Chance Encounters: That Changed the World

By Rodney Castleden

This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication.

He didn’t realize it at the time, but in the late 1860s, David Livingstone had disappeared and was presumed dead. He had been in Central Africa and out of touch with the world for 5 years. In November 1871, Henry Morton Stanley mounted an expedition to find him. Read about the famous encounter between Stanley and Livingstone along with other famous chance encounters that changed the world.

Contents: Sir Cloudesley Shovel and Navigation, William Wilberforce and Slavery, Wordsworth and the French Revolution, Nelson and the French Sniper, Dr Barnardo and the Homeless, Algernon Swinburne and Guy de Paupassant, Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone, Dr Crippen and Chief Inspector Drew, The Titanic and the Iceberg

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canary Press eBooks Limited
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781908698407

Book preview

Introduction

We all have encounters that change the way we think, the way we see the world, and ultimately the way we behave. It is one of the characteristics that make us human beings. A lot of these encounters are commonplace, like the encounters we have with our teachers at school, and most of us can remember moments when a teacher somehow, by telling us or showing us something, made us see things differently.

Then there are encounters with friends, colleagues, husbands, wives and lovers, building over the course of months, years and decades to change us piecemeal in all sorts of ways. And there are fleeting encounters with strangers, maybe a brief conversation, maybe no more than a fragment of someone’s conversation overheard as they pass.

All these different encounters, significant and insignificant alike, are woven into the fabric of our lives, changing us sometimes subtly and gradually, sometimes with dramatic suddenness, into different people.

It is striking how many encounters happen quite by chance. There might have been a sensational and scandalous relationship springing from the chance encounter between the two remarkable 19th century writers, Algernon Swinburne and Guy de Maupassant. The 31-year-old Swinburne was evidently interested in seducing the young Maupassant, showing him pornographic photographs and giving him alcohol that almost knocked him out. But it was to no avail, and Maupassant escaped before things went too far, later writing a version of the encounter as a kind of literary curiosity.

In October 1805, Admiral Horatio Nelson had carefully planned his attack against the French at Trafalgar, the battle at which he sent his famous signal, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’. But in a sea battle almost anything can happen, and even the best laid plans often go wrong. Amid the confusion and chaos of the close quarters fighting, Nelson was shot dead by a French sniper up in the rigging of one of the enemy ships. England had lost one of her greatest warriors through a chance encounter with an unknown opponent.

The importance of chance in the unfolding of events is disconcerting, as it means that many of the things that happen to us might just as easily not have happened. If his driver had not accidentally taken the wrong turning in a street in Sarajevo, the archduke would not have been assassinated, and the First World War might not have happened. In fact, a lot of history might easily not have happened at all.

This book is inevitably about chance encounters experienced by people who have made their mark, famous people whose lives are a matter of record. Some encounters such as the one between Swinburne and Maupassant look full of promise, as if they should lead on to something momentous, yet they don’t. Others involve unknown people like the French sniper at Trafalgar who happened to be in the right place at the right time. But, as I hope the book shows, the unpredictability of human encounters is what gives them their peculiar interest.

1

Marco Polo and Kublai Khan

(1274)

Marco Polo was born in 1254 into a noble Venetian family. His father and his uncle were energetic and resourceful merchants who travelled ambitiously long distances east along the Silk Road. When Marco was born, his father Niccolo and his uncle Maffeo were not in Venice; they were away on an expedition to Bokhara and Cathay (China).

Their trading operation had taken them from Venice to Constantinople, then on across the Black Sea to the Crimea, and from there eastwards to Bokhara. There they encountered envoys from Kublai Khan and travelled with them into Cathay.

Maffeo and Niccolo Polo were received by the great emperor Kublai Khan, who it was said had never seen Europeans before. He was delighted with the Polos and commissioned them to act as his ambassadors to the pope. He wanted the Polos to ask the pope to send a hundred well-educated Europeans who were learned in the sciences and the arts.

The Polos returned to Europe with good intentions of carrying out the great Khan’s epoch-making mission in 1269. But they found when they reached Acre in Palestine that Pope Clement IV had died the previous year and no new pope had been elected. Frustrated, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo returned to Venice, with the intention of returning to Cathay later.

In 1271 the two brothers set off again, this time taking Niccolo’s son Marco with them. He was then 17 years old. They travelled through Mosul and Baghdad and the Pamirs to the Gobi Desert and arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in 1275. The Khan was again very pleased