I observed that the Japanese used small paper packages for tea, thus making it convenient to handle tea. I then recalled the custom of the Chinese in compressing tea for transportation by caravan to the great Fair of Nijnii Novgorod. Here was an opportunity, I thought, and I suggested to Susan B. King that she might invest her $30,000 to good purpose in sending to New York a cargo of tea put up in little paper packages, and that, if she wanted to try it, I would give her letters to men in Canton who could arrange the matter for her. She undertook the scheme, and I wrote a description of it for Anglin's Gazette, in Yokohama. The tea was shipped to New York, and was handled at the Demorest headquarters. The tea was in half-pound and pound packages. This was long before Sir Thomas Lipton employed this method of putting up teas.
At Saigon, in French Cochin-China, I met the United States ship Alaska; and from that port sailed on a ship of the Messagerie Imperiale line for Marseilles. The remainder of the voyage was uneventful, except for the diversion just before we left Singapore of hearing the news of the fall of the Second Empire, the defeat of Louis Napoleon at Sedan, and the establishment of the republic.
I have already recorded, in the chapter on the Commune in France, my arrival at Marseilles and my experiences in the brief period of my visit. After I had been arrested and liberated, and had had my interview with Gambetta at Tours, I passed on rapidly to New York, and finished my tour of the world inside of eighty days.
My second trip was made in the year '90. I planned it while I was in jail in Boston for a debt that I did not contract. There had been some note-worthy efforts on the part of newspaper writers to make a record-breaking trip, and Miss Bisland had gone around in seventy-eight days, while Nellie Bly had succeeded in making the voyage in seventy-three days. I proposed to Col. John A. Cockerill, of the New York World, who had sent Nellie Bly on her trip, to make the circuit in less time; but he did not care to upset the World's own record. I then telegraphed to Radebaugh, proprietor of the Tacoma Ledger, that if he would raise $1,000 for a lecture in Tacoma, I would make a trip around the world in less than seventy days. He told me to come on.