I
A year or two ago a lively book was published called _The Happy
Traveller_. It is not an indispensable work if you have booked your
passage, or are on a ship’s articles, for only Providence can help you
then, yet it is a cheerful guide if you would know what long journeys
are like, in parts, without making them. Its author, the Rev. Frank
Tatchell, proves he has seen enough of the world to satisfy a crew
of able seamen. He has seen it from the byroads, the highroads, the
decks of local trading ships, and the windows of third-class railway
carriages. He has seen it because, apparently, he wanted to; and he
has enjoyed it all, or most of it. He has some heroic advice for those
whom he judges may be infected by his own enthusiasm, and indeed his
book would induce many young men to pull on their boots forthwith:
“Be cheerful and interested in everything,” he tells us; and, “Do not
bother too much about your inside.”
But what I sought in his volume was not the Malay for Thank you--which
he gave me--but what set him going. Why did he do it? There is a
word, frequently seen in glossy narrative, “Wanderlust.” The very
lemmings must know it. It excuses almost anything in the way of
travel lunacy, even to herding with Russian emigrants for fun. It
is used as a flourish by those who hope we will fail to notice that
they are uncertain what to do with themselves. Mr. Tatchell, however,
does not use it once. Yet you see him hustling through the bazaar at
Bhamo, where you do not meet many tourists; and he discovers that the
half-castes of the Society Isles are especially charming, though he
does not pretend that it is worth while voyaging to the South Seas to
confirm that; or he peeps into the Malayan forest long enough to note
“myriads of leeches in all directions humping and hastening towards the
traveller.” He certainly saw those leeches. He saw them _hump_. But
why did he foregather with them, and go to smell Bhamo? For out of so
varied an experience he returns but to assure romantic youth sitting
on the bollards of our quays and gazing seaward wistfully, “Elephants
dislike having white men approach them from behind.” Or of this: “If
you should become infested with fleas, sleep out on a bed of bracken
one night, and in the morning you will be free from the pests.”
Such fruits of travel seem hardly enough. Mr. Tatchell himself was
decidedly a happy traveller, and the cause of happiness in others--his
book can be commended in confidence--for he admits that his method of
enjoying himself in a strange bed is to sing aloud the aria, “Why do
the Nations?” But he does not tell us what sent him roving, nor does
he produce any collection of treasures, except oddities such as the
warning to white men about approaching the behinds of elephants, and
Vinakka vinnakka! (Fijian for Bravo.)
Perhaps those little curiosities are enough. We are pleased to hear
of them. What else was there to get? It would be very hard for most
voyagers to explain convincingly why they became restless, and went to
sea. Some do it to get away from us, some to get away from themselves,
and some because they cannot help it. I shall not forget the silliness
which gave me my first sight of Africa. The office telephone rang.
“Oh, is that you? Well, we want you to go to Algeria at once.” I went
downstairs hurriedly to disperse this absurdity. But it was no good. I
had to go. And because I was argumentative about it they added Tripoli
and Sicily, which served me right. After all, while in Africa, one is
necessarily absent from Fleet Street. I should have remembered that.
Mr. Tatchell tells us that even a poor man, if he does not leave it
till he is in bondage to the income-tax collector or the Poor Law
officials, may see all the world. I suppose he may. With sufficient
health, enterprise, and impudence, a young fellow could inveigle
himself overseas without paying a lot of money to the P. & O. Company;
though it wants some doing nowadays, under the present rules of the
Mercantile Marine Board and the seafarers’ unions. Shipowners do not
lightly engage to pay compensation for accidents to inexperienced hands
whose sole recommendation is that they want to see the world so wide.
As for getting a berth for the voyage cheaply, it would be foolish to
suppose that agents for passenger ships are willing to forgive the fact
that you are poor, and will shake Cornucopia about freely. Why should
they? You have to pay across the counter in exchange for a ticket, and
at the post-war rates. If anyone doubts that this is a hard world, let
him cut the painter at Port Said, with a shilling in his pocket, and
note what will happen. In some difficult regions you must travel on
foot with the natives, and live with them; and that costs very little,
even in a land otherwise expensive, but those unsophisticated coasts
must first be reached. That simple way of a nomad is all very well in
the wilderness, but I think any reasonable man, however thirsty he may
be for a draught of primitive Life, would hesitate before sequestering
himself in native cities like Calcutta and Singapore, counting cannily
the lesser coins, and traveling about in third-class carriages. I
noticed that even Mr. Tatchell shrank from the prospect of getting
from island to island of Indonesia with the deck passengers. I am not
surprised. One is easily satisfied with an occasional hour on the lower
deck, in converse with a picturesque native elder. But to eat and sleep
there for weeks, among the crowing cocks, the banana skins, the babies,
the dried fish, and men and women spitting red stuff after chewing
betel nut! It has been done, I believe, but the shipping companies and
all their officers set their faces against it. They do not encourage
Europeans to travel even second class in those seas, though there is
hardly any difference between the cabins of the two classes. Of course,
if one were anything of an Orientalist, it would be ridiculous to keep
to the first saloon with the Europeans when there were Arab and Chinese
merchants in an inferior saloon of the ship.
I do not know how one plans a long voyage, and maintains the excellent
plan scientifically through all its difficulties. I have never done any
planning. A ship seems to have drifted my way at last by chance, and
then, if I did not hesitate too long about it, I went in her, though
always for a reason very inadequate. One bitter and northerly Easter I
read, because gardening was impossible, Bates’ “Naturalist on the River
Amazons.” The famous illustration of that spectacled entomologist in
trousers and a check shirt, standing with an insect net in a tropical
forest surrounded by infuriated toucans, fixed me when casually I
pulled the volume off a library shelf. The book had not been specially
commended to me, but its effect was instant. And the picture that
artful naturalist drew of the pleasures of Santa Belem de Para, when
contrasted with the sleet of an English spring, made me pensive over a
fire. I had never seen the tropics. And what a name it is, the Amazons!
And what a delightful book is Bates’!
Yet when I enquired into this enticement, Para might as well have been
in another star. One may go cheaply to Canada, and risk it. That trick
cannot be played on the tropics with impunity. I had the propriety to
guess that. Then, one night, a sailor came home from sea, and just
before he left he spoke of his next voyage. They were going to Para,
and up the Amazon; and up a tributary of that river never before
navigated by an ocean-going steamer. “Nonsense,” I said, “it cannot be
done--not if you draw, as you say you do, nearly twenty-four feet. And
it means rising about six hundred feet above sea level.”
“You can talk,” the sailor replied, “but I’ve seen the charter. We’re
going, and I wish we weren’t. Sure to be fevers. Besides, a ship has no
right inside a continent.”
I began thinking of Bates. My friend turned up the collar of his coat
before going into the rain. “Look here,” he said, “if you have any
doubt about it, you may take the trip. There’s a cabin we don’t use.”
I never gave that preposterous suggestion a second thought, but I did
write, for a lively morning newspaper, my sailor’s mocking summary
of what that strange voyage might have in store. The editor, a day
later, met me on the office stairs. “That was an amusing lie of yours
this morning,” he said. I answered him that it was written solely
in the cause of science and navigation. What was more, I assured
him earnestly, I had been offered a berth on the ship for the proof
of doubters. “Well,” said the editor, “you shall go and prove it.”
He meant that. I could see by the challenging look in his eye that
nothing much was left about which to argue. He prided himself on his
swift and unreasonable decisions.
Somehow, as that editor descended the stairs, showing me the finality
of his back, the attractive old naturalist of the Amazon with his palms
at Para, toucans, spectacles, butterflies, and everlasting afternoon of
tranquillity in the forest of the tropics, was the less alluring. This
meant packing up; and for what? Even the master of the steamer could
not tell me that.
It is better to obey the mysterious index, without any fuss, when it
points a new road, however strange that road may be. There is probably
as much reason for it, if the truth were known, as for anything else.
It would be absurd, in the manner of Browning and Mr. Tatchell,
to greet the unseen with a cheer, and thus flatter it, yet when
circumstances begin to look as though they intend something different
for us, perhaps the proper thing to do is to get into accord with them,
to see what will happen.
There was no doubt about that voyage, either. I take this opportunity
to thank an autocratic editor for his cruel decision one morning on
the office stairs, a trivial episode he has completely forgotten. It
is worth the break, and the discomfort of a winter dock, and the
drive out in the face of hard westerly weather, to come up a ship’s
companion one morning, and to see for the first time the glow of
sunrise above the palisade of the jungle. You never forget the warm
smell of it, and its light; though that simple wonder might not be
thought worth a hard fight with gales in the western ocean. Yet later,
when by every reasonable estimate of a visitor accustomed to the
assumption of man’s control of nature the forest should have ended, yet
continues as though it were eternal--savage, flamboyant, yet silent and
desolate--the voyager begins to feel vaguely uneasy. He cannot meet
that lofty and sombre regard with the cheerful curiosity of the early
part of the voyage. He feels lost. St. Paul’s cathedral does not seem
so influential as once it did, nor man so important. And perhaps it
is not an unhealthful surmise either that man may be only a slightly
disturbing episode on earth after all, and had better look out; a
hindering and humbling notion of that sort would have done him no harm,
if of late years it had given him pause.
[Illustration:
_To see the glow of sunrise above the palisade of
the jungle._
]
Well, something of that sort is about as much as one should expect to
get out of the experience, that and the ability to call for a porter in
Fijian or Chinese. But is it not sufficient? It is hardly as tangible
as hearing earlier than the people at home of the wealth of oil at
Balik-papan, or what comes of getting in at the Rand on the ground
floor. Even as book material it is not so sparkling as Lady Hester
Stanhope, or as exciting as sword-fish angling off the Bermudas. Nor
does it provide any inspiration, once you are home again, to get to
work to plant the British flag where it will do the lucky ones most
good. There seems hardly anything in it, and yet you feel that you
could not have done any better, and are not sorry it turned out just so.
Besides, there were the men one met. It would not be easy to analyse
the impulse which sent one travelling, an impulse strong enough, if
vague, to overcome one’s natural desire to be let alone. What did
one want, or expect to learn? It would be hard to say. But you are
aware, in rare moments, that you have got something almost as good
as a word about a new oil-field, through some chance converse with a
stranger, about nothing in particular. For it might have been night in
the Malacca Strait, with little to give reasonable conviction of the
realities except the stars, the tremor of the ship’s rail, and the glow
of a shipmate’s cigar; and the other man might not have said much. You
had previously noticed he was not that kind. But his casual relation
of an obscure adventure--rather as if the droning of the waters had
become a significant utterance--gave an abiding content to the shadows.