This Woodhull-Claflin affair had far-reaching effects. Besides leaving me for thirty years in the grip of the court, it affected many other persons. I shall refer here only to one of these, the publisher of a newspaper in Toledo, who printed some of the matter that I had printed in New York. He was prosecuted, and his paper and press were seized. The poor fellow asked me to lecture in his interest. I could not do this, but helped him to raise some money to buy a new printing-press. This was in August, '83, when I was at Vevay, Switzerland.
A worthless piece of paper eventually fell into the hands of another man, who proceeded to prosecute me, and, with the assistance of the courts, kept me in the Charles Street Jail, Boston, for some time. I was arrested for this old debt of another man, and was refused the constitutional relief of habeas corpus by Judge Devins and five other judges of Massachusetts. The amount of the debt had steadily increased, and was $800 in '89. Finally, I went before Judge McKim, and he at once dismissed the case as groundless.
This brought my jail experiences to a close. Was it fitting that Boston, where I had lived and worked; where I had devised the building of the greatest ships the world had known up to that time; where I had projected and organized the clipper-ship service to California, and opened a new era in the carrying trade of the world, and where I had organized the Union Pacific Railway to develop the entire West and draw continents nearer together, should put me in jail for a petty debt that I did not owe, as in some sort an evidence of its gratitude?
My prison experience has been more varied than that of the most confirmed and hardened criminal; and yet I have never committed a crime, cheated a human being, or told a lie. I have been imprisoned in almost every sort of jail that man has devised. I have been in police stations, in Marshalseas in England and in Ireland, in common jails in Boston, in the Bastile of Lyons, in the Prefecture at Tours as the prisoner of Gambetta, Dictator of France, and in the famous old Tombs of New York. I have used prisons well. They have been as schools to me, where I have reflected, and learned more about myself—and a man's own self is the best object of any one's study. I have, also, made jails the source of fruitful ideas, and from them have launched many of my most startling and useful projects and innovations. And so they have not been jails to me, any more than they were to Lovelace:
"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage."
CHAPTER XXVIII
AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY, SIXTY-SEVEN, AND SIXTY DAYS
1870, 1890, 1892
I went around the world in eighty days in the year '70, two years before Jules Verne wrote his famous romance, Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours, which was founded upon my voyage. Since then I have made two tours of the world, one in sixty-seven and a half days, and the other in sixty. The last voyage still stands as the record trip in circling the globe.
I have always been something of a traveler, restless in my earlier years, and never averse to visiting new scenes and experiencing new sensations. In Australasia I had improved every opportunity to see the new world of the South Seas, and later had visited every part of the Orient that I could by any possibility reach during my various journeys in that portion of the globe. Europe I had traversed quite thoroughly, from the Crimea to Nijnii Novgorod, from the Volga to the Thames, from Spain to Finland. When I left Australia it was my intention to establish a great business in Yokohama, and, when that had been done, I intended to pass on across the Pacific, thus girdling the globe; but my first effort to go around the world was prevented by the war in the Crimea, and so I turned back and came home, as already described, by way of China, India, Egypt, and Europe.