Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
you want him to go?' 'I can't say,' replied Andrew Stuart, 'but after all,
the world is large enough.' 'It was so . . .' said Phileas Fogg in an under-
tone . . .
The discussion was interrupted during the rubber. But Andrew
Stuart soon took it up again, saying: 'What do you mean by was? Has
the world got smaller, eh?' 'Of course it has,' rejoined Gauthier Ralph;
'I agree with Mr. Fogg. The world has got smaller, since one can travel
over it ten times more rapidly than a hundred years ago.'
6
The scene from
Around the World in Eighty Days
is fictional but
the subject of discussion was one which fascinated many of Jules
Verne's contemporaries. The Frenchman, himself a keen traveller
and yachtsman, published his story three years after the opening of
the Suez Canal in 1869 (it was translated into English in 1874). It
was an era in which continent after continent was being crossed by
steam locomotives, and ocean after ocean was being traversed by
the faster, more reliable steamships. The world was, indeed, getting
smaller. More people travelled to distant lands to satisfy their curi-
osity. And if to distant lands, why not right round the world?
As the sea lanes filled rapidly with the burgeoning commerce of
the industrial nations, a new kind of vessel was beginning to appear
amidst the clippers and the tramps - the pleasure yacht. Sailing, long
the pursuit of princes, was in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury a smart hobby taken up with enthusiasm by the
nouveaux riches
of Europe and America. Boatyards from Hamburg to Marseilles, Cly-
deside to Falmouth, Boston to Charleston vied with each other in
building trim, luxurious craft for their wealthy clients, craft which
would be crewed by professionals and were designed as much for
showing off the affluence of their owners as for seaworthiness.
One of these floating palaces was the
Sunbeam
, laid down in
Bowdler and Chaffer's yard, Liverpool, about 1870. She was a
157-foot, three-masted, topsail schooner, carrying a mass of sail but
