University of Virginia Library

RETURN OF THE HOLY LAND EXCURSIONISTS—THE STORY OF THE
CRUISE.

The steamer Quaker City has accomplished at last her extraordinary voyage
and returned to her old pier at the foot of Wall street. The expedition was a success
in some respects, in some it was not. Originally it was advertised as a “pleasure
excursion.” Well, perhaps, it was a pleasure excursion, but certainly it did
not look like one; certainly it did not act like one. Any body's and every body's
notion of a pleasure excursion is that the parties to it will of a necessity be young
and giddy and somewhat boisterous. They will dance a good deal, sing a good
deal, make love, but sermonize very little. Any body's and every body's notion of
a well conducted funeral is that there must be a hearse and a corpse, and chief
mourners and mourners by courtesy, many old people, much solemnity, no levity,
and a prayer and a sermon withal. Three-fourths of the Quaker City's passengers
were between forty and seventy years of age! There was a picnic crowd for you!
It may be supposed that the other fourth was composed of young girls. But it
was not. It was chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors and a child of six years.
Let us average the ages of the Quaker City's pilgrims and set the figure down as
fifty years. Is any man insane enough to imagine that this picnic of patriarchs
sang, made love, danced, laughed, told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity? In my
experience they sinned little in these matters. No doubt it was presumed here at
home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all day, and day
after day, and kept up a noisy excitement from one end of the ship to the other;
and that they played blind-man's buff or danced quadrilles and waltzes on moonlight
evenings on the quarter-dock; and that at odd moments of unoccupied time
they jotted a laconic item or two in the journals they opened on such an elaborate
plan when they left home, and then skurried off to their whist and euchre labors
under the cabin lamps. If these things were presumed, the presumption was at
fault. The venerable excursionists were not gay and frisky. They played no
blind-man's buff; they dealt not in whist; they shirked not the irksome journal,
for alas! most of them were even writing books. They never romped, they talked
but little, they never sang, save in the nightly prayer-meeting. The pleasure ship
was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse.
(There is nothing exhilarating about a funeral excursion without a corpse.) A free,
hearty laugh was a sound that was not heard oftener than once in seven days about
those decks or in those cabins, and when it was heard it met with precious little
sympathy. The excursionists danced, on three separate evenings, long, long ago,

(it seems an age,) quadrilles, of a single set, made up of three ladies and five gentlemen,
(the latter with handkerchiefs around their arms to signify their sex,) who
timed their feet to the solemn wheezing of a melodeon; but even this melancholy
orgie was voted to be sinful, and dancing was discontinued.

The pilgrims played dominoes when too much Josephus or Robinson's Holy
Land Researches, or book-writing, made recreation necessary—for dominoes is
about as mild and sinless a game as any in the world, perhaps, excepting always
the ineffably insipid diversion they call croquet, which is a game where you don't
pocket any balls and don't carom on any thing of any consequence, and when you
are done nobody has to pay, and there are no refreshments to saw off, and, consequently,
there isn't any satisfaction whatever about it—they played dominoes till
they were rested, and then they blackguarded each other privately till prayer-time.
When they were not seasick they were uncommonly prompt when the dinner-gong
sounded. Such was our daily life on board the ship—solemnity, decorum, dinner,
dominoes, devotions, slander. It was not lively enough for a pleasure trip; but if
we had only had a corpse it would have made a noble funeral excursion. It is all
over now; but when I look back, the idea of these venerable fossils skipping forth
on a six months' picnic, seems exquisitely refreshing. The advertised title of the
expedition—“The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion”—was a misnomer.
“The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession” would have been better—much
better.

Wherever we went, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation, and, I suppose
I may add, created a famine. None of us had ever been any where before;
we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us, and we conducted
ourselves in accordance with the natural instincts that were in us, and trammeled
ourselves with no ceremonies, no conventionalities. We always took care to make
it understood that we were Americans—Americans! When we found that a good
many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a good many more
knew it only as a barbarous province away off somewhere, that had lately been at
war with somebody, we pitied the ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot
of our importance. Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere
will remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of our Lord
1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to imagine in some unaccountable
way that they had a right to be proud of it. We generally created a famine,
partly because the coffee on the Quaker City was unendurable, and sometimes the
more substantial fare was not strictly first class; and partly because one naturally
tires of sitting long at the same board and eating from the same dishes.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously
at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed
that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for
expenses, and got what we conveniently could out of a frane, and wondered where
in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and
stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those
idiots understand their own language. One of our passengers said to a shopkeeper,
in reference to a proposed return to buy a pair of gloves, “Allong restay tranked—
may be ve coom Moonday;” and would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born

Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said. Sometimes it seems to me,
somehow, that there must be a difference between Parisian French and Quaker
City French.

The people stared at us every where, and we stared at them. We generally
made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with them, because we bore
down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them. And yet we took
kindly to the manners and customs, and especially to the fashions of the various
people we visited. When we left the Azores, we wore awful capotes and used
fine tooth combs—successfully. When we came back from Tangier, in Africa, we
were topped with fezzes of the bloodiest hue, hung with tassels like an Indian's
scalp-lock. In France and Spain we attracted some attention in these costumes.
In Italy they naturally took us for distempered Garibaldians, and set a gunboat to
look for any thing significant in our changes of uniform. We made Rome howl.
We could have made any place howl when we had all our clothes on. We got no
fresh raiment in Greece—they had but little there of any kind. But at Constantinople,
how we turned out! Turbans, scimetars, fezzes, horse-pistols, tunies, sashes,
baggy trowsers, yellow slippers—Oh, we were gorgeous! The illustrious dogs of
Constantinople barked their under jaws off, and even then failed to do us justice.
They are all dead by this time. They could not go through such a run of business
as we gave them and survive.

And then we went to see the Emperor of Russia. We just called on him as
comfortably as if we had known him a century or so, and when we had finished
our visit we variegated ourselves with selections from Russian costumes and sailed
away again more picturesque than ever. In Smyrna we picked up camel's hair
shawls and other dressy things from Persia; but in Palestine—ah, in Palestine—
our splendid career ended. They didn't wear any clothes there to speak of. We
were satisfied, and stopped. We made no experiments. We did not try their costume.
But we astonished the natives of that country. We astonished them with
such eccentricities of dress as we could muster. We prowled through the Holy
Land, from Cesarea Philippi to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a weird procession of
pilgrims, gotten up regardless of expense, solemn, gorgeous, green-spectacled,
drowsing under blue umbrellas, and astride of a sorrier lot of horses, camels and
asses than those that came out of Noah's ark, after eleven months of seasickness
and short rations. If ever those children of Israel in Palestine forget when Gideon's
Band went through there from America, they ought to be cursed once more
and finished. It was the rarest spectacle that ever astounded mortal eyes, perhaps.

Well, we were at home in Palestine. It was easy to see that that was the grand
feature of the expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped
through the Louvre, the Pitti, the Ufizzi, the Vatican—all the galleries—and
through the pictured and frescoed churches of Venice, Naples, and the cathedrals
of Spain; some of us said that certain of the great works of the old masters were
glorious creations of genius, (we found it out in the guide-book, though we got hold
of the wrong picture sometimes,) and the others said they were disgraceful old
daubs. We examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence,
Rome, or any where we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn't we
said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of America. But

the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We fell into raptures by the barren
shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor and at Nazareth; we exploded into
poetry over the questionable loveliness of Esdraelon; we meditated at Jezreel and
Samaria over the missionary zeal of Jehu; we rioted—fairly rioted among the holy
places of Jerusalem; we bathed in Jordan and the Dead Sea, reckless whether our
accident-insurance policies were extra-hazardous or not, and brought away so
many jugs of precious water from both places that all the country from Jericho to
the mountains of Moab will suffer from drouth this year, I think. Yet, the pilgrimage
part of the excursion was its pet feature—there is no question about that.
After dismal, smileless Palestine, beautiful Egypt had few charms for us. We
merely glanced at it and were ready for home.

They wouldn't let us land at Malta—quarantine; they would not let us land in
Sardinia; nor at Algiers, Africa; nor at Malaga, Spain, nor Cadiz, nor at the Madeira
islands. So we got offended at all foreigners and turned our backs upon them
and came home. I suppose we only stopped at the Bermudas because they were
in the programme. We did not care any thing about any place at all. We
wanted to go home. Homesickness was abroad in the ship—it was epidemic. If
the authorities of New York had known how badly we had it, they would have
quarantined us here.

The grand pilgrimage is over. Good-bye to it, and a pleasant memory to it, I
am able to say in all kindness. I bear no malice, no ill-will toward any individual
that was connected with it, either as passenger or officer. Things I did not
like at all yesterday I like very well to-day, now that I am at home, and always
hereafter I shall be able to poke fun at the whole gang if the spirit so moves me to
do, without ever saying a malicious word. The expedition accomplished all that
its programme promised that it should accomplish, and we ought all to be satisfied
with the management of the matter, certainly. Bye-bye!