A. Merritt: journalist, author, editor, scholar and amateur archaeologist.

The other day, I saw—yet again—something online about how H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain was “the inspiration” behind Indiana Jones. I’m a huge Haggard fan, but Quatermain was emphatically not an archaeologist, even by nineteenth century standards. That got me thinking about A. Merritt—an HRH fan—and his impressive stable of fictional ‘adventurer archaeologists’.

'Adventurer archaeologists' have been a thing for a long time. If Haggard made an actual archaeologist the hero of one of his novels, I don't recall it. On the other hand, A. Merritt was something of an amateur archaeologist himself. Early in his journalistic career, he spent some time in the Yucatan, where he was particularly fascinated by Mayan cenotes.

It would be no great leap from mysterious, jungled pools of unplumbed mystery in the Yucatan to the tropical, eldritch ruins of Nan Matal and its 'Moon Pool' in the Pacific. As I have written about elsewhere, Merritt's "The Moon Pool" was a runaway success, catapulting him to pulp stardom. That novelette was chiefly concerned with the archaeologist, Dr. David Throckmartin, and his investigations into the basaltic ruins of Nan Matal. Here is how Merritt puts it:

David Throckmartin and his wife, Edith. Illo by Virgil Finlay.

"Dr. Throckmartin set forth, you will recall, to make some observations of Nan-Matal, that extraordinary group of island ruins, remains of a high and prehistoric civilization, that are clustered along the east shore of Ponape. With him went his wife to whom he had been wedded less than half a year. The daughter of Professor Frazier-Smith, she was as deeply interested and almost as well informed as he, upon these relics of a vanished race that titanically strew certain islands of the Pacific and form the basis for the theory of a submerged Pacific continent.
[Throckmartin] was then, as you know, just turned forty, lithe, erect, muscular; the face of a student and of a seeker. His controlling expression was one of enthusiasm, of intellectual keenness, of—what shall I say—expectant search. His ever eagerly questioning brain had stamped itself upon his face."

Throckmartin is depicted by way of Dr. Goodwin as a stalwart, manly protagonist--with a hot wife--who is confronted by mysterious forces far beyond his ken. His entire party disappears under eerie circumstances. The highly-demanded sequel, "The Conquest of the Moon Pool", was concerned with Dr. Goodwin seeking to discover the fate of Throckmartin and his team.

The semi-sequel to The Moon Pool novelization, The Metal Monster, is once again narrated by the botanist, Dr. Walter Goodwin. Goodwin is searching for a rare strain of the purple lotus in the Trans-Himalayas when he encounters Ruth and Martin Ventnor. The Ventnors are siblings. Martin is an anthropologist. The two of them had journeyed north of Kashmir to hunt and explore.

"I recognized the long, lean outline of Ventnor, rifle in hand, gazing intently up the ancient road whose windings were plain through the opening."

Martin had managed to keep the two of them alive while lost in the Trans-Himalayan mountains for months. No mean feat. Ventnor was a chad.

At this point, I might as well take a quick look at the definition of "archaeologist". The Oxford Dictionary defines an archaeologist as "a person who studies human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains".

I've known archaeologists most of my life. I even toyed with the idea of becoming one as a boy. The general academic track toward becoming an archaeologist starts with getting a bachelor's degree in anthropology. It branches out from there.

Martin Ventnor was a certified anthropologist with extensive experience among southwest Asian peoples, including fluency in the Persian and Arabic languages. When Goodwin meets the Ventnors, Martin had just discovered what would turn out to be a lost civilization. For all intents and purposes, he was an archaeologist by the standards of the time. Not much different than T.E. Lawrence, for example.

The 1968 Avon edition of *The Ship of Ishtar*. It was the first edition I ever read and the Rosa cover does the best job of conveying the 'adventurer archaeologist' aspect of John Kenton.

The Metal Monster was published in 1920. The Ship of Ishtar first saw publication in 1924. It introduced Merritt's adventurer archaeologist par excellence, John Kenton. Kenton had traveled all over the Middle East as an archaeologist and had then fought in the trenches of World War One--once again, much like T.E. Lawrence. Here are some quotes from Merritt:

"Kenton could read the cuneatic [cuneiform script] well nigh as readily as his native English. He recalled now that in the inscription Ishtar's name had been coupled with her wrathful aspect rather than her softer ones, and that associated always with the symbols of Nabu had been the signs of warning, of danger. (...)
To reach the room wherein was the ship, Kenton's way led through another in which he kept the rarest of his spoils from many a far away corner of the world. Passing, a vivid gleam of blue caught his eye and stayed him, like a hand. The gleam came from the hilt of a sword in one of the cabinets, a curious weapon he had bought from a desert nomad in Arabia."

So, Kenton can easily read cuneiform from the time of Sargon and he has 'spoils' of his travels stashed away in his Manhattan penthouse. An adventurer archaeologist in the classic mold--a mold that Merritt helped create and define.

A decade after The Ship of Ishtar, Merritt's Creep, Shadow was published. This was Merritt's final completed novel and one of my personal favorites. Once again, the protagonist is an adventurer archaeologist. Dr. Alan Caranac is a renowned ethnographer and delver into ancient mysteries across the world. Here are two passages in his own words:

"Dick [Ralston, a friend of Caranac's], on the other hand, attributed my wanderings to an itching foot inherited from one of my old Breton forebears, a pirate who had sailed out of St. Malo and carved himself a gory reputation in the New World. And ultimately was hanged for it. The peculiar bent of my mind he likewise attributed to the fact that two of my ancestors had been burned as witches in Brittany. (...)
What're manners in a discussion of goblins, incarnation, ancestral memories and Isis, Set and the Black God of the Scyths who looked like a frog? Now I'm going to tell you something, Dr. de Keradel. I've been in a lot of out of the way corners of this globe. I went there hunting for goblins and demons. And in all my travels I've never seen one thing that couldn't be explained on the basis of hypnotism, mass suggestion, or trickery. Get that. Not one thing. And I've seen a lot."

Dr. Caranac's scepticism in regard to the supernatural is drastically altered by Dr. de Keradel's daughter not much further into the novel. He then comports himself manfully in a struggle upon which, eventually, the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance.

Caranac assailed by the shadow minions of Demoiselle de Keradel.

So, there you have it. Four A. Merritt adventurer archaeologists who helped define the trope. Indy's godfathers, and also progenitors of Dirk Pitt and Lara Croft. Those four Merritt stalwarts are the ones who fit the Venn diagram the best, but there are several honorable mentions from Merritt's oeuvre. I'm saving those for another post.