Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7

“Here is Pétatoné. This is the 10th of December; The sun shines, and the birds sing; Clear is the water in rivers and streams; Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air....

“Californians are called the scum of the earth, yet their great city is the best policed in the world,” said a New York friend to me, when he heard that I thought of crossing th...

After visiting Nicholson‘s tomb at the Cashmere Gate, I entered my one-horse dawk--the regulation carriage of India--and set off for Kurnaul and Simla, passing between the sand-...

The smallest of our southern colonies except Tasmania,--one-fourth the size of New South Wales, one-eighth of Queensland, one-twelfth of West Australia, one-fifteenth of South A...

Placed in the very track of storms, and open to the sweep of rolling seas from every quarter, exposed to waves that run from pole to pole, or from South Africa, to Cape Horn, th...

There is not in the world a nobler outlook than that from off the terrace at Quebec. You stand upon a rock overhanging city and river, and look down upon the guardship‘s masts....

At the post-office, in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon a few last messages for home--he one to me for some Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and a wave, we parted, to meet in Lo...

“All general observations upon India are necessarily absurd,” said to me at Simla a distinguished officer of the Viceroy‘s government; but, although this is true enough of theor...

From the bows of the steamer _Saratoga_, on the 20th June, 1866, I caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe, as, threading her way between the sand-banks of Capes Charles an...

After five days’ steady steaming across the great Australian bight, north of which lies the true “Terra Australia incognita,” I reached King George‘s Sound--“Le Port du Roi Geor...

The attack upon Mormondom has been systematized, and is conducted with military skill, by trench and parallel. The New England papers having called for “facts” whereon to base t...

My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table seemed to end the talk; but I had not been out West for nothing, so explaining that I was only four hours in Virginia City,...

We failed to sight the Island of Cocoas, a territory where John Ross is king--a worthy Scotchman, who having settled down in mid-ocean, some hundreds of miles from any port, pro...

One of the greatest difficulties with which the British have to contend in Hindostan is how to discover the tendencies, how to follow the changes, of native opinion. Your Hindoo...

Quitting Lahore at night, I traveled to Moultan by a railway which has names for its stations such as India cannot match. Chunga-Munga, Wanrasharam, Cheechawutnee, and Chunnoo,...

For fifty years or more, we have been warned that one day we must encounter Russia, and for fifty years Muscovite armies, conquering their way step by step, have been advancing...

“Old Cambridge! Long may she flourish!” proposed by a professor in the University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers, by the graduates and undergrad...

The first letter which I delivered in San Francisco was from a Mormon gentleman to a merchant, who, as he read it, exclaimed: “Ah! so you want to see the lions? I‘ll pick you up...

In America we have seen the struggle of the dear races against the cheap--the endeavors of the English to hold their own against the Irish and Chinese. In New Zealand, we found...

After the parching heat of Australia, a visit to Tasmania was a grateful change. Steaming along Port Dalrymple and up the Tamar in the soft sunlight of an English afternoon, we...

The capital of South Australia is reputed the hottest of all the cities that are chiefly inhabited by the English race, and as I neared it through the Backstairs Passage into th...

At Umbala, I heard that the Sikh pilgrims returning from the sacred fair, or great Hindoo camp-meeting, at Hurdwar, had been attacked by cholera, and excluded from the town; and...

On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley, and supped at Junction City, the extreme point that “civilization” has reached upon the plains. Civilization means whisky: post-...

Payment of members by the State was the great question under debate in the Lower House during much of the time I spent in Melbourne, and, in spite of all the efforts of the Vict...

The city of the high priest clothed in robes of gold figures largely in the story of Spanish discovery in America. The hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic in caravels and co...

In the back country of Virginia, and on the borders of North Carolina, it becomes clear that our common English notions of the negro and of slavery are nearer the truth than com...

Among our Californian passengers, we had many strong party men, and political conversation never flagged throughout the voyage. In every discussion it became more and more clear...

Through Mirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtehpore, I passed on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at Allahabad; for though the city is strategically important, there is in it but...

SPENDING but a single day in Madras--an inferior Columbo--I passed on to Calcutta with a pleasant remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs about the chief city of what is...

We are coasting again, gliding through calm blue waters, watching the dolphins as they play, and the boobies as they fly stroke and stroke with the paddles of the ship. Mountain...

“Encourage native industry!” the colonial shopkeepers write up; “Show your patriotism, and buy colonial goods!” is painted in huge letters on a shopfront at Castlemaine. In Engl...

In America, the working men, themselves almost without exception immigrants, though powerful in the various States from holding the balance of parties, have never as yet been ab...

At the far southeast of New York City, where the Hudson and East River meet to form the inner bay, is an ill-kept park that might be made the loveliest garden in the world. Nowh...

Of all the towns in India, Kurrachee is the least Indian. With its strong southwesterly breeze, its open sea and dancing waves, it is to one coming from the Indus valley a pleas...

Of all printed information upon India, there is none which, either for value or interest, can be ranked with that contained in the Government _Gazette_, which during my stay at...

I had landed in America at the moment of what is known in Canada as “the great scare”--that is, the Fenian invasion at Fort Erie. Before going South, I had attended at New York...

Near Mithun Kote, we steamed suddenly into the main stream of the Indus, the bed of which is here a mile and a quarter wide. Although the river at the time of my visit was risin...

From the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240...

Parting with my companions (who were going northward) in order that I might return to Wellington, and thence take ship to Taranaki, I started at daybreak on a lovely morning to...

When a Briton takes a survey of the colonies, he finds much matter for surprise in the one-sided nature of the partnership which exists between the mother and the daughter lands...

“We take no thought for the morrow; the Lord will guide his people,” was my rebuke from Elder Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing manner characteristic of the...

That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to colored races was not less strong in California than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for th...

The English traveler who crosses India from Calcutta to Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condition of the land. He has heard in England of palaces and temples, of art treas...

“These Red Indians are not red,” was our first cry when we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They had come into the town to be painted as English ladies go to London to sho...

When the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but that above them there commenced a secon...

At early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A boat which started from the ship at...

In the comparative cool of early morning, I sallied out on a stroll through the outskirts of Benares. Thousands of women were stepping gracefully along the crowded roads, bearin...

Panama is a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that rises abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decaying bastions and decayed cathedrals, while a dense jungle of mangrove...

“What will I do for you if you stop here among us? Why, I‘ll name that peak after you in the next survey,” said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain towering to its 15,...

New South Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles.

It is no longer possible to see the Pyramids or even Heliopolis in the solitary and solemn fashion in which they should be approached. English “going out” and “coming home” are...

The early morning was foggy and cold as an October dawn in an English forest; but before I had been long in the gardens of the Government House, the sun rose, and the heat retur...

Crossing the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point and entered the harbor, the s...

Pacing the deck with difficulty as the ship tore through the lava-covered seas, before a favoring gale that caught us off Cape Lewin, some of us discussed the prospects of the g...

During my stay in Lahore, a force of Sikhs and Pathans was being raised for service at Hong Kong by an officer staying in the same hotel with myself, and a large number of men w...

Although Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital, and a thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout India for the splendor with which its people celebrate the Mohammedan Mohurr...

Hitherto the attempts at settlement which have been made have been mainly confined to six districts--Mysore, where there are only some dozen planters; the Neilgherries proper, w...

“As the Pakéha fly has driven out the Maori fly; As the Pakéha grass has killed the Maori grass; As the Pakéha rat has slain the Maori rat; As the Pakéha clover has starved the...

When, on my way home to England, I found myself off Mocha, with the Abyssinian highlands in sight, and still more when we were off Massowah, with the peaks of Talanta plainly vi...

The words are Governor Gilpin‘s, made use of by him in discussing the future of overland trade, and worthy of notice as showing why it is that, in making forecasts of the future...

The name “Maori” is said to mean “native,” but the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in the title “Natives of the Soil” is one which conflicts with their traditions....

The political forecasts and opinions which were given me upon plantations were, in a great measure, those indicated in my talk with the Norfolk “loafers.” On the history of the...

In company with a throng of men of all races, all tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer can alone collect, I came coasting southward under the cliffs of Lower C...

“I look upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best men that God could send as ministers to those unto whom He sent them,” wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the “Shaker” village of...

“What is a Colonial Conservative?” is a question that used to be daily put to a Victorian friend of mine when he was in London. His answer, he told me, was always, “A statesman...

When you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of Virginia, “Here is grou...

Dashing through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene: a range of huts and forts crowning a long, low hill seamed wi...

Closely resembling Great Britain in situation, size, and climate, New Zealand is often styled by the colonists “The Britain of the South,” and many affect to believe that her fu...

Crossing in a railway journey of an hour one of the most fertile districts of the Punjaub, I was struck with the resemblance of the country to South Australia: in each great swe...

In one respect, Victoria stands at once sadly behind and strangely in advance of other democratic countries. Women, or at least some women, vote at the Lower House elections; bu...

All allowance being made for the great number of wide roads for trade, there is still a singular absence of traffic in the Melbourne streets. Trade may be said to be transacted...

Melbourne is unusually gay, for at a shapely palace in the center of the city the second great Intercolonial Exhibition is being held, and, as its last days are drawing to their...

We had been presented at court, and favorably received; asked to call again; admitted to State secrets of the presidency. From this moment our position in the city was secured....

A regular and uniform system of spelling of native names and other words has lately been brought into common use in India, and adopted by the government. Not without hesitation,...