Henry Hayes Perkins FRGS: Adventure-Traveler Extraordinaire
A “working man’s” perspective on inequality, life, politics, and travel in the early 1900s
Story by David A. Laws
Wanna buy a boat?” called the bewhiskered leader of a group of men hauling a battered rowboat up the Yukon River bank near Fort Gibbon, Alaska in 1908.
Henry Hayes Perkins watched intently from a distance. The crude vessel, constructed from whipsawed lumber waterproofed with strips cut from kerosene cans nailed over moss-filled seams, promised his best chance of escape.
With no job, almost broke, and desperate to return to the Lower 48, Perkins hid his eagerness to make a deal. In a hurry to reach the goldfields, the prospectors quickly shook hands on five dollars, a price that included an oar fashioned from a strip of lumber nailed to a bent pine branch, plus twenty pounds of flour, eleven pounds of bacon, and two pounds of prunes.
“What more can a man want,” mused Perkins as he slid his flimsy craft into ice-flecked whitewater en route to the Bering Sea, twelve days and 900 perilous miles to the west.
The Dairies of Hayes Perkins
Modern adventure travelers seek adrenaline-fueled fun tinged with a moderate degree of risk. But few are exposed to anything more dangerous than riding a runaway camel or zooming over the jungle on a zip line.
By comparison, the journeys of Hayes Perkins (1878–1964), who worked his way across Africa, North America, and the South Seas for 30 years as a manual laborer in the early 1900s, qualify him as a pioneering adventure-traveler extraordinaire.
Unusual for someone of his time, humble birth, and limited education, Perkins kept a detailed diary of his travels around the world in search of rewarding employment and adventure.
His narrative reveals that he found little of the former and a surfeit of the latter. Still, his stories provide a unique workingman’s perspective on life, politics, racial and social inequality, and war of the era.
Perkins kept handwritten notes of his travels until 1924, when he purchased a Remington portable typewriter. He used the machine to document his journeys and correspond with people around the world. Few of those letters remain, but a friend, Frank W. Preston, whom he met on a voyage to Australia, arranged for his diary to be typed and bound.
Published in 1961 as Here and There, in a limited edition of five typed carbon-paper copies, today they are held by the Royal Geographical Society of London, New York Geographical Society, Oregon Historical Society, and, in California, Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo, and the City of Pacific Grove Public Library.
A Bird of Passage
Born on a homestead near the Oregon lumber port of Bandon in 1878, Perkins was fascinated by tales of explorers and their adventures in Africa. In 1890 the family moved to an evangelical community in Texas. He left home at age 15 to escape abuse by his father, “a Methodist of the strictest sort,” who beat the boy frequently for refusing the gospel.
Perkins hopped freight trains and worked in fields, forests, mines, ranches, and sawmills across the country before setting off to explore the globe. His diary is filled with chilling tales of personal privation and appalling conditions endured by migrant laborers of the era. But a taste for adventure and a desire to see the world remained strong throughout his life. In 1940, the San Francisco Chronicle described him as a “bird of passage.”
He embarked on his first ocean voyage and experience of foreign travel from Portland, Oregon, in October 1898. As a crew member on the schooner Austrasia, he survived a dangerous passage around Cape Horn to England. A year after his return, he joined the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, a forerunner of the Coast Guard, to see “other lands down the horizon line that need exploring.”
Over the next 30 years, he documented 130 ocean voyages for a total of eight circumnavigations of the globe that including three extended trips to Alaska and seven to Africa. Russia was the only country he regretted having missed in his travels.
Perkins’s stories could fill several travel-adventure books and movies. They include near starvation, brutal abuse, threats to his life, tropical fever, the hypocrisy of religious zealots, and the kindness of strangers. The following anecdotes represent typical examples of his life as an adventurer before settling back in the United States.
Alaska
On hearing of work opportunities in Alaska in 1908, Perkins headed north. After several weeks of fruitless searching for employment to return home, he purchased a wooden boat for $5 and set off to row 900 miles down the Yukon River to the coast. He shared the voyage with a companion who professed to know nothing about cooking but was a good oarsman.
“As to the first part of this statement, he told the truth, but in the last, he was a liar.” Over the next 12 days, Perkins guided their craft through raging waters, mosquito-infested sandbars, alcohol-sodden native encampments, and 40 miles of open, storm-tossed waters of the Bering Sea to St Michael, where he took a steamer to Seattle.
Africa
With a 2-year contract as a groundskeeper, in 1914, Perkins traveled from London by boat, rail, and finally six weeks overland to The Heart of Africa Mission in the Belgian Congo.
He cultivated productive fruit and vegetable gardens for the mission but was disillusioned by the missionaries’ use of alcohol and abusive discipline to control their flock. He quit after less than a year.
Heading east through the Ituri Forest, he walked over 500 miles to Lake Victoria. On succumbing to fever, he was saved by natives who shared their meager rations with him. He called their generosity: “An act of kindness I have never seen equaled during the starvation days at sea, on the Yukon or anywhere I have ever been.” On reaching the headwaters of the Nile he traveled downstream by ferry to the Mediterranean and thence via steamship to Australia and the US.
Returning to the Congo in 1918, Perkins prospected for the Forminière diamond mining company. He was successful, and the wages were good, but disgusted with the Belgian’s treatment of native workers, he spoke out and was eventually blacklisted for his opinions. One of the most impassioned passages in his diary reads:
“Words fail to describe that awful pit as I saw it, for there can be nothing worse in hell. The old wounds on the bodies of the pitmen were white, festered, and gaping. Blood streamed with the mud, tinting it scarlet, while the bodies of the pit slaves moved spasmodically as the whips lit, and every bone in their emaciated bodies seemed to show through their skin. That is how we get diamonds.”
Samoa
In 1921, he fantasized: “I want to get away from the brutal slave gangs of Africa and the equally hard-driving machine age of the USA. Where else but the languorous beauty of the South Seas can this be found”? Hired to run a trading post in Savai’i, Samoa, he was initially entranced by the islands but soon learned that there was no escape from the realities of human nature.
Food he donated for a sick girl was consumed by her family. “What use was (she) to me, … she would soon die anyway,” her mother exclaimed. Disillusioned, he wrote: “I came here to hide away from the selfishness, the greed and pain of the big outside world, but find it here in even greater force than in my own land … I will return to Africa bad as it is.”
Hearst Castle and Wyntoon, California
In 1928, at age 50, after writing, “I am getting too old for a life of adventure … I am aweary of this life of pointless wandering,” Perkins returned to the US. He found a job, initially in construction and later as a zookeeper in the animal park at Hearst Castle. His diary entries for this period offer unique insights from the perspective of an hourly laborer into the people and politics of the privileged world rising on William Randolph Hearst’s “Enchanted Hill” near San Simeon, California.
Although he hated Hearst’s infatuation with fascist dictators, particularly Mussolini, Perkins describes him as a fair, even a benevolent, employer. “He has an infectious grin that instantly puts all at ease. He will bestow this on his humblest employee as quickly as the greatest of men.” Perkins observed and wrote about many notable visitors.
Anecdotes about Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, George Bernard Shaw, Prince Leopold of Prussia, plus numerous Hollywood stars, including Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gloria Swanson, and Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies, fill nearly 200 typed pages.
Perkins spares no kind words for the legions of sycophants and corrupt managers who ruled the roost in Hearst’s absence. He describes the debauchery of visiting Hollywood figures and their ravishing of young women invited to party on the hill.
As a non-drinker, he was especially troubled by late-night beach landings to replenish the castle liquor cellars during Prohibition. Coast Guard officials he knew from his prior employment ignored his whistle-blowing for fear of reprisal by Hearst. And by 1931, even Hearst’s vast wealth could not sustain the project.
Perkins transferred to Wyntoon in Northern California, where the architect of Hearst Castle, Julia Morgan, was also retained to rebuild the Hearst family compound after a fire. He worked on heavy laboring tasks until assigned to less strenuous duties in the household. Here, he continued to observe and engage with the Hearsts and their guests. Construction ceased each fall, and the property closed up for the winter.
At the invitation of Frank W. Preston, who he met on a voyage to Australia, Perkins traveled to Butler, Pennsylvania for the winter, where he spoke on his foreign travels to Pittsburg society. Preston, who later arranged for the typing of the diary, also supported his induction as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS) of London. In 1936, he invited Perkins to build a game park around his glass research laboratory in Butler. The final entry in the nearly 60-year saga of Here and There is dated October 10, 1936, as he was in San Francisco preparing to travel to Butler.
Perkins worked for Preston for less than two years but completed landscaping work on the estate that today is preserved as a public park. Mrs. Preston described him as “very able, literate, and an exceptionally good workman at any task he undertook.”
Pacific Grove, California
Perkins returned to California in 1938 to escape the cold East Coast winters. He lived in Pacific Grove because it “wasn’t cluttered up with bars.” For much of the rest of his life, he worked to beautify a poison oak-infested bluff overlooking Monterey Bay “to make come true a dream I have entertained since I was a small boy. I wished to have a beautiful garden beside the sea.”
In 1950, the city recognized his efforts by naming the oceanfront Perkins Park. For more than 70 years, his “magic carpet” of fluorescent purple succulent blooms has attracted visitors as one of the Pacific Coast’s most loved and distinctive horticultural attractions in springtime.
Perkins made two more overseas trips — to Algeria and the Moroccan desert in 1952 and as a passenger on a voyage around South America in 1955. He died in Pacific Grove in 1964.
The brief anecdotes in this article only touch on a few episodes in the adventurous life and travels of Henry Hayes Perkins. I look forward to the day when another writer, or perhaps a filmmaker, mines the depths of the 2,000 typed pages of his diary to reveal the rich life of this remarkable and tenacious personality to a wider audience.
Modern adventure travel is defined as “travel with a certain degree of risk and which may require special skills and physical exertion.” The journeys of Hayes Perkins qualify him as a pioneering adventure traveler extraordinaire. Each time my airplane is delayed a few hours, I remember his three-month wait for a boat on the Niger River. Never again will I complain about airline food without recalling his life-saving meal of green plantains in the jungle. Travel for the working man has come a long way in the last 100 years.
End Note
Nobody I asked seemed to know why the popular oceanfront garden a short walk from my home in Pacific Grove was called Perkins Park. The reference librarian in the public library directed me to the local history section, where I came across the three bound volumes of Here and There. Thus began a fascinating journey of discovery that included solving the mystery of why pages had been torn from the front of the book.
Author’s Note
Special thanks for their assistance in researching this story to Nancy Ayala, CSU Monterey Bay; Don Beals, The Heritage Society of Pacific Grove; John Martin, creator of the “Hayes Here and There” website; Laura Sorvetti. Public Special Collections & Archives, Robert E. Kennedy Library, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Diana Godwin and all the wonderful reference librarians at the Pacific Grove Public Library.
Sources
Here and There by Hayes Perkins (1878-1964). Available in the Local History section of Pacific Grove Public Library.
Hayes Here and There, a website by John Martin with a synopsis of Volumes 1 and 2 of Perkins’s diaries covering the years 1878 to 1914.
“Hayes Perkins — The “Magic Carpet Man” by David A. Laws from an article originally published in Eden: Journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society. Winter 2019, pages 4–15. Download a pdf copy of the full issue here.
