Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Holidays in Mozambique
A dusky maiden had a fit at the sight of our faces!!!
Arthur Holmes diary
At Victoria station on Saturday 18th March, 1911, Holmes met
up with Wayland and Wray and a fourth member of the
Mozambique prospecting team, a mining engineer called
Wilson; the two leaders of the group, Reid and Starey, having
gone ahead a couple of days previously. Despite a rough cross-
ing from Dover to Calais the team were in high spirits and man-
aged a fine dinner in Paris where the train stopped for four hours
before continuing on through France, over the Alps and down
the length of Italy to breakfast in Rome. They disembarked in
Naples where they had arranged to meet Starey and were to
board their ship.
At every stop on the journey to Naples Holmes had sent his
parents a postcard 'to make the land part of my journey as
real as possible to you' . None of the family had ever been
abroad before, so even Europe seemed exotic and remote. As an
only child Arthur was devoted to his parents, and they to him,
and he was genuinely concerned for their worries about this trip
to somewhere so distant as Mozambique. But he was an excel-
lent and frequent letter writer, and almost everything that is
known about this trip derives from the surviving letters he sent
 
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