It has been said that tourists need only go part of the way up the mountain to obtain a certificate of having made the entire ascent, provided they pay for the complete course. It is doubtful if this is the case; not that the guides would be unwilling to oblige a patron, but because the summit is in full view of the village of Chamouny, and parties who make the ascent are watched through powerful telescopes by loungers on the verandas of the hotels.
CHAPTER XXI.
TRAVELING WITHOUT MONEY.
Anyone can travel who has time and money at his disposal, but it requires genius, or its first cousin, improvidence, to travel without it. One who is not a genius, but who possesses common-sense and prudent habits may see a great deal of the world for a very little cash. Bayard Taylor made the tour of Europe in his younger days for less than five hundred dollars, and devoted more than a year to the journey; how he did it is told in his volume entitled "Views Afoot." He has had many imitators, and some of them have traveled for less than he did; of this class was Ralph Keeler, who claimed to have seen Europe for less than two hundred dollars, but he went through many hardships that the majority of men would decline to undergo.
In the fall of 1880 an account was published of a printer who made a tour around the world in four years, and had only fifty dollars in his pocket when he started. According to his story, he left San Francisco in 1876 as steward of a sailing-ship, which he quitted at Honolulu for work in a newspaper office there. After setting type for a month he arranged to take care of some horses that were being shipped to Melbourne, and in this way he reached Australia. He remained in that country nearly a year, tramping through it, and occasionally working at his trade. He shipped on a coasting-vessel as a sailor in the fall of 1877, was wrecked on a reef, and picked up by a ship that carried him to Suez. Through Egypt and the Holy Land he went as servant to travelers, and as a vagrant, and in this way managed to get to Constantinople, and thence up the Danube to Vienna. From Vienna he walked northward to the shores of the Baltic, where he again became a sailor during the summer of 1878. In the fall of that year he re-crossed Europe, most of the way on foot, till he reached Rome, and from there he proceeded to Spain, and thence to Paris. He was in the French capital till July, 1879, when he had earned money enough to carry him to London, where he remained some weeks, and then sailed for Charleston, S.C. From Charleston he walked through most of the coast States, and when the account was published he had reached Detroit on his way to San Francisco. When asked if he had experienced any real hard times, he answered:—
"I suppose you would call it hard to go twenty-four hours without food, but I have done that many times and it didn't hurt me, and I have lived for weeks at a time without knowing what a bed was, and without clean clothes, except as I would wash my own shirt and wear my coat buttoned closely while it was drying." He said further that such little conveniences as stockings, collars, cuffs, and handkerchiefs never entered his thoughts.
Not many would care to travel after the manner of this wandering printer, but there is a fair number of Americans who set out to see the world with very little more money than this man had in his pocket at the commencement of his journey. If the annals of the American consulates could be published a great many of us would be surprised to know the number of appeals to the consular pocket for aid. The story usually told at the consulates is that the traveler's remittances have failed to reach him, and he desires a loan for a few days till his letters arrive. They generally do not come, and when the money that was borrowed is gone another appeal is made and with the same excuse. When the consul's patience is exhausted (and also his purse), the adventurer makes a final petition for sufficient money to carry him to the next city, where the same story is told, and the same process goes on. In this way a tourist may live comfortably for a couple of weeks or so in each of the principal cities of Europe, provided he can find the consuls able and willing to "lend" him what he wants.
The foregoing is intended as a hint to the enterprising American who has neither conscience nor money and is desirous of traveling abroad. The best time for him to begin his travels on this plan is just after a change of the presidential administration has caused a sweeping removal in the consular offices and the appointment of a new set of incumbents. A new consul is anxious to be polite and obliging, and will often prove a rich mine to the adventurer, while the old one has become case-hardened in the service, and is sceptical about the stories that the unfortunates tell him, and you should gauge your appeal according to the time a man has filled a consular office. If he is newly-arrived you can make three or four loans of ten dollars or so while waiting for your remittances, and can then borrow more to move on with. If he has been there a year or two you can hardly expect more than a couple of preliminaries, or perhaps only one, and if he has been there three or four years you cannot expect him to do more than pay your second or third-class passage to the next place.
The adventurer who seeks to travel for nothing sometimes claims to be the correspondent of a newspaper, and not unfrequently he writes letters for a daily or weekly journal. If he cannot obtain the loan he wants he revenges himself by writing an abusive letter about the consul who has refused him, and sometimes he gets the latter into trouble. Nine-tenths of the abusive letters about our consuls abroad come from the fellows who try to borrow money and fail. As a general thing the American consuls in Europe and Asia are capable men who render their country good service for inadequate pay; the government gives them no contingent fund from which to make up their losses from loans to swindlers, and all these sums must come out of their own pockets. The evil is so great that there is not a consul who has been a year in the service who does not tremble when a strange American presents himself at the consulate and wishes to see the representative of his country. The chances are three to one that a "loan" is wanted, and the tale that accompanies the application is so pitiful that it would melt the heart of a bronze dog. Some of the consuls require strangers to state their business to the clerk before they can see the chief, but it needs more courage to demand it than is possessed by the majority of American officials.
Some of our representatives abroad have painful recollections of visits from "inspectors of consulates" appointed by the government to make tours of inspection in various parts of the world. Two at least of this gentry made it a practice to ask a loan of fifty dollars of each consul before inspecting his office; if the money was forthcoming the office was speedily examined and found to be in excellent condition, but if the consul was not in a lending mood he was reported to have his books in bad shape, and to be personally unfit for the position he was filling. It is needless to say that the great majority of the consuls saw the point, and imitated the example of Captain Scott's coon by "coming down" before the fire was opened. And no one of them to this day has been repaid a penny of the borrowed money.
Memorandum: If you can add the title of "Inspector of Consulates" to your other accomplishments you will vastly improve your chances of swindling your way around the world. The most of these officials are men of excellent character, and if you try the rôle you must assume the manners of a gentleman, however much you may be devoid of his instincts.