Maiden Voyages (9 page)

But, however essentially just as this claim may be, yet, conscious as I am of belonging to a socially unfavoured class, it needs far more courage than the requirements of travel demand, to present this work on Algeria to the public. The butt of wit and witling, the satirist’s staple theme, the “unprotected” lady looms before the popular gaze as a synonym for that ideal Gorgon, the “strong-minded woman”; from whose wooden face, hard features, harsh voice, blunt manners, and fiercely-independent bearing, society shrinks in horror. To be confronted
with such a fancy portrait of myself, is in truth, no pleasant thought; but as every innovation must have victims, I accept my menaced fate, cheered by the conviction that my immolation will prove of benefit to that class of tourists which, in these pages, I represent. The rearguard of progress passes unmolested over the same ground that the van traversed amidst whizzing bullets. Our great-grandmothers did not exchange their pillion for a side-saddle without being exposed to a fire as brisk as that which now awaits the “unprotected” lady tourist. The bold, audacious Amazon, dressed in hat and coat, denounced with vehemence in the pages of the “Spectator,” is now the applauded lady equestrian. The ridiculed bluestocking of the last century is the respected authoress in this. It is no long time ago since the wisest heads imagined that the interests of society required that old women with hooked noses should be burned. Still later, it was an unquestioned doctrine that queues eminently enhanced the dignity of the masculine aspect. Opinions become, in the course of years, quite as ridiculous as clothes whose fashion is obsolete. Every standard of right and wrong undergoes a change, save that which is based on the immutable principles of morality. Doubtless, in the twentieth century, enterprising lady tourists will not feel it needful to preface the published records of their travels with a plea in vindication of the act; for ladies continuing to do what daily experience proves they can safely do, with high enjoyment, will soon be safe from ridicule or reproach, since the unfamiliar, passing into the familiar, invariably becomes a recognised social law.

And undesirous as I am to see my sex infected with a disrelish for home life, and a craving for adventure, I yet feel no fear that these pages will tend to foster such a feeling. The many deeds of derring-do, of which men read continually, exercise no perceptible influence upon the mass of the community. The published records of the Alpine Club do not result in a general masculine rush to find some hitherto unascended snowy peak to climb. The doctor does not forsake his patients from an ardent desire to seat himself on the summit of Chimboraza. The barrister does not leave his clients to join an exploring expedition to Central Africa. Nor do tradesmen close their shops to wander over the world in search of the picturesque and romantic. And should Robinson-Crusoeish aspirations survive the period of early boyhood, they
are speedily extinguished in the mass, by the necessity of earning the means of subsistence. If such is the case with men, still less likely are women to be infected with a craving for adventure. Loving ease and luxury still more than men, not one woman in a thousand can comprehend how hardships and difficulties may be combined with any degree of enjoyment. The fact alone, that the lady of independent means forms but the smallest fraction of society, affords a guarantee that a feminine love of travel can never lead to baneful consequences. As long as the world endures, man, and more especially woman, will seek and find their happiness in the limited sphere of domestic life. To do today what has been done yesterday, and to run on in the same groove from year to year, will ever constitute, to all but an insignificant number, one of the essentials of a happy existence. The lady tourist will ever be, to her sex at large, but as a meteoric flash amidst the hosts of fixed stars that stud the sky.

And now, with this exordium, I launch my little bark upon the sea of letters, to float or sink, as may be. And though the hope prove vain, that some amongst the unknown world which I address may bear me willing company along an unfamiliar track, yet not wholly profitless has been my task, since these pages, like a mirror, reflect to me not only many a beautiful scene, and many a quaint picture of human life, but a time, when long days of active exertion in the open air, bracing the energies of a delicate frame, infused through every vein a sense of buoyant health to which I had been long a stranger.

(ca. 1840–?)

from
JOURNAL OF A LADY
’
S TRAVELS ROUND THE WORLD

Salt Lake City
, August 15

We got on board the Atlantic mail (which does the 3,300 miles from ocean to ocean in about 160 hours) on Friday night, and found ourselves at noon on Sunday in the Mormon capital. Our two days of travel in a Pullman car were comfortable enough. During the day by taking a
“section” we had a space equal to about two seats each, which at night was made up into two large beds, one over the other, in the lofty carriage. Very different was this same journey a few years ago, when the emigrants bound westward toiled over the desolate plains, and took seven months to accomplish what is now done in five days. Crossing the Sierra Nevada range we passed through nearly thirty miles of snow-sheds—rough barns built over the line at high elevations—and saw at one station the gigantic snow-plough, which, with ten locomotives behind it, is used to cleave a way through the snow-drifts; for during what is called a “wet winter” the snow falls to the depth of sixteen or twenty feet up here.

The American desert through which we travelled after leaving the mountains is not interesting. Sand and alkali plains as far as the eye can reach; as desolate as a great ocean bed from which “the waters were gone.” Sometimes a patch of grey melancholy-looking sagebrush appears, but the sun’s rays fall perpendicularly on this barren scene, burning and withering as though they would crush out any attempt which nature might make, to introduce vegetable life. Now and then we journeyed through a fertile valley where a little river made its way down from far-off mountains; people tell us there is more “fancy than fact” about these rivers, for, except at certain seasons, they dwindle away into sad-looking pools, where the thirsty emigrant has to dig for sufficient water to supply his beasts. Sometimes a curious mirage makes one quite certain that a lovely lake and trees and gardens lie far away on the horizon; but very little of anything green did we see till, early yesterday morning, we caught sight of the silver streak of “Great Salt Lake,” and descended on the wide valley in which it lies, where the Mormons have turned the unprofitable plain into corn-fields and orchards. A sign-board, with “ten miles of track in one day,” marks the place where the Central Pacific Company, with four thousand workmen, accomplished the feat and laid the last sleeper (which has had to be twice renewed, clipped away by enthusiastic relic-hunting tourists) on their eight hundred miles of railroad. Salt Lake City is about thirty miles off the main track, so we changed into the Saints’ railway—built, however, by Gentiles—and wound our way through cultivated land, and by ugly little wooden farmhouses, stopping once to pick up a Mormon family on their way to Zion for a Sunday outing. We thought
the husband looked bored at having to carry three bundles, three umbrellas and three shawls, evidently belonging to the domestic circle—his three wives, who accompanied him.

A four-horse omnibus deposited us at the door of this large and comfortable hotel, built by an ex-Mormon, who, finding it inconvenient, as his income increased, to pay a tenth of it to the Church, became a Gentile. After luncheon—during which a scientific lady informed us that the butter was “oleomargarine,” and the honey “glucose”—we walked down the broad street, with young trees and a running stream of clear water at each side, where the Saints were enjoying Sabbath repose in rocking-chairs, chewing tobacco, with their heels elevated on the back of another chair. All was neat and orderly—and very, very ugly; the shops closed, and some of the thirty thousand Mormon Sunday-school children going about hymn-book in hand.

We entered the Tabernacle, a large oblong building, in the Mormon style of architecture—the ancient rule of thumb—over which these clever ignorant people have constructed one of the largest self-sustaining roofs in the world, and were conducted to the strangers’ seat, by a decorous German Elder. The building will hold eight thousand people; yesterday it was about half full. The large and really fine organ, also of native manufacture, was well played, and the choir of fashionably dressed young men and women sang nicely, out of the Mormon hymn-book, well-known Christian hymns. Church dignitaries and some of the twelve apostles sat on a high place round the velvet-covered desk, on which lay a large Bible and a small “Book of Mormon”—the divine revelation which, in 1827, “a holy Angel permitted the youth Joseph Smith of Manchester, New York, to take from the hill of Cumorrah, and translate through the aid of a sacred instrument, called the Urim and Thummim.” The metallic plates and sacred things were shown to three witnesses, by an angel from heaven, and five thousand copies of the inspired translation were printed in 1830.

Below the daïs stood rows of electro-plate bread-baskets and goblets of water; and, in the centre of the building, a fountain for Baptism. Men and women chiefly sat apart; looking round on the congregation, we thought ourselves back again in some remote part of Wales or Ireland; stupid good-natured, unintelligent faces—a curious contrast to the usual
American crowd of keen-featured sharp-eyed citizens. And so indeed it is: Mormonism has gathered together the low-class type of humanity and uneducated of all countries, and formed them into an industrious community. One could not help feeling that many members of the congregation would have been in gaol, and living at the expense of the British taxpayer, had they not been sitting this pleasant Sunday afternoon drowsily listening—for they take their devotion easily—after a week’s hard work, to one of their twelve apostles, preaching a practical but somewhat prosy sermon. I never saw so many ugly women, or so many sad-looking black bonnets; of course, if a woman has only a share in a husband, pin-money must also be shared—and not many new bonnets obtained. We discoursed with the friendly Elder. “How many Mormons are there?” I impiously asked. “Brother, how many saints are we?” he inquired of his neighbour. “About one hundred and forty-four thousand,” was the reply. We were about to ask what proportion the womenkind bore to the population; but the preacher, Brother Orson Pratt, one of the original twelve apostles who led the Church into the wilderness—a venerable-looking old man (they say that through religious fervour and fasting his four wives were starved to death)—rose to preach.

The 50th anniversary of the Latter-day Saints has lately been held, and the Tabernacle was still hung with flowers and decorations, for, in 1830, “Joseph Smith was ordained by John the Baptist, to preach the last Revelation to the world”; and it was also divinely revealed that his wife, Emma Smith, “was to receive as many wives as he chose to take to himself, but that she was to abide and cleave to the prophet, and none else.” Persecution is proverbially good for a Church, and the Mormons had plenty of it, and throve accordingly. At last, in 1844, the Prophet Joseph Smith was murdered, “lynched” by a mob in Illinois; and the Saints, under the leadership of their apostles, and President Brigham Young, a Yankee carpenter, determined to fly to the wilderness, and seek a Land of Promise in the Rocky Mountains. After terrible sufferings, they with their wives and children, in worn-out waggons, a really heroic company of fanatics, having crossed 1,000 miles of desert, began to take possession of a land, certainly not flowing with milk and honey—not an ear of corn could be grown without irrigation; and armies
of grasshoppers, wild Indians, and Mexican brigands, contantly descended on their scanty crops.

Still the people grew and multiplied, and sent out missionaries to all parts of the world (there were twenty-five nationalities represented in the Tabernacle at the festival the other day) under Brigham Young’s vigorous rule; and now out here, where thirty-three years ago the Mormon pioneers built their first mud fort, there is a flourishing town with 20,000 inhabitants, two lines of railway, school boards, daily papers, and co-operative societies.