May 7, 1861

Rabindranath Tagore, (May 7, 1861 to August 7, 1941) sailed from England, after winning the 1913 Nobel Prize for literature. He was sailing to Bengal, he was going home. He left after a farewell dinner attended by, among other notables, William Butler Yeats, and, in a letter to a good friend, William Rothenstein, dated September 7, 1913, Tagore described his shipboard leisure:

Beloved friend, this is just to let you know, that it is an uninterrupted delight to me, these days on the sea, full of sunlight and leisure....Kali Mohan and myself, two solitary souls, take our chairs in the loneliest corner of the deck and pass our days in silence, while our fellow passengers are busy with their endless schemes of amusement...They do not molest us in any way except a missionary who takes every opportunity to impress upon my mind the superiority of Christianity over Hinduism. He is after my immortal soul, lying in wait for it like a cat for a bird. I can see from this window that ....Mohan is caught. I should come to his rescue but this would only add to the number of victims.

Tagore had an international renown and functioned to transmit knowledge from East to West and the other way too. He argued against the excesses of the caste system for instance, while at the same time he opposed the Raj. By all accounts Tagore had a very charismatic presence. He did not depend on that with wild animals:  "A man is not shamed by refusing to challenge a tiger on equal terms with teeth and nails."