Part 1

Round the World In any number of days

[Illustration: MY TICKET IS FOR NEW ZEALAND (page 4)]

ROUND THE WORLD IN ANY NUMBER OF DAYS

By Maurice Baring

ILLUSTRATED BY B. T. B., VINCENT LYNCH AND WALTER J. ENRIGHT

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1914

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MAURICE BARING

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published October 1914_

Contents

INTRODUCTORY 1

TILBURY: JUNE 21 3

BAY OF BISCAY: JUNE 24 11

GIBRALTAR: JUNE 28 14

NAPLES: JUNE 29 15

PORT SAID: JULY 3 22

THE RED SEA: IN JULY 26

THE GULF OF ADEN: JULY 34

THE INDIAN OCEAN: DURING THE MONSOON 46

CEYLON: JULY 51

FROM COLOMBO TO FREMANTLE: JULY 57

FREMANTLE: JULY 68

ADELAIDE: JULY 71

MELBOURNE: JULY 76

SYDNEY: AUGUST 2 77

ON BOARD THE MAUNGANUI: AUGUST 82

WELLINGTON: AUGUST 10 102

NEAR PALMERSTON: AUGUST 20 106

WELLINGTON: SEPTEMBER 111

RORATONGA AND TAHITI: SEPTEMBER 117

ACROSS THE PACIFIC: SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 3 138

SAN FRANCISCO: OCTOBER 3 144

NEW YORK: OCTOBER 173

Illustrations

MY TICKET IS FOR NEW ZEALAND (page 4) _Frontispiece_

THE STEWARDS 4

NAPLES--THREE IMPRESSIONS 16

FROM SHIP’S MUSIC, AS A RULE, ONE CAN WITHDRAW ONE’S ATTENTION WITHOUT DIFFICULTY 36

IF G. K. CHESTERTON HAD BEEN AN AUSTRALIAN 42

“THERE IS NOTHING SO ROMANTIC AS FOOD” 62

IN SYDNEY I FOUND THE MEN IN THE BOOKSTORES ABNORMALLY INTELLIGENT 78

“YOU MUSTN’T THINK OF A GREEN HORSE” 90

A WELLINGTON MAN TURNING A STREET CORNER 102

A GREAT QUANTITY OF NATIVES SWARM ON BOARD 120

VERY FEW WRITERS THINK WHEN THEY ARE WRITING 148

THE ONLY HANSOM CAB IN LONDON 158

ANOTHER TURN OF THE SCREW AND HE WOULD BREAK DOWN 176

UNDRESSING IN THE BERTH OF AN AMERICAN CAR IS AN ACROBATIC FEAT 184

THEIR WHOLE BUSINESS IS TO STEAL OTHER PEOPLE’S BAGGAGE 188

TRYING TO GET A NUMBER AT THE HOTEL CECIL 192

ROUND THE WORLD IN ANY NUMBER OF DAYS

I believe there is a school of people who say the world is flat. I asked H. G. Wells (who ought to know) whether the world was flat: He said he thought it improbable (mark the scepticism of H. G. Wells!), but he said the proofs generally given of the world’s roundness were bosh. The dogmas of science go round and round, from reaction to progress, and from progress to reaction, like the dogmas of medicine. One has only to remain very conservative to find one’s self a revolutionary. “But,” some one may say, “whether the world is round and you are going round it, or whether it is flat and you are going across (or along?) it, that is no reason for describing your voyage--nowadays a hackneyed affair; you might just as well describe a journey round the Place de la Concorde or Trafalgar Square.”

My answer to this is, I might. But all journeys differ with the differing traveler. I write partly to please myself, partly in the hope of pleasing others, and partly in the hope (a pious hope) of gain.

_Tilbury: June 21_

There is a dock-strike going on: but the leaders say this has been defeated; the newspapers say it is over. I reach Tilbury Docks by noon of Friday, June 21. There, evidences of a strike are manifest in the shape of a local body of special police. The porter who wheels my luggage points them out and alludes to them in vivid and disrespectful terms. He says they are a pack of--you know the rest.

I am sailing in one of the Orient ships: one of the big ones, twelve thousand tons or so.

As soon as I get on board the lift-boy assures me that there are only eight old hands on board--all the rest have struck.

“But who are the new hands?” I ask. “Casual amateurs?”

“Oh! just any one we would get,” he says.

It turns out that five hundred members of the police have been on board the ship for a week. Coaling has been carried out with the utmost difficulty. Most of the new stewards have never been to sea. Nobody knows where anything is. The steward in the smoking-room doesn’t know where the materials for liquid refreshment are concealed.

“But will they be found before the end of the voyage?” I hear a man inquire in some trepidation.

The steward says they will. There is a sigh of relief, and soon we are steaming down the Thames. I shall be in the ship till we reach Australia. My ticket is for New Zealand.

There is a sense of delicious independence and freedom from the fretting ties of everyday life when one starts on a long journey in a big liner. And, watching the lights of Brighton flashing in the night, I murmur to myself the words of the hymn:--

“Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away.”

Somebody ought one day to write the epic of Brighton, just as Mr. Arnold Bennett has written the epic of the Five Towns. Arnold Bennett has given us pictures of Brighton, it is true; and as for Sussex, no county has such a crowd of enthusiastic poets to sing its praise. But when I hear the word Sussex spoken, the picture it evokes for me has nothing to do with any of that lyrical enthusiasm.

[Illustration: THE STEWARDS]

I see a third-class railway carriage on a Monday morning full of bluejackets. They are travelling to London from Portsmouth. We have just left Horsham. One of them is looking out of the window; he observes a man sitting on a stile. “Nice easy job that bloke’s got,” the sailor observes, “watching the tortoises _flash_ by.”

All this is suggested by the sight of Brighton where, at this very moment, while I am setting out to wander with the antipodes (the expression is Shakespeare’s), I know that two friends of mine are dining in that most comfortable of inns, the Royal York Hotel. I wish I were there....

While thus meditating on absent friends, somebody asks me if I play bridge. I say Yes. “Why did you say Yes?” I say to myself, groaning inwardly as I sit down to play. “You know you can’t play properly and that you’ll spoil the game.”

Sure enough I revoke in the first game. However, in my prophetic soul the comforting thought arises that I shan’t be asked to play again.

The next morning by breakfast time we have almost reached Plymouth. I know the coast we are passing between Bolt Head and Wembury Point, having been brought up in that little corner of land. I played on those beaches as a child, picnicked on those cliffs, played at robbers and smugglers in those caves. It is like a piece of a dream to see these familiar, these intimate rocks and cliffs, after so many years.

The sea has that peculiar glitter as of a million golden scales, and the sky has something peculiar in the quality of its azure, something luminous, hazy, and radiant which seems to me to belong to the seas of South Devon, and to the seas of South Devon alone.

Is this really so? Does it, I wonder, strike other people in the same way? Or is the impression I receive due to the unfading spell and the old glamour of childhood.

There is a ruined church nestling in the rocks right down by the waves; there are the paths, and the pools, which were the playground of hundreds of games, and the battlefields of mimic warfare, and the temples of the long thoughts of boyhood.

There are the spots which to childhood’s eye seemed one’s very own, a sacred and permanent possession, part and parcel of that larger entity of home which was then the centre of one’s universe, and seemed to be indestructible and everlasting.

And now! Thirty years after, I have no more to do with it than any of my fellow passengers in this ship. The place is there, the place is the same, but I am divorced from it. There it is, in sight and almost within reach, but I no longer belong to it. It is far away, a part of the past, a part of the irrevocable, a fugitive facet in a kaleidoscope of memories and dreams.

* * * * *

If the world of romance be divided into provinces, each having its capital, Plymouth is certainly the capital of that region in the romantic world of England which concerns the sea. And the last twenty years, which have made such fearful havoc among so much which was characteristically English, have spared Plymouth. Plymouth still smiles over the Sound--between the luxuriant wooded hills of Mount Edgecombe and the forts of Statton Heights, crowned in the distance by the blue rim of Dartmoor. Little cutters, with their spotless sails, are racing in the Sound; two torpedo destroyers are dressed because it is Coronation Day; a German liner has arrived from New York. Everything is just the same as it used to be thirty years ago.

Just before sunset a real Devonshire shower comes on, veiling the hills in a gray mist, but the sun, only half hidden, silvers the waters. Then the rain drifts away, and the sun sets in a watery glory of gold and silver, and as the twilight deepens, threatening and cloudy, all the lights begin to twinkle on the Hoe.

There are always a lot of lights in Plymouth, but there are more than usual to-night, because the city is illuminated. We steam past the breakwater. The Eddystone Light appears and vanishes intermittently far ahead, and behind us Plymouth is twinkling and gleaming and flashing.

“Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships, Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe, An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’, He sees it arl so plainly, as he saw it long ago.”

These lines of Newbolt’s, from his poem, “Drake’s Drum,” ring in my memory and seem now and to-night intolerably appropriate. It begins to drizzle once more, and I feel the well-known smell of the West Country rain all about me, and the years slip by, and the past rises from its tomb, sharp and vivid as the present.... I see it all so plainly as I saw it long ago.

All at once forward in the steerage, a party of Welsh emigrants start singing a wailing Celtic chorus, piercingly melancholy, alien and strange, and this chases away the dream, and reminds me that I am on a liner bound for Australia, and that it’s raining, and I determine to seek the smoking-room.

_Bay of Biscay: June 24_

Somebody ought to start a series called “Books by Bores for People who Really Want to Know.”

These books would contain that particular information which you need at particular times and seasons, but which you cannot bear to have imparted to you at any other time. Information about the conditions of life on board different liners, for instance. If somebody begins to tell you about this when you are not going on a journey and he has just returned, you withdraw your attention and think of Tom Thumb, as Dr. Johnson did when people talked of the Punic Wars; or, if you are on familiar terms with the informant, you tell him to dry up. But when you are yourself starting on a journey, that is just what you want, in choosing your line and your steamer, and just what you can’t get. Nobody knows. It appears to be a dead secret. I am not going to give a particle of that information here,--I know the result too well. Any digression on any general subject, say the claims of Christian Science, or the merits of Harry Lauder’s songs, would be tolerated, but not that; because those things are topics, and this other thing is instruction. Neither children nor grown-up people can bear to be instructed. Children have to submit to it, until the general Children’s Strike occurs. Grown-up people needn’t and don’t, and if people insist on instructing them, they either kill them, as the Greeks killed Socrates, who was a schoolmaster abroad if ever there was one; or they put them in Coventry and isolate them by not listening, as the House of Commons did to Burke and Macaulay; or they damn them by saying, “So-and-so knows a lot, but he is a bore.” It need only be said once. The man is done for. He has quaffed an invisible and intangible poison more deadly than hemlock. He is a social leper. His approach is like a bell. Wherever he goes, he makes a desert. He can call it peace, if he likes.

That is why I shall say no word about the arrangements, the huge qualities and advantages, of the steamers of the Orient line.

But to go back to the Series of Books by Bores for People who Really Want to Know: I would suggest the following subjects:--

A Book telling you (A) whom to give tips to, and how much, in country-houses and hotels in all the countries of the world.

And (B) how much to public men, men of business, and like officials, anywhere.

Section (B) would be good reading if written by an expert, because the art of tipping or bribing a Prime Minister is no doubt a delicate one, and though one hears so much about the terrible bribery and corruption in many countries, one so rarely meets any one who has actually himself tipped or bribed either a rich Banker, a Magistrate, a General, an Archbishop, or a Minister for Foreign Affairs.

_Gibraltar: June 28_

Most people have been there. For those who haven’t:--

“It looks Exactly as it does in books.”

We stop there only three hours.

_Naples: June 29_

One often hears people say that Naples is “disappointing.” The disappointment depends on what you expect, on your standard of comparison, and on the nature of the conditions under which you see Naples.

There was once upon a time an Englishwoman who came out to Rome to live there. She was the wife of a scholar. She was asked by one of her compatriots whether she liked Rome. She said it was a great come-down after what she had been used to.

“And where,” asked the second Englishwoman, “used you to live in England?”

“Surbiton,” she answered.

Have you ever seen Surbiton? It is a small suburban town on the Southwestern Railway, about half an hour’s distance by rail from London.

Well, if you go to a place like Naples and you expect to find a place like Sheerness, you will be disappointed.

Then as to the conditions. These depend on the weather; and I know by experience that the weather at Naples can make disappointment a certainty. The first time I went there it rained. That was in spring. The second time I went there it snowed. That was in winter. The third time I went there I chose the month of May so as to insure good weather. There was a thick fog the whole time. You couldn’t even see Vesuvius. Nevertheless I persevered and went there a fourth time, and was rewarded. This time I found the proper weather for Naples. It is broiling hot, with just a slight sea-breeze.

[Illustration: NAPLES--THREE IMPRESSIONS]

It is St. Peter’s Day, consequently I anticipated that the shops would be shut. I spoke my fear to one of the talkative and gesticulative guides who boarded the ship.

He said No.

“But it’s ‘festa,’” I said.

“St. Peter,” he answered with a sniff; “St. Peter’s the patron Saint of Rome, but here, no!”--and he made a gesture of indifferent contempt, which no man can do so well as an Italian. “We’ve got St. Januarius,” he added.

St. Peter, he gave one to understand, was, as far as Naples is concerned, a very secondary person, a poor affair. And this is odd, because St. Peter was a fisherman, and Naples is a city of fishermen. At Naples St. Januarius overshadows every one and everything which is connected with the Life Sacred: besides the fact of having a miracle that works plumb, and to which the unbeliever bears witness.

Some of the shops were shut, some were open. The churches were decorated with red hangings and crowded with people--old fishermen, decrepit women, quantities of children and young women, and some smart young men in white ducks and flannels.

I hold that in many ways Naples is the most characteristic, the most Italian, of all Italy’s cities. It is the most exaggeratedly Italian of them all. _L’Italie au grand complet._ It is there you see the bluest of blue skies, the yellowest of yellow houses, where you hear Italian talk at its most garrulous, Italian smells at their most pungent, and Italian song at its most nasal sentimental pitch, those squalling, pathetic, imploring, slightly flat love songs, the best of all love songs, because they express real love without any nonsense, plain love, unendurable, excruciating love.

“Excruciating” is the word. It is the love Catullus sings of in one of the shortest of poems:--

“Odi et amo, quave id faciam fortasse requiris Nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.”

I hate and I love; and if you want to know how that can be, I can’t tell you, but I feel it, and I am excruciated--that is to say, I am in agony.

I imagine Catullus living at Naples and sailing on the bay in his yacht (_phaselus ille_) and going out to dinner and drinking too much wine, and being witty and sometimes insolent to important people such as Julius Cæsar, and squalling love songs, bitter-sweet, desperate, passionate songs, in the gardens of his Lesbia, whose real name was Clodia.

She was the wife of a politician called, I think, Metellus Celer, and the professors say she was very, very bad. I don’t trust the professors. I don’t believe they know what the Romans, and especially the she-Romans, were like. I distrust their knowledge. But I trust Catullus’s verse, and from that it is evident that he was very much in love, indeed, and very unhappy. Wretched Catullus, as he calls himself. And she, Lesbia, didn’t care a rap. And in his misery he calls her hard names, which were probably well deserved. The note you hear in his poetry is the same you get in certain Neapolitan songs you hear in the street. You can get them on the gramophone, sung by Anselmi.

“At Florence,” according to an Italian saying, “you think; at Rome, you pray; at Venice, you love; at Naples, you look.” There is plenty to look at, especially in the evening, when Vesuvius turns rosy and transparent and the sea becomes phosphorescent; and plenty even in the daytime, when you watch

“The blue Mediterranean where he lay Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers.”

The poets do hit it sometimes. And that is an exact description of Capri. It quivers in the wave’s intenser day. As you drive along to Posilippo, the hills of Sorrento seem like phantoms; the vegetation on the hill is gorgeously luxuriant and green; you pass donkey carts laden with bright-coloured fruits; the driver carries a huge yellow or green parasol; every now and then somebody shouts; trams whistle by. It is hot, swelteringly hot, but freshness comes from the sea. Vesuvius is dormant, but crowned by a little cloud which pretends to be an eruption and isn’t.

You are glutted with sunshine and beauty and heat and colour. This is Italy, the quintessence of Italy, a panorama of azure, and sun, and dust. To-day, in any case, there is nothing disappointing about it--and I wish I were going to bathe in the reaches near Posilippo, and to sail in a boat at night and listen to the squealing, love-sick Neapolitan songsters.

When I get back to the ship, the passengers are all looking on at the boys diving for pennies, and carefully distinguishing between copper and silver, under the sea; till at last we leave behind the noise, the chatter, and the importunate vendors who want to sell you opera-glasses for almost nothing, and steam past Vesuvius, Sorrento, and Capri, away into the blue Mediterranean. _Addio, Napoli._

_Port Said: July 3_

We call for the mails at Taranto and then nothing happens till we get to Port Said--except that the stewards who had never been to sea before have recovered from seasickness, and the passengers are all well enough now to organise games and competitions in order to break the monotony, or to mar the peace (whichever you like), of the voyage.

At Port Said we coal. Black men do it, singing the whole time. When one has seen the black men coal at Port Said one realizes how the Egyptian pyramids were built. I don’t mean how the engineering was done, but the kind of way in which the people who had to make bricks without straw set about it; for in the East nothing changes.

Conjurers and fortune-tellers come on board. I have my fortune told. I am amazed by the accurate description of my character and the probability of the foretold fortune, until a friend of mine has his fortune told, and on comparing notes, we find the man told us word for word the same thing about our characteristics and fortune, past, present, and future. On reflection, I see that the way to tell people’s character is to have one list of characteristics and to use it for every one without the slightest variation. It is bound to succeed. For instance, supposing Falstaff and Hamlet had their fortunes told by this Nubian, I imagine he would have told Hamlet’s character as follows (I assume Hamlet and Falstaff to be on board _incognito_):--

You are not so fortunate as you seem. You have a great deal of sense, but more sense than knowledge. You can give admirable advice to other people. Your judgment is excellent as regards others, but bad as regards yourself. You never take your own good advice. You are fond of your friends. You prefer talk to action. You suffer from indecision. You are fond of the stage. You are susceptible to female beauty. You are witty, amiable, and well educated, but you have a weakness for coarse jokes. You are superstitious and believe in ghosts. You can make people laugh; you often pretend to be more foolish than you are. At other times you will surprise people by your power of apt repartee. Your bane will be an inclination to fat which will hamper you in fighting. You are unsuccessful as a soldier, but unrivalled as a companion and philosopher. You will mix in high society, and have friends at Court. You will come off badly in personal encounter, and your final enemy will be a king.”

Now, imagine him saying exactly the same thing to Falstaff. Doesn’t it fit him just as well? Can’t you imagine Falstaff saying, “He has hit me off to a T,” and Hamlet murmuring, “My prophetic soul”? In fact, I believe the profession of a fortune-teller, after that of a hair-specialist, to be the finest profession in the world, and the easiest. In the first place it is almost impossible to prevent the patient from telling you the whole of his past and present of his own accord; and even if he doesn’t do this, a little deft cross-examination involved in a mass of vague generalization will extract a good deal.