Richard Halliburton (January 9, 1900 – presumed dead after March 24, 1939) was an American travel writer and adventurer who swam the length of the Panama Canal and paid the lowest toll in its history—36 cents in 1928.

This included some time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, run by the eccentric and innovative John Harvey Kellogg, whose philosophy of care featured regular exercise, sound nutrition, and frequent enemas.

The words of Oscar Wilde, who in works like The Picture of Dorian Gray enjoined experiencing the moment before it vanished, inspired Halliburton to reject marriage, family, a regular job, and conventional respectability as the obvious steps after graduation.

On the strength of his lecturing and increasing celebrity appeal, publisher Bobbs-Merrill, whose editor-in-chief David Laurance Chambers was also a Princeton graduate, accepted Halliburton's first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925),[9] which became a bestseller.

In 1929, Halliburton published New Worlds To Conquer, which recounted his famous swim of the Panama Canal, his retracing the track of Hernán Cortés' conquest of Mexico, and his enactment in full goat-skin costume, of the role of Robinson Crusoe in Alexander Selkirk's, "cast away" on the island of Tobago.

Casual acquaintances were many, as lectures, personal appearances (notably to promote India Speaks), syndicated columns, and radio broadcasts made him a household name associated with romantic travel.

The pair started on Christmas Day 1930, making stops along the way, from Los Angeles to New York City,[12] where they crated the airplane and boarded it on the oceanliner RMS Majestic.

Paid well, to fulfill his end of the deal, Halliburton traveled extensively to Cuba, Haiti, Martinique, Miami, Washington, D. C. (to do research at the Library of Congress), to New York, Europe, and finally to Russia.

At the end of the year, Halliburton returned to Europe to fulfill his dream of emulating Hannibal by crossing the Alps on an elephant - one chosen for the task from a Paris zoo named "Miss Dalrymple", going from Martigny (Switzerland) to Aosta (Italy).

[22] Biographers credit the idea for the voyage to Walter Gaines Swanson, who, as the Exposition's public relations manager, promoted its goal of celebrating both the Oakland and Golden Gate bridges as well as the cultures of the Pacific rim.

[23] Besides Halliburton's secretary Paul Mooney, the initial crew included George Barstow III, a 21-year-old student at Juilliard, Dartmouth "lads" John Rust Potter, Robert Hill Chase, and Gordon Ellicott Torrey.

The crew composition would change; engineer's assistant Richard L. Davis would bow out, ship's cook James Sligh, and able-bodied seamen Ralph Granrud and Benjamin Flagg would be added and a last-minute entry, student globetrotter Velman Fitch of the University of Minnesota.

[19][24] While the Sea Dragon Expedition was partly funded through: paid subscriptions for a projected series of progress reports that Halliburton intended to send from China, sales of commemorative tokens and other keepsakes, and expected tourist excursions.

[19] $14,000 of the $26,500 raised ($300,000 to $400,000 in today's money) came from the three crew members from Dartmouth: Robert Chase, John "Brue" Potter, and Gordon Torrey, who had extensive amateur sailing experience.

[26] A trial run in January 1939 revealed the vessel's flaws; the completed Sea Dragon, distinctly top heavy, rode precariously low, rolling and heeling in moderately active waters.

Moreover, Chief Officer Dale Collins of the SS President Coolidge, along with others noted that the masts and sails were far too heavy, and that the poop deck, meant to house a radio cabin and galley, was 10 feet (3.0 m) higher than befit a junk of its size.

[28] Besides poor performance by the junk in rough seas, the February attempt was aborted due to an injury sustained by Potter when struck by the mainsail boom while handling the 18 foot (5.5m) tiller.

[22] Sea Dragon Expedition researcher Gerry Max has noted that Potter, as well as Torrey, who did not make the trip, and a couple of other crew members may have contracted gonorrhea during their time in Hong Kong at the start of the voyage.

[34] Later in May, an extensive US Navy search with several ships and scout planes, including USS Astoria, scouring 152,000 square miles (390,000 km2) over the course of many days, found no trace of the junk or the crew, and the effort was ended.

[21] The ocean liner SS President Pierce, captained by Charles Jokstad, passed flotsam in the middle of the Pacific, covered with an estimated one year's growth of barnacles in 1940, believed to be from the wreck of the Sea Dragon,[40] perhaps the ship's rudder.

Halliburton intended to write his biography and kept ample notes for the task, interviewing in person or corresponding with prominent British literary and salon figures who had known Brooke, including Lady Violet Asquith Bonham-Carter, Walter de la Mare, Cathleen Nesbitt, Noel Olivier, Alec Waugh, and Virginia Woolf.

Acting as sort of an emcee, or performing some often cleverly garish stunt, he recalled that person and invoked a place associated with him; by so doing, he escorted readers to a different time and locale, with some reflective asides added into his narrative for perspective.

Of further note, he retraced the fateful expedition of Hernando Cortez to the heart of the Aztec Empire, like his hero Lord Byron, he swam the Hellespont, metaphorically bridging Europe and Asia, and he lived among the French Foreign Legion in North Africa.

Such run-ins occurred when he breached security to take photos of the guns at Gibraltar and was arrested; again, when he attempted to enter Mecca, which is forbidden to non-Muslims; and yet again when he snuck past the gatekeepers at the Taj Mahal where, beneath a moonlit sky, he indulged in a swim in the sacred pool that faced the worshiped tomb.

In Borneo he notes that for the Dyaks "free love is not only accepted, but encouraged," and, after describing their courtship rituals, remarks that "in this utterly natural society there is no such thing as prostitution or repression.

His admiration may have been piqued by his exposure at Princeton to English Professor Henry Van Dyke, a popular essayist and poet of his time who was also a teacher of Halliburton's editor, David Laurance Chambers.

[56] Distinguished by their readerliness, the essays on historic persons which appeared in both his books and newspaper articles, specifically of Spanish–American War hero Captain Richard Hobson and of Haitian leader Henri Christophe, show the skills of a natural biographer, and offer a further hint of career evolution.

Publisher James O'Reilly, who reissued The Royal Road to Romance to celebrate the centenary of Halliburton's birth, characterized the author-adventurer thus: "From the Jazz Age through the Great Depression to the eve of World War II, he thrilled an entire generation of readers."

[58] As the writer of a succession of bestsellers, and as a popular lecturer, Halliburton figured prominently in educating several generations of young Americans in the rudiments of geography, history and culture, especially through his two Books of Marvels,[59] re-issued in one volume after his death.

John Hamilton's Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Newsgathering Abroad, published in 2009, devotes considerable space to Halliburton and his contemporaries in the travel writing field.