The Life of John Metcalf, Commonly Called Blind Jack of Knaresborough: With ... Anecdotes of His Exploits in Hunting, Card-Playing, &c., Some Particulars Relative to the Expedition Against the Rebels in 1745 ...; And Also a Succinct Account of His Various Contracts for Making Roads, Erecting Bridges ... in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire ...

In 1717, a boy in Knaresborough lost his sight to smallpox. By the time of his death in 1810, he had become one of the most remarkable figures in eighteenth-century England: a road-builder who laid over 120 miles of turnpike roads across Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire; a soldier who rode with the government forces against the Jacobite rebels at Culloden; a musician, horse trader, fisherman, and gambler who navigated the English countryside with nothing but instinct and a walking stick. This book, published in 1795 and based on conversations with the man himself, captures his life in his own words: the boyhood escapades and unauthorized swims, the misadventures and narrow escapes, the sheer Audacity of a blind man moving through a world built for sighted people. What emerges is not a tale of tragedy overcome but of exuberant, rebellious life lived at full volume. Metcalf refuses to be defined by his disability, and he refuses to let the reader forget it. He is vain, clever, lucky, and enormously alive. This is adventure writing before the genre existed, a voice from the eighteenth century that still crackles with personality.