From the archive, 15 December 1875: French travel club offers round-the-world …

There was a time, and that by no means remote, when a man who had been round the world was a personage. Schoolboys used to speak in the same tone of Alexander the conqueror and Cook the circumnavigator. But cheap trips have taken place of pilgrimages; and an enterprising Frenchman has put forth a scheme for the manufacture of fifty circumnavigators per annum.

M. Georges Biard in the course of his voyages as a naval lieutenant has remarked the discomfort that frequent changes from ship to ship entail upon tourists. He therefore proposes to form a “Société des Voyages d’Etudes Autour du Monde.”

Although study is an essential feature in the title, it is optional in the scheme. A first-class vessel is to be constructed, with a separate cabin for each of the passengers, who are not to exceed fifty in number. Ten months is the time allotted for the completion of the journey; 104 days being devoted to travel and 100 to seeing the lions at the various stopping places. Books will be provided, but no one will be compelled to read them; professors will deliver lectures, but attendance on them is to be optional; atlases and globes will be supplied profusely, but no one need turn them over. The fare is to be £800. M. Biard is surely the Napoleon of tourist agents.

It must be confessed that M. Biard has made good provision for the safety and comfort of his prospective clients. Under which category shall we place the regulation that no women are to be allowed on board? It is scarcely possible to imagine so misanthropic a rule being devised by a Frenchman; but so it is. Should any lady hereafter determine to emulate the example of Ida Pfeiffer, and make a woman’s journey round the world, it will have to be pursued under all the discomforts of the present system and without any of the luxuries which M. Biard has devised for the “curled darlings” of the other sex.