Italy · Summer 1867Five months, sixty pilgrims, and every guide in the Old World
In June of 1867 I paid twelve hundred and fifty dollars to be taken to Europe and the Holy Land with a shipload of respectable people. They prayed, I played dominoes, and we were all of us cheated in eleven languages. These are my letters home, put back together.
- When
- 8 Jun – 19 Nov 1867
- How long
- 165 days
- Who went
- Me, sixty-odd pilgrims, and the Doctor, Jack and Dan
- Stops
- 39
- Getting around
- The Quaker City, trains, a great many horses and one donkey
Trip details
- Who went
- Me, sixty-odd pilgrims, and the Doctor, Jack and Dan
- Getting around
- The Quaker City, trains, a great many horses and one donkey
In this story · 4 chapters
In the spring of 1867 a circular went round New York announcing a Grand Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land. It promised a fine steamer, a select company, a brass band, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman, and five months of uninterrupted enjoyment. I read it twice. I had never been promised uninterrupted enjoyment by anybody before, least of all in print, and I wanted to see what it looked like.
I put my name down. A newspaper in San Francisco paid the twelve hundred and fifty dollars on the understanding that I would write them letters, and I did, about fifty of them, and they printed every one, which shows you what newspapers will do for twelve hundred and fifty dollars. What follows is those letters, cleaned up, with the parts my mother objected to taken out and two or three of them put back.
01 The programme, and what became of it
| The circular said | What happened |
|---|---|
| Henry Ward Beecher will sail with the party | He did not. Neither did General Sherman. Neither did the actress. I was the celebrity, and nobody asked me. |
| A brass band | A melodeon, three hymn books, and a young man with a cornet who knew one tune. He played it from New York to Bermuda. |
| A select company | Sixty-five passengers, of whom the majority were over forty and in mourning for something. They never told me what. |
| Every comfort of a first-class hotel | Every comfort except getting off. |
| Five months of pleasure | Five months and eleven days. I will not quarrel with the figure. |
| Paris, Italy, Greece, the Holy Land and Egypt | All of them, and Bermuda at the end, like a mint after a funeral. |
I do not complain about the passengers. They were good people, and they kept on being good the whole way, which is more than I managed in a fortnight. They held a prayer meeting every evening in the saloon, and on a calm night you could hear them all over the ship, praying for a fair wind, while the captain, who was the only man aboard who knew where the wind came from, stood on deck and smoked.
02 Where we went
We were gone from the eighth of June to the nineteenth of November. In that time we saw the Rock of Gibraltar, which is exactly like its pictures; Paris, which is not; Venice, which is better; Rome, which is older; the Holy Land, which is smaller; and the Sphinx, which is larger and has a better character than any of us. I learned to say no in eleven languages and to be ignored in all of them.
03 What it cost
Anybody who adds this up will find it comes to more than a working man earns in three years, and less than a pilgrim gives away in backsheesh between Damascus and Jerusalem. I do not say this to discourage travel. I say it so that when you go, you will know it is not the money you are losing. It is your character, a little at a time, at every landing.
04 The letters
Read nextThirteen days of prayer meetingsThe crossing, and the dominoes.Read nextThe barber of ParisI had dreamed of a Paris shave since I was a boy. I have stopped.Read nextIs he dead?Rome, and how to tire out a guide.Read nextThe price of a boat on GalileeThe Holy Land, and the one place I put my jokes away.
The rest of them are under the trip, place by place, in the order things happened to us. Where I have changed a name, it was to protect a guide. Where I have not, it was because he deserved it.
The Quaker City