarchs, sportsmen, saints, and scientists. Once started, those would easily fill a book to the exclusion of all else. Politicians, too, have not made the cut, with the exception of men like Washington and Winston Churchill, who deserve their places for other reasons. No collection of heroes can be utterly definitive, and there will always be too little space for every great tale. Courage is perhaps the first requirement for inclusion here. Courage, determination, and some dash.

Some of the heroes in this book are more rogue than angeland one or two are absolute devils. Yet in their brief existence they showed what can be done with a life, one single span of decades in the light. We have not judged them by modern standards. They would have scorned such judgment.

When you tire of humanitys flaws, perhaps you will read a few chapters and be reminded that we can also be inspiring. Fortune played its part, of course, but there was always that moment when the world fell still and the searchlights of Colditz Castle drifted silently across the yard. They did not falter thenand their lives should be known to all.

Conn and David Iggulden

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, What is the use? For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard,
The Worst Journey in the World

G eorge Washington was not a great soldier. He was not even a great farmer, yet he was in the right place, at the right time, several vital times. His greatness was thrust upon him, so now it appears that, of all men, George Washington alone was destined to be the founding father of the United States of America.

His family traces its roots to Northamptonshire in England and a land grant by Henry VIII. Colonel John Washington sailed to the Virginia colony in 1657 to farm. The links with Britain were maintained, however, and Georges father, Augustine, was educated there. He briefly went to sea before returning to Virginia, where he farmed, built mills, was involved in iron-ore mining, acquired more land, and married twice. George was the eldest of Augustines second wife, Marys, six children. He was born at Popes Creek on February 22, 1732.

Three years later Augustine moved his family farther up the Potomac River to his land at Little Hunting Creek, and three years after that to Ferry Farm plantation on the Rappahannock River. Its there that red-haired George Washington was brought up, haphazardly educated at home and at the small local school. There are many tales of his childhoodthe chopping of the cherry tree, throwing a silver dollar across the mile-wide Potomacand all are myths. He was a Virginia farmers boy with an inclination to arithmetic, measurement, and trigonometry.

His father died when George was eleven, and his eldest half-brother, Lawrence, became a surrogate father to the boy. Lawrence suggested in 1746 that George enlist in the Royal Navy as midshipman. The navy then was becoming fashionable. All Britain, the colonies, and Europe were talking about the recent four-year voyage around the world by Commodore Anson, a voyage from which he returned to Portsmouth laden with fabulous treasure. Georges aptitude for mathematics might have made him a natural navigator, but his mother vetoed that career.

A nearby British landowner, Lord Fairfax, instead offered young George an assistants position in a survey he was financing. At sixteen years of age George trekked through the wilderness to the Shenandoah Valley, where he helped survey and plot some of Fairfaxs five million acres.

His diary of the 1748 journey records the experience of sleeping under a thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas & c. Along the way they met a Native American war party bearing someones scalp. George Washingtons dislike of Native Americans surfaces early in his derogatory comment about central European immigrants: As ignorant a set of people as the Indians they would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch.

Copyright 2009 by Matt Haley

Washington made an impression in the Shenandoah survey. The next year he helped plan the town of Belhaven (Alexandria) and Lord Fairfax sponsored him to become surveyor of Culpeper County. For two years he traveled and camped through Culpeper and other Virginian counties, surveying and mapping the wilderness. It was during this time that Washingtons lifelong interest in western land development began. He saved money and purchased unclaimed Virginian land.

However, his surveying career ended abruptly in 1851 when Lawrence sailed to the colony of Barbados in a desperate attempt to treat his tuberculosis. George went with his half-brother, but it did neither any physical good. Lawrence died the following year, while George contracted smallpox, which left him with facial scars. Lawrences daughter died within two months of her father, leaving George to inherit the Little Hunting Creek (Mount Vernon) plantation on the Potomac River.

At twenty, an established and capable surveyor, Washington instead became farmer of a tobacco plantation of two thousand acres with eighteen slaves. The boy had become a large man, six feet two inches tall, with a large nose, big hands, wide hips, and narrow shoulders. His height gave him a commanding presence, made more impressive when his red hair was powdered fashionably white. He never wore a wig.

Washington also applied for Lawrences vacant commission in the Virginia militia, despite a complete lack of military training and experience, and was appointed major. He concentrated on farming Mount Vernon, gradually purchasing more land and attempting to increase the quality and quantity of his tobacco. In the free London market, Mount Vernon leaf was marked as mediocre.

West of the Appalachians, meanwhile, trouble was brewing. In defiance of the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, French soldiers and settlers had moved back into the Hudson Bay area in the far north and into the Ohio Valley in the west. Successive timber forts marked the French expansion south to the Forks of the Ohio (then Virginia), a strategic gateway into the Ohio Valley. In December 1754, Virginia lieutenant governor Robert Dinwiddie asked Major Washington to deliver an official letter to the French demanding that they leave the area and return north.

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