Down the Horizon Line

Hayes Perkins (1878-1964) left home at fifteen to travel the world for the next 60 years, a lone working-class adventurer, maintaining no fixed address and always paying passage with the skill of his own hands. Throughout his travels, Hayes kept a diary that eventually ran to 2,000-pages. One early entry, written as he walked away from yet another good job, announced his life's guiding principle: "[T]here are other lands down the horizon line that need exploring, and to these I must go." Down the Horizon Line: The Working Adventures of Hayes Perkins 1878-1964 recounts Hayes' world travels with special emphasis on his seven extended working adventures in Africa. Romanticized accounts of the exploits of Henry Morton Stanley convinced ten -year-old Hayes that he too must explore Africa before all the "elephants and cannibals would be killed off." The jobs he would later work alongside rapacious mahogany cutters, glassy-eyed missionaries, forcibly indentured diamond miners, and wanton big-game hunters sobered Hayes' understanding of colonial Africa (and of basic human decency). Yet none of his experiences, however harrowing, ever quite extinguished his anticipation of some new escapade awaiting down the next horizon line.