CHAPTER IV
YACHTING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
Taken at its face value a month in the Mediterranean, on board one of
the finest yachts afloat, with visits to Corsica, Elba, Nice, Cannes,
Naples, Genoa, Syracuse, and the Pirams, should give promise of a
picturesque and entertaining record of sight-seeing, the kind of journal
in which the views of Baedeker and of your local cab driver are blended,
in order that the aroma of foreign travel may be wafted to the nostrils
of your fresh-water cousins.
What my narrative lacks of this flavor of luxurious vagrancy must be
supplied by the peculiar interest of a cruise which violated every
tradition of the annals of yachting, and created precedents which in all
human probability will never be followed so long as iron floats on
water.
It was part of Mr. Pulitzer's scheme of nautical life to shroud all his
movements in mystery. One result of this was that when we were on the
yacht we never knew where we were going until we got there. The compass-
course at any moment betrayed nothing of Mr. Pulitzer's intentions, for
we might turn in at night with the ship heading straight for Naples and
wake up in the morning to find ourselves three miles south of the Genoa
lighthouse.
Apart from Mr.
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