The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [116]
Finally, we reached San Francisco. It was such a relief to be in a cultured metropolis once more, with paved roads and gaslights and hotels made of wood, not canvas. Triumphantly, Charles and I paraded through the streets in our miniature carriage, our ponies none the worse for the trip. Three times a day we filled Platt’s Hall, which held two thousand people, and were able to telegraph Mr. Barnum that the trip had been the “golden opportunity” he had envisioned, indeed.
We left San Francisco for Yokohama, Japan, on November 4, 1869; we would not return to the shores of this great country of ours until June 22, 1872. All in all, we traveled 55,487 miles (31,216 of them by sea) and gave 1,472 entertainments in 587 different cities and towns in all climates of the world without missing a single performance because of accident or illness.
We met the Viceroy of India, King Victor Emmanuele II of Italy, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, and assorted Maharajas and Shahs. We ate leechee nuts in China, chewed tea leaves in Ceylon, and consumed octopus in Japan. We saw the Pyramids, pilgrims on their way to Mecca, and sampans in Japan. The heat in Singapore was like being wrapped in a hot woolen blanket and set out in the noonday sun; the cold of the Australian desert at night made your bones cry. We saw women dressed scandalously, in nothing but scarves and jewels, in Madras; we observed entire families bathing together in the nude in Japan. Trains, when we could find them, were primitive: some with benches, with no backs, for seats; others simply cavernous cars in which you sat upon the floor. Ships were steamers, and often they were overcrowded, with poor people practically hanging off the deck rails. Often we would get to a destination with no clear idea how we would then travel on to the next place; maps were crude, unreadable, and unreliable.
Yet even in such places we would sometimes come across a reminder of home; of civilization. Minnie spied an 1862 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book in a fish market in Bombay, of all places; she eagerly begged the fishmonger to give it to her, instead of using it to wrap up his eels. Somehow he understood, and she carried it with her through the rest of the tour, reading and rereading it although the fashions, of course, were long out of style even before we left home. (Such wide skirts we used to wear! And those ridiculous, enormous-ribboned bonnets!)
And one evening in Ceylon, while I was trying to read by the weak oil light in the hotel parlor (there was no reading in the primitive bedrooms, as everything was encased with thick mosquito netting), Mr. Bleeker presented me with a tattered copy of the New York Herald Tribune. “Look at this,” he said with a sly grin. He pointed to an article with his bony finger.
“Barnum’s newest sensation,” I read aloud, and laughed. I checked the date of the paper; it was over a year old. But seeing Mr. Barnum’s name in print, so far away from him, after having been gone so long, made my heart leap unexpectedly, almost as if he himself had entered the room. We stayed in communication during the trip, of course, but mainly with telegrams, which were always so businesslike and addressed to the troupe in general, never to me personally. And if telegrams were sporadic in the places we were visiting, letters were even more so. So it was with a hunger I hadn’t even been aware was gnawing at me that I read his name.
“The old man has kept himself busy while we’re away,” Mr. Bleeker said with a chuckle, as he folded his long frame into an absurdly small, lacquered Oriental chair. He lit his pipe and puffed until he could get a good draw on it.
“Yes, it appears he has,” I said as I continued to read the article. Mr. Barnum had begun presenting a new discovery,