Around the World For a Wager
Hale and tanned, but marked by scars made by cruel fetters in a Russian prison, Henri Mosse arrived in San Francisco recently from the Far East on the French steamer Amiral Juareguiberry en route to Paris striving to win a strange race.
The steamer reached port on a Saturday night, but was held in quarantine until the next morning on account of the presence on board of a large number of Japanese steerage passengers, who were bound for Vancouver, B.C. Mosse and an Englishman now in India are the sole surviving competitors in a race around the world, and both are nearing the end of their long journey. One or the other will win a prize of 50,000 francs by arriving first in Paris.
Mosse was chauffeur in the French capital when the Sportsmen's Club, of London, suggested to the Touring Club, of Paris, that each organisation should furnish four men and send them out on a competitive tour of the world, without funds, except two francs each, the men to travel in pairs, an Englishman with a Frenchman.
The four pairs were to go over different routes. After all preliminaries had been arranged, the start was made on June 14, 1904, and the limit for the world tour was fixed for June 14, 1906. Two of the men started by the way of Africa, two by way of America and the remaining couple by way of Asia Minor. Mosse and his English companion took the Asia Minor route, and got along well together until Constantinople was reached, in July, 1904, when the Englishman, George Moss, succumbed to an attack of fever. The Frenchman, Mosse, came on alone, and had many hairbreadth escapes. At Odessa, on the Black Sea, he was suspected of being a Japanese spy, and for 25 days was kept in chains in a foul prison. His ankles still bear the scars of the irons. Upon being released he passed on afoot and by sea to India, and still later to China.
In the district of Bing Sam, in the interior of China, Mosse was captured by highwaymen and robbed of £4, all the money he had. But he was well treated by the bandits, who offered him a Chinese wife if he should care to remain a while with them.
Mosse chose to keep moving, and he tramped along until he reached the coast, where he took ship for Japan. At Yokohama he joined the Amiral Juareguiberry and worked his way thence to San Francisco. He must leave the vessel there, for it is a condition of the contest that he shall travel overland whenever it is possible. Mosse has been kept posted by the French Club as to his competitors. Letters he has received at various points along his strange course have informed him that the couple going by the African route were murdered by treacherous Abyssinians on the desert, who cut off the heads of the Frenchman and Englishman. The two men who went by way of Australia both took sick and died in the same hospital of a fever. The Frenchman who went by way of America was lost in China, his companion proceeding to India, where he was at last accounts plodding along.
The victory in the long race rests between Mosse and the Englishman in India, the only survivors of the contest. The winner will receive a prize of 50,000 francs, and there is no second prize. That Mosse has visited all the strange places he talks about is proven by the autographs and seals of officials in the countless out-of-the-way places all the way from Paris to Yokohama.
Wanganui Chronicle, Volume L, Issue 12143, 17 September 1907, Page 3.
