ABSTRACT
In the year 1896 an American woman named Jessie Ackermann published in Chicago a book entitled The World Through a Woman's Eyes. 1 It was a traveller's tale of unusual interest. This lady traveller had undertaken a journey of almost epic proportions (especially given her much mentioned propensity to seasickness). Since she sailed out of San Francisco in the autumn of 1888, she claimed to have covered 150,000 miles in all. Following the track of the eighteenth-century English explorer James Cook, Ackermann visited Hawai'i, New Zealand and Australia. She had set foot on every continent of the world — exotic places like China, Japan, Thailand, Java, Burma, India and South Africa among them. She claimed unusually close contact with local people.
I was a guest in nearly two thousand homes; all kinds of homes, rich and poor, high and low — from the palace, government house and castle to the thatched cot of the sturdy farmer, the canvas or tin tent of the miner, and the bark hut of the lumber camp. 2
