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.