It is cold and wet here this morning, and I was feeling particularly sedentary until this tale of adventure inspired me to greater feats. Athletes Alan Rankin and Willie Gibson are due to recreate the complete journey of David Balfour, hero of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, to raise money for charity.
“In the summer of 2016 we will set sail from South Queensferry [west of Edinburgh], around Orkney down the Minch to the island of Erraid, off Mull. From Erraid, the team will go by foot the 270 miles back to South Queensferry,” they write on their website. “The overland leg will cross some of the wildest and most stunning landscapes in Scotland, following the route as described in the book, and mapped on the long-distance route the Stevenson Way.”
“We plan to follow as close as possible to the route described in the book,” Rankin told the Scotsman. “However, unlike the story, there will be no real-life kidnapping and, hopefully, no shipwreck either. We hope to complete the whole trip in under 18 days. Heading off in late May offers us long daylight hours for the sailing leg and hopefully we will be finished the trek before the midges are out in force.”
Quite apart from the fact that I’d forgotten just how entertaining Kidnapped is – I’ve been looking through it this morning and am planning an evening wrapped up in David’s adventures – just how much fun does their trip sound? It’s a step beyond the usual literary tourism of visiting the Keats house in Rome (although I did love that) or the Brontë parsonage in Haworth - and I find myself craving my own real literary adventure.
Kidnapped is a great choice: Stevenson is so detailed in his descriptions of where David is taken that it makes for an easy route to follow. “And here I must explain; and the reader would do well to look at a map. On the day when the fog fell and we ran down Alan’s boat, we had been running through the Little Minch. At dawn after the battle, we lay becalmed to the east of the Isle of Canna or between that and Isle Eriska in the chain of the Long Island. Now to get from there to the Linnhe Loch, the straight course was through the narrows of the Sound of Mull. But the captain had no chart; he was afraid to trust his brig so deep among the islands; and the wind serving well, he preferred to go by west of Tiree and come up under the southern coast of the great Isle of Mull.”
But might it not be even more exciting to follow in the footsteps of Jim Hawkins? If only we could find our own “map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores”.
I think Rankin and Gibson’s choice of Kidnapped has put me in the mood for the sort of adventure books I read as a child, so I’m wondering about recreating one of Hal and Roger Hunt’s adventures (Amazon Adventure was my favourite), or Buck’s journey in The Call of the Wild. But the wilds of the Yukon or the Amazon jungle might be a step too far. Maybe Arthur Ransome could be more doable, whether it’s the Lake District adventures of Swallows and Amazons, or the North Sea escapades of We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.
How about you? Which literary adventure would you recreate, if you had the time and the money?
