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Round the world in any number of days

Chapter 13: Fremantle: July
By Maurice Baring
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Travel Writing

About This Book

A lively travelogue recounts a round-the-world sea voyage, tracing the route from British ports through the Mediterranean and Suez, across the Indian Ocean to Australia and the Pacific, and onward to North America. The narrative mixes shipboard anecdotes about crew, fellow passengers, and daily routines with vivid sketches of ports, landscapes, and local scenes, blending humorous observation, personal reflection, and practical detail. Chapters alternate episodic port reports, atmospheric descriptions of sea passages and weather, and wry commentary on contemporary travel, producing an impressionistic chronicle of long-distance travel in the early twentieth century.

Fremantle: July

Fremantle is the least attractive of ports. You are not meant to stay there. You are meant to go on to Perth. Nevertheless, it was my first sight of an Australian city. It struck me as being in some ways rather like a Russian provincial town; this is not odd, because Russia is a country of colonists. What differentiates a Russian city from an Australian—and indeed from any other city—is the churches with their gilded spires and blue cupolas and their Byzantine shape.

At Fremantle the firemen went on shore—against orders. They drank to their hearts’ content, and came back in a state of truculent inebriation, as did many of the steerage passengers. We left Fremantle in the evening. There was a strong wind blowing. Two little tugs were doing their best to pull us out of the narrow harbour. They could scarcely pull their own weight; and then one of the hawsers broke. We drifted to port where alongside of the wharf some cargo steamers lay at anchor.

“Hullo!” said somebody; “we shall only just do it.”

The passengers became interested.

Then it became evident that we weren’t going just to do it; and we went—crunch! crunch!—into the steamers alongside the wharf, carrying away the wooden gear they had to put cattle in.

Then began a slow battle of the tugs against the wind; whenever we seemed to be moving to starboard, the wind brought us back again to the wharf. It looked at one moment as if we were going to be there all night. Two of the firemen were fighting forward. Then the wind dropped a little, our own engines began to work, and we steamed safely out of the harbour.

We did hardly any damage to the ship against which we crunched, except carrying away that wooden gear; but the moment any little incident of that kind happens in a ship, it makes you realize instantly how disagreeable a real accident would be. These large ships look so helpless under such circumstances: and after all, when accidents happen, they happen, whether a ship is in harbour or in midocean, whether she is large or small: witness the Royal George and the Titanic.