The desire for travel possessed me mightily in '69, just after the golden spike was driven at the completion of the Union Pacific Railway, by which California and New York were made nearer one another by many days of travel. The circumference of the globe had been shrunken. I wanted, naturally, to be the first man to utilize the great advantage thus given to travel by making the quickest trip around the world.
After closing my lecture tour on the Pacific coast in the spring and summer of '70, I prepared for such a trip, carefully calculating that it could be made within eighty days, even with the inevitable losses due to bad connections at different ports. I wanted to take my sons, George and Elsey, with me, but, at the last moment, they were prevented from going. I found out only a few days ago, when accusing my daughter Sue of keeping them in Newport, that their mother had given them ten golden eagles each not to go. I sailed from San Francisco August 1, '70. On the same ship was Susan B. King, whom I found in San Francisco waiting to sail, as she was tired of the way her affairs were going in New York and wanted a long trip for rest and recreation. She had $30,000 with her, which she said she would try to invest profitably on the voyage. She was then quite an old woman, as the world generally estimates age.
I made Yokohama in very good time, and went immediately to the Japanese capital, the new seat of the Emperor, Tokyo. I may record here a very curious thing. I believe I was the last man—the last foreigner, at least—who had taken part in an old national custom of Japan, by which persons of opposite sex bathe together, without bathing suits. It was then considered, in that land of good morals and fine esthetic sense, that no impropriety was involved in this custom. Manners and customs there were open and free as in Greece, when Athens was "the eye of Greece" and the center of the world's civilization. I went to one of the public baths to experience a decidedly new sensation. I was allowed to bathe with old men and women, young men and maidens—and no one, except, perhaps, myself, felt any degree of embarrassment or false modesty.
But the fact that a foreigner was bathing in this way with Japanese women and girls made something of a stir in Tokyo that had been unexpected by me. It seems that, a short time before, some Englishmen had gone into one of the public baths and made themselves very offensive. This had taught the Japanese that they could not trust the foreigner, and they had already nearly decided to exclude foreigners from their baths, or to separate the sexes. My experience was, therefore, the last, as I believe. After this the sexes were not permitted to bathe together.
I observed that the Japanese used small paper packages for tea, thus making it convenient to handle tea. I then recalled the custom of the Chinese in compressing tea for transportation by caravan to the great Fair of Nijnii Novgorod. Here was an opportunity, I thought, and I suggested to Susan B. King that she might invest her $30,000 to good purpose in sending to New York a cargo of tea put up in little paper packages, and that, if she wanted to try it, I would give her letters to men in Canton who could arrange the matter for her. She undertook the scheme, and I wrote a description of it for Anglin's Gazette, in Yokohama. The tea was shipped to New York, and was handled at the Demorest headquarters. The tea was in half-pound and pound packages. This was long before Sir Thomas Lipton employed this method of putting up teas.
At Saigon, in French Cochin-China, I met the United States ship Alaska; and from that port sailed on a ship of the Messagerie Imperiale line for Marseilles. The remainder of the voyage was uneventful, except for the diversion just before we left Singapore of hearing the news of the fall of the Second Empire, the defeat of Louis Napoleon at Sedan, and the establishment of the republic.
I have already recorded, in the chapter on the Commune in France, my arrival at Marseilles and my experiences in the brief period of my visit. After I had been arrested and liberated, and had had my interview with Gambetta at Tours, I passed on rapidly to New York, and finished my tour of the world inside of eighty days.
My second trip was made in the year '90. I planned it while I was in jail in Boston for a debt that I did not contract. There had been some note-worthy efforts on the part of newspaper writers to make a record-breaking trip, and Miss Bisland had gone around in seventy-eight days, while Nellie Bly had succeeded in making the voyage in seventy-three days. I proposed to Col. John A. Cockerill, of the New York World, who had sent Nellie Bly on her trip, to make the circuit in less time; but he did not care to upset the World's own record. I then telegraphed to Radebaugh, proprietor of the Tacoma Ledger, that if he would raise $1,000 for a lecture in Tacoma, I would make a trip around the world in less than seventy days. He told me to come on.
As I started West, to sail on the Abyssinia, I received message after message from Radebaugh. Instead of the $1,000 I had asked for, $1,500 had been subscribed by the time I reached Chicago, and at St. Paul it had gone up to $3,500. I soon reached Tacoma, and lectured there to an immense audience, taking in $4,200, the largest amount ever paid for a single lecture—and sailed out into the Pacific March 18th. I was accompanied by S. W. Wall, editor of the Ledger. Lafcadio Hearn, the distinguished writer, was on the same ship, on his way to Japan. He was so ill that he did not leave his state-room during the voyage.
We made Yokohama in sixteen days, and the moment I landed I telegraphed to the American legation at Tokyo to get me a passport. It had always taken three days to get a passport, but I said that I must have this at once, and I got it. In seven hours I was on the way to Kobe, overland, three hundred miles across Japan. I caught the German ship for Nagasaki, from which point, after a short delay, I sailed for Hongkong. In a trip of this kind, of course, one sees little of interest. It is a mere question of rushing from vessel to vessel the moment you get into port, or of catching trains, or of chartering boats to bridge gaps, or of haggling with ship-captains or railway managers about getting extra accommodations at very extra prices.