by Scott Williams

It was 80 years ago this month, presumably on March 24, 1939, that Brownsville, Tennessee-native Richard Halliburton, the most famous travel and adventure writer of his time, met his untimely death while sailing a Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean. In this post, originally published as the preface to his book, The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton: A High-Flying Life from Tennessee to Timbuktu (2014), writer Scott Williams looks back on Halliburton's life and influence.

May 13, 1945

“For six years the Pacific Ocean has kept locked in its depths the mystery of the fate that overtook Richard Halliburton, adventurer and writer, who disappeared when his Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, vanished midway between Hong Kong and San Francisco in March, 1939.  Speculation on the fate of Halliburton and his crew was revived the other day when the water-logged hull of a small vessel obviously of the same type as Halliburton’s was washed ashore at Pacific Beach, near San Diego, Calif. Little remained of the ship, only a flat-bottomed section of heavy timbers, held together with huge brass bolts.”

The American Weekly
 

By the time remnants of what possibly was the Sea Dragon (but most likely wasn’t) washed up on a beach near San Diego, California on May 13, 1945, Richard Halliburton and the crew of the Chinese junk had been dead more than six years. During that time, the nation had been focused on fighting the Second World War, so by the time it was suggested a piece of Halliburton’s boat had washed ashore, it wasn’t the big news it would have been just a decade earlier.

Born in the very first days of the twentieth century, this son of the well-to-do cotton culture of West Tennessee eventually became the most-famous adventure writer of his day. He inspired millions of readers, young and old alike, to consider adding a little travel and adventure to their lives. And because he lived from 1900 to 1939, his life and career was lived out against the backdrop of world going through dramatic growth and change. With books on the best-seller lists for months at a time and selling well over a million copies, he made and spent huge sums of money during the Jazz Age and then the Great Depression. As a lecturer and radio personality, millions of individuals personally heard him share stories of the adventures he had while traveling around the world in a unique style that was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before.

In his lifetime, Halliburton climbed Mount Olympus in Greece, the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps and Fujiyama in Japan. He swam the length of the Panama Canal and plunged into the Hellespont in Turkey. He was arrested in Gibraltar, slept on top of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and was the first to photograph both Mount Everest and the Taj Mahal from the air. Halliburton rode a donkey he named Hannibal over the Pyrenees and, in homage to Hannibal, rode an elephant across the Alps. He spent time with convicts on Devil’s Island and a month on the island of Tobago pretending he was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Halliburton joined the Foreign Legion, dove 70 feet into a Mayan well of death at Chichen Itza and flew all the way from here to…yes, Timbuktu; literally, right across the middle of the Sahara Desert in an airplane he christened The Flying Carpet.

During that time, the articles about his adventures helped sell a lot of newspapers and magazines. When radio was still in its infancy and before movie theaters sprang up around the country, Americans escaped the boredom of their everyday lives and explored the world around them through ink on paper. With a combined weekly circulation of nine million, his syndicated articles appeared in newspapers around the country and inspired others to seek the adventures that can be discovered through travel. While some critics rolled their eyes at his obvious tendency to embellish and an overly enthusiastic and youthful writing style, his fans flocked to hear him speak at public appearances and teachers applauded his books for bringing to life historic events and introducing young readers to the benefits of reading.

Halliburton was also popular with the rich and famous. His friends included fellow-adventurers, journalists, painters, writers, politicians, musicians and entertainers. Known for his unique sense of personal style, good looks and carefree attitude, it was good to have Richard Halliburton at your party. At the height of his career, his fame was equal to well-known personalities like Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindberg, Charlie Chaplain, Rudolph Valentino, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

If you had been in Kansas City, Missouri on Sept. 11, 1927, you would have unfolded your copy of The Kansas City Star and read an “editor’s introduction” to an article by Richard Halliburton that offers a great summary of the Halliburton image at the beginning of his career:

“Richard Halliburton typifies the romantic spirit of youth–the desire to do-and-dare, to fulfill dreams regardless of consequences, attempting feats that older heads have declared impossible. Seemingly throwing caution to the winds, he has experienced enough thrills to last a normal man a lifetime. A recent Princeton graduate and reared in most comfortable circumstances, he has lived the life of a vagabond in a tour of the world—brother to a prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy.”

Halliburton was among the first American personalities who created an entertainment brand and then perpetuated it in order to achieve validation, media attention and financial reward. While Charlie Chaplin became the “little tramp with a big heart,” Amelia Earhart was the “female flyer making it in a man’s world,” and Charles Lindbergh was the “handsome daredevil,” Richard Halliburton was the “boy adventurer” who, like Peter Pan, refused to grow up. The only problem was, when he grew tired of that image, he found it impossible to shake.

His last adventure, and the one that resulted in his death at age thirty-nine, took place on an ancient Chinese junk he had built in Hong Kong and was sailing with a crew to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. In late March 1939 the crew of the Sea Dragon encountered a typhoon and tragically, all aboard were lost. Although the expedition was driven by exhaustion, desperation and a misplaced sense of confidence, with a small shift in the weather or the timing, things very easily could have turned out differently and Halliburton would have, once again, defied the odds. But this time, it didn’t work out that way.

It’s difficult to sum up Richard Halliburton’s life in neat little description. It’s also difficult to understand how someone who became so famous, could disappear so completely. For an article in Smithsonian Magazine, David M. Swartz wrote, “He was Marco Polo and Indiana Jones wrapped up in one, with P. T. Barnum’s flippancy and James Bonds bravado, capped off by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s aristocratic good looks and manners.”[i] That description works well. But perhaps his father, Wesley Halliburton, described him best when, many years after his son’s death, emotion cracking in his voice, he said, “Richard was a meteor…that blazed across the heavens…and was gone.”[ii]

Images, from the top:

Promotional photograph of Richard Halliburton from the studio of famed portraitist, Frank Rinehart. Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University.

Flyer promoting a Richard Halliburton lecture. Courtesy of the Rhodes College Archives and Special Collections, Memphis, Tennessee.

First edition of Richard Halliburton's first book, The Royal Road to Romance (Bobbs-Merrill, 1925). From the collection of the Tennessee State Museum.

Scott Williams is president and CEO of Discovery Park of America in Union City, Tennessee. He chose Richard Halliburton as the subject of his first biography, “The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton: A High-Flying Life from Tennessee to Timbuktu.” It was published in 2014.