“A wanderer is man from his birth,” and some of us who have done
comparatively little wandering in our own persons, have done our full
share of those less palpable divagations which may be performed within a
very small compass of the earth’s surface, nay even within the radius of
a single garden chair.
The gipsy dies hard in many people, and the dreams which have fluttered
round our youthful fancy flutter round it still, though youth may have
become a memory, and the chances of any serious explorations be reduced
to a scarce perceptible minimum. To be a traveller in the real and
heroic sense is a very great and a very stirring ambition. To have the
hope of wandering far and fruitfully; of bringing home the results of
those wanderings; such a hope and such an aspiration is one of the
biggest things that can be set before a youthful ambition. With a
disregard of probabilities, which, looking back, I can only characterise
as magnificent, such an ambition had I, in early days, set before
myself. To be a traveller on the great scale; a visitor of remote
solitudes, and practically untrodden shores; a discoverer of undescribed
forms; a rifler of Nature’s still unrifled treasure-houses--such was the
hope, and such the happy dream. The words “Unknown to science” floated
in those days before my youthful fancy, and were to it a shibboleth, as
other and more obviously stimulating words have been to other youthful
brains. Fate has not willed that any such resounding lot should be mine,
nor was it, to tell the truth, particularly likely that it should so
will it. To few of our race has it been given to add, by even a little,
to the knowledge of that race, and I am not aware that any portion of my
own equipment had particularly marked me out for this rôle that I had so
confidently assigned to myself.
Luckily we learn to grow down gracefully, as the sedums and the
pennyworts do. A lot that at ten years old seems unendurably pitiful in
its narrowness, at five times that mature age comes to be regarded as
quite a becoming lot, leaving room for plenty of easy self-respect, and
even for a spurt or two of the purest and most invigorating vanity. As
that down-growing process advances we assure ourselves, more and more
confidently, that all the really important, the vital part of such
explorations belongs to us, at least as much as to the explorers
themselves. If we have not thridded Amazonian forests in our own persons
with Mr. Bates, or Nicaraguan jungles with Mr. Belt, we know all that
those indefatigable travellers have seen, done, discovered, experienced,
and only need to take down their books from the shelf to be in the thick
of those experiences once more.
So too, with the rest--the botanists, zoologists,
paleontologists--greater, as well as less great. With the prince of them
all one starts once more upon that immortal _Voyage of the Beagle_,
which, besides circumnavigating the world, enables one to accumulate
those prodigious stores of observation, destined by-and-by to make one’s
own name famous to the world’s end, and to endow that world itself with
one or two practically new departments. With Professor Wallace, one
spends years in the Malay Archipelago, till the geography of even the
obscurer members of that bewildering group becomes rather more familiar
than that of the next parish. With Collingwood one pores over the
rock-pools of Chinese seas, which never before reflected human face, or
at most that of some shore-haunting Mongolian, uninterested in zoology.
With the savants of the _Challenger_ one sets forth, with all the pomp
of subsidised science, upon a three years’ cruise, in search of
Globigerinæ, of blind Decapoda, of Coccospheres, of Rhabdospheres, and
other long-titled occupants of abyssmal depths. And if one has been
tempted to now and then share the dismay felt by the youthful
lieutenant, upon being shown that single teaspoonful of grey slop, as
the result of nights of toil, which kept the whole crew of Her Majesty’s
ship from their bunks, well, one reflected that the wise men probably
knew what they were about, and that the teaspoonful in question could
hardly be an ordinary teaspoonful. Later, hand in hand one has journeyed
with other travellers, some biological, others merely exploratory, or
geographical. With Stanley groped for weeks in African forests, and been
shot at by unpleasant little beasts with hands. With Miss North
travelled far, yet unweariedly, in search of unknown flowering trees,
and other forms of vegetation. With Nansen, until one grew to feel
brittle as any icicle, and occasionally almost as callous as one. With
Mrs. Bishop, across many seas, and scenes; and last of all with Miss
Kingsley, the only one of these illustrious travellers in whose company
I have always felt entirely secure, sure that no dangerous animal--lion,
rattlesnake, cobra, shiny tattooed warrior, German trader, or the
like--would dare molest me while under her ægis.[A]
[A] Written in September, 1899. Alas!
Yes, I have been a great explorer. The earth, and its multifarious
contents has lain below my feet, as the Pacific was believed by Keats to
have lain below those of Cortez, and if now and then I have been
troubled by a passing doubt, a “wild surmise” as to whether all these
places really have been seen by my own eyes, I have made haste to put
that misgiving aside, as His Majesty King George the Fourth was no doubt
in the habit of doing, whenever similar misgivings as to the heroic part
played by himself at the Battle of Waterloo crossed the royal mind.
To have been so far, and to have seen so much is good, but to have
retained a lowly spirit with it all is even better. To be able, with
Alphonse Karr, to set forth on the five hundred and first tour round
one’s garden, brimming with expectation, and all the certainty of new
discovery. To be as thrilled over the alternations between the nut-tree
walk in winter, and the alpine heights in summer, as ever the family of
the Vicar were over those between the blue parlour and the brown. These
are the things that really carry a traveller comfortably forward in an
easy jog-trot towards his predestined bourne. And if there happen to be
a pair of such travellers, a pair of such explorers, and if each of them
carries his or her own wallet, or knapsack, and if those two travellers
part often, yet often come together again, then what an opening up of
budgets takes place! What a retailing of adventures; what a comparison
of discoveries; what a vastly extended sense of the round world, and of
all the fulness thereof! That there are really great journeys to be
performed, great events in life, and great adventures to be met with, I
am quite willing to concede; also that there are very small journeyings,
very small events, and very small adventures. But the odd thing is that
no one seems ever able to decide for one finally and authoritatively
which is which!