The Fryer show opened in Kansas City and then worked right out to the coast. After a month in San Francisco, we jumped to Hawaii. We showed a month at Honolulu and the King rarely missed a performance. We had a royal box fitted up for him, and he had as good a time as any of the youngsters. From Honolulu we went to Auckland, New Zealand, where we found a twenty-day quarantine on all animals. We managed to get along by giving performances in the Theatre Royal—just the acts that required no animals. After that we went to Australia and showed at all the large towns; then we shipped to Java. Next we visited the Malay Peninsula, where later I was to spend many years in collecting animals.
During these long voyages, I spent much of the time with Gaylord, listening to his stories of experiences with animals. I had many questions to ask and Gaylord, whose fund of information was inexhaustible, always answered them and told me more besides.
A few days after we arrived at Singapore, he said: "Do you want to come with me while I buy some animals?" Naturally, I jumped at the chance. We went to the house of Mahommed Ariff, the Malay dealer who held a monopoly on the animal trade. He was squatted in the center of his courtyard, surrounded by cages containing the animals brought in from the jungle by his native agents. He was a wicked old devil and a man had only to glance at him to be convinced of the fact. His forebears, Gaylord told me as we were going to his house, were pirates, and he was the chief of a clique of Samgings (the native gangsters), composed of natives who would commit any crime he ordered. It was by using such methods that he held his monopoly of the animal business; the natives were afraid of him, and no European or native had dared to interfere with his trade. His head was shaven and his lips and chin were stained crimson from chewing betel-nut. He had little bullet eyes, set in a fat face. My impression of Mahommed Ariff was that he would be a bad man to have as an enemy, but it naturally didn't enter my head that he was to become a sworn enemy of mine a few years later. He greeted us cordially, for he had done business many times with Gaylord, and we sat down with him to talk animals. His religion was "to do all Europeans," but he could not help being honest with us. If any man knew the value of animals, it was Gaylord, and old Mahommed Ariff was well aware of the fact. That day we bought a tiger, several monkeys and a pair of leopards.
Several times during our stay in Singapore, I went to see Mahommed Ariff. He spoke a little English and he was usually willing to talk with me, hoping, perhaps, that we would buy more animals. From him I learned something of the work of collecting as it was done on the Malay Archipelago, but I had no idea, at that time, of entering the business.
The show moved to Penang; thence to Bangkok, Hongkong and Shanghai; then to Japan. It was in Tokyo that Gaylord had one of his bright ideas. He organized, in conjunction with the circus, a Japanese village, and, when we worked back over our route, via Singapore and Australia, we carried forty Japanese with us. Twelve of them were performers and the remainder were artisans. We had miniature Japanese houses, in which the artisans worked at their trades, such as fan-making, wood-carving and embroidering. Also we carried a big stock of cheap Japanese goods, which were sold as the products of our traveling factory. The Japanese village was a great success and brought a lot of money into the show.
In September, 1886, we struck Buenos Aires, where the show had to buck the Carlos Brothers—the big South American outfit—and bad weather. During the long tour we had overcome many obstacles, but that combination was too much. Fryer, Gaylord and Fitzgerald decided to disband, and most of the properties and animals were sold to the Carlos Brothers.
By hard work and careful saving, I had managed to accumulate over $8,000; so I was happy to head northward. I returned to New York by way of London and in December I met Fitzgerald. A short time afterward we were in St. Louis, where we bought the Walter L. Main show, which consisted of nothing more than a tent and some seats. We had no animals but we hired performers and started out on the road.
For one week we had luck and took in money; then came nine days of rain. The tent absorbed tons of water, and we had no way of drying it and preventing mildew. It was so heavy that the canvas-man could scarcely handle it.
At Springfield I went out to the lot and found Fitzgerald there; he just stood there, looking at the wet canvas spread out on the ground with the rain beating down on it. The canvas-men had given up—the tent was too heavy to hoist. That was the end of my only adventure as a circus-owner.
The big shows carried an extra tent to meet emergencies, but we couldn't have one, of course. The rain had beaten us to a finish. Even if we could have raised our tent, we should have had no audience, and we weren't well enough supplied with money to follow Bailey's idea of giving a performance if there were only two persons there to see it. Our "Greatest Show in the World" was sunk in an Illinois mud-puddle.