Six Letters From the Colonies

HULL: WILDRIDGE & CO.
MDCCCLXXXVI.
was absent from England eleven months, from November, 1884, to October, 1885. The first three of these Letters are reprinted, with slight alterations, from the Eastern Morning News . The last three were written after my return to England. As I have not cared to keep up the fiction of having written them from Australia, they may contain some references to events subsequent to my return. It is often objected, and truly enough, that travellers, who spend only so short a time as I have in fresh countries, are not justified in expressing deliberate opinions about them; but this does not apply where a writer gives his impressions as such, and not as matured opinions, or where he expresses the opinions of other people who, by long residence or otherwise in a particular country, have had every opportunity of forming them. I think it will not be found that I have offended in this particular.
London,
October, 1886.

Voyage to Australia has in these days become so ordinary an affair that it may seem to require an apology to attempt to describe one, but a voyage in a sailing ship is so different from that in a steamer that it may interest some people. It is, as a rule, only those who go abroad for their health who prefer a sailing ship, on account of the great length of the voyage, in allusion to which steam people call sailing ships wind jammers, while the sailors retort on steamers by dubbing them iron tanks and old coffins. There is no doubt that the picturesqueness of a sea voyage is quite destroyed by a steamer. There are no, or very few, regular sailors on board; so much of the work is now done by steam. There are no chanties or sailors' songs, which help the work to go easily. In a steamer there is no interest in noting the course—they go straight on, and the distance covered does not vary, or only slightly, from day to day. The movement of a sailing ship through the water at 12 knots per hour is quite exhilarating; the ship hurries on by leaps and bounds. Contrast with this the labouring plunges of a screw-steamer at the same rate. In short, romance is perishing from the sea with the universal invasion of steam. Could the poet have thus written of the Pirate—