Five winters in succession without one summer is an experience which I recall with pleasure these hot days! How did I manage it? Just crossed the equator to Brazil in May, back to New York in November, down to Brazil in May again and back once more in October.
Many people "who loved geography when they were young" have still no realizing sense of the reversal of the seasons south of the equator, and do not know how interesting a voyage they might easily make if they went "up and down in the world," instead of going around it.
Everybody who is fortunate enough to have the money to do it has treated himself or some of his family to a trip around the world, and missionaries and commercial men have added to the list until we all speak with familiarity of life and travels in China and Japan, India and Egypt; but what American ever started for a pleasure trip to the southern half of his own hemisphere! Why not?
I have gone there by two different ways, and for variety recommend them both. Suppose you go in May—as you can most comfortably and with the largest number of new experiences—by way of the American Line to Southampton, England; thence, sailing from that same Southampton harbor, to Rio de Janeiro by the English Royal Mail Line. You find yourself leaving England in a good-sized, well-built steamer named for some river, "Nile," "Danube," "Magdalena," or "Clyde,"—let us say the "Nile,"—and evidently made for different seas from the North Atlantic. Your cabin may be 7 × 10 feet, its walls on the gangway made of slats like blinds slightly open for ventilation; and the wide decks covered with permanent awnings suggest a summer veranda. This line of steamers makes the trip from England to Buenos Ayres in twenty-four days, and winter and summer they must heat the cabins at one end of the trip for the comfort of the passengers; for at one end it is winter if at the other you find summer. You will arrive at Rio de Janeiro at the end of seventeen days.
Out of the English Channel, stopping at Cherbourg for a few passengers from Paris, across the Bay of Biscay, it takes from Friday morning till Sunday to reach the quaint Spanish harbor of Vigo. Perhaps, so far, there will have been in the ship's company one or two wine merchants who now leave for Oporto. Here you will receive your first instalment of emigrants, Spanish peasants, going to the Argentine Republic, the women with black hair and eyes and the most brilliant colors in their clothes. They may have nothing on their feet but their heads will be tied in kerchiefs, suggestive of a tulip-bed for hues.
You wish with your careful American training that a dignified old English steamship line would not regularly plan to spend that first Sunday in such a heathenish port, lng and unlng freight and taking on such irreligious-looking passengers. There is no service for you but what you make for yourself, and you look on with a painful sense that the great outside world is different from your gentle home, and go down to your room and get your Bible and try to think while the hoisting apparatus outside is lifting bumping boxes out of lighters and creaking them down into the hold, and scores of little boats full of Spanish vendors are screaming their fruits and earthenware or helping their poor countrymen into the steerage of your ship.
You wonder if "Boss Tweed" really enjoyed life here up to the time when Nast's cartoon strayed into the town and inspired the authorities to report the discovered "child-stealer."
One lesson you may learn from the foreign conditions of the day—to sympathize more sensitively with the daily life of our Lord spent among people who did not think as He did.
One day more and you anchor off Lisbon. Of course you will make one of a party with some of your shipmates, hire a boat and go ashore, a mile or more of rowing or sailing. How pretty the cream-colored city looks in her green palms! and how substantial the great stone quays! You hire a guide and go to drive. You get an impression of ornate public buildings and memorial statues, of narrow business streets with numberless insignificant shops, of the brr avenues of thick-walled, stuccoed, gay-colored residences, standing low and square in heavy shrubberies, of the Botanical Garden which no well regulated Portuguese city could be without and which here lies on the brow of a hill looking over the town; and now you know you must have your luncheon, and find a good one at a hotel. The semi-tropical life is comfortable behind "the Venetians," and you have been getting glimpses of pretty courts through open corridors.
Now you must try to think what best use you can make of the remaining hour before you must cross the Place du Commerce, or Black Horse Square as the English call it, looking out on the harbor and surrounded the other three sides by government offices and custom-house, with spacious arcades, a triumphal arch, and bronze statue of Joseph I., then pick your way down the wet stone steps to the little boat which will row you out to your ship.
But where shall you go for one hour? Down to the dirty, narrow, old, Moorish quarter? No. Out to the church and palace of Belem built on the site whence Vasco de Gama embarked in 1500, and now containing the tombs of that explorer and of the great poet, Camoens (whom many readers will also connect with Macao, China). No that's too far and too interesting for a mere hour. So is its neighboring tower in which the peerages of Portugal and her colonies are kept, and which looked so picturesque from the steamer, Moorish architecture in yellow brick. Can you go to see what the irreverent traveler calls "the dried kings" in the fine church of San Vicente de Fora, where you may see the remains of royalty of the line of Braganza preserved in glass coffins? Can you go to the beautiful suburb of Cintra, the summer resort of the nobility, the favorite of the English residents? No, it is fourteen miles away, through orange groves, and up, up from two to three thousand feet.
I remember when we were seeing the sights of Lisbon we had one very entertaining man in our little party who proved to be an American missionary in Brazil. He had been over this ground before, and seemed never to forget anything. He told us the story of a Lady Bountiful, blessing the poor with her generosity, no other than our old fellow-countrywoman of Woman's Rights' fame, Victoria Woodhull, now married and living near Lisbon. Indeed she is a very great lady, said the tale, and very gracious to American visitors.
But no! It would require too much time to see any sights more than the marvelous pictures of three scenes in the life of our Lord, done in Rome in mosaic after Raphael, Michael Angelo and Guido Reni, which we find in a small chapel in the church of San Roque in the heart of the city. About 1740 King John V. had this alcove or chapel made in Rome. He was a devoted Romanist, had been enriched by the discovery of the gold and diamond mines of Brazil, so this could be very costly in mosaic, bronze, porphyry, lapis lazuli, etc. It was set up in St. Peter's in Rome and the Pope celebrated the first mass in it, then it became one of the treasures of Lisbon.
And now you are again on the ship. You look at beautiful Lisbon and know that if it had not been for Brazil you would never have seen it. It has been so easily reached from England on this steamer, but what an interminable journey it would have been by rail! Spain seems far enough away when one is traveling "on the Continent," but Portugal! Indeed, this enterprising, seafaring, colonizing country of three hundred years ago is nearly forgotten. How many know now that her sailors named Formosa (beautiful) as they found its lovely shores, or think to trace her hand on every Continent!
But the anchor is being drawn up and you feel like old residents on the "Nile," and hardly know whether you are English or Americans as you look about at the new passengers, French, Portuguese, Brazilians and Argentinos; for the English tongue and simple brusque manners fall into slight minority. French clothes, which these wealthy new-comers love, are well displayed by their ladies, and you will soon be shrugging your shoulders and gesticulating dramatically unless you are very unsympathetic. Your next meals amuse you; for the bill-of-fare which so far has had English names and dishes, now caters to at least three sets of people. The English get their bacon, their "grilled bones," and their cold meat pies, the Americans have hash (with a foreign element of grease and onions which the true Yankee would not own), the Portuguese have baccalhao and feijao (codfish and black beans), and plenty of mutton stewed with carrots. What else? Good soups, meats, vegetables, salads and desserts, and one dish daily required by the original charter of the Royal Mail Steamship Co.—curry and rice!
These people and you are to be two weeks together now, in summer seas, a most al fresco life. Each passenger has brought a deck chair to his own taste, varying from the simplest camp variety to the East Indian adjustable luxury of rattan with bottle-sockets in the arms and places to keep one's , field-glasses and games.
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