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American travel writer and adventurer (1900–1939)

Richard Halliburton (January 9, 1900 – presumed dead after March 24, 1939) was an American travel writer and adventurer who swam the length of the Panama Canal and paid the lowest toll in its history—36 cents in 1928. He disappeared at sea while attempting to sail the Chinese junk Sea Dragon across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California.

Richard Halliburton was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, to Wesley Halliburton, a civil engineer and real estate speculator, and Nelle Nance Halliburton. A brother, Wesley Jr., was born in 1903. The family moved to Memphis, where the brothers, who were not close, spent their childhood. Richard attended Memphis University School, where his favorite subjects were geography and history; he also showed promise as a violinist, and was a fair golfer and tennis player. In 1915 he developed a rapid heartbeat and spent some four months in bed before its symptoms were relieved. This included some time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, run by the eccentric and innovative John Harvey Kellogg, whose philosophy of care featured regular exercise, sound nutrition, and frequent enemas. In 1917, following an apparent bout of rheumatic fever, Wesley Jr., thought strong and in fine health, suddenly died. At 5'7" (170 cm) and about 140 pounds (64 kg), Halliburton was never robust but would seldom complain of sickness or poor stamina. He graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1917, where he was chief editor of The Lawrence. In 1921 he graduated from Princeton University, where he was on the editorial board of The Daily Princetonian and chief editor of The Princetonian Pictorial Magazine. He also attended courses in public speaking and considered a career as a lecturer.

Halliburton's friends during this time included movie stars, writers, musicians, painters, and politicians, including writers Gertrude Atherton and Kathleen Norris, Senator James Phelan, philanthropist Noël Sullivan, and actors Ramón Novarro and Rod La Rocque. Casual acquaintances were many, as lectures, personal appearances (notably to promote India Speaks), syndicated columns, and radio broadcasts made him a household name associated with romantic travel. Halliburton was acquainted with swashbuckling cinema star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who was also a world traveler. Halliburton himself, though several times approached about film versions of his adventures (notably by Fox Film Corporation in 1933 for The Royal Road to Romance), only appeared in one movie, the Walter Futter produced semi documentary India Speaks (1932; re released in 1947 as Bride of Buddha or Bride of the East).

In 1930 Halliburton hired pioneer aviator Moye Stephens on the strength of a handshake for no pay, but unlimited expenses—to fly him around the world in an open cockpit biplane. The modified Stearman C 3B was named the Flying Carpet after the magic carpet of fairy tales, subsequently the title of his 1932 best seller. They embarked on "one of the most fantastic, extended air journeys ever recorded" where they crated the airplane and boarded it on the oceanliner RMS Majestic. They sailed to England, where their extended mission began. They flew to France, then Spain, the British possession of Gibraltar, and on to Africa at Fez, Morocco (where Stephens performed aerobatics for the first air meet held in that country). They crossed the Atlas mountains and set out across the Sahara to Timbuktu, using the fuel caches of the Shell Oil Company. While in Timbuktu, they were guests of Pere Yakouba, a French Augustinian friar who had fled years before from the distractions of modern society and become a patriarch and a noted scholar of the community. the plane was again loaded onto a ship (SS President McKinley) to cross the ocean. They flew the final leg from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Barbara H. Schultz's Flying Carpets, Flying Wings – The Biography of Moye Stephens (2011), besides recounting the Flying Carpet Expedition from a flier's viewpoint and documenting Stephens' (1906–1995) contributions to aviation history, contains Stephens' extended reports of the adventure. With rare glimpses into the travel writer's art, these give historic balance to Halliburton's often romanticized renditions.

Early in 1934 the Bell Syndicate Newspapers contracted with newspapers throughout the United States, beginning with the Boston Globe, to publish weekly feature stories prepared by Halliburton. About one thousand words each with pictures, ultimately fifty stories resulted. Among these were stories about the Seri Indians of Southern California, Fort Jefferson, where Dr. Samuel Mudd, convicted of conspiracy in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, was imprisoned; Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson, who deliberately sank his own ship during the Spanish–American War, the Battle of Santiago de Cuba a month later; Henri Christophe and the Citadelle Laferrière in Haiti; Christopher Columbus, Lord Byron, and "The Girl from Martinique Who Wrecked Napoleon". Paid well, to fullfill his end of the deal, Halliburton traveled extensively to Cuba, Haiti, Martinique, Miami, Washington, D. C. (to do research at the Library of Congress), to New York, Europe, and finally to Russia. At the height of his popularity, he appeared on radio, attended celebrity parties (including one at the home of novelist Kathleen Norris who also wrote stories that appeared regularly in the newspapers). After the purchasing a used Ford roadster, he explored the heartland of California and the beauties of the Lake Tahoe area. Other commissions followed: United Artists was producing a movie about Benvenuto Cellini; they asked him to do a story on the Renaissance artist's love life. Halliburton also gave frequent lectures and even turned down offers; a radio company offered him the considerable sum of $500 a week for 26 weeks, "to speak on a beer program". The Memphis Commercial Appeal, and newspapers in Milwaukee, Kansas City, Columbus, and Toronto published his syndicated stories. At the end of the year, Halliburton returned to Europe to fulfill his dream of emulating Hannibal by crossing the Alps on an elephant one chosen for the task from a Paris zoo named "Miss Dalrymple", going from Martigny (Switzerland) to Aosta (Italy). The following year Bobbs Merrill published Halliburton's Seven League Boots, filled with his latest adventures and arguably the last of the great travel works of the classic period.

In 1937 William Alexander Levy designed a house for Halliburton in Laguna Beach, California, which is now known as "a landmark of modern architecture". Alexander was a novice architect, a recent graduate of the New York University School of Architecture and close friend of Paul Mooney. Mooney managed the construction of the house. The house, built of concrete and steel, fortress like in appearance, contains a spacious living room and dining room and three bedrooms: one for Halliburton, which featured a wall sized map of the world, one for Mooney and one for Levy. Because of its position, perched 400 feet (120m) above a sheer canyon, it was called "Hangover House" by Mooney, and this title was cast into a retaining wall on the site. Writer Ayn Rand, who visited the house in 1937 while still an unknown writer, is believed to have based the "Heller House" in The Fountainhead (1943) upon Halliburton's house.

On September 23, 1938, Halliburton boarded the SS President Coolidge, was an essentially a Wenchow style junk, 75 feet (23 m) in length, modified to Halliburton's specifications and built in the shipyards of Kowloon by shipwright Fat Kau. Its stern was emblazoned with a colorful dragon, its interior hull was equipped with a diesel engine; the Sea Dragon, a dramatic symbol of East meeting West, was to be an attraction at the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in San Francisco (at Treasure Island); there, after its three month voyage across the Pacific, it would dock and, for a small admission fee, take fair goers on excursions around San Francisco Bay. According to Halliburton's first cousin, whom he visited in 1938, the trip was meant, in part, to renew interest in Halliburton whose fame at the time was in decline. Biographers credit the idea for the voyage to Walter Gaines Swanson, who, as the Exposition's public relations manager, promoted its goal of celebrating both the Oakland and Golden Gate bridges as well as the cultures of the Pacific rim. Despite having an interest in sailing craft since childhood, Halliburton had little practical navigation experience. Seeking capable leadership, he hired veteran mariner John Wenlock Welch as his captain and Henry Von Fehren as his engineer. Besides Halliburton's secretary Paul Mooney, the initial crew included George Barstow III, a 21 year old student at Juilliard, Dartmouth "lads" John Rust Potter, Robert Hill Chase, and Gordon Ellicott Torrey. The crew composition would change; engineer's assistant Richard L. Davis would bow out, ship's cook James Sligh, and able bodied seamen Ralph Granrud and Benjamin Flagg would be added and a last minute entry, student globetrotter Velman Fitch of the University of Minnesota. A Chinese messboy, a Chinese bosun and two Chinese sailors completed the crew. After he inspected a number of junks along the China coast, finding most either too expensive or wholly unseaworthy, Halliburton decided to have a junk built. While the Sea Dragon Expedition was partly funded through: paid subscriptions for a projected series of progress reports that Halliburton intended to send from China, sales of commemorative tokens and other keepsakes, and expected tourist excursions. Major and immediate funding came from Halliburton's wealthy relatives, including the wife of his cousin Erle Halliburton. A trial run in January 1939 revealed the vessel's flaws; the completed Sea Dragon, distinctly top heavy, rode precariously low, rolling and heeling in moderately active waters. For medical reasons, Potter stayed behind after the junk's unsuccessful first voyage and later offered an account of his experiences, as did Torrey. Besides poor performance by the junk in rough seas, the February attempt was aborted due to an injury sustained by Potter when struck by the mainsail boom while handling the 18 foot (5.5m) tiller. The closest friendly ship to the junk was the liner President Coolidge, 400 miles (640 km) away, and 1,180 miles (1,900 km) west of Midway Island, itself battling huge seas. It was presumed to be on its way to rendezvous with the beleaguered craft. Among the radio messages the liner received from the junk's Captain Welch was an ironically cheerful one: "Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here instead of me." As noted by the Coolidge, waves during those dire moments were estimated at 40 feet (12 m) high. The next message was different: "Southerly gale. Heavy Rain Squalls. High sea. Barometer 29.46. True course 100. Speed 5.5 knots. Position 1200 GCT 31.10 north 155.00 east. All well. When closer may we avail ourselves of your direction finder. Regards Welch." That was the last message heard from the junk. Until then, Halliburton had kept regular, if sporadic, contact with radio stations and trans Pacific Ocean liners. At first the Coast Guard at Hawaii delayed searching for the missing ship, possibly thinking Halliburton staged his disappearance as a publicity stunt. A Yugoslavian freighter, SS Recina, was the first to arrive at the last reported position of Sea Dragon, on April 16. Later in May, an extensive US Navy search with several ships and scout planes, including USS Astoria, scouring over the course of many days, found no trace of the junk or the crew, and the effort was ended. By June, Halliburton's mother abandoned hope that he would be found alive. As with Amelia Earhart, many rumors and reports of Halliburton's fate continued to arise over the years, with fans hoping he might yet turn up alive. perhaps the ship's rudder. Later, in 1945 a 30 foot skeleton of a 150 foot boat of oriental design, mistaken by some as that of the 75 foot Sea Dragon, washed ashore in San Diego, California. Missing at sea since March 1939, Halliburton was declared dead on October 5, 1939, by the Memphis Chancery Court. His empty grave is at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis at the Halliburton family gravesite. His ghost is reputed to haunt his final residence, Hangover House, completed in 1938 by architect William Alexander Levy in Laguna Beach.

Halliburton never married. In his teens he dated several young women and, as revealed in letters to them, was infatuated with at least two of them. As an adult, his companions were chiefly male. Among those romantically linked to him were film star Ramón Novarro and philanthropist Noël Sullivan, both of whom enjoyed, as Halliburton did, a bohemian lifestyle. Halliburton's most enduring relationship was with freelance journalist Paul Mooney, with whom he often shared living quarters and who assisted him with his written work. French police reports, dated 1935, noted the famed traveler's homosexual activity when in Paris at about the time of his planned crossing by elephant over the Alps: "Mr Halliburton is a homosexual well known in some specialized establishments. He is in the habit of soliciting on Saint Lazare Street" (near the station of the same name).

Halliburton admired English poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whose beauty and patriotic verse captivated a generation. Halliburton intended to write his biography and kept ample notes for the task, interviewing in person or corresponding with prominent British literary and salon figures who had known Brooke, including Lady Violet Asquith Bonham Carter, Walter de la Mare, Cathleen Nesbitt, Noel Olivier, Alec Waugh, and Virginia Woolf. Halliburton never began the book, but his notes were used by Arthur Springer to write Red Wine of Youth—A Biography of Rupert Brooke (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1952). A vigorous correspondent, Halliburton wrote numerous letters to fans, friends, editors, sponsors, and literary acquaintances. To his parents alone, he wrote well over a thousand letters; a large selection of these, edited in part by his father Wesley, was published in 1940 by Bobbs Merrill as Richard Halliburton: His Story of His Life's Adventure As Told to His Mother and Father.

In his colorful and simply told travel adventures Halliburton was the "innocent abroad", receptive to new ideas with a quiet erudition. He displayed a romantic readiness that shone through his best prose, prose at once picturesque, gently informative, extroverted, and personally confiding. He often described his attaching himself to a famous historic person (or key event for which that person was known) or to a revered place, such as the Taj Mahal. Acting as sort of an emcee, or performing some often cleverly garish stunt, he recalled that person and invoked a place associated with him; by so doing, he escorted readers to a different time and locale, with some reflective asides added for perspective into his narrative. Thus he duplicated Hannibal's crossing of the Alps by elephant – naming the pachyderm he had gotten from a Paris zoo Miss Elysabethe Dalrymple; he emulated Ulysses' myriad adventures in the Mediterranean dressed often as a beach comber or playboy; he re enacted Robinson Crusoe's island solitude, adopting a menagerie of domestic pets with names such as Listerine, Kitty and Susie. Examples of this cultural self enlistment filled his work and helped define his public image. Of further note, he retraced the fateful expedition of Hernando Cortez to the heart of the Aztec Empire, like his hero Lord Byron, he swam the Hellespont, metaphorically bridging Europe and Asia, and he lived among the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Halliburton was an early proponent of what Susan Sontag in her essay "Notes on 'Camp'" tagged "the theatricalization of experience." He did not just view legendary places and landscapes, but dramatized them, often by performing, in relationship to them, some athletic feat ultimately intended to thrill armchair travelers as well as to educate them: he swam the Panama Canal, climbed the Matterhorn and Mount Fuji (achieving its first documented winter ascent), and twice he descended into the Mayan Well of Death, the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza. The occasional trouble that he received from authorities only contributed to the excitement of his adventures. Such run ins occurred when he breached security to take photos of the guns at Gibraltar and was arrested; again, when he attempted to enter Mecca, which is forbidden to non Muslims; and yet again when he snuck past the gatekeepers at the Taj Mahal where, beneath a moonlit sky, he indulged in a swim in the sacred pool that faced the worshiped tomb. Halliburton's books were meant for the general reading public. Into households across America, they brought the world's many divergent peoples and cultures. Racist comments their author made, though for the time not unique to him, when revisited today, are unsettling. At times ethnocentric, he thought it "extraordinary" that "such a primitive race" as the Seri Indians residing in Lower California "should live so close to (presumably civilized) Hollywood." Of the blending of races and cultures he encountered, Halliburton attempted to be descriptive rather than judgmental. Still, intrigued by the "slim Sonias" working in Blood Alley in Shanghai, he seemed both amused and dismayed by the interracial mingling that their physical appearances suggested to him: "When Chinese blood and foreign blood are mixed, especially if the foreign blood is Russian, Portuguese or French, the devastating result is something to write home about." Halliburton's ideas on miscegenation are traceable partly to racist notions prevalant in his day. One source was Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920). Halliburton's love of the world's natural wonders, and such monuments of mankind that seemed best to compliment those wonders, derives in part from the Romanticism of poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His admiration may have been piqued by his exposure at Princeton to English Professor Henry Van Dyke, a popular essayist and poet of his time who was also a teacher of Halliburton's editor, David Laurance Chambers. Like them, Halliburton took a dim view of technology, and he gently urged that one see the world's marvels before "modern Progress" obliterated them. Halliburton was a cultural relativist; believing that "culture was king." He adhered to the credibility of multiple perspectives such as adopting the garb of a particular region by "going native". Perhaps this attitude explains his claim of having purchased a slave child in Africa; more likely the claim was made for shock interest; according to travel companion Moye Stephens, it did not happen. As a sort of cultural ambassador, he met heads of state from Peruvian dictator Augusto Leguia, to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, to the Last Emperor of China, to King Feisal al Husain of Iraq and his son the Crown Prince. Over time Halliburton's social and political views shifted. An early letter (1923) expressed his "virulent antipathy for democracy as practiced in America" and a hatred "for the laboring class", but these views contrast with the plight he shared with the abused prisoners at Devil's Island, and is evident in some early maritime adventures of working alongside rough hewn seamen. In "Straight Talk From Russia," in Seven League Boots (1935), he contrasted the suspension of freedoms in the Communist nation to the freedoms people enjoyed in democratic America, exuberantly praising the latter. In his last writings, done in collaboration with journalist Paul Mooney, the four letters (of a projected seven) comprising Letters from the Sea Dragon as well as in the fifteen articles comprising The Log of the Sea Dragon, their descriptions of the displacement of peoples engendered by the Japanese advance suggest the war reportorial course his writing might have taken had he lived. A news correspondent's role is also suggested by his skilled interview with the executioner of the Romanovs, the last ruling dynasty of Russia. Distinguished by their readerliness, the essays of historic personages appearing in both his books and newspaper articles, notably of Spanish–American War hero Captain Richard Hobson and of Haitian leader Henri Christophe, show the skills of a natural biographer, and offer a further hint of career evolution; he may even have been moving toward a sort of proto gonzo journalism.

Publisher James O'Reilly, who reissued The Royal Road to Romance to celebrate the centenary of Halliburton's birth, characterized him: "From the Jazz Age through the Great Depression to the eve of World War II, he thrilled an entire generation of readers." He was "clever, resourceful, undaunted, cheerful in the face of dreadful odds, ever optimistic about the world and the people around him, always scheming about his next adventure." He wrote that Halliburton's "manhood spanned the brief interval between the two World Wars" and acclaims him as a "spokesman for the youth of a generation". As the writer of a succession of bestsellers, and as a popular lecturer, Halliburton figured prominently in educating several generations of young Americans in the rudiments of geography, history and culture, especially through his two Books of Marvels, re issued in one volume after his death. Two structures commemorate Halliburton: Hangover House in Laguna Beach, California, and the Memorial Tower at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Architecture historian and writer Ted Wells considers Hangover House, which Halliburton commissioned, to be one of the "best modern houses in the United States". Nearly a quarter century after Halliburton's disappearance, his father donated $400,000 to build an imposing bell tower. It was dedicated in 1962 as the Richard Halliburton Memorial Tower; the elder man died the following year at age 95. In his Second Book of Marvels, Halliburton stated, "Astronomers say that the Great Wall is the only man made thing on our planet visible to the human eye from the moon." Although untrue, this statement was a possible source for the urban legend that the Great Wall of China could be seen from space. The Richard Halliburton Papers are held at Princeton University Library and the Richard Halliburton Collection at Paul Barret, Jr. Library at Rhodes College. Beginning with Gerry Max's Horizon Chasers: The Lives and Adventures of Richard Halliburton and Paul Mooney, published in 2007, a succession of books about Halliburton has appeared. John Hamilton's Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Newsgathering Abroad, published in 2009, devotes considerable space to Halliburton and his contemporaries in the travel writing field. The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton: A High Flying Life from Tennessee to Timbuktu by R. Scott Williams appeared in 2014, American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World's First Celebrity Travel Writer by Cathryn J. Prince in 2016, and Richard Halliburton and the Voyage of the Sea Dragon by Gerry Max in 2020. Of interest is Garrett Drake's fictional The Secret of the King's Tomb (one of a series) subtitled "a Richard Halliburton Adventure" (Green E Book, 2019). The World War II liberty ship was named in his honor.