The Tao of Travel

This seems a superb Fielding farce, the absurdity of setting out and going nowhere—he'll never make it! Much of the book is satirical, ironic, blustering, and his ailments so numerous and debilitating, it is like self-satire, or at least comic exaggeration. Only forty-seven, he is plagued by "lingering imperfect gout...[and] besides being lame, I was very ill with great fatigues I had lately undergone added to my distemper ... My health now reduced to the last extremity ... I went into the country [Bath] in a very weak and deplorable condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy [edema], and an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated, that it had lost all muscular flesh ... I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders."

Still in England, he recovers with a regimen of tar-water treatments and then, with "the first dawnings of my recovery I had conceived of removing to a warmer climate." He rejects Avignon and decides on Lisbon for convalescence, leaving home in a lugubrious frame of mind. "On this day, the most melancholy sun I ever beheld arose and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a motherlike fondness."

His book is a chronicle of delay and frustration. It's true that Fielding ultimately arrives in Lisbon, but the greater part of the voyage is spent at various anchorages and moorings on the English coast, the winds too light to bear the ship away, so Fielding and his party go ashore and stay in public houses and inns to pass the time. The contentious and tyrannical captain cruises back and forth from Ryde to Portland to Spithead, awaiting a favorable wind and complaining.

"The captain now grew outrageous, and declaring open war with the wind, took a resolution, rather more bold than wise, of sailing in defiance of it, and in its teeth." This tactic fails; they are soon back on the English coast. Fielding fills his journal with reflections on eating, on the difference between seamen and landlubbers, on tyranny and officialdom, on his quarrels with the captain and the customs officers, on mythology. He writes that if his disquisitions can serve as a remedy for "the most inveterate evils, at least, I have obtained my whole desire, and shall have lain so long wind-bound in the ports of this kingdom to some purpose."

Never less than adversarial, the captain believes that he is "under the spell of witchcraft" and spends less and less time on his ship, going ashore or to other ships to socialize, as Fielding—fading again—is attended by doctors.

Toward the end of August, the wind picks up and proves helpful, and a full two months after setting off, Fielding is at last on his way, at sea. The rest of the voyage is brisk. Four days later they are "thirty miles to the westward of Plymouth," the next day in the Bay of Biscay, and becalmed, then in a gale: "Our voyage was retarded." Several days after the gale they are off the Portuguese coast and soon at Lisbon. The actual voyage is so abbreviated as to seem an anticlimax: "About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, tho' at the same time one of the most populous, to a kind of coffeehouse, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea."

He hoped to regain his health in Lisbon, but the last lines of the Journal are ominous, and seem like a premonition of his own death. Horace: "This is the end of the story, and the journey" (Hic finis chartaeque, viaeque).

Fielding died in Lisbon a little over a month after arriving, in October 1754. The book was published posthumously in 1755.

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