Some actors seem to define a role for all time, so that few people can imagine Thomas More as anyone but Paul Scofield or T. E Lawrence as anyone other than Peter O’Toole.  So, too, Allan Quatermain will always be Stewart Granger, tall and handsome and clean-shaven.  However, Quatermain is much the opposite, bearded and described, for example, in the brief tale “Hunter Quatermain’s Story,” as a “curious-looking little lame man” who has “short grizzled hair, which stood about an inch above his head like the bristles of a brush.”

That description was most closely depicted on film in 1937 by Cedric Hardwicke, but it is the 1950 interpretation by Granger that determines how most people think of this fictional hero.  Portrayals by Richard Chamberlain and Patrick Swayze scarcely bear mentioning, while Sean Connery, as he can with any role, conveyed Quatermain’s shrewdness and grit.

Allan Quatermain was created by H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925), and like his contemporary, Sherlock Holmes, Quatermain has taken on a life of his own.  Haggard’s alter ego is best known from the novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and its four movie versions.  Although the most faithful film adaptations were in 1937 and 1950, both took liberties, notably by adding to Quatermain’s expedition a beautiful young lady, in 1950 played by Deborah Kerr.

Quatermain is by profession a big game hunter and by circumstance an explorer in southern Africa, based in Natal.  He therefore has become a symbol of British imperialism and Western bigotry.  Anyone reading the stories, however, will see a more complex picture.

In King Solomon’s Mines, for instance, one of Quatermain’s English companions falls in love with Foulata, a native girl, an aspect of the story that surely raised eyebrows in Victorian drawing rooms.  Meanwhile, in each story Quatermain muses upon the nature of civilization; like exploration itself, such self-examination is something associated with Western culture.  King Solomon’s Mines being so well-known, though, we turn instead to Quatermain in the novel of 1887 simply entitled by his name.

Allan Quatermain is the sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, and it finds Quatermain undertaking another trek into officially uncharted regions of Africa.  This journey is by way of recovering from grief, the widower Quatermain having just buried his only child, his son Harry.  Quatermain and his three companions from the previous story search for a mythical people, the Zu-Vendi, possibly descended from Persians or Phoenicians.

In his mid-fifties, Quatermain has observed that human nature never changes, and he believes that humans are nineteen parts savage and one part civilized.  He sees no big difference between an African girl in a necklace and feathers and an English lady bedecked in much the same manner.  Likewise, he notes that a gentleman in a London club would quickly lose his refined veneer were someone suddenly to strike him.  “Civilisation,” concludes Quatermain, “is only savagery silver-gilt.”

Several scenes in his new adventure are harrowing, but Quatermain reflects that fearing for one’s life makes no sense.  “We never know what is going to happen to us the next minute,” he says, “even when we sit in a well-drained house with two policemen patrolling under the window.”  The end will come, despite all our comforts and precautions.

Quatermain contrasts the law of the Zu-Vendi with that of the English.  English law, he notes, “is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money.”  He adds, “A man may half kick his wife to death or inflict horrible sufferings upon his children at a much cheaper rate of punishment than he can compound for the theft of a pair of old boots.”  Among the savages, however, “they rightly or wrongly look upon the person as of more consequence than goods and chattels, and not, as in England, as a sort of necessary appendage to the latter.”  That ironic indictment is hardly the opinion of a mindless jingoist.

Quatermain’s adventures contain all the elements humans have always loved in their best stories:  mountains, rivers, and caves; forgotten kingdoms, lost cities, and hidden treasure.  Moreover, there are lions and elephants, swashbuckling battles and narrow escapes, and connections with the world of the Bible.

Quatermain regrets that the old virtues seem to be giving way to commercial celebrity and “many a time-serving and word-coining politician.”  Instead, Quatermain takes pride in being an adventurer, which he defines as “he who goes out to meet whatever may come.”  To his way of thinking, “that is what we all do in the world one way or another.”  For him, being an adventurer “implies a brave heart and a trust in Providence.”

He declares that “all our magnificent muster-roll of colonies, each of which will in time become a great nation, testify to the extraordinary value of the spirit of adventure which at first sight looks like a mild form of lunacy.”  While Quatermain can foresee a day when the British Empire has devolved power and created new nations, he listens sympathetically to the worldview of Umslopogaas, his Zulu friend:  “Better is it to slay a man in fair fight than to suck out his heart’s blood in buying and selling and usury after your white fashion.”

As in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, the villains in Allan Quatermain are the priests, votaries of the sun god.  Quatermain himself is a religious man, steeped in his Bible and his Book of Common Prayer, yet he doubts the goodness of this world.  “How can a world be good,” he asks, “in which money is the moving power, and self-interest the guiding star?”  He adds, “The wonder is not that it is so bad, but that there should be any good left in it.”

Quatermain has inspired other intrepid characters in bush hats, first Harry Steele, played by Charlton Heston in The Secret of the Incas (1954), and then from the 1980s into the 2000s, Indiana Jones, a role indelibly associated with Harrison Ford.  Quatermain has also roused the imaginations of real-life adventurers, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Wilfred Thesiger.  Those men agreed with Quatermain’s words, “I would go again where the wild game was, back to the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom I love, although some of them are almost as merciless as Political Economy.”  Almost:  It is what makes Quatermain the cultural critic still worth reading.

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.