Front matter
Reading edition
MY TICKET IS FOR NEW ZEALAND (page 4)
ROUND THE WORLD IN ANY NUMBER OF DAYS
By Maurice Baring
ILLUSTRATED BY B. T. B., VINCENT LYNCH AND WALTER J. ENRIGHT
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MAURICE BARING
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October 1914
Contents
Introductory 1
Tilbury: June 21 3
Bay of Biscay: June 24 11
Gibraltar: June 28 14
Naples: June 29 15
Port Said: July 3 22
The Red Sea: in July 26
The Gulf of Aden: July 34
The Indian Ocean: during the Monsoon 46
Ceylon: July 51
From Colombo to Fremantle: July 57
Fremantle: July 68
Adelaide: July 71
Melbourne: July 76
Sydney: August 2 77
On Board the Maunganui: August 82
Wellington: August 10 102
Near Palmerston: August 20 106
Wellington: September 111
Roratonga and Tahiti: September 117
Across the Pacific: September 21-October 3 138
San Francisco: October 3 144
New York: October 173
Illustrations
My ticket is for New Zealand (page 4) Frontispiece
The Stewards 4
Naples—three impressions 16
From ship’s music, as a rule, one can withdraw one’s attention without difficulty 36
If G. K. Chesterton had been an Australian 42
“There is nothing so romantic as food” 62
In Sydney I found the men in the bookstores abnormally intelligent 78
“You mustn’t think of a green horse” 90
A Wellington man turning a street corner 102
A great quantity of natives swarm on board 120
Very few writers think when they are writing 148
The only hansom cab in London 158
Another turn of the screw and he would break down 176
Undressing in the berth of an American car is an acrobatic feat 184
Their whole business is to steal other people’s baggage 188
Trying to get a number at the hotel cecil 192
ROUND THE WORLD IN ANY NUMBER OF DAYS
I BELIEVE there is a school of people who say the world is flat. I asked H. G. Wells (who ought to know) whether the world was flat: He said he thought it improbable (mark the scepticism of H. G. Wells!), but he said the proofs generally given of the world’s roundness were bosh. The dogmas of science go round and round, from reaction to progress, and from progress to reaction, like the dogmas of medicine. One has only to remain very conservative to find one’s self a revolutionary. “But,” some one may say, “whether the world is round and you are going round it, or whether it is flat and you are going across (or along?) it, that is no reason for describing your voyage—nowadays a hackneyed affair; you might just as well describe a journey round the Place de la Concorde or Trafalgar Square.”
My answer to this is, I might. But all journeys differ with the differing traveler. I write partly to please myself, partly in the hope of pleasing others, and partly in the hope (a pious hope) of gain.