The Sun

Afoot in Latin America

Barry A. Franck Off on Another Vagabond Journey.

This Time He Will Wander Through Mexico and Central and South America

-Will Work His Way as on His Previous Trips-A Relief From Teaching.

Harry A. Franck, author of "A Vagabond Journey Around the World" and "Four Months Afoot in Spain," the latter just published by the Century Company, is on another trip. He has been spending the summer knocking about in the Rockies, working part of the time with railroad gangs, and the first part of October is his scheduled time for crossing the Mexican boundary line. He will travel southerly through Mexico and Central America.

"I plan to travel, through October," he says, "through northern Mexico to Mexico City. About the first of November I'll start out to walk from the capital to Guatemala and Honduras. A classmate of mine is the vice-consul at Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and I'll probably spend Christmas and New Year's there.

"I'll take a boat from the west coast of Honduras down past the isthmus and land, in all probability, on the coast below Quito. From there I expect to travel on foot, and possibly by mule, through the highlands of the Andes Mountains, taking trails from one village to another, for there'll probably be no roads, in the usual sense of the word, connecting these mountain villages.

"It will take about six months to reach Santiago, Chile, covering Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Lake Titicaca, and I'll live with the natives all the way. From Santiago I can cross the Andes, cover Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and, entering Brazil, cover most of the Amazon country either by travelling down from its head waters in Peru or after visiting Argentina.

All the better known cities and seaports will be avoided and my very elastic itinerary will be confined to the less civilized districts and the little known parts of the country. It is quite possible that I'll take two years for the trip and continue it around the southern hemisphere. If I get to South Africa, Australia and the Pacific islands, particularly Madagascar, I'll spend several months in each."

Mr. Franck plans to travel much as he did on his other long journeys, carrying very light shoulder luggage and a special Kodak.

But, he says, "whereas on the former trip I attempted to work my way around the world as a common laborer, accepting manual work only, this time I plan to journey rather among the middle classes. But of course I expect to come into frequent contact with laborers and tramps as before. I'll take work of any description that falls in my way or is opened by letters of introduction, such as newspaper work in Spanish speaking countries, tallying cargoes, as timekeeper for labor gangs, &c.

And I think I can pay my expenses."

Since the author has facility in four languages besides English—German, French, Spanish and Italian—he has found it easy to get on terms of intimacy with the natives, especially when he has followed the calling of laborer. Generally in his travels he has been taken for a native, though never making this claim, and when he left Spain after his last vagabond journey he found that his tongue had difficulty with English.

Mr. Franck has been an instructor in the Springfield Technical High School for the last three years. He thus explains his reasons for giving up this position for another vagabondage.

"The first reason," he says, "is that I promised myself when I first took up teaching that I would take every seventh year off, a sabbatical period," without pay, if necessary, "and I've now been teaching continuously for six years since my trip around the world. A teacher, like an athlete, is likely to become stale. The second reason is to gather material for writing, and the third and best is that the territory in view has a personal interest."

Mr. Franck was graduated from the University of Michigan in 1903 and it was while earning tuition money on vacation trips through the West that he learned the value of these methods of travel and study. In 1900 he made a short summer trip to England and France, working his passage and earning a discharge as able seaman that has been valuable to him many times since.

Then came three short summer trips across the Continent, during which he tried his hand variously, working in railroad and harvest gangs, as a steamboat hand, as stevedore, carpenter and mason's helper.

On his trip around the world, when he earned his way entirely, he bossed a gang of native workmen as carpenter; in a circus he was first bouncer and then clown; he was tally clerk for a navigation company; as a sailor he worked his passage on the longer trips, in this manner working his way from Japan to Seattle.

This trip, which resulted in "A Vagabond Journey Around the World," lasted from June, 1904, to October, 1905, and covered a good deal of western Europe and then passed through Palestine, Syria, Egypt, the Sudan, Ceylon, India, Burma, the Malay peninsula, Siam and Japan.

In the summer of 1907 Mr. Franck made the four months walking trip through Spain which supplied the adventures for "Four Months Afoot in Spain." In 1908 he walked through Germany, Belgium and France.