My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth YearTrain, George Francis
History
My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year
Train, George Francis
Train, George Francis, 1829-1904
I observed that the Japanese used small paper packages for tea, thus
making it convenient to handle tea. I then recalled the custom of the
Chinese in compressing tea for transportation by caravan to the great
Fair of Nijnii Novgorod. Here was an opportunity, I thought, and I
suggested to Susan B. King that she might invest her $30,000 to good
purpose in sending to New York a cargo of tea put up in little paper
packages, and that, if she wanted to try it, I would give her letters to
men in Canton who could arrange the matter for her. She undertook the
scheme, and I wrote a description of it for Anglin's Gazette, in
Yokohama. The tea was shipped to New York, and was handled at the
Demorest headquarters. The tea was in half-pound and pound packages.
This was long before Sir Thomas Lipton employed this method of putting
up teas.
At Saigon, in French Cochin-China, I met the United States ship Alaska;
and from that port sailed on a ship of the Messagerie Imperiale line for
Marseilles. The remainder of the voyage was uneventful, except for the
diversion just before we left Singapore of hearing the news of the fall
of the Second Empire, the defeat of Louis Napoleon at Sedan, and the
establishment of the republic.
I have already recorded, in the chapter on the Commune in France, my
arrival at Marseilles and my experiences in the brief period of my
visit. After I had been arrested and liberated, and had had my interview
with Gambetta at Tours, I passed on rapidly to New York, and finished my
tour of the world inside of eighty days.
My second trip was made in the year '90. I planned it while I was in
jail in Boston for a debt that I did not contract. There had been some
note-worthy efforts on the part of newspaper writers to make a
record-breaking trip, and Miss Bisland had gone around in seventy-eight
days, while Nellie Bly had succeeded in making the voyage in
seventy-three days. I proposed to Col. John A. Cockerill, of the New
York World, who had sent Nellie Bly on her trip, to make the circuit in
less time; but he did not care to upset the World's own record. I then
telegraphed to Radebaugh, proprietor of the Tacoma Ledger, that if he
would raise $1,000 for a lecture in Tacoma, I would make a trip around
the world in less than seventy days. He told me to come on.
As I started West, to sail on the Abyssinia, I received message after
message from Radebaugh. Instead of the $1,000 I had asked for, $1,500
had been subscribed by the time I reached Chicago, and at St. Paul it
had gone up to $3,500. I soon reached Tacoma, and lectured there to an
immense audience, taking in $4,200, the largest amount ever paid for a
single lecture--and sailed out into the Pacific March 18th. I was
accompanied by S. W. Wall, editor of the Ledger. Lafcadio Hearn, the
distinguished writer, was on the same ship, on his way to Japan. He was
so ill that he did not leave his state-room during the voyage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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