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Whether or not Williams’ mission to help the natives of the Congo struck a chord with Burroughs is not known, but there are interesting parallels with his fictional exile, who stands up against the violence and greed of the colonial hunters.
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Williams was successful in highlighting the abuses heaped upon the Congolese people and his trips to Africa were widely reported at the time and would certainly have been known to Burroughs, who first put Tarzan into print in 1912.
TARZAN REAL FREE
Played by Samuel L Jackson in The Legend of Tarzan, Williams was a human-rights campaigner who in 1889 fought to end the suffering of the Congolese in the Congo Free State at the hands of Belgian colonists, who were busy producing rubber in the region. George Washington Williams was a Civil War veteran and the first African-American to be elected to the Ohio State Legislature. Although attitudes to race were fairly unreformed, there was a growing feeling that, in the jungles of Africa, the heroes were not the guys with pith helmets and rifles. Burroughs was writing at a time when the fight against slavery, having been settled in the West, was broadening out into a movement against colonialism. Man’s Adventure did run true stories, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence outside of the article that Mildin existed at all.īut there are other ways of being inspired. Or it may be because Llewellan himself made the whole thing up. So why didn’t Burroughs acknowledge the real-life inspiration for Tarzan? According to Llewellan, Mildin’s death and the details of his adventures were largely kept secret due to complications with his will. Lord Mildin claimed to have been befriended by a group of benevolent apes who offered him food and shelter Within months Mildin was back in Britain. Mildin eventually left the village after his people’s renewed hostilities with a rival tribe and over a number of years made his way 250 miles further up the coast, eventually coming to a trading post. The teenage Mildin eventually left the apes and became accepted by a tribe of natives, marrying five of the local women – siring four children in the process – while he lived there. The boy took pride of place within the ape family by fashioning weapons and creating fire. Mildin claimed to have been befriended by a group of benevolent apes who offered him food and shelter. Official insurance documents, Llewellan says, verify the ship’s destruction in 1868. Mildin’s ship was wrecked after a three-day storm and the young lad survived by clinging to a piece of driftwood that eventually washed him ashore somewhere between Pointe Noire and Libreville in French Equatorial Africa. Man on a mission: human rights campaigner George Washington Williams Credit: The earl’s story came to light only when family documents were made public following the death of his son in 1937.Īccording to Llewellan Jones, Lord Mildin left 1,500 pages of memoirs, which begin: “I was only 11 when, in a boyish fit of anger and pique, I ran away from home and obtained a berth as cabin boy aboard the four-masted sailing vessel, Antilla, bound for African ports-of-call and the Cape of Good Hope…” Could it be that Tarzan was based on a real person?Īccording to journalist Thomas Llewellan Jones in a 1959 article for Man’s Adventure magazine, the 14th Earl of Streatham, William Charles Mildin, spent 15 years living in the wilds of Africa between 18. There has long been debate as to the inspiration behind one of literature’s most enduring characters.
TARZAN REAL SERIES
So begins a series of wild adventures as Tarzan fights numerous jungle beasts and bloodthirsty hunters as the head of his adopted family.
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The orphaned John Clayton is raised by a family of semi-literate apes who name him Tarzan, meaning “white of skin”. In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stupendously successful books (and they really were a huge deal in their day), Tarzan is an aristocratic child left to fend for himself in the African jungle after he and his parents are marooned. As The Legend of Tarzan arrives on UK cinema screens on 6 July, we investigate the possible inspirations behind the rope-swinging Lord of the Apes…