In 1844, Thomas Machell left the family rectory in Beverley to fulfil his dream of travelling to the East – he sailed round Cape Horn to the Polynesian Marquesas Islands, found romance there with the daughter of a cannibal chief, and spent much of his adult life in India as an adventurer.
His remarkable story will be told by Jenny Balfour Paul on Friday 9 October at the East Riding Theatre in Beverley at 11am, as part of the Beverley Literature Festival.
She will retrace Machell’s story through his illustrated journals and pulls together the strands of one of the most intriguing characters of the Victorian age, living a life vastly removed from his early life in East Yorkshire, but with traces still existing in the town today.
Jenny Balfour Paul is an Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University and a Fellow of London’s Royal Geographic Society and Royal Asiatic Society.
Tickets for the event are available at www.bevlit.org, along with full details of the Beverley Literature Festival 2015.
