Eighty Days by Matthew Goodman

Author:Matthew Goodman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345527288
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-25T18:30:00+00:00

DECEMBER 18–23, 1889

South China Sea

ON BOARD THE PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL STEAMSHIP THAMES BOUND for Singapore, Elizabeth Bisland slept “the languorous, voluptuous sleep of the tropics.” Her stateroom had a comfortable bed with an iron frame, but she preferred the divan that lay beneath the square window that let in warm sea winds and soothing whispers of water as it brushed against the side of the ship. She had never felt quite as happy as she did on board the Thames. It turned out that she loved to travel; she took unexpected pleasure in the daily cataloguing of new sights, understood the exultation of Keats’s “watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” Travel, she had discovered, was a delightful means of gratifying the intelligent curiosity that Dr. Johnson had called the root of all wisdom and culture. “I go to bed exhaustedly happy,” she wrote in her notebook, “and wake up expectantly smiling.”

At six-thirty each morning a white-capped stewardess brought tea, fruit, and a biscuit; at first Bisland found it odd to eat at this hour, but she quickly learned that in the tropics it was best to eat small meals at numerous times throughout the day. Later she would write in an essay for female travelers, “If one refuses to adapt one’s self to this custom, and insists upon doing in Rome as the Americans do, the result will be a feeling of great exhaustion after dressing that robs one of appetite for breakfast and spoils the day.” She could spend hours at a time on one of the ship’s bamboo lounging chairs, with perhaps a book or some sewing in her lap, watching the sea quiver under the blinding sky. In the afternoon she bathed in a large marble tub filled with cool salt water, followed by a nap between the hours of three and four. Other than “a charming little old lady from Boston,” Elizabeth Bisland was the only female passenger aboard the Thames; as a result, she wrote, “the atmosphere has a pronounced masculine flavor; but despite even this limitation it is interesting.” All of the passengers traveled first or second class; there were no accommodations for steerage. The ship was yachtlike in its proportions, with a saloon of gold and white that extended the length of the ship and a broad top deck generously shaded by canvas awnings. Cages with canaries in them hung above the deck; the air around the ship was filled with birdsong as it was scented with coal smoke and lavender water.

The sky stayed always the same clear blue, but the sea was ever-changing. One day it was speckled like the breast of a peacock, another it was divided, curiously, into distinct bands of green, blue, and violet. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, where Bisland had spent whole days clutching the sides of her berth inside a storm-tossed cabin, the sea here was as flat as the western prairie; it occurred to her that the ship could carry a full glass of water the entire way and never spill a drop.

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