playing hymns in the halls. Soon after I went on deck, land appeared,
the first we have seen in four days, and we remained in sight of
it all day. Between us and land a ship was steaming southward, and
a school of porpoises also appeared, disturbing the sea for miles.
They were as lazy as the natives, and jumped in a leisurely, slow
way that amused us. About noon, Cape Guardafui appeared. Guardafui
is the most eastern extremity of the African continent, and when we
rounded it about noon, we were in the Arabian sea, and the ship’s
prow was pointing toward home: due west. The rocky point around which
we turned to enter the Arabian Sea, bears a striking resemblance to
a huge crouching lion, when viewed from a distance. We passed quite
near the shore, but saw no signs of life: nothing but a desolate
waste of sand and rock.... After rounding Guardafui, we were in
the Gulf of Aden, which looks small on the map, but we shall steam on
its surface thirty hours, out of sight of land, before reaching Aden
and the entrance to the Red Sea. We are now in that section referred
to by Kipling as “East of Suez:” land of poor crops, poverty and
misery. A few days’ sail to the east from Guardafui, and the traveler
reaches India, where ignorance is worshipped as mystery, and where
men of the tenth or hundredth generation know no more than did their
fathers.... Africa is larger than North America; it is almost as
large as the American continent, and is controlled by such enlightened
natives as England, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Portugal, yet
from one end of the country to the other there is no such thing as a
public school for the natives. Indeed, I have heard many Englishmen
openly declare that education is the ruination of the native. I don’t
dispute the statement; I only call attention to two different ideas
of the importance of education. In the Philippine Islands, in Guam,
in Porto Rico, in Honolulu, in Cuba, we are insisting upon education
as the solution of the native problem; over here, the powers insist
that education only makes the native problem worse. At home, we are
called upon to contribute money with which to send missionaries to
the heathen. Over here, where the heathen lives, the whites almost
universally say that the missionary causes useless trouble. I am
not trying to settle the question, or argue it: I am merely calling
attention to a queer phase of it.... A gentleman told me today
that in Portuguese East Africa, where he lives, there is a Catholic
mission in charge of French priests. In the chapel, there are huge
oil paintings showing pictures of hell. The devil is represented as
a negro. In one picture, a native is dying, and hundreds of fiends
surround his bed, waiting until life is extinct, that they may torture
him. There is education of this sort in Africa, but no school-house
for the natives.... Religious services were held in the dining-room
at five o’clock this afternoon, conducted by a German. The full band
was used instead of an organ; the preacher would line a hymn, and then
those present would sing it, accompanied by the band.... The ship’s
library contains books printed in German, English, French, Portuguese,
and Dutch, which will give you an idea of the different nationalities
patronizing this line.
MONDAY, APRIL 21.—At 9 o’clock this evening we came to Aden, in Arabia,
said to be the hottest town in the world. Every drop of water used
there is condensed from the sea, although there is a white population
of two thousand, including English soldiers, and an Arab population
of forty thousand. There is a tradition that rain fell at Aden three
years ago, and that every roof in town leaked, but previous to that
time no rain had fallen in the town or its vicinity for many years;
many of its elderly citizens had never seen a rain-storm, and looked
with wonder upon the one which fell three years ago. Aden is located
on a rock seventeen hundred feet high, and this rock may be seen far
out at sea. The town is an important coaling station, and the English
have tremendous fortifications—almost equal to Gibraltar—in the rocks.
The harbor is a large one, and almost land-locked, and we thought
the place a very pretty one, by moonlight. Although Aden has such a
bad reputation for hot weather, the evening was delightfully cool.
We were not permitted to land, owing to the plague, but our ship was
promptly surrounded by Arabs in boats, who bartered with the passengers
until after midnight. The Arabs had ostrich feathers, cigarettes,
post-cards, and dozens of other articles to sell, and these they sent
up the ship’s side in baskets, for the inspection of the passengers.
If the passengers were interested in the goods offered, they asked
the price, said it was too much, and offered half; then the dealer
became excited, and screamed back that he wouldn’t take it, although
he often did. There were dozens of these boats, and the uproar was so
incessant that sleep was impossible. The ostrich feathers offered
were poor, and those who bought, even at greatly reduced prices, were
probably worsted.... The old town of Aden dates back to the days of
Tyre and Sidon, and was a celebrated commercial centre long before our
Christian era; for many centuries it has been a fortified town because
of its strategetical position. From the eleventh to the thirteenth
centuries it did an enormous trade with China, India and Egypt, and
its market was the clearing-house of that day for the treasures of
the East. For tens of centuries, Aden has been the cockpit of fierce
fights for ascendency amongst the Arabs, Abyssinians, Persians, Turks,
and Egyptians.... A gentleman who lives at Aden says he pays $20 a
month for water, which is delivered at his door in tank-wagons drawn by
camels. Some of the numerous shops in Aden sell nothing but condensed
and bottled water, and the price in quantity is usually a dollar per
hundred gallons.... Many years ago, great tanks were built at Aden,
to catch the precious rainfall, but these have not been in use for many
years, although tourists usually visit them.... Aden is a great
camel market, and much of the famous Mocha coffee is shipped from
this point. There is just one industry in the town: the manufacture
of cigarettes, which is in the hands of Greeks, and who bring their
tobacco duty-free from Turkey and Egypt. The walls of the houses are
built of a cheap concrete, and plastered.... A third-class passenger
on the “Burgermeister” is a little German girl, five years old,
traveling alone. She was brought on board at Dar-es-Salaam, to be taken
back to Germany. Her mother died three days before, and her father was
somewhere in the interior, trying to make a fortune. The little girl’s
mother arrived in Dar-es-Salaam only a week before her death. Now the
child is very ill, and it is not believed she will live to reach her
friends in Germany. The women passengers are doing all they can for the
child, but she cries almost constantly for her mother, and not much can
be done for her.
TUESDAY, APRIL 22.—This morning at 11 o’clock we entered the Red Sea,
through the Straits of Bab el Mandeb. The straits are about ten miles
wide, and are made narrower at the entrance to the Red Sea by Perim
Island, which the English have fortified. On our right, Asia; on the
left, Africa,—two continents in sight. The Red Sea is a great highway
for ships since the completion of the Suez Canal; ships for India,
China, Japan, Ceylon, Australia and Africa now pass this way. From 7
o’clock this morning until 3 P. M. we passed fourteen ships: six were
in sight at one time. Most of them passed us so closely that we could
read their names.... All over the world, you hear how terribly hot
and disagreeable a passage through the Red Sea is. I have been through
it twice, and both voyages were cool and pleasant. Ask anyone who
has been through the Red Sea, and he will tell you he had a pleasant
voyage, but those who have not made the trip, say it is dreadful. If
you have a head-wind, they say, the voyage is endurable, but if you
have a following wind,—well, passengers can’t stand it, and beg the
captain to run the other way for a time, and give them some relief.
We have a following wind today,—that is, the smoke from our funnels
is ahead of us,—but we find the weather more agreeable than it was at
Beira, or other points on the east coast of Africa.... We are rarely
out of sight of land, and this afternoon we passed the Arabian town of
Mokka. We spell it Mocha, and famous coffee comes from its vicinity.
Mocha coffee is like the Blue Point oyster; it is very rare, and there
are many imitations. The town of Mocha has no harbor, and ships rarely
call there, so the little coffee it produces is sent to Aden. Further
up the coast is the town of Jiddah. It is from this place that pilgrims
start for Mecca, sacred city of the Mohammedans. Only one white man
has ever visited Mecca, as white people are not allowed in the place.
This man, an English officer named Burton, disguised himself as an
Arab physician. He spent several years in familiarizing himself with
the Mohammedan religion and the Arab language. After his preparations
were complete, he shipped as a deck passenger at Suez and successfully
deceived the dozens of real Arabs and Mohammedans with whom he was
intimately associated. The pilgrims to Mecca from Jiddah are cruelly
robbed by the Arabs through whose country they must pass, and the party
Burton traveled with had one pitched battle with the thieves. Burton
wrote a book telling of his experiences, and I know of nothing more
interesting in the way of adventure. A railroad is now being built to
Mecca, if it has not been actually completed, and Jiddah will lose
much of its former importance. War and slavery are common in most of
the Arab towns along the Red Sea, and it is dangerous for ships to
send parties ashore, unless heavily armed. During the hot, dry season,
many of these towns are entirely deserted; the inhabitants go into the
mountains, and remain there until the weather becomes endurable. The
Red Sea has a shore-line of more than three thousand miles, yet the
country surrounding it is so worthless that there is almost no town of
importance on its shores, and no river runs into it. There is no rain
in the vicinity of the Red Sea, and it loses eight feet every year
from evaporation, which must be made up from other seas where there is
more rain and less heat.... You hear a great deal of the “Mysticism
of the East.” This mysticism is as foolish as the doggerel used by
children when they count the buttons on your coat: “Rich man, poor man,
beggar man, thief; doctor lawyer, merchant chief,” etc. Mysticism never
means anything. The West solves riddles, and discovers how to produce
a hundred bushels of corn per acre: the East pays great attention to
Mysticism, and has more poor, dirty and ignorant people than any other
part of the world. When the plague breaks out in the East, as a result
of foolish pilgrimages to Mecca or Benares, the pilgrims say the plague
is a part of the Mysticism of the East, and continue to drink holy
and dirty water. But the men of the West have a better doctrine: its
chief tenet is, “Clean Up,” and the plague disappears before it....
All our deck passengers left us at Aden. Men who spend half their
time saying their prayers do not flourish in the great world west of
Suez.... The passengers spend a good deal of their time in reading.
I often hear them talking of the books they are reading. “How do you
like it?” one will ask. “Oh,” the other will reply, “it serves to kill
time, but is rather foolish.” What queer things you find in books! And
how much alike many of the famous ones are. “Adam Bede,” “The Manxman,”
and “The Scarlet Letter,” were all written around an “idea” that is
unnatural, unclean and absurd.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23.—We are in a wider part of the Red Sea today, and
are not meeting so many ships; the few we have seen have been far away.
Yesterday we were in a part of the sea almost as narrow as a river, and
we could not avoid meeting all passing vessels. At one time last night
so many brilliantly lighted ships were in sight that we were reminded
of a night parade of electrical features at a celebration.... We
have had a strong head-wind all day which travelers pray for in the
Red Sea, and toward evening the “Burgermeister” acquired considerable
motion.... The English passengers on board organized a Sports
Committee this morning, and are now busily engaged in arranging
for such elevating sports as “In a Pig’s Eye,” “Are You There?”
potato-races for women, etc. The traveling Englishman has lately
gone crazy about ship sports; he is like a Methodist who believes in
sanctification by baptism: he will talk of nothing else, and insists
on arguing the question with you. In England, only cheap people at
country fairs engage in such sports, but on English ships, dukes and
princes are expected to take part, for the honor of Old England. The
German passengers are not enlisting for the sports, but the English
urge them to take part to the point of annoyance.... I have heard
none of the passengers mention the fact that the water in the Red Sea
is not red; the fact that the water in the Red Sea is blue, now seems
to be generally known.... A passenger in the third-class is very
ill, and the ship doctor, and a German military doctor who volunteered
his services, decided that the man has malaria of the head. Malaria
is so common in the tropics that now they have it in the head....
A peculiar thing about the “Burgermeister” is that several of the
gentlemen passengers wear white socks. Somewhere on this trip I met a
man who was irritable because his white socks attracted attention. He
should be on the “Burgermeister,” where they are quite common....
I heard a woman make a remarkable statement last night. She said: “I
have been traveling four months, and have not seen a single married man
attempt to flirt; all the flirting I have seen has been done by married
women with young men.” I submit the statement as unusual, without
comment.... The dance last night was a failure; the orchestra played
several numbers which did not attract any dancers at all, and only
five couples danced during the entire evening. All the women dancers
were married, and their husbands sat around and frowned at the young
fellows who were dancing with them. There is nothing in the notion that
husbands want their wives to be very popular with other men....
During the concert this evening, the tall negro man nurse who has
whiskers, appeared with a bottle of milk, and submitted it to the
inspection of his employer. The woman smelt and then tasted the milk;
it seemed satisfactory, for she gave it back to the tall Kaffir, and he
disappeared, probably to feed his charge.
THURSDAY, APRIL 24.—I awoke early this morning because of a strange and
unusual sensation. I feared I might be catching the fever, or plague,
but later discovered I was cold. A chilly head-wind was blowing, and
this in the Red Sea, which rumor says is as hot as a furnace! The
passengers went about wearing overcoats all day. At 2:30 P. M. we
passed out of the tropics.... For two days we have been in that part
of the Red Sea which is two hundred miles wide, and have not seen many
ships; but tonight we were in a narrow part, and four ships were in
sight at one time. All of them were small; there are many ships in the
east, but no very big ones. If one of the big ships of the Atlantic
should appear at Bombay or Colombo, people would travel hundreds of
miles to see it.... The general impression in America is that an
English lord is an effeminate little man who only knows enough to
carry an eyeglass in one eye. As a matter of fact, some of them seem
to be quite useful and manly. Lord Delamere is one of the conspicuous
figures in the development of British East Africa, and has done much
for that country. In addition, he is the world’s greatest lion-hunter.
Up to 1911, he had killed seventy lions, single-handed. Of the first
forty-nine he shot, not one escaped. No other lion-hunter has a record
half as good as Lord Delamere.
[Illustration: Street-Car in East Africa
Ricksha Boy, South Africa
Car to Kimberley Diamond Mines
Bullock Teams, Victoria Falls
Transport Wagons, Rhodesia]
Another useful man in Africa is Lord Carnworth, who is an extensive
farmer, as is Lord Delamere. Both these men engage in expensive
agricultural experiments for the general good. Lord Carnworth lately
wrote a book entitled, “A Colony in the Making.” It displays a
wonderful knowledge of British East Africa. Among other things, he
says the American hunters who come here are game hogs, and places Mr.
Roosevelt in that class. He also speaks jestingly of the dangers of
hunting in Africa. The terrible rhino, which in books is never content
unless he has a hunter impaled on his single terrible horn, is not
thought to be dangerous by hunters who live in this country.... In
his book, Lord Carnworth discusses the native labor question quite
frankly. He says what practically all the whites here say: that the
missionaries are doing no good—that their converts are worse than the
unconverted negroes. I quote his exact language:
“Inevitably but unfortunately the mission-educated native does not bear
a good name, either among his fellow natives or among Europeans. It is,
alas, a very generally accepted fact that one should beware of mission
servants, who almost invariably lie, drink and steal.”
Speaking of Roosevelt reminds me that in German East Africa I saw
his hunting book, translated into German, on sale at the bookstores.
Everyone knows of him, and around Mombasa all the natives say with
pride that they saw him. There are dozens of big-game hunters on this
boat; most of them know men who were with Roosevelt, and one of them
was in Roosevelt’s party for a time. They all say Roosevelt was very
popular in Africa, but that Kermit, his son, was cordially despised.
Roosevelt himself, they say, is a thorough sportsman, and a man of
undoubted courage. He is not considered a particularly good shot, but
they say he is the luckiest hunter who ever handled a gun. Besides,
everything was specially arranged for his hunt. Not only all the white
residents, but all the native chiefs, did what they could to locate
game for him; he did not have the trouble of the usual hunter. It is
further said over here that Roosevelt was a great talker, and that
he would quit hunting any time to tell about his well-known theories
for bettering humanity.... It is also agreed that hunters are very
unpopular among the actual residents of Africa; not that the residents
object to the game being killed, but every hunter requires a large
number of natives for his outfit, and these are drawn mainly from the
farms, where labor is scarce, and badly needed. There are millions of
native men able to work, but most of them won’t work. In the native
settlements, the hard labor is mainly performed by the women, children,
and old men; the stalwart fellows who would do the work in a civilized
community, strut about covered with grease, looking for fights with
other tribes. The whites say these idlers should be made to work; that
it is better that they work for a shilling a day than spend their time
in idleness and mischief, and I would not be surprised to hear that the
British have adopted a Vagrancy Act to reach the loafers.
FRIDAY, APRIL 25.—One of the passengers plays the piano a good
deal, and plays it well, and I have just learned that he is a noted
lion-hunter. That is the funniest combination I have ever heard of; a
piano-player who is a lion-hunter.... There is on board a captain
in the British army, and a captain in the German army. You would think
they would affiliate, but they do not; on the contrary, they glare
at each other. The German captain wears his uniform a good deal, and
as the British captain does not, I am satisfied that he thinks the
German is lacking in taste.... Among the passengers are two elderly
men married to young wives; Germans who occupy official positions of
some kind in German East Africa. They are the most loving couples on
board; the old husbands always have their arms about their wives when
on deck. If there is any one thing particularly fitted for privacy, it
is love. I think the old gentlemen believe that the other passengers
talk about them—and they do—and want to show them that their young
wives are satisfied.... We have been having Sports today, the
English gentlemen having had their way.... Every little while two
men dash by with their legs tied together. They are practicing for the
three-legged race, and have already run over two babies and one negro
boy nurse. In the Ladies’ Potato Race, two women fell headlong, and the
exhibition of dry goods was as indelicate as that seen in a dry-goods
window to show new spring underwear. There is something wrong with
every woman’s figure, and a potato-race brings out the irregularities.
SATURDAY, APRIL 26.—We reached Suez at 1:30 this afternoon, after a
chilly ride through the narrow end of the Red Sea, which is known as
the Gulf of Suez. All morning, land was in sight on both sides, and
lighthouses on lonely islands were frequent. At 3 o’clock this morning
we passed Mount Sinai. I have asked about half the passengers what
happened on Mount Sinai to make it famous, and they don’t know....
Three hours before reaching Suez we saw a steamship that had gone
ashore during the night. Another vessel was assisting it, and we did
not stop.... We had a long wait at Suez before being admitted to
the canal. The port doctor, a woman, amused us by coming on board,
and marshaling us in the music-room for inspection. As our names
were called, we walked past the doctor, and she looked at us in a
manner intended to be searching. I was called out as “Herr Howe,”
while Adelaide answered to “Fraulein Howe.”... We had a scheme to
go to Cairo by special train from Suez, and rejoin the ship at Port
Said, but the authorities would not let us land, owing to our taking
on a dozen or more Arab firemen at Aden, where there is plague. But
dozens of Egyptians surrounded the ship, in little boats, and offered
us all sorts of articles, which they sent up for our inspection in
baskets. One ship went into the canal ahead of us, having been waiting
longer, and a dozen or more boats came out carrying mud from the canal
dredgers. Finally a launch appeared, bringing the long-expected pilot,
and at 5:30 P. M. we steamed slowly into the canal, passing within a
few hundred feet of the main streets of Suez. In an hour, we passed
two freight steamers, and they gave us right of way, as ours is a
mail-boat.... The Suez Canal, as everyone knows, runs through the
Egyptian desert, and the desolation on the Arabian side interested me
greatly. The canal requires so many workmen that it is fringed with
residences of one sort and another; some are boat-houses, some are
huts, and some are sightly stations. And every quarter of a mile there
seems to be a dredge, to keep the channel the required depth. Every
foot of the canal, on both sides, is being lined with stone, and for
this work a great many Egyptian laborers are required.... On the
Egyptian side there is a fresh-water canal, supplied from the Nile,
and this is used to irrigate a considerable stretch of country. With
a glass, we could see a good many typical Egyptian farm-houses, and
Egyptian agricultural life in various stages; but on the Arabian side,
there was the lonely desert you have seen in pictures and read about.
At one place we saw a caravan of camels in camp for the night: the
drivers in one group, and the camels in another. At another place we
saw a jackal among the little hills composed of dirt from the canal.
The animal was gaunt and ugly, and looked at the ship indifferently.
There was a great deal to see, but the sun was declining rapidly, and
at 7:30, when we left the deck and went down to dinner, we could see
nothing fifty feet beyond the lighted decks.... There was to be a
dance after dinner, beginning at 9 o’clock, but the night was cold, and
before that hour the travelers from Kansas went to bed; just as the
ship entered one of the lakes which form thirty miles of the canal. In
this lake we steamed at full speed, whereas in the canal proper we
had been running at five miles an hour. At Suez, we took on a special
lighting apparatus; not a headlight, but a searchlight. This was
attached to our prow, and lighted our way.... The engineer of the
“Burgermeister,” a fat German we all admire, sat on deck while we were
passing through the canal, reading a newspaper. I asked him how often
he had been through, and he guessed that he had made the trip seventy
times. His ship makes four trips a year around Africa.