At the beginning of the 19th century, it took months to get from England to India, clear at the other end of the Empire. Better communications were imperative. This is the story of how it was done - laboriously, stubbornly, sometimes misguidedly - by several generations of entrepeneurs, engineers, inventors and military men, first with steamships and then by railway. It is a story full of colourful anecdotes and even more colourful characters, from Captain Charles Chesney (who tried - and failed - to establish a steamship route on the Euphrates River to the founder of the Orient Express (who rejoiced in the name of Georges Nagelmackers) to Major James Buster Browne, builder of a rail line across a Northwest Indian desert so inhospitable that 32 soldiers died there of heat stroke when their train broke down. The account spans roughly a century, from the first tentative use of steam engines in ships to the decline of the great age of railways following World War I.

The Columbianna, an ancient tramp steamer with a notably eccentric crew, 200 layers of paint on her decks, a sailing history going back to 1945, and demons in her plumbing, was crossing the Atlantic for the umpteenth time—but on this occasion with a sharp-eyed observer, whose brilliant account brings to life the harshness, humor, and bizarreness of life on board. Steaming to Bamboola is a story of the author's time at sea. He tells first-hand about typhoons, cargoes, smuggling, mid-ocean burials, rescues, stowaways, hard places, hard drinking, and hard romance. It is the tale of a ship and her crew, men fated to wander for a living—always steaming to, but never quite reaching, Bamboola. This was the first book by renowned author and humorist Christopher Buckley, which was originally published in 1982 to glowing reviews. Forty years and over twenty books and hundreds of articles later, Buckley introduces Columbianna and her roguish crew to a new generation of readers.