Hamilton, Frederick Spencer, Lord, 1856-1928 / 2008-06-14 00:00:00
EBOOK HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE ***
Produced by Karen Fabrizius, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE
BY
LORD FREDERIC HAMILTON
TO MY GALLANT CANADIAN FRIEND GERALD RUTHERFORD, M.C. OF WINNIPEG
FOREWORD
So kindly a reception have the public accorded to "The Days Before
Yesterday" that I have ventured into print yet again.
This is less a book of reminiscences than a recapitulation of various
personal experiences in many lands, some of which may be viewed from
unaccustomed angles.
The descriptions in Chapter VIII of cattle-working and of
horse-breaking on an Argentine estancia have already appeared in
slightly different form in an earlier book of mine, now out of print.
F. H.
_London, 1921._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
An ideal form of travel for the elderly--A claim to roam at will in
print--An invitation to a big-game shoot--Details of journey to Cooch
Behar--The commercial magnate and the station-master--An outbreak of
cholera--Arrival at Cooch Behar Palace-Our Australian Jehu--The
shooting camp--Its gigantic scale--The daily routine--"Chota Begum,"
my confidential elephant--Her well-meant attentions--My first
tiger--Another lucky shot--The leopard and the orchestra--The
Maharanee of Cooch Behar--An evening in the jungle--The buns and the
bear--Jungle pictures--A charging rhinoceros--Another rhinoceros
incident--The amateur Mahouts--Circumstances preventing a second visit
to Cooch Behar
CHAPTER II
Mighty Kinchinjanga--The inconceivable splendours of a Himalayan
sunrise--The last Indian telegraph office--The irrepressible British
Tommy--An improvised garden--An improvised Durbar hall--A splendid
ceremony--A native dinner--The disguised Europeans--Our shocking
table-manners--Incidents--Two impersonations; one successful, the
other the reverse--I come off badly--Indian jugglers--The
rope-trick--The juggler, the rope, and the boy--An inexplicable
incident--A performing cobra scores a success--Ceylon "Devil
Dancers"--Their performance--The Temple of the Tooth--The uncovering
of the Tooth--Details concerning--An abominable libel--Tea and
coffee--Peradeniya Gardens--The upas tree of Java--Colombo an Eastern
Clapham Junction--The French lady and the savages--The small Bermudian
and the inhabitants of England
CHAPTER III
Frenchmen pleasant travelling companions--Their limitations--Vicomte
de Vogue--The innkeeper and the ikon--An early oil-burning steamer--A
modern Bluebeard--His "Blue Chamber"--Dupleix--His ambitious scheme
--A disastrous period for France--A personal appreciation of the
Emperor Nicholas II--A learned but versatile Orientalist--Pidgin
English--Hong-Kong--An ancient Portuguese city in China--Duck junks--A
comical Marathon race--Canton--Its fascination and its appalling
smells--The malevolent Chinese devils--Precautions adopted
against--"Foreign devils"--The fortunate limitations of Chinese
devils--The City of the Dead--A business interview
CHAPTER IV
The glamour of the West Indies--Captain Marryat and Michael
Scott--Deadly climate of the islands in the eighteenth century--The
West Indian planters--Difference between East and West Indies--"Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die"--Training-school for British
Navy--A fruitless voyage--Quarantine--Distant view of Barbados--Father
Labat--The last of the Emperors of Byzantium--Delightful little Lady
Nugent and her diary of 1802--Her impressions of Jamaica--Wealthy
planters--Their hideous gormandising--A simple morning meal--An
aldermanic dinner--How the little Nugents were gorged--Haiti--Attempts
of General Le Clerc to secure British intervention in Haiti--Presents
to Lady Nugent--Her Paris dresses described--Our arrival in
Jamaica--Its marvellous beauty--The bewildered Guardsman--Little trace
of Spain left in Jamaica--The Spaniards as builders--British and
Spanish Colonial methods contrasted
CHAPTER V
An election meeting in Jamaica--Two family experiences at contested
elections--Novel South African methods--Unattractive Kingston--A
driving tour through the island--The Guardsman as
orchid-hunter--Derelict country houses--An attempt to reconstruct the
past--The Fourth-Form room at Harrow--Elizabethan Harrovians--I meet
many friends of my youth--The "Sunday" books of the 'sixties--"Black
and White"--Arrival of the French fleet--Its inner
meaning--International courtesies--A delicate attention--Absent
alligators--The mangrove swamp--A preposterous suggestion--The swamps
do their work--Fever--A very gallant apprentice--What he did
CHAPTER VI
The Spanish Main--Its real meaning--A detestable region--Tarpon and
sharks--The isthmus--The story of the great pearl "La elegrina"--The
Irishman and the Peruvian--The vagaries of the Southern Cross--The
great Kingston earthquake--Point of view of small boys--Some
earthquake incidents--"Flesh-coloured" stockings--Negro hysteria--A
family incident, and the unfortunate Archbishop--Port Royal--A sugar
estate--A scene from a boy's book in real life--Cocoa-nuts--
Reef-fishing--Two young men of great promise
CHAPTER VII
Appalling ignorance of geography amongst English people--Novel
pedagogic methods--"Happy Families"--An instructive game--Bermuda--A
waterless island--A most inviting archipelago--Bermuda the most
northern coral-atoll--The reefs and their polychrome fish--A
"water-glass"--Sea-gardens--An ideal sailing-place--How the Guardsman
won his race--A miniature Parliament--Unfounded aspersions on the
Bermudians--Red and blue birds--Two pardonable mistakes--Soldier
gardeners--Officers' wives--The little roaming home-makers--A pleasant
island--The inquisitive German naval officers--"The Song of the
Bermudians"
CHAPTER VIII
The demerits of the West Indies classified--The utter ruin of
St.
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