The desire for travel possessed me mightily in '69, just after the golden spike was driven at the completion of the Union Pacific Railway, by which California and New York were made nearer one another by many days of travel. The circumference of the globe had been shrunken. I wanted, naturally, to be the first man to utilize the great advantage thus given to travel by making the quickest trip around the world.
After closing my lecture tour on the Pacific coast in the spring and summer of '70, I prepared for such a trip, carefully calculating that it could be made within eighty days, even with the inevitable losses due to bad connections at different ports. I wanted to take my sons, George and Elsey, with me, but, at the last moment, they were prevented from going. I found out only a few days ago, when accusing my daughter Sue of keeping them in Newport, that their mother had given them ten golden eagles each not to go. I sailed from San Francisco August 1, '70. On the same ship was Susan B. King, whom I found in San Francisco waiting to sail, as she was tired of the way her affairs were going in New York and wanted a long trip for rest and recreation. She had $30,000 with her, which she said she would try to invest profitably on the voyage. She was then quite an old woman, as the world generally estimates age.
I made Yokohama in very good time, and went immediately to the Japanese capital, the new seat of the Emperor, Tokyo. I may record here a very curious thing. I believe I was the last man--the last foreigner, at least--who had taken part in an old national custom of Japan, by which persons of opposite sex bathe together, without bathing suits. It was then considered, in that land of good morals and fine esthetic sense, that no impropriety was involved in this custom. Manners and customs there were open and free as in Greece, when Athens was "the eye of Greece" and the center of the world's civilization. I went to one of the public baths to experience a decidedly new sensation. I was allowed to bathe with old men and women, young men and maidens--and no one, except, perhaps, myself, felt any degree of embarrassment or false modesty.
But the fact that a foreigner was bathing in this way with Japanese women and girls made something of a stir in Tokyo that had been unexpected by me. It seems that, a short time before, some Englishmen had gone into one of the public baths and made themselves very offensive. This had taught the Japanese that they could not trust the foreigner, and they had already nearly decided to exclude foreigners from their baths, or to separate the sexes. My experience was, therefore, the last, as I believe. After this the sexes were not permitted to bathe together.