Free Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard

pace that had dramatically reduced the average travel time betweenSouthampton and Cape Town from a month and a half to just over two weeks.
    Even that was too long for Churchill. To nearly everyone who gazed up at it, the Dunottar Castle , with its straight, strong masts, slanting lines of rigging and elegantly curving bow, was a thing of beauty. To Churchill, it was a sight that made his stomach churn. He had already crossed the ocean many times in his young life, traveling between England, India, Africa and North America before the invention of the airplane, and he had hated every moment he was forced to spend on a ship. Not once had he avoided becoming violently ill. Even crossing the English Channel was “worse than a flogging,” he had written to his mother after returning to India from London, and it made him “wretched.”
    Churchill would never lose his hatred of traveling by sea. Later in life, quoting Samuel Johnson, he would compare being on a ship to being in prison, only “with the chance of being drowned.” As much as he dreaded the two weeks that stretched before him now, however, he resolutely took his place in line and solemnly boarded the ship, knowing that whatever misery he was about to endure aboard the Dunottar Castle , war lay on the other side.

    At 6:00 p.m., with the final cry of “Any more for the shore!” hanging in the air, Churchill watched from the ship as reporters and photographers frantically dashed down the gangplank and the throng that swarmed the long pier shouted their last good-byes.As Buller stood on the captain’s deck, waving to the upturned faces, the Dunottar Castle slipped its moorings, and the shouts slowly began to die away. In their place rose the soft, swelling sound of women’s voices, singing “God Save the Queen.” As men joined in the chorus, the words, solemn and strong—“Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us”—followed the ship out to sea, and the passengers, looking “back towards the shores swiftly fading in thedistance and the twilight,” Churchill wrote, “wondered whether, and if so when, they would come safe home again.”
    Even Churchill, who had never been particularly nostalgic and now wanted nothing more than to leave England and the dashed dreams of the past year behind him, had brought along a few items of purely sentimental value.Inside his stitched brown leather wallet, a small bird tooled in gold on the front, four pencil sketches had been slipped in next to the silky dark green lining. One of the portraits was of Churchill’s mother, looking proud and youthful with her long neck and perfect, bow-shaped lips, but the other three were of a much younger woman. She had delicate features, wide, heavily lidded eyes and a serene, thoughtful expression. Her name was Pamela Plowden, and she was the first great love of Churchill’s life.
    He had met her three years earlier in India, soon after arriving in Bangalore. “I was introduced yesterday to Miss Pamela Plowden,” he had written breathlessly to his mother. “I must say that she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.” Although Pamela had been born in India, the daughter of Sir Trevor John Chichele Chichele-Plowden, who was in the Indian civil service, she had only recently returned to the subcontinent. Five years before, following her mother’s death from a poisonous snakebite, her father had remarried, and Pamela had moved for a short time to London, where her beauty and intelligence had attracted a great deal of attention. Even the acerbic Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister who had been so dismissive of Churchill after his defeat, referred to her as “the brightest star in London’s social firmament.” Winston could not agree more.
    While in India, he had taken every opportunity to see Pamela. He had dined several times with her family and had even toured Hyderabad with her, on the back of an elephant. “You dare not walk,” he had