An American Dragoman in Palestine—and in Print

“Uncle Allen,” it turns out, was the alter-ego of Baptist minister Henry Allen Tupper. The tale of the American dragoman outwitting the Bedouin sheikh came from his 1898 book Uncle Allen’s Party in Palestine, which was a fictionalized version of a real trip that Tupper had taken to Palestine a few years prior. Written for a youth audience, it was a didactical work, with Uncle Allen teaching his niece and nephew about the Holy Land by responding to their questions.

It was not the only book that Tupper wrote about the trip. That same year, he also published Around the World with Eyes Wide Open, a more conventional travel narrative that he hoped would allow “others to share with me the pleasures and profits of my visits to many lands and among many peoples[.]” 

As Tupper’s simultaneous publications suggest, tales of travel sold well in the late nineteenth century, especially those involving the Holy Land. Beyond the “glow of romance” they offered readers, travel narratives provided crucial channels through which Americans encountered the wider world. In this, they joined the missionary literature that had proliferated with the growth of a global American mission network throughout the nineteenth century. At a time before newspapers had overseas news bureaus, it was often travelers and missionaries who taught Americans about the contemporary world (as well as their place in it). “Uncle Allen” happened to have a bit of the traveler, a bit of the missionary in him—Tupper’s father had served for years as the secretary of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board.

As might be expected, Tupper’s twin travelogues featured much of the same material. Among the overlap was the tale of the Bedouin sheikh. However, in Tupper’s more straightforward telling in Around the World with Eyes Wide Open, he made clear that the fantastical story was not his own; it was told to him by his real-life American dragoman, a man whose distinctive name would have likely been familiar to devoted readers of Holy Land travelogues. That man was Rolla Floyd.

Originally from Maine, Floyd and his wife Theodocia had come to Palestine as part of the much maligned Adams Colony of Jaffa. The colony was the creation of George Joshua Adams, an actor and religious adventurer who had taken up and then broken away from the Mormon faith in favor of his own millenarian vision. A compelling and persuasive preacher, Adams believed he had been called to prepare for the prophesied ingathering of the Jewish people by establishing an agricultural colony in the Holy Land. He successfully recruited forty-three families, including the Floyds, to set out from Maine on a ship called the Nellie Chapin in 1866.

They landed in September and began setting up their colony at a site near Jaffa. It was a disaster. Within the first two months, thirteen colonists died from illness. The colony’s first crops failed, and the colonists soon divided against each other and Adams, who publicly feuded with both his wife and the American vice-consul. Before long, the experiment fell apart altogether, with dozens of colonists finding passage back to the United States on the steamship Quaker City.

Their plight would be immortalized by that ship’s most famous passenger, Samuel Clemens, better known, of course, as Mark Twain. Reporting on the trip for the Daily Alta California, Twain found it difficult to pry information about the “complete fiasco” from the miserable survivors, noting, “They gave it reluctantly and in a very fragmentary condition, for, having been shamefully humbugged by their prophet, they felt humiliated and unhappy. In such circumstances people do not like to talk.” The Quaker City, Twain reported, had taken on “some forty members” of the colony, adding that others had already deserted. “We left in Jaffa,” he noted, “Mr. Adams, his wife, and fifteen unfortunates who not only had no money but did not know where to turn or whither to go.”

Among the “unfortunates” were Rolla and Theodocia Floyd. “When I left America I had $1,200…I gave to Mr. Adams,” Rolla wrote to his sister, Aurilla Floyd Tabbutt, in 1869. When the colony fell apart, he “got back 50 dollars.” Worse still, the Floyds’ son, a toddler, had died amidst the colony’s struggles—the fourth young child they had lost. However, the Floyds had remained supportive of Adams even as the majority of colonists abandoned him and had scraped by in the intervening two years “by being very saving[.]”

Rolla had also recently come into better fortune—he’d been contracted by the Ottoman government to run a stagecoach on the new road between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Already, he reported, some of the “great people” coming to the Holy Land would “not go in the stages unless I drive.” He soon was finding steady work as a guide and training as a dragoman.

Floyd’s operation grew into a success as pilgrim traffic to Palestine picked up. In 1874, the leading British travel agency Thomas Cook & Son hired him as their primary dragoman and then agent in the Holy Land. Among Floyd’s most illustrious charges during his time with the agency was former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, who wrote a testimonial noting that his guide’s “thorough knowledge of Bible references, history & traditions” had “very much added to the interest and pleasure of our visit.” Cooks touted their capable American dragoman in promoting their expanding eastern operations, even bringing him west during the offseason for promotional exhibitions in London, Paris, and Philadelphia.

Though an acrimonious rift between Floyd and Cook’s led him to leave the esteemed agency in the 1880s, Floyd’s services remained in demand through the end of the 19^th century. He successfully built an independent operation as an agent, gleefully and spitefully poaching Cook’s customers along the way. At times, too, he threw in with the other leading travel agency of the era, Henry Gaze & Sons. By the time Floyd stepped back from leading tours himself in the 1890s, he had become something of an institution. He was “the most noted dragoman in Palestine[.]”

 

Floyd’s unusual career was only possible because of a surge in western travel to Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth century. That surge not only secured his living but also brought the tremendous proliferation of Holy Land travel literature noted above. Floyd’s name frequently appears in these accounts. He was “that prince of dragomans[,]” a “man of great intelligence” and “splendid physique” who was “so well known all over the world[.]”

Floyd’s renown was a rare thing among dragomen, who were generally distinguished by their invisibility. Only a few merited mentions in travel accounts beyond endorsement or rebuke for the quality of their work. Most dragomen were natives of the region and so, where mentioned, were most commonly measured against travelers’ depictions of a benighted East mired in Islamic fanaticism and Turkish misrule. While some travel writers did find their dragomen stood out from this “Oriental” background—for their honesty, for their care, for their language skills or intelligence—more often they portrayed them as symbolic of it.

Rolla Floyd thus inevitably stood out as a Yankee Protestant (albeit an odd kind of a Protestant), something that boosted his business and bolstered his reputation. Native dragomen had to struggle to earn the trust of skeptical American and English clientele. Floyd, who had himself been trained by an Arab dragoman, was born possessing it. James Martin Peebles, for example, complained in his 1875 Around the World of “unwisely” hiring an Arab dragoman “because better guides can be employed in Jaffa at the same price”—most especially the “very candid, competent American gentleman” that Peebles regretted not hiring, Rolla Floyd. Later, once Floyd withdrew from guiding tours himself, travelers praised his management of the Arab dragomen. “Blessings on you, Rolla Floyd, you were our efficient, attentive and altogether satisfactory manager for many weeks,” one traveler wrote, reporting, “Shukry Hishmeh, prince of dragomen, is helping everyone with skillful hand and polite and cheery word.”

Undoubtedly, Floyd’s curious past as part of the Adams Colony also contributed to his renown—those travel writers who did dwell on him inevitably gave the colony some mention. Some took liberties. Edward Stansbury Wilson, for example, falsely reported Floyd had come to take “his station on Mount Zion” to watch the Mount of Olives in expectation of Christ’s Second Coming. “He expected to see Christ float down on the historic summit in a cloud of glory[,]” Wilson claimed. “But the Redeemer failed to come, and Mr. Floyd was so disappointed that he never returned to America.”

While Floyd had certainly been part of the radical millenarian experiment and sometimes speculated about the “signs of the times,” he did not consider himself particularly religious. His letters to his sister suggest that business interests, as much as anything, had brought him to Palestine and kept him there—he had planned from the beginning to operate stagecoaches and run a hotel. Still, Floyd was often noted as “the only one left of the unfortunate American colony[.]” (Even this was an exaggeration. The other most prominent “survivor,” Herbert Clark, also worked for Cook’s while serving for decades as the US vice-consul in Jerusalem.)

Floyd’s unusual visibility gives rare insight into how the largely-invisible dragomen shaped travelers’ understandings of the Bible and their perceptions of the Holy Land. His charges frequently cited him in their identification of holy sites and their interpretations of biblical passages. Floyd was widely considered an expert “in all matters which concern the geography and the historical and Biblical associations of the Holy Land.” Even so noted an authority as the historian and theologian Philip Schaff cited the American dragoman in interpreting the familiar passage from Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The “needle’s eye,” Floyd had reported to Schaff, was not strictly a metaphor, but a reference “to the small door in Oriental towns which stands alongside the large and heavy gate[.]”

Travelers particularly delighted in sharing Floyd’s insights into the peoples of Ottoman Palestine. Henry Martyn Field reported that Floyd had “lived many years in Palestine, and travelling in every part of it, he has become well acquainted with the different tribes that inhabit the country across the Jordan, and with their sheikhs, who converse with him with the greatest freedom.” Besides Floyd’s insider knowledge, Field noted his “great physical strength and courage” helped him “keep the upper hand of quarrelsome muleteers” and deal with “the thieves who infest almost every village[.]” One report, published under the headline “A Muscular Christian Yankee in Syria,” claimed Floyd’s name was “worth a hundred rifles against any tribe in Syria.” Such claims often accompanied the retelling of one of Floyd’s tales of outwitting or out-muscling some venal Ottoman official or bloodthirsty gang of Bedouin brigands—stories like the one Henry Allen Tupper told about Floyd grasping the sheikh’s belt.

Tupper’s tale was fantastical, but certainly not unique in its recounting of Floyd’s exploits. It was one of many that showed Floyd as the ingenious, intelligent, sturdy American who could tame the wild East. What was unique to Tupper’s account, though, was his fictionalized repetition of it in Uncle Allen’s Party in Palestine. Writing as himself, Tupper recounted the story as Floyd’s: writing as “Uncle Allen,” it became his alter-ego’s own experience.

It was a minor liberty, almost certainly justifiable to Tupper by his crediting of Floyd in Around the World with Eyes Wide Open (as well as the fictionalized and didactic nature of Uncle Allen’s Party). Tupper was open and intentional in claiming Floyd’s story for “Uncle Allen.” 

Still, Tupper’s appropriation of the story does raise the question of what else Holy Land travelers might have less overtly purloined from Floyd and other dragomen—what thrilling experiences they might have claimed, what novel biblical interpretations they might have shared, what general impressions of the land and its peoples they might have repeated to their readers as their own.

Scholars have long argued the power of Holy Land travelogues in shaping westerners’ perceptions of Palestine. They have traced how these perceptions, over time and repetition, hardened into a kind of empirical knowledge of a benighted East—knowledge that alternately guided and justified the conduct of empires.

That the dragomen shared in the creation of that knowledge is undeniable, even as the influence of these oft-invisible men can be hard to trace. In the American dragoman Floyd, though, we catch glimpses of it—a “fine specimen of American manhood,” as one traveler put it, who was simply too big and too American for Holy Land travelers to ignore.

 

Further Reading:

Shimon Gibson, Yoni Shapira, and Rupert L. Chapman III, Tourists, Travellers, and Hotels in Nineteeth-Century Jerusalem (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2013).

Reed M. Holmes, The ForeRunners, 2^nd edition (Tel Aviv: Reed and Jean Holmes, 2003).

Rachel Mairs, From Khartoum to Jerusalem: the Dragoman Solomon Negima and His Clients (1885-1933) (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

Rachel Mairs and Maya Muratov, Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters: Exploring Egypt and the Near East in the Late 19th-Early 20th Centuries (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Helen Palmer Parsons, editor, Letters from Palestine: 1868-1912 (Self-published, 1981).

Stephanie Stidham Rogers, Inventing the Holy Land: American Protestant Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1865-1941 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).

Lester Vogel, To See a Promised Land (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2025. 

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Walker Robins is a historian of American religion and foreign relations, with a special focus on the relationship between American Christians and Israel/Palestine. He is the author of Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel (University of Alabama Press, 2020). His work has appeared in First World War Studies, American Jewish History, Israel Studies, the Journal of Southern Religion, the Journal of Church and State, and Baptist History and Heritage Journal.