THE WORLD’S BACK DOORS

Taranaki Daily News, 22 July 1929, Page 2

THE WORLD’S BACK DOORS

travellers from new lands. Now that the colonies are settling down into nations with the inevitable staid background of home life, there is fast springing up amongst the younger generations a desire to re-discover the old world whence their ancestors came. The four young ’Varsity students from Canada who are travelling as deck boys with the cargo steamer Canadian Conqueror are typical of the scores of other young men who have been unable to resist the call of the wanderlust. Recently a book called “The World’s Back Doors,” has been written by a young Melbourne lad, Max Murray. He was just twenty-one and had no ties to keep him home, so when the “spring fret” came over him he had to go roving for no other reason than that one day he went down to a grey Swedish ship that lay in the Yana beyond Queen’s bridge. She was discharging lumber from Oregon, and the skipper was watching the remnants of his crew going ashore. It was so easy to get work on her that he got it and came back wondering what had possessed him. With five shillings in his pocket and a dream of distances and uncharted seas, hjj signed on as cabin boy to the Lygnern. He was of sturdy pioneer stock, for his people had sailed for Australia more than a hundred years previously. Now he was travelling back from the new world below the line to discover the old world of which he had heard so much. It was a hard life in the foc’sle of a cargo boat bound for the West Cpast of America, but he stuck it even though the ship was so hungry that the seagulls would not follow her, and so full of vermin that the rats had left.

At San Francisco his fingers were crushed while they were re-loading, so he was paid off and for a while hobnobbed with the lumber men of the west coast. When lie grew tired of this he became guard to ft number of Chinese who were being convoyed from San Francisco to Mexico. Then he went back over the border and lived like Mark Twain on a Mississippi river steamer, where ho worked with “the laziest, dirtiest, most down-and-out crew that could be conceived.”, Wandering on to New York, he then worked his passage across into the Mediterranean and finally arrived in. London.

But during all his travels it was always the “world's back doors” that he entered. The average man, when he goes abroad, follows the beaten track left by his prosperous forerunners. The front doors of the world are open, and when he looks in he sees only the cities on holiday and admires only the beauties of the countryside. But there is the other way of travelling, chosen by Max Murray, and though it may be hard and at times unpleasant, this is compensated for by the deeper insight into the real state of affairs which can be gained. The countries through which Murray passes are merely backgrounds for the Americans and Egyptians and Englishmen with whom he rubs shoulders,