Travel diary reveals Victorian honeymoon couple’s amazing trip

A remarkable travel diary documenting the round-the-world honeymoon of a Victorian couple has emerged 125 years later.

The hard-backed log is filled with 129 pages of Lily and Godfrey Armitage’s handwritten account of the nine-month trip with coloured drawings and photographs illustrating their travels.

It contains a hair-raising account of a horrific voyage across the Pacific Ocean when their 550ft-long cruise liner was hit by a typhoon and capsized before righting itself.

One passenger was so terrified he threatened to shoot himself if the vessel rolled over again. The well-to-do couple also described how highwaymen held up five trains on the track ahead of theirs as they crossed America.

Other fascinating adventures they documented in words and pictures include them visiting an opium den in San Francisco, enjoying a Japanese tea party and camping on the American prairies.

There is also a gruesome description of an elephant hunt the newly-weds took part in in India. The travel journal is expected to fetch £1,000 after it was put up for sale with David Lay Auctions in Penzance, Cornwall. 

It had been bought by an eagle-eyed bargain hunter at an antique fair. The Armitages were married at Over Hall, Winsford, Cheshire and left for their honeymoon from Liverpool on September 2, 1893.

They planned their trip to follow Thomas Cook’s World Tour, taking in America, Canada, Japan, China, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and India, before they returned to England via Plymouth in May 1894.

In one extract Mrs Armitage describes the stomach-churning sea crossing when their ship, RMS Empress of Japan, almost sunk.

She writes: ‘Tuesday night was our worst night, it was frightful and everyone thought our last hours had come.

‘At two o’clock in the morning we gave one terrific roll, 42 degrees, the hurricane deck went right under water and she lay there for a minute before she could right herself.

‘The captain has since told us that if she had done it a second time it would have been all over with us. No-one thought we should ever get through that night.’

She describes the ‘mad’ passenger who almost shot himself during the dramatic incident.

She writes: ‘He was frantic during the storm and rushed after the captain offering him £2,000 to stop the boat and he bent down for his pistol to shoot himself after the big roll he was so frightened.’

Another diary entry describes the couple going on an elephant hunt in India in March 1894. She describes the bull elephant heading towards the tree she was in before her husband delivered his ‘death shot’. 

The account is very matter-of-fact and she states they had a bottle of champagne for dinner after the locals cut off the elephant’s limbs to keep as souvenirs.

It reads: ‘Then after Godfrey getting four shots into him he was first making for my tree and then Godfrey gave him his death shot and he came down close to my tree. He put his trunk in the air and then went down on his knees first.

‘We immediately sent for the coolies (Indian labourers) to cut off his legs and it took six hours to cut his ears, legs, trunk and tail off. He measured 10 feet high, 13 feet long from front to hind legs.

‘We fished in the evening and had a bottle of champagne for dinner.’

In America they spent two weeks camping out on the prairies, shooting and preparing their own food and encountering wolves, bears and the Native American Sioux Indians who Lily said ‘look at you in such a funny way that you feel rather uncomfortable’.

They travelled across America to San Francisco where they visited an opium den in Chinatown which Lily described as a ‘dreadful hole’.

She wrote: ‘In a little low-roofed room lay 26 men, all smoking hard except two or three who had fallen asleep, how they live in such a fearful atmosphere is wonderful.’

Mimi Connell-Lay, from the auction house, said: ‘It’s a fascinating historical document and once you get stuck into it, it’s hard to put it down.

‘We don’t really know a lot about Lily and Godfrey Armitage as the vendor bought the diary at an antique sale but they obviously came from a very affluent family to afford a trip like this.

‘Lily writes very engagingly but also in a very matter-of-fact way. They were doing a lot of life-threatening activities but she just takes it all in her stride.

‘The elephant hunt is just gruesome, it’s just a completely different mindset to how we think now. It’s the complete opposite of modern-day package holidays, she was the ultimate adventurous traveller.

‘I think the diary could appeal to collectors on so many different levels, there are lots of early photographs from India and Japan that are of interest on their own, and little rice paper watercolours.’

Godfrey Armitage was a major in the army and died in 1913. Lilly re-married in 1916 to Sir Maurice Bromley-Wilson, a baronet. The journal will be sold on Thursday.