The Square Pegs (10 page)

Returning to Liverpool in stormy seas, Train was responsible for ordering the rescue of two hundred persons on a floundering ship carrying railroad iron. After another year in Liverpool dabbling in phrenology, visiting the mansions of the titled, suggesting decorations for Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace, Train became restless. The Colonel, he felt, was holding him down. He was destined for bigger things.

He hastened back to Boston and demanded a full partnership. Colonel Enoch’s reaction was one of mild apoplexy. After a terrible scene the Colonel offered him a larger share of the business, a share amounting to $15,000 a year. Train waited for the contract and then, instead of signing it, tore it up. He had decided to go off on his own. He would go to Melbourne, Australia, which had been founded less than twenty years before and was in the midst of a gold rush. The Colonel, it must be said, accepted the decision with good grace.

The journey from New York to Australia took ninety-two days. Train occupied himself, on the clipper
Bavaria
, by hooking a shark, harpooning a porpoise, and catching an albatross. He traveled not only with his wife, but also with clerks hired in Boston, crates of business forms and books, and contracts to purchase Australian gold for one firm and to export South Seas goods for another. Despite the gold rush, he expected to find a desolate, isolated Australia, and was speechless when he counted six hundred ships in Sandridge Harbor, the port of Melbourne.

Train wasted no time. His activity was as feverish during his first week Down Under as it would be every week of his two-year stay. He needed a warehouse in Sandridge. He ordered one built in Boston and shipped in sections, thus anticipating prefabricated building by almost a century. The six-story warehouse cost him $25,000. Then, dissatisfied with the crude buildings of Melbourne, he constructed his own corner offices in the heart of the city for $60,000. The city’s population had doubled to forty thousand persons almost overnight. Train made a spectacular bid for their business, Installing marble trading-counters in his headquarters and lavishing free champagne lunches on impressed customers. He sold gold, sold a no-day transportation service to Boston, imported Concord stagecoaches, imported canned foods. In a year his profit in commissions was $95,000.

Train was fascinated by Australia. He introduced not only Yankee vehicles, but also American bowling and the Fourth of July to Melbourne. But when his wife became pregnant a second time their first child, a girl, had died in her fifth month Train packed her off to the United States. Not only did he want more civilized conditions for her, but he wanted the boy born on American soil so that he might be eligible for the American presidency. The boy turned out to be a girl, named Susan, and she was born in Liverpool, en route to Boston. Later, indeed, there were two boys, George and Elsey, who grew up to become bankers in Omaha. But Susan was Train’s favorite. She married a man named Gulager, who worked in the New York Subtreasury, and lived in Stamford, Connecticut, where Train often visited her.

His wife’s departure from Melbourne was actually well timed. For shortly after, twenty thousand miners in the Ballarat and Bendigo fields revolted against new government restrictions. The government had saddled the gold miners with increased license fees and banned them from participation in the provincial government. With a roar of protest, the armed, unruly miners marched on Melbourne, killing forty-one soldiers in the process, burning down the Bentley’s Hotel, and erecting a stockade in the ruins.

They made plans to establish a democratic Five Star Republic. But first they needed more weapons. One of their number, an American citizen, James McGill, offered to lead a raid on a government shipment. No sooner had McGill left for the raid than government troops swarmed over the miners’ stockade and crushed it.

Posters appeared throughout Melbourne offering 1,000 pounds for McGill, dead or alive. Still he did not surrender. Unable to execute his raid, unable to return to his base, he determined to find the vital arms inside Melbourne. In his desperation, he turned to George Francis Train.

Train had been sympathetic toward the miners. And they, in turn, admired him. They felt kinship toward an individualist who came from a nation that had once upended British authority. They proffered him the presidency of their projected Five Star Republic. Train declined. “I neither wanted it, nor could I have obtained it,” he remarked years after.

Train was in his office one morning, working at his desk, when the fugitive McGill slipped into the room, locked the door, and stood before him. “I hear that you have some eighty thousand dollars’ worth of Colt’s revolvers in stock,” McGill began. “I have been sent down here to get them.”

Train stared at him. “Do you know that there is a reward for your head of one thousand pounds?”

“That does not mean anything.”

Train became angry. “This will not do. You have no right to compromise me in this way.”

“We have elected you president of our republic.”

“Damn the republic … I am not here to lead or encourage revolutions, but to carry on my business.”

In that tense moment, there was a knock on the door. It was the Melbourne Chief of Police. Hastily, Train hid McGill, admitted the Chief, learned that he merely wanted to requisition some Concord wagons. Train got rid of him, then returned to the fugitive. “Now, McGill, I am not going to betray you, but am going to save your life. You must do as I tell you.”

Train found a barber and had him shave off McGill’s mustache and cut his hair. Then Train had McGill change into laborers’ clothes. In this guise McGill was led to the safety of one of Train’s clippers, where he was put to work as a stevedore. Three days later he was safe at sea and with him went Train’s prospects for the Australian presidency.

Actually, Train had more ambitious plans. He felt that his Australian commission business was too limited and that the New Englanders he dealt with were too conservative. He decided to pull up roots and move north. A year before, Commodore Matthew Perry and his seven black ships had sailed into Yedo Bay and opened Japan to world trade. Train set his sights on a new business in Yokohama.

Though he started out for Japan, he never quite reached it. When he arrived in Shanghai, he learned that all sailings for Yokohama had been canceled and would not be resumed until the Crimean War peace treaty had been settled. But neither the journey toward Japan nor the long voyage home after was wasted. The sights Train saw and the adventures he met stimulated a lifelong odyssey that took him four times around the world and across the Atlantic on twenty-seven different occasions.

From the moment Train left Australia he peppered the pages of the
New York Herald
with a provocative running commentary on his travels. Sailing through the Strait of Sunda, he saw the volcanic island of Krakatau threaten eruption. And erupt it finally did, exactly twenty-eight years later, in the loudest blast in all history (heard as far away as Australia), an explosion that sent waves halfway around the earth to the English Channel. He halted in Singapore to visit a Chinese millionaire and his two pet tigers, rode from Hong Kong to Canton with H. E. Green, the future husband of

Hetty Green, and strolled about Manchu-ruled Shanghai shuddering at the “gory heads of rebels hanging from the walls.”

Continuing his travels, he visited the Black Hole of Calcutta and felt that “there have been many worse catastrophes.” He approved of the cremation pyres on the Ganges because they were economical, costing only one-half cent per body. He found nine flying fish dead in his berth near Aden. He took a donkey to the Pyramids. He was shocked by Palestine. “For three days I saw nothing but humbug and tinsel, lying and cheating, ugly women, sand-fleas and dogs.” He was revolted by Bethlehem, “disgusted at being taken down two flights and shown an old wet cave as the place where the Saviour was said to have been born.” He visited Balaklava in the Crimea and reported that the Charge of the Light Brigade had been “a terribly exaggerated affair, so far as massacre was concerned.”

When he returned to New York in July 1856, the
Herald
greeted him with sixteen full columns of his letters from abroad and James Gordon Bennett met him with the request that he run for Congress. But the wanderlust was, for the moment, more important to him than politics.

In 1856 he returned to Europe with his wife and infant daughter, taking up residence in Paris at the Grand-Hotel du Louvre, in the rue de Rivoli. He contracted to write a series of financial articles for
Merchants’ Magazine
and determined to become a linguist like the German businessmen he had met in the East. He already knew German. Now he hired a Catholic priest to tutor him in French and Italian. When he wasn’t studying he was trying to enter European society. He mingled with French counts, Spanish dukes, and tsarist princes, and felt what he learned from them “made up for the loss of a college career.” He was childishly happy to be invited to a formal ball given by Napoleon III in the Tuileries. There were four thousand guests, many waltzing to an orchestra led personally by Johann Strauss. Train was pleased to meet the Emperor’s current mistress and to speak to the Empress Eugénie in French.

He did not remain in Paris long. He went to Rome, where a fiery Italian delegation welcomed him as a liberator. He was certain they mistook him for Garibaldi, but it turned out that they knew who he was. Nevertheless, he wanted no part of their violence. “The curious thing about the affair,” he reflected later, “was that here, as everywhere, these people regarded me as a leader of revolts Carbonari, La Commune, Chartists, Fenians, Internationals as if I were ready for every species of deviltry. For fifteen years, five or six governments kept their spies shadowing me in Europe and America.”

In 1857 he went to Russia armed with a social message from a mutual friend to the Tsar’s younger brother, the Grand Duke Constantine. Train tracked the Grand Duke to his country residence in Strelna, near St. Petersburg. After that he was royally treated. He found Moscow the most impressive city he had ever seen. “There is something primitive and prehistoric about it. … I was astonished to find in the Kremlin a portrait of Napoleon at the battle of Borodino.”

But Train was more than a tourist. In every country he carefully made business contacts. It was after his return to Paris from Moscow that one of these contacts paid off handsomely. And soon Train was embroiled in the first of several financial jugglings that were to make him a millionaire.

He had met Queen Maria Cristina of Spain, one of the wealthiest women in the world. He had also met her financial adviser, Don Jose de Salamanca, the Spanish banking giant. Train swiftly made use of these acquaintances. He learned that when the United States had bought Florida from Spain, part of the purchase money had been deposited to the Queen’s credit in the Bank of the United States. After the bank was liquidated, the Queen’s cash assets were invested in forty thousand acres of Pennsylvania real estate, land rich in coal and iron ore.

It troubled Train that these forty thousand acres were lying unexplored. He had long had an idea that a rail link should be constructed between the Erie Railroad and the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, thus uniting the East and the Midwest. Now he saw that this link could be built across the Queen’s property in Pennsylvania, enriching her holdings a hundredfold. He approached her, and she was interested. It was all the encouragement Train required.

He darted in and out of Paris, London, New York, and Pennsylvania, trying to pull the deal together. He needed solid financing. He tried to see the Queen’s banker, Don Jose de Salamanca. He had no luck until he offered to lend him a million dollars. Salamanca’s interest was piqued. But, instead of lending the Spaniard a million, Train walked out with Salamanca’s signature on notes for a million. With this money pledged, Train wangled $2,200,000 worth of credit from manufacturers of iron in Wales. With the financing completed, Train permitted the Queen’s representative in London, James McHenry, who had made a fortune exporting dairy products from America, to take over and push the project to completion.

Train collected $100,000 in commissions. The four hundred miles of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad were built across three states, including the Queen’s acres. The railroad proved a terrible failure. It went into receivership three times in thirteen years before it finally became a success as part of the Erie Railroad. In the end, the Queen saw no profits. And the invincible Don Jose de Salamanca had nothing to show for his gamble beyond a sea of red ink and a town named Salamanca in New York.

Train, however, was heady with his coup and certain that he could make more money by concentrating on transportation. Impressed by horse-drawn streetcars in Philadelphia and New York, he decided to promote them, with a few innovations of his own, in Europe. England, especially, seemed a likely place. Train had long been appalled by the snail’s pace of its carriage traffic. Further, he felt that English labor sorely needed a cheap means of public transportation.

He took his radical ideas to Liverpool. They were promptly rejected by the authorities, who felt that his trams would clutter the thoroughfares and provide unfair competition for the omnibuses. He moved on to neighboring Birkenhead, and there found that an old shipbuilding friend was chairman of the city commissioners. By promising many concessions among them that he would rip up his tracks and repair the streets at his own expense if the system proved a nuisance Train was given permission to proceed with a “horse tramway.” He laid four miles of tracks, provided spacious streetcars, each drawn by horses, and inaugurated the line on August 30, 1860. The tramway was an immediate sensation.

Certain that he had overcome all opposition, Train stormed into London. But there he ran into a stone wall. The omnibus people, fearing competition, and the gentry, objecting to overcrowded passages, vigorously opposed him. Train fought the harder, and finally by his eloquence gained permission for an experimental two-mile track from Hyde Park to Bayswater.