was creaking at the seams, embroiled in war with Russia and on the cusp of terminal decline. Whaley lit up this volatile world like a quick-burning candle, with a devil-may-care attitude and a strong self-destructive streak, but also an ability to recognise the absurdity of his own actions and the world around him. His travels also taught him something he might not have learned had he stayed at home. When he encountered hardship and danger on his travels he realised that his lavish life of privilege was a mere accident of birth. Survival required personal resilience: ‘you are left to shift for yourself, with those advantages which nature and not any fortuitous circumstances may have bestowed on you’. (W, 96) Although this experience did not save him from his innate self-destructiveness, it did bring him closer to his essential humanity.
Whaley’s Jerusalem odyssey earned him celebrity status in Britain and Ireland, a fame that persisted into later years. His great wager may even have given Jules Verne the idea for Phileas Fogg’s bet in Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). Today he is remembered as ‘Buck’ Whaley, the flamboyant character who journeyed to Jerusalem on the back of a wager, and until recently a Dublin nightclub situated not far from his St Stephen’s Green townhouse bore his name. Indeed his story is deeply resonant in the twenty-first century, a time when foreign travel has become commonplace. For those of us fortunate enough to live in first world countries it is usually a highly sanitised experience, involving strolls through shiny airport lounges, glitzy duty-free shopping, and a few hours airborne in a pressurised aircraft before we land, perhaps somewhat disorientated, in whatever place business or pleasure has ordained. Accommodation is constrained by budget, but normally we can expect some level of comfort. For Whaley and the adventurers of the past, travel was a far more complicated, protracted and visceral affair. For him it involved many days at sea, subject to the vagaries of the weather and encounters with pirates and hostile fleets, as well as gruelling overland expeditions and lodgings in whatever roadside shed or stable could be put to the purpose. His story puts the travel back into travel. It gives us a sense of what it must have once been like, long before the age of online booking.
***
This book is based on a number of manuscript and printed sources. One of these is Whaley’s own memoirs, principally an account of the Jerusalem expedition. He died before he could publish the memoirs and they lay in obscurity for the next hundred years. Around 1900 the antiquarian Sir Edward Sullivan acquired the original manuscript, along with a copy which he claimed was ‘to all intents and purposes a duplicate’ of the original. Working from these volumes he published a version of the text in 1906 as Buck Whaley’s Memoirs. This book has long been regarded as the best source for Whaley’s life, but it is not the only one. The current whereabouts of the original manuscript are unknown10 but the copy is now held in the London Library. It contains a fair amount of material, some of it risqué, that Sullivan saw fit to leave out of his published version. There is also an independent account of the Jerusalem expedition: a journal kept by Whaley’s travelling companion Captain Hugh Moore. Now kept in a private collection in Istanbul, Moore’s journal confirms most of Whaley’s account while acting as an invaluable corrective to many of the latter’s exaggerations. It also contains a great number of additional details and anecdotes.
The above sources focus mainly on the Jerusalem expedition. We would know comparatively little about the rest of Whaley’s life were it not for one man: his land agent Samuel Faulkner, who carefully filed away virtually every letter he received concerning Whaley’s estates, finances, expenses, near-continual gambling losses, and desperate attempts to clear or evade his debts. The correspondence includes many letters from Whaley’s associates, friends and family members, not to mention the man himself. Although it is in private possession, the owners kindly allowed me to consult it while researching this book. Also, copies of many of the letters are held on microfilm in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the National Library of Ireland. This material fills in many of the gaps in Whaley’s life story while revealing a human side rarely glimpsed in the memoirs: the 17-year-old boy who thought he could replace missing teeth with substitutes purchased from a peasant, the hot-headed young gentleman ready to fight duels at the slightest provocation, the benevolent master who was kind to his servants, and the despairing fugitive on the run from yet another catastrophic gambling loss. Whaley was a human being like any other, and he freely admitted his own flaws, weaknesses and shortcomings. For his entire life he struggled with these deep human frailties, even as he hurled himself into one of the greatest adventures of the age. It is this, more than anything, that makes his story so appealing.
PART ONE
EARLY LIFE
1
MAKING A BUCK
I was born with strong passions, a lively imagination and a spirit that could brook no restraint. I possessed a restlessness and activity of mind that directed me to the most extravagant pursuits; and the ardour of my disposition never abated till satiety had weakened the power of enjoyment … In the warmth of my imagination I formed schemes of the wildest and most eccentric kind; and in the execution of them no danger could intimidate, no difficulty deter me. (W, 335)
So wrote Thomas ‘Buck’ Whaley towards the end of his short life, evoking the powerful and wayward spirit that set his days ablaze, from the follies of his youth to the hare-brained schemes, remarkable adventures and crushing disasters of his adulthood. It was his sheer heedlessness, his willingness to do the unthinkable in the face of all sense and advice to the contrary, that made Whaley such an attractive character, not only to his contemporaries but also to us today, over 200 years after his demise. The same volatile and adventurous disposition that ignited his spectacular expedition to Jerusalem also set him on the road of calamity and financial disaster, a path he struggled on until his untimely death at the age of 34.
When Whaley was born in 17651 there was little to suggest that he was destined for such a reckless and dissipated life. His father, Richard Chapel Whaley, was a prominent Anglo-Irish landowner who had carefully consolidated and augmented the extensive landed wealth he had inherited from his forebears. Richard’s great grandfather Henry Whalley had been a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell and a firm supporter of the parliamentarians during the English Civil Wars between King and Parliament in the 1640s. In 1649 Henry Whalley’s brother Edward, along with Cromwell and others, signed Charles I’s death warrant. Later that year Cromwell embarked on his conquest of Ireland, crushing and dispossessing the Irish Catholics who had sided with the king during the conflict. Many parliamentarians received grants of the confiscated estates and Henry came into substantial property in the Galway area.2
Over the generations that followed his descendants added to this landed fortune. In 1725 his great grandson Richard Chapel Whaley inherited the Galway lands, and some years later his uncle bequeathed him property in Armagh and Fermanagh.3 Richard was a canny entrepreneur and in 1755 he invested ‘to very great advantage’ in a copper mine near Whaley Abbey, his home in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains.4 The money amassed from investments like this enabled him to acquire further estates in Dublin, Wicklow, Carlow and Louth. By this time he and his fellow upper-class Protestants had become a powerful elite in Ireland. Their victory in the Williamite War (1688–91) had enabled them to seize yet more property from the Irish Catholics and in the early-eighteenth-century Protestants, though a minority, owned some 80 per cent of the land in Ireland. They also controlled the Irish Parliament and the legislature. Determined to keep Catholics in a subordinate position, they introduced penal laws prohibiting them from practising their religion, owning land, voting or holding public office. The laws were only sporadically enforced but Richard Chapel Whaley was one of their firmest advocates, partly because he used them for his personal gain. When engaged in his mining venture he seems to have defrauded his business partner, a Catholic named Bolger: ‘Whaley took advantage of the penal laws to rob him and prospered on the ill-gotten plunder.’5
Unsurprisingly given that he was the descendant of a Cromwellian, Whaley was also keen to enforce the penal laws for their
