In his 1917 book, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer, James Morris Morgan provided this account of his voyage to Egypt in 1870:

...We hurried on board of an Inman Line steamer, the City of Washington. For those days the liner was a very fine and large ship of nearly four thousand tons. She was full ship rigged and very fast. It took us only twelve days to make the passage to Liverpool, in which city we spent three hours waiting for a train for London. In London we lingered for an hour before starting for Paris. In Paris we stayed four hours and then took a train for Brindisi, Italy. We crossed Mont Cenis on a railroad built with three lines of rails, the centre rail being cogged, and a cog wheel on our engine fitted into the cogs and thus pulled us up the steep inclines. (My great-uncle, Dr. John Morgan, has left an account in his journal of how he crossed the same mountain in 1763 on muleback for part of the way and was carried in a sedan chair the rest.) We stopped in Brindisi for only five hours while waiting for the Austrian mail steamer from Trieste bound for Alexandria, Egypt, where we arrived seventeen days from the time we left New York.