Identified only as "young," "American," and an "employee of the Standard oil company," he and Joan Heppleton are married for one year, presumably living in Calcutta where she meets him (321). At the end of that time they are divorced.
This is the man for whom Joan Heppleton leaves her husband and goes to Australia. While living there she assumed his name, but since she married again later that name might not have been Heppleton. The narrator sums his character up by saying "no Englishman out of his native island has any honor about women" (321); at some point the pair went to India, where he deserted Joan in Bombay.
Mentioned a couple times, briefly, in the history of her "lovers" that Joan Heppleton provides for Horace Benbow, this man (probably not named "Heppleton," but not otherwise named) was in his fifties when she married him at eighteen. Together they went to Hawaii just before or during the First World I; after she left him for another man, they divorced and he "made a settlement on her" (322).
Mumbai, as Bombay is named today, is a large city and seaport on the west coast of India. It is where Joan Heppleton was abandoned by the British man for whom she left her first husband.
A decade or so before Joan Heppleton arrived in Australia after leaving her first husband in Hawaii, the six former British colonies there had achieved sovereign nation status as the Commonwealth of Australia. Flags in the Dust does not say where in the country she and the "Englishman" lived (321).
Hawaii was formally annexed to the U.S. as a territory in 1898. But in the early 20th century, Honolulu, like the other places Joan Heppleton mentions in the history of her lovers she gives Horace Benbow, was still a remote and, for most Americans, exotic spot on the globe.
After leaving her first husband in Hawaii, Joan Heppleton arrives in Australia about a decade after the six former British colonies there had achieved sovereign nation status as the Commonwealth of Australia. Flags in the Dust does not say where in the country she and the "Englishman" she was now traveling with lived (321).
Hawaii was formally annexed to the U.S. as a territory in 1898. But in the early 20th century, Honolulu was still a remote spot on the globe when Joan Heppleton mentions it, along with several other faraway places, in the history of her lovers she gives Horace Benbow in Flags in the Dust. Hawaii is mentioned again as a tourist destination in Requiem for a Nun, when in Act I of the drama, Temple Drake Stevens tells Gavin that her family "may go on to Hawaii in the spring" (44); they don't, but by 1929 an average of about 22,000 tourists visited the islands annually.
