Sometimes we don’t appreciate our soulplace until we leave it.
It was 1723, and Franklin was underemployed and unhappy. Restless, too. One day, while working at the Philadelphia printing house with his miserable boss, Franklin saw Sir William Keith, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, dressed impeccably, approach the door and knock. It was not Keimer who the lieutenant governor had come to see but Franklin. He had heard good things about the teenager from Boston and suggested they decamp to a local tavern for some fine Madeira.
That is the kind of place Philadelphia was at the time. The kind of place where an ambitious young runaway with a mere two years’ education and hardly a farthing to his name finds himself sitting down at a local pub downing a bottle of excellent wine with the colony’s lieutenant governor.
Keith saw something in young Ben and suggested he establish his own printing business. Ben sailed for Boston and, chastened, asked his father for a loan. The elder Franklin, unimpressed with the scheme, turned him down. Back in Philadelphia, the smooth-talking William Keith suggested Franklin travel to London, where Keith assured Ben that Keith’s own good credit would enable Ben to stock up on the equipment needed to launch his print shop.
So on November 5, 1724, eighteen-year-old Ben Franklin boarded a sailing ship, the London Hope—an ironic name, he’d soon learn—and watched as the waters of the Delaware River receded, giving way to the Delaware Bay and, soon, the vast and unforgiving expanse of the North Atlantic. The seas were rough, the weather bad. Six weeks later, on Christmas Eve, the London Hope entered the English Channel.
Ben and I have this in common: we were both bitten by the travel bug at a young age—me growing up in 1970s Baltimore, Ben in 1710s Boston. I watched the planes overhead, en route to Friendship Airport (now Baltimore-Washington International), and dreamed of becoming a pilot. Ben watched the ships arriving at Boston Harbor and dreamed of becoming a sailor. That wasn’t in the cards, so young Ben traveled in his mind, gazing at the four world maps his father had pinned to the walls of their tiny house, reading travelogues and chatting with arriving sailors at Boston Harbor.
Soon, he no longer needed his father’s permission to travel—so he did, logging 42,000 miles over the course of his life. As deputy postmaster, he traveled the entire length of the Northeast and at age seventy embarked on an arduous journey to Montreal. At age seventy-six, he considered traveling through Italy before realizing the stagecoach ride would probably kill him. He could be cocky about his travels, bragging to friends about his mileage count or his iron stomach, which never failed him even when other passengers were hurling overboard.
For Franklin, travel was not optional. If he didn’t take his annual summer excursion, he grew irritable. “I am as well as I can be without my usual journey,” goes a typical letter to his wife, Deborah, “but I begin to feel the want of it, and shall set out in a few days.” Travel enabled Franklin to cast his gaze beyond Puritan Boston and still-parochial Philadelphia. It was also “one way of lengthening life.” With the right mindset, he said, two weeks in Paris felt like six months anywhere else.
Travel enabled Ben to pause and think. He did some of his best writing and experimenting while on the road or at sea. It was on a bumpy carriage ride from Philadelphia to Albany, New York, in 1754 when he composed his brilliant and prescient plan for colonial unity. It was on an Atlantic crossing to London in 1757 when he wrote his famous “Father Abraham’s Speech,” later retitled “The Way to Wealth.”
It is a truism that travel broadens our horizons. But like most truisms, it is only partly true. Yes, travel expands our world, but it does so by shrinking it. Life on the road is circumscribed and manageable, and that is why I find it so appealing. For me, a pared-down life is a better, happier life.
The dirty little secret of travel is that it’s a parlor trick, a mind game. We are the same person on the road as we are at home. You may feel more romantic in Paris or more relaxed in Rio de Janeiro, but those cities, wonderful as they are, can’t take all the credit. So why the transformation? Because out there, you give yourself permission to be romantic or relaxed, or whatever else, and so you do. Everything you experience while traveling you could experience at home too. It’s just a lot harder. Parlor tricks and a little self-deception are useful. No one knew this better than Franklin, a man John Adams once called the “Old Conjurer.” Adams didn’t mean it as a compliment—he was referring to Franklin’s alleged duplicity—but I bet Ben smiled at the moniker.
From a young age, Franklin was a fussy traveler. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t. Had Tripadvisor existed then, he would have been every hotelier’s worst nightmare. In France, he argued with innkeepers over matters small and smaller. In England, he described a Portsmouth hotel as a “wretched inn,” where even the stationery was shoddy. He called the town of Gravesend “a cursed biting place” whose inhabitants expertly relieved travelers of their money. “If you buy any thing of them, and give half what they ask, you pay twice as much as the thing is worth,” wrote Franklin, before delivering the coup de grâce: “Thank God, we shall leave it tomorrow.”
It’s difficult to pin down when Franklin grew suspicious of Governor Keith’s promises. Perhaps it was when the ship’s captain denied him access to Keith’s letters of credit until they reached English waters. Perhaps it was when Ben discovered there were no such letters. No doubt he knew he had been duped when the merchants he approached in London had nothing good to say about Keith and tended to swear a lot when his name was mentioned. Franklin’s inevitable conclusion: the governor had not given him letters of credit because he had no credit to give. Ben wondered why Keith chose to dupe a hapless young man, but he had more immediate concerns.
Put yourself in Benjamin Franklin’s shoes. You are eighteen years old. You’ve never seen a city larger than one with ten thousand inhabitants. Now, hoodwinked by a trusted elder, you find yourself in a sprawling metropolis of more than half a million restless souls, a “great and monstrous thing,” as Defoe called London. You are unemployed and broke. What do you do?
Most people, I think, would finagle a ticket on the next ship back to Philadelphia. Not Franklin. I don’t know if he knew the word chutzpah, or if it even existed back then, but that’s what he displayed. He talked his way into not one but two printing jobs. He met some of London’s most eminent thinkers, such as the writer and philosopher Bernard Mandeville. And he managed to leverage his status as an “exotic” colonist.
The New World was the crypto of the eighteenth century. Virginian tobacco. Jamaican rum. Antiguan sugar. It was all new and therefore good. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. Was it risky? Sure, but investors didn’t ask too many questions. The potential payoff was too tempting. Curiosities from the New World were also in demand. No one knew this better than a young printer from Philadelphia with outsized confidence and at least one exotic goodie tucked in his luggage. But, first, he needed to navigate a colossal and unforgiving city, alone and destitute.