By the time they got to Callao, the seaport of Lima, Peru, they were out of the tropical summer and into more temperate climates. A routine delay gave them an extra day for sightseeing in Lima, and they had a chance to see Pizarro’s mummy, parks, and the slums by which Heinlein gauged the “real” standard of living of the countries they were visiting. They chatted amiably with anyone they were thrown together with, and Heinlein found his own assumptions and world view challenged by the understandings and assumptions that made South American politics work.3
The news from the United States was filled with the doings of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Of his general attitude toward McCarthy, Heinlein later explained, “Let me take time to make it clear that I regard McCarthy as a revolting son of a bitch, with no regard for truth, justice, nor civil rights—also that I think his purposes were demagogic and personally ambitious, not patriotic. All clear?”4 The local news was a sharp and strange contrast. His attitudes toward the McCarthy hearings, he said, were shaped by what he saw there:
I read most about them while in Lima, Peru—and at the same time passed back and forth in front of the Colombian Embassy where Haya de la Torre had taken sanctuary. Here was this poor devil, on the short end of a South American political difference, hiding in one room for years on end, because the alternative was to come out and face a firing squad. I could not help comparing him to Fifth Amendment “martyrs” [in the U.S.]. I concluded that the whole McCarthy incident was a shining example of just how strong our Bill of Rights can be.…
I think that the most regrettable thing about the whole McCarthy teapot tempest is the way hordes of usually sensible people let themselves be panicked. “Run, run, the sky is falling!” If we can’t stand up to a pipsqueak threat like McCarthy, what would we do in the face of a real menace? Preposterous! All out of proportion to the irritation. Have we lost our wits, to let such a bogeyman frighten us?5
Dismayingly, he found almost zero comprehension of what the American ideal of political freedom might mean in practice. Even when otherwise sophisticated people believed what they heard of American political life (not universally the case), they reinterpreted the reportage to fit their own customs and conditions. “McCarthyism”—which, he observed, “they conceive to be a policy of take-him-away-and-lock-him-up-I-don’t-like-his-politics”—was ramping up, and there was a disturbingly widespread assumption that the McCarthy “reign of terror,” an expression understood in the United States as metaphorical (though serious), had the scale and violence of the French Revolution:
… the political institutions of another country are hard to understand. Outside the United States very few people comprehend the nature of a congressional investigation and it is almost impossible to explain it to them. They have it mixed up with the Inquisition, with Senator McCarthy having all the functions and powers of Torquemada. The idea that a private citizen can answer or refuse to answer a series of questions put to him by a senator [as to treasonable activities] … and then get up and walk out a free man—is so foreign to most other people that they simply cannot believe it.6
It was a theme he encountered over and over again throughout this trip—and the others he made in later years. It seemed to him that virtually nobody got the essential lesson here: Nobody was killed in the United States; nobody was even jailed except by due process of law; the worst that happened was that some people had reputations blackened, possibly deservedly if they had in fact been engaged in treasonous activities. The system worked exactly the way it was supposed to—protecting the rights of individuals. Heinlein was resilient, but it did take some of the shine off his long-standing one-world sentiments. How could people unite in mutual self-interest if they couldn’t even comprehend that politics might not be pursued by Latin vendetta?7
… in the wider sense we have made the greatest cultural contribution of any society to date, by demonstrating that 160,000,000 people can live together in peace and freedom. Nothing else in all history even approaches this cultural accomplishment, and sneers at our “culture” are both laughable and outrageously presumptuous when emanating from a continent that habitually wallows in its own blood. I’ll take Coca-Cola, thank you; it may be vulgar, no doubt it is simply impossibly American, it may lack the bouquet of a Continental wine—but it is not flavored with ancient fratricidal insanities.8
From Lima the Gulf Shipper made for the Chilean port of Arica. Heinlein occupied his time brushing up his navigation skills and shooting the sun each day with the ship’s navigator.9
Their time aboard the Gulf Shipper came to an end early in December—midsummer—in Valparaiso, Chile. They gave a farewell dinner party the night before they left the ship, exchanging addresses with newfound friends. The line’s local agent shepherded them through customs and onto a train bound for Santiago, where they would spend a week or more at the luxurious Hotel Carrera.
There, Robert drafted a brief portrait, about eight thousand words, of the bemused and somewhat surreal mental state they were enjoying, “Ms. Found in a Pisco Bottle or Around the World Backwards and Upside Down”—the introduction of which would become the opening paragraphs of chapter 2 of his travel book Tramp Royale.10 They enjoyed Chile enormously but had a deadline to meet in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They flew across the continent on December 12, 1953, to catch the ship for the next leg of their trip and get back on the schedule laid out in their itinerary. Both of them were apprehensive about going into Argentina, the last fascist state left over from World War II.
This trip was three hours across the continent (though they did get to see the enormous Christ of the Andes statue from the air) and three hours getting through customs. Ginny had scheduled them for only four days in Buenos Aires—the original Big Apple—on the theory that that was the absolute maximum length of time she could possibly keep her mouth shut (Robert thought she was unduly optimistic).11 Then Ruys delayed in sailing, and they had more time. They were, therefore, relieved and pleasantly surprised to find that they liked Juan Perón’s Buenos Aires: It was relaxed and above all civilized. Perón’s presence was felt everywhere, true—but the general run of opinion seemed supportive, popular attitude mirroring in an apparently genuine way the Perón cumple posters seen around town: “Perón keeps his promises”; “Perón performs.” Santa Evita had been dead for only a year and a half, and her memory was everywhere, too. Unlike her husband, though, Eva Perón seemed to be almost universally despised—by the middle classes.
The major hazard to the tourists, Robert remarked, was the alligators—the empty ones sold as bags and shoes.12 But they found some of Robert’s books on sale, and once when they were out trying to find American cigarettes on the black market (Heinlein’s attitude toward a wartime black market was one thing—but to black markets created by busybody regulations he had a strictly pragmatic attitude), Heinlein incautiously admitted to the man giving them directions that he was a writer. Word spread quickly, and he was besieged by reporters. He agreed to a radio interview on Friday, December 18, 1953, for the Servicio Internacional—the International Broadcasting System of Argentina13—that went surprisingly well despite some cultural differences that made him uncomfortable.14 One part of the interview he feared might give him trouble: He was expected to say “something really nice about Papá.”15 He was able, however, to approve at least one sentiment seen around town on banners prominently displayed: “In the new Argentina, the only privileged ones are the children.”
After eleven days they boarded M.V. Ruys for the next leg of their voyage, to Brazil by way of a two-day stopover in Montevideo, Uruguay, where a chance meeting in a sidewalk café, five minutes socializing with a spaniel and its human family, led to a warm personal relationship with a young Uruguayan diplomat, Mauricio Nayberg, and to introductions around the world, particularly in Singapore, that would open unexpected doors.
They had only three days in Brazil, so started inland by bus the first day from booming, industrial Santos to São Paulo, and then overnight, two days befor
e Christmas, up the coast to Rio de Janeiro.16 They had only one day in Rio, a native guide who spoke almost no English, and a day of overpowering heat and humidity—but they drove up Corcovado mountain to see at first hand the monumental Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking the steep hills over Rio—and, what the Heinleins may not have realized they were overlooking, Rio’s favelas, some of the worst slums in the world, so legendary in their poverty, violence, and crime that they are still being used as the setting for many “shooter” video games.
Ruys headed for Cape Town, South Africa, next, and the weather was rough. There was a fire extinguisher low outside their stateroom door that would catch them whenever the ship lurched. Ginny, who always bruised easily, got a vivid collection of bruises from hip to knee. One day she startled some of the South Africans returning home, who were lounging by the ship’s swimming pool. “What happened to you?” they asked, concerned. The devil got into Ginny at that moment: “My husband beats me,” she told them. They were indignant on her behalf—never stopping to ask themselves why a wife-beater would localize his abuse to her upper legs. Ginny let them go on, amused. But it got around the ship that Robert was a wife-beater. One of them even wrote him a stern letter about it. It was the kind of thing it was hard to take seriously—but also hard to shrug off. Fortunately, they would leave it behind them when the ship got to South Africa.17
The captain decided to risk an unscheduled stopover at the most isolated inhabited spot on Earth, the island of Tristan da Cunha—an opportunity like catnip to Robert in both his “official” capacities as loafing tourist and working writer. A British possession midway between South America, Antarctica, and Africa, Tristan da Cunha rarely had ships more often than once every three to seven years. Ruys arrived on January 2, 1954, and Heinlein posted a handwritten letter on ship’s stationery to Ron Hubbard—also an avid world traveler (and member of the Explorer’s Club)—for the curiosity value of the postmark.
The Tristans were friendly and hospitable, but lack of cultural context made it nearly impossible to converse with them—a stark contrast with the way they had managed to chat with strangers with whom they had no language in common over all of South America. They were able to conduct commerce, however: Crew members bought some penguins from the islanders. But the Tristans did not have disease resistances the others all shared: A cold was going around the ship—a very minor thing that didn’t even disturb the ship’s surgeon’s routine. But the islanders caught it from them, and four of them died in the ten days after Ruys left.18
Two days later, the ship grounded at the Cape of Good Hope.
South Africa under apartheid was a problem for Heinlein, his aggressive anti-racist impulses at continuous war with his deliberate policy of openness to autres moeurs, of trying to understand the different folkways, how they came to be and what functions they served in a living society. But South Africa was an intensification of his dilemma at home. The Union of South Africa is the other USA, and his dilemma is set out on the first page of the South Africa chapter of Tramp Royale: It was, like Robert’s USA, a stunning, gloriously beautiful country—“a paradise where you expect to wake up some morning with your throat cut.”19
They had ten days to get overland from Cape Town to Durban to join their next ship. One of their shipboard friends on Ruys, Sam (not otherwise identified), invited them along on a road trip overland from Cape Town to Johannesburg, through the Karoo Desert, where they encountered African cattle (rangier than their American counterparts), exotic birds, and springboks, the national emblem of South Africa, a kind of gazelle that has no American counterpart, through the Orange Free State and into the Transvaal (literally, across the Vaal River).
Johannesburg was where their host’s trip ended,20 and the Heinleins rented a taxi for a day to tour Kruger Park. No zebras, unfortunately, and no rhino, but an abundance of birds, impalas and other African gazelles, and even buffalo. And many lions—out of season and therefore unexpected—blended into the landscape and looking like termite hills, like abysses looking back at you.21 Robert was shaking with excitement. This was the Africa he had come for.22
They almost did not get back. Their train was fully booked, and they had to stay overnight in Nelspruit and hire the taxi to drive them back to Johannesburg the next day—expensive, but it did give them a chance to inspect the Voortrekker Monument outside of Pretoria, a brother-under-the-bronze of the Mormon migration monument in Salt Lake City.23
From Jo’burg, they flew to Durban in a DC6B workhorse. Ruys was delayed an extra day, which gave them a chance to make a hundred-mile day trip into Zululand and visit the atelier of Ntuli, then a world-famous African sculptor. They bought a bust of a Zulu Matron, “strong and proud,” for a ridiculously small fee. “And I met Ntuli himself—” Heinlein wrote later to a friend:
[I]t turns out that we are twin brothers, save that he is younger than I am and (of course) several shades darker as he is a Zulu. But our skulls have the same bony structure and the close resemblance is unmistakable—I got Ginny to preserve the fact in Kodachrome, the two of us.”24
They returned to Durban with enough time left over to try to book the leg from Singapore, where they would leave Ruys, through to Australia by way of Indonesia—perhaps by way of Bali. Heinlein wanted to see for himself the bare-breast fashion in sarongs that was even then being suppressed by the new Indonesian government.25 But Bali was not possible this trip.
They left Ruys in Singapore early on the morning of January 29. Ginny’s sense of humor was not always appropriate for the perilous world outside America. To the routine inquiry “Anything to declare?” when they were going through Singapore customs, Ginny replied tartly, “Two pounds of heroin.” Robert went cold, and the customs inspector’s eyes bugged out. Though Ginny remembered only that he said “Oh, you Americans!” and stamped them through,26 Robert remembered it differently: “… he decided to treat it as a joke, laughed hollowly, said, ‘Yes, yes, no doubt,’ and refrained from searching us. But I did not draw a breath until we were outside and in a taxi.”27 He never did succeed in impressing on Ginny how very much real trouble they had narrowly escaped.
Singapore was “a three-ring circus and a year-long Mardi-Gras,”28 with a million people packed into a space that could not possibly hold more than fifty thousand. Predominantly Chinese in population, “properly speaking, the whole city is a slum, so tightly stacked they are one on another. But it is so alive, so cheerful, so bursting with energy that the slumlike quality of it is not depressing.”29
They settled in for a week or more at Raffles, a hotel chosen for its associations in romantic fiction. They wound up with Nelson Rockefeller’s suite and enjoyed “Oriental splendor” that they almost could not have imagined—including the services of a sixty-year-old “houseboy,” Foo, who lavished attention on them. In the hotel’s gift shop Heinlein found a Tom Corbett comic book, which he purchased for his working files back home in Colorado Springs.30
Their pick-up acquaintance with Mauricio Nayberg in Montevideo had resulted in an introduction to one of his father’s business connections, a Mr. Ho Chuy Moo. Mr. and Mrs. Ho lavished hospitality on the Heinleins, even more startling and abundant than the Naybergs’—superlative Cantonese food (plus instruction in the use of chopsticks), introductions to tailors, amusement parks, a day trip to the Sultanate of Johore, and the Tiger Balm Garden/Har Paw Villa (an extravagant oriental garden and collection of exotica built by the heir of the Tiger Balm fortune) that stretched even the imaginative/descriptive faculties of this science-fiction writer.
The Heinleins were finally able to book passage to Brisbane, on the northwest coast of Australia, by way of Indonesia on a China coast vessel, Tjibadak—the last cabin left. Their preferred route from the west coast of Australia, possibly Derby or Darwin in the north, or even Perth in the far south, then by rail to Sydney on the east coast, was not possible. Australia and New Zealand were open-ended for them now, since they had not yet been able to find transport back to th
e United States.
With Mr. Ho’s assistance, they were even able to obtain an Indonesian visa—not for Bali, but for Jakarta, where they would have a three-day layover. They sailed from Singapore on about February 10.
On the night before they left, they decided to give a thank-you dinner for the Hos at Raffles. While they were dressing for dinner, it suddenly occurred to Heinlein that Raffles might have the same “non-European” prejudice they had run across everywhere from Africa to Asia. The telling of this incident in Tramp Royale (at pp. 225–6) is more genteel than the somewhat more bloodthirsty version Robert saved for friends: “Say, hon,” Robert remarked to Ginny,
“I don’t recall having seen any orientals in the dining room—is this joint still ‘pukka-sahib’ and all that crap? We don’t want to embarrass Mr. and Mrs. Ho.”
Ginny went right on dressing. “Don’t give it a thought.”
“Huh?”
“If they try to keep our guests out of the dining room, we then go straight to the front desk and check out—and once our luggage is outside, we set fire to the place.”
She’s a practical woman. Get the luggage out first—
.… So I suppose I will never be a real literary-type author, because I can’t learn to be a detached and analytical observer; I get involved, I take sides.
And so does Ginny. But she need never worry about my getting annoyed with her over this, because her instincts in such matters always suit me. She is what I feel to be a good person in the word’s simplest and plainest meaning. Which includes lashing out with her claws on some occasions when others may consider it improper—I don’t give a damn whether Ginny is “proper” or not; I like her. I like her values.31
But Raffles was civilized: They were not put to the necessity of rescuing their luggage.
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 13
