A Vagabond Journey Around the World: A Narrative of Personal Experience

by Harry Alverson Franck

Published, March, 1910

TO MY ALMA MATER

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

WITHOUT WHOSE TRAINING

THIS UNDERTAKING HAD BEEN IMPOSSIBLE

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	Preliminary Rambles	[3]
II.	On the Road in France and Switzerland	[26]
III.	Tramping in Italy	[43]
IV.	The Borders of the Mediterranean	[64]
V.	A “Beachcomber” in Marseilles	[83]
VI.	The Arab World	[103]
VII.	The Cities of Old	[131]
VIII.	The Wilds of Palestine	[167]
IX.	The Loafer’s Paradise	[188]
X.	The Land of the Nile	[215]
XI.	Stealing a March on the Far East	[237]
XII.	The Realms of Gautama	[251]
XIII.	Sawdust and Tinsel in the Orient	[272]
XIV.	Three Hoboes in India	[289]
XV.	The Ways of the Hindu	[309]
XVI.	The Heart of India	[327]
XVII.	Beyond the Ganges	[354]
XVIII.	The Land of Pagodas	[378]
XIX.	On Foot Across the Malay Peninsula	[410]
XX.	The Jungles of Siam	[444]
XXI.	Wanderings in Japan	[462]
XXII.	Homeward Bound	[483]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Harry A. Franck	[Frontispiece]
	FACING PAGE
A boss cattleman of the Walkerville barns who has crossed the Atlantic scores of times	[6]
Upon arrival in Montreal I put up at the “Stock Yards Hotel” and get a preliminary hair-cut in anticipation	[6]
Women laborers in the linen-mills of Belfast, Ireland	[11]
S. S. Sardinian. “Lamps does a bit of painting above the temporary cattle-pens”	[11]
A baker’s cart of Holland on the morning round	[18]
A public laundry on the Rhine at Mainz, Germany	[18]
Canal-boats laden with lumber from Nièvre entering Paris	[31]
“They are excellently built, the Routes Nationales of France”	[31]
A typical French roadster who has tramped the highways of Europe for thirty years	[34]
The two French miners with whom I tramped in France. Notice shoe-laces carried for sale	[34]
A Venetian pauper on the Rialto bridge	[55]
My gondolier on the Grand Canal	[55]
Going for the water. A village north of Rome	[58]
Italy is one of the most cruelly priest-ridden countries on the globe	[58]
Selling the famous long-horned cattle of Siena outside the walls	[66]
Italian peasants returning from market-day in the communal village	[66]
A factory of red roof-tiles near Naples. The girl works from daylight to dark for sixteen cents	[76]
Italian peasants returning from the vineyards to the village	[76]
My entrance into Paris in the corduroy garb and with the usual amount of baggage of the first months of the trip	[94]
“Tony of the Belt”	[94]
As I appeared during my tramp in Asia Minor. A picture taken by Abdul Razac Bundak, bumboat-man of Beirut	[114]
The lonely, Bedouin-infected road over the Lebanon. “Few corners of the globe offer more utter solitude than Syria and Palestine”	[127]
The Palestine beast of burden loaded with stone	[127]
Damascus. “The street called Straight—which isn’t”	[133]
A wood-turner of Damascus. He watches the ever-passing throng, turning the stick with a bow and a loose string, and holding the chisel with his toes	[133]
The most thickly settled portion of Damascus is the graveyard. A picture taken at risk of mobbing	[140]
Women of Bethlehem going to the Church of the Nativity	[140]
Tyre is now a miserable village connected with the mainland by a wind-blown neck of sand	[149]
Agriculture in Palestine. There is not an ounce of iron about the plow	[149]
On the road between Haifa and Nazareth I meet a road-repair gang, all women but the boss	[156]
On the summit of Jebel es Sihk, back of Nazareth. From left to right: Shukry Nasr, teacher; Elias Awad, cook; and Nehmé Simán, teacher; my hosts in Nazareth	[156]
The shopkeeper and the traveling salesman with whom I spent two nights and a day on the lonely road to Jerusalem. Arabs are very sensitive to cold, except on their feet and ankles	[176]
A high official of Mohammedanism. It being against the teachings of the Koran to have one’s picture taken, master and servant turn away their faces	[176]
The view of Jerusalem from my window in the Jewish hotel	[183]
Sellers of oranges and bread in Jerusalem. Notice Standard Oil can	[183]
The Palestine beast of burden carrying an iron beam to a building in construction	[186]
Jews of Jerusalem in typical costume	[186]
A winged dahabiyeh of the Nile	[190]
Sais or carriage runners of Cairo, clearing the streets for their master	[190]
An Arab gardener on the estate of the American consul of Cairo, for whom I worked two weeks	[197]
Otto Pia, the German beggar-letter writer of Cairo	[197]
An Arab café in Old Cairo	[200]
An abandoned mosque outside the walls of Cairo, and a caravan off for Suez across the desert	[204]
Spinners in the sun outside the walls of Cairo	[211]
Guests of the Asile Rudolph, Cairo. François, champion beggar, in the center, in the cape he wore as part of his “system”	[211]
An Arab market-day at the village of Gizeh	[215]
A woman of Alexandria, Egypt, carrying two bushels of oranges. Even barefooted market-women wear the veil required by the Koran	[216]
On the top of the largest pyramid. From the ground it looks as sharply pointed as the others	[216]
“Along the way shadoofs were ceaselessly dipping up the water that gives life to the fields of Egypt”	[218]
The “Tombs of the Kings” from the top of the Libyan range, to which I climbed above the plain of Thebes	[218]
A water-carrier of Luxor. A goatskin full costs one cent	[222]
The main entrance to the ruins of Karnak	[226]
The Egyptian fellah dwells in a hut of reeds and mud	[231]
Arab passengers on the Nile steamer. Except for their prayers, they scarcely move once a day	[234]
The Greek patriarch whose secretary I became—temporarily	[234]
S. S. Worcestershire of the Bibby Line, on which I stowed away after taking this picture	[239]
Oriental travelers at Port Saïd	[239]
An outrigger canoe and an outdoor laundry in Colombo, Ceylon	[252]
Road-repairers of Ceylon. Highway between Colombo and Kandy	[252]
Singhalese ladies wear only a skirt and a short waist, between which several inches of brown skin are visible	[263]
A Singhalese woman rarely misses an opportunity to give her children a bath	[263]
The woman who sold me the bananas	[264]
The thatch roof at the roadside, under which I slept on the second night of my tramp to Kandy	[264]
Singhalese infants are very sturdy during the first years	[266]
The yogi who ate twenty-eight of the bananas at a sitting	[266]
Central Ceylon. Making roof-tiles. The sun is the only kiln	[268]
The priests of the “Temple of the Tooth” in Kandy, who were my guides during my stay in the city	[268]
The rickshaw men of Colombo	[274]
American wanderers who slept in the Gordon Gardens of Colombo. Left to right: Arnold, ex-New York ward heeler; myself; “Dick Haywood”; an English lad; and Marten of Tacoma, Washington	[274]
The trick elephant of Fitzgerald’s circus and a high-caste Singhalese with circle-comb	[287]
John Askins, M.A., who had been “on the road” in the Orient twenty years	[287]
A Hindu of Madras with caste-mark, of cow-dung and coloring-matter, on his forehead	[295]
Hindus of all castes now travel by train	[298]
“Haywood” snaps me as I am getting a shave in Trichinopoly	[298]
The Hindu affects many strange coiffures. Natives of Madras	[305]
A Hindu basket-weaver of Madras	[305]
The great road of Puri, over which the massive Juggernaut car is drawn once a year	[320]
The main entrance to Juggernaut’s temple in Puri. I was mobbed for stepping on the flagging around the column	[322]
“Suttee” having been forbidden by their English rulers, Hindu widows must now shave their heads, dress in white, and gain their livelihood as best they can	[324]
A seller of the wood with which the bodies of Hindus are burned on the banks of the Ganges. Very despised caste	[324]
Bankipur’s chief object of interest is a vast granary built in the time of the American Revolution to keep grain for times of famine. From its top the traveler catches his first glimpse of the Ganges	[338]
Women of Delhi near gate forced during the Sepoy rebellion. One carries water in a Standard Oil can, another a basket of dung-cakes	[338]
One of the many flights of steps leading down to the bathing-ghats and funeral pyres of Benares	[341]
The Taj Mahal, Agra, India	[348]
A market-day in Delhi, India. Many castes of Hindus and Mohammedans are represented	[351]
The Hindu street-sprinkler does not lay much dust	[351]
A lady of quality of Delhi out for a drive	[352]
Hindu women drinking cocoanut-milk	[352]
Bungalows along the way in rural Burma	[380]
Women of the Malay Peninsula wear nothing above the waist-line and not much below it	[380]
A Laos carrier crossing the stream that separates Burma from Siam	[433]
The sort of jungle through which we cut our way for three weeks. Gerald James, my Australian companion, in the foreground	[440]
“An elephant, with a mahout dozing on his head, was advancing toward us”	[448]
Myself after four days in the jungle, and the Siamese soldiers with whom we fell in now and then between Myáwadi and Rehang. I had sold my helmet	[448]
Bangkok is a city of many canals	[450]
A swimming-school of Japan, teachers on the bank, novices near the shore, and advanced students, in white head-dress, well out in the pool	[464]
Women do most of the work in the rice-fields of Japan	[464]
Horses are rare in Japan. Men and baggage are drawn by coolies	[467]
Japanese children playing in the streets of Kioto	[467]
A Japanese lady	[472]
Japanese canal-boats and coolies of Kioto	[478]
The castle of Nagoya, in which many Russian prisoners were kept	[480]
Laying out fish to dry along the river in Tokio. Japan lives principally on fish and rice	[480]
An employee of the Tokio-Yokohama interurban, and some street urchins	[483]
Fishermen along the bay on my tramp from Tokio to Yokohama	[483]
The Russian consulate of Yokohama, in which we “beachcombers” slept	[488]
Japanese types in a temple inclosure	[488]
A Yokohama street decorated for the Taft party. The display is entirely private and shows the general good will of the Japanese toward the United States	[494]