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Round the world in any number of days

Chapter 2: ROUND THE WORLD IN ANY NUMBER OF DAYS
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.

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.