Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/209

Belzoni of Wiltshire' were compiled by him.

In 1834 he published, in an octavo volume, 'A Review of the Chandos Peerage Case, adjudicated 1803, and of the pretensions of Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, Bart., to designate himself per Legem Terre Baron Chandos of Sudeley,' in which the emptiness of those pretensions is shown, His only other work was issued in 1841, under the title of 'Memorials of the Order of the Garter, from its Foundation to the Present Time.' He was engaged in this work during many years, and only survived its publication by a few months. He was attacked by his last illness while on a tour on the continent, and died at Basle 28 Oct. 1841, aged about 64, and was interred in the cemetery of the parish of St. Peter there.

[Gent. Mag. January 1842. p. 107.]

 BELZONI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (1778–1823), actor, engineer, and traveller, was born at Padua in 1778. His father was a Roman barber, and it was at Rome that Giovanni was educated, as he tells us himself, for monastic orders. The French invasion, however, in 1798, seems to have unsettled the young man's mind, and at the beginning of the present century he started upon a career of enterprise and adventure which has few parallels even in the annals of discovery. Belzoni came to England in 1803 to seek his fortune. He was then a remarkable figure, six feet seven inches high and broad in proportion, with winning manners and a decidedly handsome countenance (as may be seen in the portrait prefixed to the quarto edition of his 'Narrative'). His personal charms soon brought him an English consort of Amazonian proportions, and the gigantic pair set about earning their living. Belzoni had evidently made away with any funds he may have brought with him to England, for he wax reduced to exhibiting feats of strength in company with his wife in the streets and at the fairs of London, until he obtained an engagement at Astley's Royal Amphitheatre, where he acted the rôles of Apollo and Hercules with success. There is a sketch in the British Museum (Saddlers Wells, vol. xiv.) of the booth in which Belzoni performed at Camberwell and Bartholomew fairs in 1803, which indicates that he took to the boards immediately on his arriral in England. Presently he turned to a more scientific pursuit, which afterwards served him in good stead Egypt. He had studied hydraulics at Rome, and had invented some improvements in water-engines. These he now exhibited in various parts of England, but still found it necessary on occasion to fall back on those feats of strength of which he was pastmaster. Hercules laden with ponderous leaden burdeus, however, proved an exhausting rôle, and the actor-engineer tried a change of scene in a tour in Spain and Portugal, where he personated Samson.

At last, in 1815, he found himself in Egypt, where he was to immortalise his name by some of the earliest and most important diecoveries of the present century. Whether he ingratiated himself by tumbling or merely by his insinuating manner is not clear, but Belzoni obtained an order from the pasha, Mohammed Ali, to erect one of his improved hydraulic machines in the viceregal garden at Shubra near Cairo. Then as now, however, improvements in irrigation met with but scanty recognition in Egypt, and the fellaheen were universally opposed to an innovation of which they could only understand the drawbacks. But the introduction to the Egyptian authorities proved of more lasting service to Belzoni than his pump did to the pasha. At the recommendation of Burckhardt, and with funds supplied by Mr. Henry Salt, the British consul-general, he was shortly afterwards (1816) employed on the difficult task of removing the colossal granite bust of Rarneses II, commonly known as the 'Young Memnon,' from Thebes to shipboard for transport to the British Museum, It is now the most prominent object in the central saloon of the museum, which is indeed full of objects purchased from Mr. Salt and to a large extent discovered by Belzoni. The next four years were full of valuable work. Belzoni had acquired a remarkable influence over the peasants by reason of hia great strength and portentous height, and, aided by Mr. Salt's liberality, he now began a series of journeys which no one who did not know the people well could have successfully accomplished. He penetrated as far south as the Second Cataract, and excavated for the first time (1817) the great temple of Rameses II at Abu-Simbel (Ipsamboul); he continued his explorations at Karnak (Thebes) ; he crossed over to the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings in the Libyan mountains, and opened (1817) the famous grotto-sepulchre of Seti I, which is still known to every tourist as 'Belzoni's Tomb,' and found the Beautiful alabaster sarcophagus which was purchased by Sir John Soane for 2,000/., and is to this day exhibited in the museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. With the same happy instinct for discovery which always led him to find the way into unexplored monuments, Belzoni next lighted upon the entrance to the second pyramid of Gizeh, which ever since the time of Herodotus had beun supposed to contain no interior chambers, but wherein the discoverer found the room now 