At Victoria station on Saturday 18th March, 1911, Holmes met up with Wayland and Wray and a fourth member of the Mozambique prospecting team, a mining engineer called Wilson; the two leaders of the group, Reid and Starey, having gone ahead a couple of days previously. Despite a rough crossing from Dover to Calais the team were in high spirits and managed a fine dinner in Paris where the train stopped for four hours before continuing on through France, over the Alps and down the length of Italy to breakfast in Rome. They disembarked in Naples where they had arranged to meet Starey and were to board their ship.

At every stop on the journey to Naples Holmes had sent his parents a postcard ‘to make the land part of my journey as real as possible to you’. None of the family had ever been abroad before, so even Europe seemed exotic and remote. As an only child Arthur was devoted to his parents, and they to him, and he was genuinely concerned for their worries about this trip to somewhere so distant as Mozambique. But he was an excellent and frequent letter writer, and almost everything that is known about this trip derives from the surviving letters he sent to his parents and to his friend Bob, as well as a diary that he kept for most of 1911.