Читать онлайн
Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water
Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water. The Journal of a Tour Through the British Empire and America
PREFACE
My husband, during his six years' tenure of the office of Director of Criminal Investigations, took the greatest interest in the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage.
In taking leave of his young friends he promised to keep for their benefit a record of our travels through the British Empire and America.
I have endeavoured to the best of my power to relieve him of this task.
It is but a simple Journal of what we saw and did.
But if the Police will accept it, as a further proof of our admiration and respect for them as a body, then I feel sure that others who may be kind enough to read it will be lenient towards the shortcomings of a first publication.
ETHEL GWENDOLINE VINCENT
1, Grosvenor Square, London
CHAPTER I
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
Lat. 43° 15´ N., Long. 50° 12´ W. All is intensely quiet. The revolution even of the screw has ceased. We are wrapped in a fog so dense that we feel almost unable to breathe.
We shudder as we look at the white pall drawn closely around us. The decks and rigging are dripping, and everything on board is saturated with moisture. We feel strangely alone. When hark! A discordant screech, a hideous howl belches forth into the still air, to be immediately smothered and lost in the fog. It is the warning cry of the fog-horn.
We are on board the White Star steamer Germanic, in mid-Atlantic, not far off the great ice-banks of Newfoundland.
It was on Wednesday, the 2nd of July, that we left London, and embarked from Liverpool on the 3rd.
I need not describe the previous bustle of preparation, the farewells to be gone through for a long absence of nine months, the little crowd of kind friends who came to see us off at Euston, nor our embarkation and our last view of England.
I remember how dull and gloomy that first evening on board closed in, and how a slight feeling of depression was not absent from us.
The next morning we were anchoring in Queenstown Harbour, and whilst waiting for the arrival of the mails in the afternoon we went by train to Cork.
The mails were on board the Germanic by four o'clock. We weighed anchor, and our voyage to America had commenced. The often advertised quick passages across the Atlantic are only reckoned to and from Queenstown. The sea-sick traveller hardly sees the point of this computation of time, for the coasts of "ould Ireland" are as stormy and of as much account as the remainder of the passage.
And now we have settled down into the usual idle life on board ship, a life where eating and drinking plays the most important part. There is a superfluity of concerts and literary entertainments, the proceeds in one instance being devoted to the aid of a poor electrical engineer who has had his arm fearfully torn in the machinery, and whose life was only saved by the presence of mind of a comrade in cutting the strap.
Fine weather again at last, for we are past the banks so prolific in storms and fog. The story goes that a certain captain much harassed by the questioning of a passenger, who asked him "if it was always rough here?" replied, "How should I know, sir? I don't live here."