CHAPTER I.
It is said that an old sailor looking at the first ocean steamer, exclaimed, "There's an end to seamanship." More correctly he might have predicted the end of the romance of ocean travel.

Steam abridges time and space to such a degree that the world grows rapidly prosaic.
Countries once distant and little known are at this day near and familiar.

Railways on land and steamships on the ocean, will transport us, at frequent and regular intervals, around the entire globe.

From New York to San Francisco and thence to our antipodes in Japan and China, one may travel in defiance of propitious breezes formerly so essential to an ocean voyage.

The same untiring power that bears us thither will bring us home again by way of Suez and Gibraltar to any desired port on the Atlantic coast.