Here is Jessica, halfway through her trip, in January 2010: "The picture below is of my very cool new t-shirt which was a present from Mum in my latest food bag. I had to share it with you guys as my crew aren't doing a very good job of sharing my excitement!" And the accompanying photo shows her wearing a T-shirt with the message "One Tough Cookie."
On her arrival home, she was greeted by tens of thousands of people, including the prime minister, who called her a hero. Likable to the last, she disagreed, saying she wasn't a hero, "just an ordinary girl who had a dream and worked hard at it and proved that anything is possible."
15. Staying home
THE NONTRAVELER SEEMS TO ME TO EXIST IN suspended animation, if not the living death of a homely routine or the vegetative stupor known to the couch potato. From an early age I longed to leave home and to keep going. I cannot imagine not traveling — stuck home all the time, in the confinement of a house or a community or a city. ¶; Yet some people never leave — distinguished writers and thinkers, chained to their desks, their towns, making a virtue of it. In his entire eighty-year life, Immanuel Kant never traveled more than a hundred miles from his birthplace, Königs-berg (now Kaliningrad), where he died. Philip Larkin, who hardly stirred from his home in Hull on the English coast, said, "I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back home the same day." Needless to say, he lived for much of his life with his mother.
Thomas Merton, who traveled widely in his early life, entered a Trappist monastery at the age of twenty-six, and for the next twenty-seven years seldom uttered an audible word, having taken a vow of silence. He did not leave his monastery in Kentucky until 1968. Invited to a conference in Bangkok, on this first encounter with the wider world after all those years of seclusion, he accidentally electrocuted himself in his hotel room. Edgar Allan Poe spent a few youthful years in Britain. Thoreau never left the United States. Emily Dickinson was more or less housebound. Yet all these people wrote brilliantly of other lands. Something about staying home, staying inside, or going in circles can stimulate a mind in the manner of conventional travel.
In fiction, the character with the most convincing philosophical objection to travel is the decadent Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in Huysmans's Against Nature (1884). He makes an elaborate plan for a trip to London, but overcome with sloth, satiated (and "somewhat stupefied") with the Dickensian atmosphere of the English-style pub in Paris, he reflects on the tedium of the Channel crossing and decides to stay put: "After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn't he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizenry, and even cutlery, were all about him? What could he expect to find over there, save fresh disappointments?"
Henry Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon
FIELDING, LOOKING FOR a rest cure and a mild climate, sets out from London for Lisbon toward the end of June 1754; and after hundreds of pages, toward the end of August, he is still off the coast of England, becalmed. In the delay and idleness he grows irritable and confides his irritation to his journal. He called himself a "great, tattered bard," and was highly skeptical of "voyage-writers," as he explains in his long preface to the published Journal.
This seems a superb Fielding farce, the absurdity of setting out and going nowhere — he'll never make it! Much of the book is satirical, ironic, blustering, and his ailments so numerous and debilitating, it is like self-satire, or at least comic exaggeration. Only forty-seven, he is plagued by "lingering imperfect gout…[and] besides being lame, I was very ill with great fatigues I had lately undergone added to my distemper… My health now reduced to the last extremity… I went into the country [Bath] in a very weak and deplorable condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy [edema], and an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated, that it had lost all muscular flesh… I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders."
Still in England, he recovers with a regimen of tar-water treatments and then, with "the first dawnings of my recovery I had conceived of removing to a warmer climate." He rejects Avignon and decides on Lisbon for convalescence, leaving home in a lugubrious frame of mind. "On this day, the most melancholy sun I ever beheld arose and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a motherlike fondness."
His book is a chronicle of delay and frustration. It's true that Fielding ultimately arrives in Lisbon, but the greater part of the voyage is spent at various anchorages and moorings on the English coast, the winds too light to bear the ship away, so Fielding and his party go ashore and stay in public houses and inns to pass the time. The contentious and tyrannical captain cruises back and forth from Ryde to Portland to Spithead, awaiting a favorable wind and complaining.
"The captain now grew outrageous, and declaring open war with the wind, took a resolution, rather more bold than wise, of sailing in defiance of it, and in its teeth." This tactic fails; they are soon back on the English coast. Fielding fills his journal with reflections on eating, on the difference between seamen and landlubbers, on tyranny and officialdom, on his quarrels with the captain and the customs officers, on mythology. He writes that if his disquisitions can serve as a remedy for "the most inveterate evils, at least, I have obtained my whole desire, and shall have lain so long wind-bound in the ports of this kingdom to some purpose."
Never less than adversarial, the captain believes that he is "under the spell of witchcraft" and spends less and less time on his ship, going ashore or to other ships to socialize, as Fielding — fading again — is attended by doctors.
Toward the end of August, the wind picks up and proves helpful, and a full two months after setting off, Fielding is at last on his way, at sea. The rest of the voyage is brisk. Four days later they are "thirty miles to the westward of Plymouth," the next day in the Bay of Biscay, and becalmed, then in a gale: "Our voyage was retarded." Several days after the gale they are off the Portuguese coast and soon at Lisbon. The actual voyage is so abbreviated as to seem an anticlimax: "About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, tho' at the same time one of the most populous, to a kind of coffeehouse, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea."
He hoped to regain his health in Lisbon, but the last lines of the Journal are ominous, and seem like a premonition of his own death. Horace: "This is the end of the story, and the journey" (Hic finis chartaeque, viaeque).
Fielding died in Lisbon a little over a month after arriving, in October 1754. The book was published posthumously in 1755.
Xavier de Maistre: Traveling Around His Room
A JOURNEY ROUND My Room is one of the curiosities of travel literature. De Maistre (1763–1852), born in Savoy, peripatetic as a soldier and landscape painter, ended his life as a naturalized Russian subject. Arrested in Italy while serving in the Austro-Russian army, he was put under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days, where he wrote this book of forty-two chapters. He hadn't planned to publish it, but when his brother Joseph, a political philosopher, read it, he persuaded Xavier to do so, and the book appeared in 1794. It has been described as "a delightful chat with the reader, filled with delicate observations, in which an artless grace, humor, and spontaneous wit are wedded to a gentle and somewhat dreamy philosophy." In fact, it is parody, self-mockery, and willfully eccentric, a deliberate attempt to stave off the boredom of confinement, calling this a "new mode of traveling I introduce into the world." Hyperbolic (one chapter describes "Latitude and Topography"), it is also a disquisition on the meaning of ordinary things.