[Rarebooks] fa:Keane.SixMonths HEJAZ.1887.Ralph Skene's copy.

[r.azzi at comcast.net]

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SIX MONTHS IN THE HEJAZ. An Account of The Mohammedan Pilgrimage To Meccah And Medinah Accomplished By An Englishman Professing Mohammedanism, by John Fryer Keane ( Hajj Mohammad Amin). London: Ward and Downey, 1887. xi, 307 pages. Original green cloth binding with gilt front pictorial of a camel and gilt lettering on spine. This copy is in unusually good condition with tight hinges and only mild foxing on the first few and last few pages. No blind stamps, markings, tears, notes etc. Hopkirk 898. Burrell 429. 
This has the ownership signature of RALPH SKENE on the front endpaper. I believe this is the Ralph Skene who was a "District Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate in Kenya's Lamu, Malindi, and Kipini Districts 1897- ). The East Africa Protectorate was later known (after 1920) as the Kenya Colony and Protectorate until Kenya became independent in 1963. His collection of papers is at UCLA. The collection (#1215) consists of Skene's official correspondence and reports while serving as District Commissioner. There is also a diary (1908), notes on the Arab clans of East Africa, photographs and postcards (1903-58). "
The following description is from a publisher’s note on the republishing of Keane’s work in 2005: 
“Keane was a sailor and adventurer. Arriving in Jeddah on board a merchant ship jumped ship and, disguised as a pilgrim and acting as the servant of a rich Indian prince, undertook the pilgrimage to Meccah and a journey to Medinah…Keane, a young sailor and adventurer, arrived in Jeddah in 1877, jumped ship and became the servant of a rich Indian prince on the Hajj. Keane’s story vividly reveals the extraordinary hazards and hardships of the pilgrimage. His report of meeting in Makkah a stranded Englishwoman, the Lady Venus, caused a sensation when first published in London. Among European accounts of the Muslim pilgrimage, John Keane’s stands out for its freshness and immediacy. As a young man of twenty-two, he had been at sea since the age of twelve, and lacked the academic and scientific background of previous travellers such as Burckhardt and Burton. However, the story of his six months in the Hijaz in 1877–8 is told with such verve and vivid observation, and in such an entertaining style, as to amply compensate for his lack of conventional scholarly attainments. 
“Keane’s career of wild adventure around the globe was to take him from Whitby, where he was born in 1854, to Australia where he was to die in 1937. As a lad he was a born rolling stone, apparently to the despair of his relatives. Fired by his family’s Indian connections, he found life at sea irresistible, and during the course of his wanderings worked as an able seaman, a 2nd mate, a whaler, a cane-cutter, and even, he claims, as an ambulance man in the Ottoman army during the siege of Plevna in 1877. Later in life he took up medicine, journalism in the Far East and, latterly, exploration and farming in Australia. His real talent was as a writer of travel and life at sea in Victorian times. He was continually down and out, and his maritime writings mark him out as the George Orwell of the Jack Tar underclass. Almost nothing has appeared in print on the life of this intriguing character, and much of what has been written centres on the mysterious affair of the “Lady Venus”, who, Keane alleged, was an Englishwoman named Macintosh living in Makkah at the time of his visit."
Regards,
Robert Azzi
Samarkand Books
Exeter NH
+ 603.770.4125

ID on ebay: bbunh