Peter MacQueen: travelogues and color-views of many lands

              PETER MacQUEEN

Travelogues and Color-Views of Many Lands
Seventy-eight Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts



Boston, Mass. April 18, 1910




D
EAR FRIEND:  I am sending out my circulars for next year  The vacant dates for New England will be in January and February, and there will be a few in October—from the Twentieth to the Thirtieth.




The lecture that has done the best is 
The Land and Game Where Roosevelt Hunted.
  This is illustrated by two hundred colored slides




Another lecture that I am making prominent this year is 
Russia and Tolstoi.
  The subject seems to take a great hold on the public mind and is unquestionably the best subject in the world for a lecture on travel.  It also has two hundred colored slides  I find, too, that there is a demand for a travel lecture upon 
The Danube River and the Turks
:
  or 
From Vienna to Constantinople.
  This is a mighty interesting field of travel, for it takes one to the edge of the Orient and into the old medieval empire of the Moslems.




I am doing also a good deal with a travel lecture on 
Egypt and the Storied Nile.
  
Japan and the Philippines
 is of perpetual interest; while 
Panama Canal and South America
 is of growing interest.




I hope that perhaps you can use one of these subjects in your city this winter.

Figure
Peter Mac Queen



VIEWS OF AN OUTSIDER



T
HE lecture on Africa by Mr. MacQueen was a thrilling narrative, full of wit, of description, of history, and of daring escapades in the jungles and on top of the highest of the African mountains, and from start to finish the views illustrating a steady flow of fluent English faded into one another in a manner both uncanny and bewilderingly beautiful.  The pictures were wonderful in their subject-matter.  The posing of the figures and the groupings showed splendid artistic ability.  They furthermore showed a daring and steadiness of nerve fully commensurate with their artistic qualities; as, for instance, a photograph at close range of a zebra caught in the act of drinking at a tiny stream by a lioness, which had sprung upon the zebra's back, prepared to take breakfast not with him but on him.
—From the Kingston 
Daily Freeman,
 April Fifth, Nineteen Hundred Ten

To Travel is to Realize the World's Intelligibility




PETER MacQUEEN,
 Seventy-eight Huntington Avenue
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS




The recipe for perpetual ignorance is:  Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
—ELBERT HUBBARD






Peter MacQueen's New Book, 
In Wildest Africa

Inky Asseverations by Clever Men Who Know a Good Thing



I
N 
The Philistine,
 Elbert Hubbard says:  
Peter knows Africa from Shepherd's Hotel to Cape Town.  Every foot of the Bwana Tumbo Country is to him familiar.  Lions, hartebeests, zebras, hippos, rhinos, crocks and tsetse-flies are his playthings.  He tells a great deal of truth in his book, and backs it up with many superb pictures.  No doubt he tells a few big lies, for like all really good men, Peter has not lost his capacity for sin.  But there are two kinds of liars:  those who lie to deceive you, and those who lie to amuse you.  Peter is a great liar, but he deceives nobody.




The New York “Nation” says:


Mr. MacQueen's book on Wildest Africa has a wide range.  Many entertaining stories are told and there are graphic pictures of life in the towns, on the ranches and in the bush.




The Edinburgh “Scotsman,” Edinburgh, Scotland:


The volume is one of the finest of its kind that has been issued.  Mr. MacQueen is an authority on the subject of Africa—its people, its vast wilderness, and its history.  He has traveled from one end of the country to the other, and made a deep study of it.  In addition he is an entertaining writer as well as an accurate one.




The London “Times,” London, England:


Mr. Peter MacQueen, of Boston, in his 'Wildest Africa' has written a very readable account of Uganda, Victoria Nyanza, the Kilimanjaro region, and British East Africa.




The New York Evening “Post”:


There is nothing provincial about the illustrations or the text in this fine volume upon Wildest Africa.




The Chicago “News”:


Mr. MacQueen gives us a very effective account of Central Africa in a way becoming a scientist who sees and sees seriously.




“Journal of Education,” Boston:


Peter MacQueen is the greatest of American Travelers among the younger men.  More than a year before Roosevelt, MacQueen was in the deepest forest jungles and with the fiercest beasts at short range, and a more fascinating or better illustrated book is hardly conceivable.




The Philadelphia “Inquirer”:


The author gives us the history and description of Africa in a book notable for the simplicity and directness of style, and the wonderful amount of information condensed in such small space.




The “Book News Monthly,” New York:


It is an entertaining and informing volume, extremely timely now when all eyes are turned to African hunting and exploring.




The Rochester “Advertiser-Union”:


A trained writer and scientist, the author brings to his work an intimate knowledge of wild life and a surprisingly good ability in the use of descriptive language.




New Orleans “Picayune”:


This instructive and entertaining relation of a hunting and exploration trip through Uganda and British East Africa will open the eyes of many to the developments that have come upon the continent that Roosevelt is now making famous.




San Francisco “Call”:


'In Wildest Africa' at once suggests our Nimrod ex-President  The author, Peter MacQueen, in his effective account of African travels, mentions Mr. Roosevelt, but has really time only for the essentials of hazardous travel life in Africa.




Toronto “Globe,” Toronto, Canada:


In 'In Wildest Africa' Mr. MacQueen has given us a very sensible and clever delineation of the tribes, customs, climate, and marvelous development of Central Africa today.




Pittsburgh “Gazette-Times,” Pittsburgh, Pa.:


The book fairly bulges with facts, and the style is noteworthy.






Published by L. C. PAGE & CO., Two Hundred Summer Street, Boston, Massachusetts, or write direct to PETER MacQUEEN, Seventy-eight Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts




Emerson said men are gods in ruins.  What he probably meant to say was that a man is a god in knee-pants.
—ELBERT HUBBARD






On the Subject of Travel



M
Y little niece, in an English boarding-school, said to me:  
Oh, Uncle, in England we shall soon be as bad as the people of France!
  I was greatly shocked and said to her:  
Child, who told you the French people were bad?  There are no bad nations   Tell your teacher with the compliments of your Uncle Peter that it is a wrongful sin to speak of bad nations.  All nations are good nations.  The great Edmund Burke said:  'You can not indict a whole nation.'  I have been in forty different civilized and uncivilized countries during the last ten years; and in that time I have met delightful Englishmen, sturdy Scotchmen, genial Irishmen, practical Americans, courteous spaniards, witty Frenchmen, kindly Italians, jovial Russians, intelligent Germans, learned Jews, bright Japanese, hospitable Chinamen, brave Filipinos, devout Hindoos, rugged Boers, splendid savages, democratic Australians, warm-hearted Canadians, artistic Greeks, manly Turks, home-loving Austrians, patriotic Swiss, hardy Norsemen, vigorous Dutchmen, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, good people from Missouri, and gentlemen from Indiana, and just as no one bouquet of flowers represents an entire Springtime, so no one race of men have gathered to themselves all the virtues of humanity.  For I believe the splendor of God is over all His children.
  That will give my little niece something to think about for some time to come, don't you think so?  We would love our enemies if we knew them.  To know all is to forgive all.





Egypt and the Storied Nile



O
NE day I stood at the headwaters of the Nile and let my mind drift down the river of a thousand dreams:  In the mirage and fancy of my brain I seemed to see the history of ten thousand years.  I beheld the Akkads conquer and crush, then raise a stately civilization of tombs and temples, of pyramids and palaces.  It was the gorgeous cradle of the human race.  In the dim background of the earlier centuries stood the figure of the first historic king, Menes, a gentleman and a physician (apologies to Elbert Hubbard).  Mistily dim, Osiris and Horus ruled over a race of beaten slaves.  Isis never lifted her veil until with her black breasts she suckled the infant Christ.  On the stage of the younger centuries I saw the prophet-son of Pharaoh's daughter, grandiose and austere; the homesick Hebrew; and that dainty princess of Utopia, the Queen of Sheba.  Then the conquering Alexander and the world-defying Romans.  Rose from the mist of Egypt's waters the flawless Grecian features, and the burning eyes, hued like a Cyprian violet, of her who ruined Antony, controlled Caesar and gave the world's Empire to Octavius—the great Queen Cleopatra.  In her met all the sweetness that has been given woman for her glory and all the genius that man has wrested from the sky  Then amid the gleam of Moslem spears flashed Napoleon's artillery, and when that had cleared away I saw the brilliant rule of mighty England.  The Nile is the river of today and tomorrow, as well as of yesterday.





Roosevelt in Africa



The Hand and Game Where 



T
HE great continent of Africa, so long a tantalizing mystery to the white man, is fast becoming civilized.  It is no longer the dark continent per se, but a land of light and learning and liberty and justice and equal laws—permeated and penetrated by the steamship and the railway, and the thoughts that shake mankind.  I spent a twelvemonth there in Nineteen Hundred Eight and Nineteen Hundred Nine, and with a photographer friend made nine hundred photographs of the animals, the natives, the country.  Eight hundred ninety-four of the pictures came out good.  I could not show you in an evening all those views, but I will show you about two hundred of them, colored and made to look almost precisely like the original setting.




These pictures cover the route taken by our brilliant ex-President in his great hunting tour.  We knew of Africa from Ptolemy to Mungo Park.  Livingston and Stanley touched its desert wilderness with undying glory.  But in our own time the trip of Roosevelt has surpassed in interest almost any happening in that great continent.  The reason is, not that he slaughtered a few thousand wild animals (most of us wish he hadn't) but his trip took great significance from the fact that for seven years he has been the cynosure of all the rulers and peoples of the world.  Marse Henry Watterson was therefore right when he averred that Theodore Roosevelt is the most striking, romantic, picturesque and powerful personality that has appeared in the world since Napoleon died at Saint Helena.  Hence the interest in a lecture on Roosevelt in Africa.





The Philippines and Japan



I
SOMETIMES wish that we had never seen the Philippines; that they had sunk in the ocean along with Krakatoa or ancient Atlantis, but since some of my friends have been appointed to government positions at a very handsome salary, I am in favor of our retention of the Islands.  They are at the gateway of the day.  They are rich in furrowed fields and forest heights.  But like all good things, from Eve's apple to the Pennsylvania oil-wells, they are full of danger and dynamite.




Neither the boundaries of Europe nor of our own country are liable to change, but over the horizon of the mightiest ocean in the world new powers have risen.  India is in a ferment for home rule:  China is awaking from the sleep of ages, the most colossal potentiality in the world; Australia, a great English democracy, is entering world politics.  Russia and Germany, England and France, are strengthening their grasp on the Pacific ocean.  Meanwhile, Japan, keen, bold, aspiring, is forging ahead with magic rapidity.  Our own Pacific coast-line is five thousand miles in extent and in a hundred years will be one of our most valuable assets.  America, Japan, Germany, England will doubtless contribute essentially to the solution of the problems of the Pacific.  Will they all develop their power in this great ocean along the lines of peace and justice?  Probably the peace, prosperity and happiness of future nations, whose shores are washed by the Pacific ocean, lie largely in the hands of the brave, little brown men of Japan.  The Japanese, like ourselves, have their good points and their weak ones.  Let us study the Japs at a closer range.  Two hundred views.




That which has been done is dead; that which is now being done is dying; that only is alive which remains to do.
—ELBERT HUBBARD






Panama and South America



T
HE PANAMA CANAL IS FINISHED!  Such is the startling news on the Isthmus.  On April Fourteenth, Nineteen Hundred Ten, one hundred three million, seven hundred ninety-five thousand cubic yards of material had been excavated.  This was the original plan and contract  In order to accommodate great dreadnaughts and giant liners the plans have had to be modified involving the removal of seventy million additional yards of material.  The record of accomplishment of the American Government at the Isthmus is without precedent in the engineering history of mankind  The Panama Canal will bring South America to our very doors.  Brazil alone is larger than the United States and probably as rich.  Venezuela, Columbia, Equador, Peru, Chili and Argentina are names with which the future history of mankind will gleam and glow.  This is a country about which every young American should learn all he can.





Russia and Tolstoi



N
O country in the world is more interesting than Russia today.  More than twice the size of the United States, peopled largely by white men, containing the most democratic population on the face of the earth, Russia in a few generations will be one of the most imposing and important factors in the world's development.  Its great cities, its immense steppes, its majestic rivers, its marvelous fecundity, its strong-grained philosophers, its red revolution, its tyranny and patriotism are the thrill and wonder of mankind.  Russia has more comfortable railways than those of the United States, a more hospitable population than even the Arab-Moslem.  It is a land of colossal ideas, brilliant antagonisms, splendid and far-reaching ethnic and ethical problems.  Above all, it is one of the sincerest friends our beloved country has ever had.





The Danube River From Vienna to Constantinopole



T
HE American Invasion of Europe has steadily flowed like an overwhelming sea.  Green Ireland, Merrie England, and the Bonnie Land of Scotland are filled and crowded with peering itinerant Americans.  The Grand fjords of the Northland, the majestic silences of the Alps, the bending river of Bingen, the broad boulevards of Paris, the galleries of Italy, the plateaux of Spain, resound from end to end with the nasal, high-pitched inquiries from the disciples of Cook and Baedeker.  But who shall sing a little song of the Danube river?  Who shall tell the story of Blondel, and Richard Cœur de Leon?  Who shall sing the great deeds of Hunyadi Janos and Dusan?  Who shall tell the quaint life of the Gypsies of Hungary?  The marketmen of Servia?  The domes and minarets that gleam around Constantinople, like jewels on the neck of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn?  Come with me and I will show you some of these things.





Belief and Disbelief of Peter MacQueen

(IN PART)



I
BELIEVE in the IDEALITY and UNITY of the human race.  I think all countries and all peoples are extremely interesting, and that it is necessary, today, to travel far and see much before a man can give any valuable opinion on public questions.  Tolstoi told me, 
Mr. MacQueen, if I had traveled so far as you have done, I would have had a broader philosophy.  Travel, travel on, and never stop traveling.
  I think that all religions have in them some good.  I believe it is better to have a false religion than no religion at all; for all false systems have in them a residuum of truth; and from that residuum a man may grow to greater truth.  I believe in the Suffragist movement, in Temperance and Progressive Prohibition, also in Christian Science, and in Osteopathy.  I think it is good for boys not to smoke cigarettes, and for men not to eat beef, or drink whisky; and that the high cost of meat has been a great blessing to our land, in making many people semi-vegetarians.  I believe in the automobile and the flying-machine, in Wireless Telegraphy and the Science of Psychology, in the liberty of man, woman and child.  I believe there is a great career for the old maid and the old bachelor in such a complex system as ours.  I do not believe in race suicide; but I think that if race suicide is to exist, it should begin at the mudsills of society.  I think every married woman who has a million dollars should have many children, whilst the poor man can not afford the luxury of more than two. I believe in labor and capital, and I think that capital has as much right to combine as labor, and vice versa.  I believe that the striker has the right to stop other men from stealing his job, and that this will be admitted in our courts inside of ten years  I believe first, last and all the time in Uncle Sam—if you mean by that the awful embodiment of average commonsense called The People.  I believe that we have the best country that ever was or ever will be for a young man or a young woman who wants to do right.  I believe in the Panama Canal and the Merchant Marine; in the Servant-Girl and her Mistress; and I think the Servant Problem, when it is a problem, is caused by an unreasonable amount of demands on one side and an unreasonable amount of shirking on the other.  I believe in the Hall-Room Boys, but I know they would make more money and live longer if they went into the country and became farmhands  I believe in the farms and farmers of the United States.  In the waving, billowed seas of wheat and corn  Above all, I believe in the permanence, dignity and divinity of the Human Race.  I want to live, and laugh, and love, and bless the thinking, feeling clay, called man  You needn't think this way if you don't want to.
—
Peter MacQueen.




Write:  PETER MacQUEEN Seventy-eight Huntington Ave., Boston, Massachusetts




I go on the principle that all men are honest when they honestly believe that the men with whom they are dealing are honest.
—H. P. HARRISON