FOREWORD
HENRY WESTON FARNSWORTH was born on August 7, 1890, in Dedham, Massachusetts. In those days Dedham was a very quiet little country village. He lived there eleven years of the most uneventful, radiant, joyous childhood, growing up in an intimacy with his family which few other conditions would have allowed.
When eleven he went to a day-school in Boston. It was his first contact with the outside world. One day, after he had been to school for a few weeks, he came home three hours late, and said, Mother, if you were a man, would you want to experience life? I felt that way this afternoon, and I have had a soda in every soda-water fountain in Boston.
The next year he went to Groton, as had been planned from his birth, and stayed there until he graduated, six years later.
When he was seventeen he travelled for the first time. Until then he had never been farther from Boston than New York. That summer he went with his family to England and France. He was filled with an enthusiasm for history, art, literature, that came as a result of his reading and thinking. Milton, Lamb, De Quincey, Stevenson, Ibsen, Byron, Omar Khayyam, Mommsen, Carlyle, Sienkiewicz, Richard Burton, had been his companions for years. He was met on all sides by old friends, on all sides by new possibilities.
In the autumn of 1908 he entered Harvard. His enthusiasm for reading and music never diminished, but was not transferred to his regular studies. He made no record as a student, not even a record for constant attendance at courses. He lived a very casual life, of no particular merit. Yet through it all he read with increasing interest, Tolstoi, Dostoievski, and Ibsen, noticeably Peer Gynt. Music had always been one of his great delights, and going constantly to the Symphony Concerts, his intelligent appreciation grew very much. But reading and music did not take all his time, and many of the other hours were spent in a way that does not deserve to be dwelt on. For all his reading, he was very young and callow in the ways of practical life, self-conscious and shy in society, and the Unknown fascinated him, and he made his mistakes.
That summer of 1909 he went West with another man. This was the first time he ever travelled without his family, the first time he ever camped out, ever saw great scenery, or wild nature. He loved the West ever afterwardthe country, the life, and the type of men he met there.
The following autumn college began as usual, and he slipped into the way he had followed his first year. He tried to change, and found that habits are hard to break. So he made the decision that ruled the rest of his life. The causes go far back, back to that mysterious and unknown thing in man called soul or nature or personality. But the tangible, outward effect came in one act. Early in November, after making his arrangements so well that he left no trace, he shipped as a deck-hand on a cattle-boat, and worked his way to England. In his passionate desire to stand alone, meeting life with his own strength, he told his plan to no one. In fact, he had no definite plan beyond the desire to test his own power. At first he tried to support himself by writing, in London; and he found, as so many thousands have, that he could not. A station in Australia was advertising for menthey promised him a job, and he sailed steerage in a small boat. The voyage was long. The incidents he generally dwelt on were the steamers halt at Genoa and his few hours there, his only glimpse of Italy; the long hours he had for reading Shakespeare; the fascinations of Ceylon. Years later, after his death, his family found a bit of manuscript, with no beginning and no end. It will tell more of this part of his life than any other words :
Lord, I wish I was coming into the tropics again for the first time. I came through the Suez Canal, and struck the East all in a heap. Nineteen years of age, and a head full of all kinds of rot at that. I used to walk the deck at night and just mutter names to myself. Port Said, Suez, Aden, Colombo, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, ParangI was especially stuck on the last three. I didnt go there. I had been reading Robbery Under Arms and Adam Lindsay Gordons poems, and was even madder to get to Freemantle, Adelaide, and Melbourne. What romance I had in those days, and how quick I lost it toothat fool kind, I mean, like calf love.
The first port in Australia was Freemantle. He landed, and coming back to the steamer after dark, he walked through one of the worst parts of the town. It was a foolish risk to chance. He was knocked unconscious, his money taken, his watch,even his shoes. He reached the steamer and landed at Melbourne, but he had no money to get to the up-country station where he had been promised work. For days he tried to find any kind of a job, and could not. Finally he realized that he was stranded and asked a man to help him cable to his father. All the rest of his life he never forgot that the first act of his struggle for independence was a cry for help, when he had travelled to the other side of the world to try to help himself.
He asked for little money, and went to work. He spent seven months in Australia, working on several different sheep stations. He learned to know discomfort, hard work, loneliness. As a little fellow he was easily frightened. Certainly one of the characteristics of his later years, absolute disregard of danger, was no gift of the Gods at birth. He made his nerve himself, every bit of it, by a grim persistence, year after year. As a newcomer he was given many of the worst horses to ride, and he never gave in once, always conquering in the end. Living sometimes with six of the hands, sometimes out for a week at a time with one sheep-herder, he met the realities of the struggle for existence, and had plenty of time to think. And thinking, he made a second decision, far harder than the first, and wrote that he would come home if his father thought it wise.
So he sailed in August, back to what was apparently the old life.
Australia brought him one great pleasure in the friendship of an Irish gentleman, a strange, gifted man, whose life read like a novel, and whose music, and love and knowledge of books, gave him much in common with FarnsworthAmericanus, as he always called him.
