About the book (by Mike Jay):
James S. Lee, a mining foreman from Yorkshire, spent many of the years from around 1895 to 1910 working in the British colonies of South East Asia, where he developed a passion for exploring local customs and, in particular, exotic drugs. His memoirs, published twenty years later, offer a unique narrative of trading a drab working life in Edwardian Britain for one of encounters with man-eating tigers, riding across India on its first motorcycle, and experimenting in the jungles and slums of Asia with hashish, cocaine, opium, morphine and other drugs unknown to Western science.