survivors of the unfortunate expedition, or that any very trustworthy information will be obtained as to the fortunes of the party which left the ship, certainly does seem faint in the extreme. There are, no doubt, several instances on record which show that life in the far north is not so unhealthy, and that the difficulty of sustaining it is not so overwhelmingly great, as the vague popular notions on the subject seem to assume it to be. In spite of the frightful hardships to which they were exposed, Dr. Hayes and his party contrived to maintain themselves amongst the natives, though they had hardly any shelter, and next to no provisions. It does, however, seem almost incredible that, if any considerable number of Sir John Franklin's crew survived for any considerable time, they should not, in the course of twelve years, have found any means of effecting their escape. The that, in point of fact, accidents hardly ever do happen on such occasions, and when they do they may almost always be attributed to carelessness or neglect. A very similar remark applies to arctic explorations. number of catastrophes that have occurred have, after all, been surprisingly few. Sir John Franklin's expedition is, indeed, the only one of the large number that have been sent out within the last fifteen years that has met with entire destruction. It may also be urged that the means with which Mr. Snow proposes to undertake his expedition are inadequate. After sending out so many and such elaborate vessels, it may appear incongruous to despatch at last a small schooner manned with a mere handful of men. This objection is hardly sustained by experience. The most successful expeditions which have ever been undertaken to the north have been accomplished with very small means. Captain M'Clintock had a small vessel and very few men, and Dr. Kane's means were still more limited; yet, in each instance, very conspicuous and memorable services were performed. Indeed, a small party is, in several respects, better fitted for such a purpose than a large one. A few men, all well acquainted with each other, and all intent upon a common object, are far more likely to be friendly, and to have a good common understanding, than a larger number. They will also naturally be chosen with more distinct reference to personal qualifications, and may, therefore, be presumed to know and have confidence in each other before they set out. It may appear to many persons that the peril attendant upon such an expedition as the one which is proposed would be so serious that no one ought to be encouraged to incur it; but, independently of the consideration that this is rather a question for those who run the risk than for those who enable them to do so, the danger would not seem to be as great, in fact, as it appears to be at first sight. Almost every thing is, in reality, far less dangerous than a graphic description of it makes it appear to be. This is not owing to boasting or exaggeration on the part of the authors of such descriptions and, certainly, nothing can, as a rule, be simpler or more manly than the descriptions of arctic voyages-but to the fact that the Such are some of the considerations which imagination is influenced, and the memory are alleged in favor of the proposed expeimpressed, with the picturesque and striking dition. They may not, perhaps, raise a very circumstances which constitute the danger, sanguine expectation of its success, but they and not with the minute and commonplace certainly seem to relieve it from the impuincidents by which the danger is averted. tation of being either hopeless or uncalled Any one who has ever made the ascent of a for. Indeed, when an enterprise which is mountain, or crossed a glacier in Switzer- unquestionably bold and disinterested asks land, knows quite well how many scores of places he has passed over which could only be described in language from which a person who had never seen such places would infer that it must be in the highest degree dangerous to approach them; yet they are not really dangerous to any one who has good nerves, and who is particular in taking the precautions for his safety which experience has discovered. The proof of this is for public support, the burden of proof is rather upon those who discourage it. Arctic exploration has contributed so many very bright pages to our naval history that we cannot help feeling what is perhaps an unreasonable leaning in favor of a proposal to add one more to the long list of gallant adventures by which its annals have been distinguished. TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF THE REV. JOSEPH WOLFF. From The Athenæum. 183 At Weimar, he was patted on the head by Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Goethe; but the people of that place, he says, Wolff, D.D. LL.D. Vol. I. Saunders, THE narrative of Dr. Wolff's career is crowded with an endless variety of incidents. It recounts a series of enterprises, hardships, escapes, and romantic episodes almost incredible, if we regard them as constituting the daily experience of one man during a long life. Joseph Wolff, as a boy, was a heretic his brethren, a fugitive from home, a among precocious apostolic preacher, a wanderer in disguise; and the least formidable of his adventures in after years seldom fell short of imprisonment, slavery, menaces of death, thirst and famine, encounters with bandits, and attempts at assassination. It was now among worshippers of the Devil, and then among worshippers of the sun, that he fell into danger; he trod in the steps of the Ten Tribes; he was robbed by the Kurds, and insulted by Lady Hester Stanhope; the voice of Haroun al Raschid spoke to him in Bagdad, and the shadow of Sennacherib crossed his path among the ruins of Mesopotamia; it was at Burchund that, discoursing from morn till eve, during fourteen days, he sent his missionary message through the mouth of Hadjee Muhammad Jawad, the dervish, throughout the whole of Khorassan, Turkistan, including Bokhara, Balkh, Cabul, Khotan, Kokan, Tashkand, Hasrat, Sultan, and Yarkand in Chinese Tartary, the whole of Hindoostan, Thibet, and China. In recognition of the hospitality enjoyed under the roof of this man, he enters upon a vindication of the dervishes as a body, and argues that they are the real heroes of the desert. "were half Christian and half Hindoo; " the There is a very characteristic account of Hoffbauer, who, half mystic, half medieval, dressed himself as a sort of Peter the Martyr, always knitted his own stockings, and preached five times a day. He was accustomed to represent the Virgin Mary in heaven with a golden crown, and Martin Luther in the nether world with a kettle of sulphur on his head. With all these eccentricities of the day Wolff became acquainted, during his two years' stay in the Austrian capital, and that portion of his life was the least marked by vicissitudes. It was after a visit to Rome and then to Tübingen, where he began to develops his Protestant opinions, that he resolved to undertake his travels. With a knapsack on his back, he walked to Fribourg in Switzerland, and thence throughout Italy; he came to England, and studied at Cambridge, and then he began his great missionary tour in Central Asia. All this is somewhat irregularly and inconsequentially related in the third person; but most readers The path into which Wolff struck in the will be impatient to leave the monks and earliest period of his life was one which tended miracle-working nuns behind them, to turn towards this wilderness of romance and travel. from Wolff the Flagellant, who avenged himHis family were the Wolffs of the tribe of self upon a priest by biting instead of kissing Levi of Prague, and his ancestors had been his toe, to Wolff, the Wanderer, inspired by immemorially Rabbin. They had emigrated the history of Francis Xavier, penetrating from Prague during the days of persecution the deserts in pursuit of a sacred purpose. We cannot undertake to treat him in his at the beginning of the eighteenth century,they had been driven from Bavaria by the character as a missionary. We think him French Invasion of 1795,-they then estab- often uncharitable and rash. We know not lished themselves for a while in Saxony, and, by what right he meets a Swedish consulafterwards, returning to Bavaria, settled at general and sets him down as "a nasty Ullfeld. There the boy Joseph heard nu- atheist and infidel," or talks of" filthy Calvinmerous conversations on religious tradition ism," or bursts out into an invective against and theology, and an impulse arose in his Methodism as though it were on a par with mind to forsake the Judaism of his fathers the grossest Fetishism of Eastern Africa. and become a Gentile. Quitting home with- We may, once for all, remark also, that he out saying a word, and without a farthing in is generally insulting and disparaging to the his pocket, he went about studying, teaching Jewish community, wherever it exists; but Hebrew, now entering a monastery, then without entering upon any discussion upon learning Latin at a gymnasium, and subject- this point, we will strike in with the traveller ing himself, notwithstanding his philosophic at the gates of Jerusalem. There, entering character, to sundry inflictions of the birch. the circle of his former co-religionist, she The whole of Aleppo, Antioch, Latakia, Hums, and Hama, had been destroyed, with all the villages within twenty miles round, and sixty thousand individuals had perished, their bodies lying scattered far and wide, and the ground rocking like the deck of a ship at sea. It was a pleasant change to quit this trembling mainland for a while, and make an excursion to Cyprus. There Dr. Wolff indulged as usual in some of his ungrateful pleasantries : found how freshly and powerfully the ancient | plain on their horses in their barnooses, with the traditions of the Hebrew mind flourish in hoods drawn over their heads, like eagles cleavthe shade of the Holy City. Here is a le- ing the air." gend dating from the age of Titus :"Two heathen merchants met together in an inn in the desert. I have a male slave,' said one to the other the like of whose beauty is not to be seen in the whole world.' And the other said, 'I have a female slave, the like of whose beauty is not to be seen in the whole world.' Then they agreed to marry these two together, and to divide the children between them; and in the evening both the slaves were brought into a room. Öne stood in one corner, and the other in the other corner, and the male slave said, 'I a priest, and the son of a high-priest, should I marry a slave?' and the female said, in the other corner of the room, 'I, a priestess, the daughter of a high-priest, should I marry a slave? and when the morning approached, they discovered that they were brother and sister. They fell upon each other's necks, and wept, and wept, and wept, until the souls of both departed. And it is on account of this that Jeremiah said, 'Over these I weep, I weep; mine eye, mine eye, runs down with water. On the road from Jerusalem across Lebanon he encountered an earthquake, in the land of the Anzairi, who had spread out their carpets on the plain, but who invited the stranger to enter their villages. He preferred to remain in the open air : "The Anzairees, therefore, remained for a while with Wolff, and they all smoked together; there being also, at about twenty yards from them, a party of Bedouin Arabs, who had their tents pitched there at the time, and were sitting round their fires. Wolff presently took out his Bible, and began to read from it to the Anzairees, when suddenly he felt something move under him, as if a pocket-handkerchief had been drawn from below him. Immediately after, all at once, the very earth moved in a horizontal direction, accompanied by a howling and thundering like that of cannon. At the moment, Wolff believed the howling to be that of the tormented spirits in hell inself. All the party at once rose, and, springing up, tried to hold themselves fast, as it were, by the air. And now, before their very eyes, the houses of their village, Juseea, fell down, and one universal cry arose. The Anzairees exclaimed, Ya Lateef! Ya Lateef! Ya Lateef!' Beneficent God! Beneficent God! The Arabs shouted, 'Allah Ak-bar!' God is the greatest! Then the Anzairees hastened to the spot where their houses had stood but a few seconds before, and came back crying, 'Merciful God! our houses are gone, our wives, our children, our cattle, are all gone!' The first grand shock lasted two minutes. After this, shocks occurred about every half-hour, sometimes ten, twenty, thirty, or even eighty shocks at a time. Oh, what a change had come over the desert! A few moments before, it was silent as night; and now it was covered with the wild Arabs and Bedouins, who were flying over the "He preached to the Jews, and lodged in the house of the British vice-consul, Mr. Surur, a little, clever, consequential man; for all men of little size are consequential, and stand up for their rights in a extraordinary manner. He one day said to Wolff, To-day you will see me in my glory, when I shall appear before the gov ernor of Damiat as representative of his most excellent majesty the king of England.' He then dressed himself in a red coat, with two immensely large epaulets, such as no general of the British army ever wore. His silver buttons were gilt over; he wore a large three-cornered hat, with feathers two feet high, and boots in which three dragoons might have stood. He was scarcely able to march in this costume, and spoke so loud that one could hear him from an immense distance. When Dr. Wolff asked him why he spoke with such a loud voice, he replied, 'Great men speak with a loud voice, little men with a small voice."" We have before alluded to an episode of the Syrian journey, the epistolary collision with Lady Hester Stanhope : "When thus arrived at Sidon, Wolff said to Col. Cradock, I have a letter with me for Miss Williams who resides with Lady Hester Stanhope. This I will send to her, and write her a civil line; but I shall not mention Lady Hester Stanhope's name.' So the letter was sent to Mar-Elias, Lady Hester Stanhope's residence, and an Arab servant conveyed it. But instead of a letter from Miss Williams, one came for Wolff from Lady Hester herself, which ran as follows: "I am astonished that an apostate should dare to thrust himself into observation in my family. Had you been a learned Jew, you never would have abandoned a religion rich in itself, though defective; nor would you have embraced the shadow of a one-I mean the Christian religion. Light travels faster than sound, therefore the Supreme Being could not have allowed his creatures to live in darkness for nearly two thousand years, until paid speculating wanderers deem it proper to raise their venal voices to enlighten them. "HESTER LUCY STANHope.' "To this Dr. Wolff replied: :"To the Right Hon. Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope. "MADAM,-I have just received a letter which bears your ladyship's signature, but I doubt its being genuine, as I never had the honor of writing to your ladyship, or of mentioning your name in my letter to Miss Williams. With regard to my views and pursuits, they give me perfect rest and happiness, and they must be quite immaterial to your ladyship. I have the honor to be your most humble and obedient servant, "JOSEPH WOLFF.' "Wolff sent this answer by the same servant as before. On Lady Hester receiving it, she perused it, and desired the man to wait, that she might give him a present. She then came out with a whip, kicked the poor fellow behind, and sent him away. He came back lame to Wolff, and told him that the daughter of the king of England had beaten him. Wolff, in order to satisfy him, gave him a dollar, for which he dares say the man would have gladly undergone another beating at the same price, from the daughter of the king of England.' with a penetrating eye, a sweet and handsome face, his beard silvery white, and hair the same, hanging down in curls. He was somewhat childish in mind, but spoke beautifully about the final redemption of his people. He convinced Wolff that they were descended from the children of Israel." He was visited in that place by the Shamseea, or secret worshippers of the sun; and departing thence, journeyed with a caravan to the mountains, and especially to the gorges of Sanjaar, inhabited by the Yezeedi, one of whom said to him, "We drink both wine and brandy in large plates the whole day long." "Fearful, indeed, is that spot! Dark and dim lights wander about it-they are the ghosts of the slain. At certain times one hears howlings they are the howlings of the damnedshricks and grinsings (snarlings!) of wicked spirits." With a company of native Christians and Arabs, with a servant, who is described as to Bagdad by water, where, he says, the He might have proceeded from Kantara at once a thief, a traitor, and a cheat, and Jews are mighty and rich, and their great with a French companion, "the greatest man has still the title, "the Prince of the scoundrel he ever encountered," Joseph Wolff Captivity;" but he was unwilling to lose an entered upon his Mesopotamian wanderings, opportunity of proselytizing by the way. crossed the Euphrates, at the rocks of Biri, visited Orpha, where he propounded a theory that Abraham and Orpheus were identical, and where he began to understand how certain are the populations over whom the sultan of Turkey claims to wield the sceptre to assert their ideas of independence. A Tartar courier arrived from Constantinople with a demand for tribute, whereupon the people assembled and solemnly cursed the sultan, It was a sad thing at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, where he firmly believes the gardens of Paradise to have been planted, to have his greatcoat stolen by a thief of the rivers! Away to Shiraz, ceaselessly travelling over air, midst torrents of rain, pursued by earthplains and mountains, sleeping in the open quakes, wrangling with the orthodox, and everywhere thinking very ill of the Jews:— the sultan's grandfather, the sultan's grandmother, the sultan's grand-children, and "Wolff had been warned what he must exhanged the sultan's messenger, with the sul-pect in visiting the Jews at Sheeraz, and the detan's order in his hand. There were lovely scription of their misery had not been exagoases in the ruin-sprinkled wilderness be-gerated. A Persian Mussulman, of whom he yond; but the pleasures of the picturesque were somewhat diminished when the Kurds illustrated their notions of authority by giving the Christian traveller two hundred blows on the soles of his feet. He was glad to be away from them, and within the walls of Mardeen, where the Jacobite Christians dwell: "The Jacobites are a wild people, but goodnatured, and with all their wild nature, they have produced great men-such as St. Ephraim, Jacob Nisibenus, and Jacob Almalfan, or Jacob the doctor. They have learned men among them to this day. At the time Wolff was there, they had still alive their great patriarch, residing in the monastery Deiralsafran, but who had resigned his office as patriarch on account of his great and unexampled age, for he was one hundred and thirty years old. When Wolff was introduced to him, he found him sitting crosslegged on a carpet in a fine room. He was a small, thin man, rather crumpled up in figure, Sec had inquired their condition some time before, whether to regard it as strictly autobiograph- Shiraz: "Fire from Heaven must come jee Muhammad Jawad. Wolff was at this time down upon a court like that! Let no person in his Persian dress, and carried a Bible under dare to ask Wolff to give a description of a his arm, as was his universal custom in travelcourt like that?" We have no doubt that ling. The ameer first opened his mouth, and he might have written, without offence to the asked Wolff, Where do you come from?'Wolff said, I come from England, and am goreader, an interesting, and not unedifying, ing to Bokhara.- What do you intend to do account of a Persian palace. But we pass on in Bokhara?' asked the ameer.-Wolff replied, with him to the foot of the Caucasus, to Kar-I, having been a Jew, visit that nation all over rass, a town in the midst of Circassia, but belonging to the Russians: 44 One morning tremendous shrieks were heard. Wolff asked the reason. The Circassians had broken through the Russian line, had taken prisoners sixteen German boys, who were quietly smoking their pipes; and having placed the boys upon their dromedaries, were flying with the swiftness of eagles towards the mountain." Dr. Wolff has strong sympathies with Russia, and praises her administration of conquered territories; but where did he learn that the Tartars of the Aral were accustomed before their subjugation to feed on human flesh? We do not care to deal with any portion of Dr. Wolff's memorials of his missionary labors and social adventures in Ireland and England. They betray a good deal of egotism, and not a little ill-humor. They refer to a pleasanter period, no doubt, than that of his subsequent flight amongst the Eastern mountains, with robbers and assassins upon his track; but, after all, he is most interesting when he is most a traveller; therefore, let us part company with him when he is again on the road from Burchund to Herat: the world, and wish to go to Bokhara, in order to see whether the Jews there are of the ten tribes of Israel, and to speak to them about Jesus.'-All in the room exclaimed, 'This man must be devil-possessed!'"' After these and various other interrogations, he was enabled to start once more; but only to fall among thieves, to be stripped from head to foot, fastened to a horse's tail, and driven in front of his captors, who incessantly whipped him as he went. Chained in a dungeon to a gang of fifty prisoners, he was not released until the khan had interfered. After which, visiting that high potentate, he saw hundreds of men and women with their eyes cut out, and their noses and ears amputated. Upon the throne stood a great prince in that land, who had killed with his own fist his father, mother, brother, sister, and son-in-law, "and so awful was his bodily strength that he would sometimes take hold of a prisoner and tear his' skull in two." He said to Dr. Wolff,— justice.' So he instantly ordered Hassan Khan Coord, and all his followers, to be dreadfully flogged. He extorted from them every farthing; and after he had got back Wolff's money, he counted it, and said, Now thou shalt see my justice;' and putting the money into his own pocket, without giving Wolff a single penny, he added, Now you may go in peace.' "For my part, I have no religion. I have already passed this world, and the other world. I have got, however, one good quality, and that is, I am a man of justice; I love strict justice; and, therefore, tell me the truth, and you shall "He walked the whole distance-being forty see my justice. How much money have these miles; and just as night had set in, two horse- rascals taken from you?'-Wolff said, 'They men came up behind him. They were of that have taken from me eighty tomanns.'-He remighty and brave race, the Pooluj, the bravest peated, Eighty tomauns?'-Wolff replied, people of Central Asia; who were afterwardsYes.'-He then said, 'Now thou shalt see my entirely defeated and subdued by General Sir Charles Napier. When these two Pooluj came "behind Wolff, they said, We are sent by Ameer Assaad-Oollah-Beyk to bring you back, because you are a spy from Abbas Mirza.' 'Wolff had no resource, but was forced to walk back to Burchund, a journey which he accomplished in three days, and then he was brought to the old castle, which was the residence of the ameer. Those castles are called in the Persian, ark, from It would be possible to quote many simiwhich our English and German word ark' lar passages to show how adventurous has is derived, and it means a fortress.' Here been the career of this bold-hearted missionWolff was dragged into a large, dark room by ary, whose life we could have wished to have the ameer's soldiers, in a rude, disrespectful seen written in a softer tone; but the narra way. Each of the soldiers had a matchlock gun tive of whose journeyings from his youthful in his hand; with a burning, smoking torch upon days to the time of his halt, in 1832, at the it, which spread a sulphurous odor through the gates of Bokhara, occupies the present inroom. On one side of the room sat the ameer, with the chiefs of the desert around him. The teresting and important volume. A future ameer himself had a most beautiful eye, and volume will describe the celebrated mission pleasant countenance; and both he and all the on behalf of Messrs. Stoddart and Conolly, other chiefs had a galyoon in their mouths, and and will complete a work which, though dis were smoking. On the other side were the figured by much dogmatism aad flippancy, Moollahs sitting; and in the midst of them was is one calculated to fascinate almost every a dervish of high repute, whose name was Had-class of readers. |