Overland travel

“ Nearly all experienced overland travelers seek this line, because it is known to be the best, shortest, most comfortable, and in every way the most desirable. To seek other more circuitous and inferior routes is accepted as an evidence of inexperience or want of information. ”

“ WHAT, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TRANSPORTATION OF THE WEST?
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the West-bound travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation?
The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters. ”

“ What a contrast to the mode of travel our grandfathers were forced to adopt, a decade ago, when the old ox team and the prairie schooner wended its slow way over the mountains and plains, over trails in every turn of which lurked danger and death. "Verily the sun do move." During my service with the Pullman company I have traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Gulf of Mexico to the borders of Canada, over nearly all the many different lines of railroad that makes the map of North America look like a spider had been crawling over it in search of a fly. ”

“ One could not go far in the diminutive Low Countries without getting over the frontier, but within the narrow limits one could travel a great deal and with great convenience. Much of the travel was by water, but there was also considerable use of wheeled carriages. ”

“ Before the bold and bustling railway noisily elbowed its way into the affections of travel and commerce and pushed aside the patient wagon of the nation-builders, the tens of thousands of hurried travelers enjoyed (or endured) the hospitality of its rocking thorough-braces as they, hour by hour, day after day, and night after night, and even week after week in the longer journeys, sat atop or inside this leviathan of the sand-ocean making the most rapid trip possible and under safe guidance. ”

“ The advantages of this charming ocean trip to the tourist are most obvious; there is the healthful air of the grand old Pacific Ocean, complete freedom from dust, heat, cinders, and all the discomforts which one meets in midsummer railway travel. ”

“ One charm in American travel is, that, in traversing that [Pg 53] mighty continent, you see scenery equal to, and like, the best that any country on earth produces. While executing the enormous distances on American rail lines, you lie down at night, the last of the twilight having shown you rural scenes—peaceful villages, ivy-clad churches, browsing cattle, waggon teams and green fields. You awake in a desert—a real desert like the great African ones. Far as the eye can reach, for hours and hours as the train rolls on, sand and nothing else. ”

“ Africa and the Antartic continent have been explored, and the North Pole bids fair to be discovered by means of a flying-machine ere long, so, with no new worlds to conquer, one might do worse in the way of pleasurable travel than to explore the waterways of France. ”

“ Persons living in the Northeastern States can, with about equal facility and dispatch, reach the eastern terminus of any one of the routes they may select by means of public transport. And, as animals are much cheaper upon the frontier than in the Eastern States, they should purchase their teams at or near the point where the overland journey is to commence. ”

“ Others take longer voyages, and, generally speaking, seek a more adventurous line of life. Thus there are, among men I have known, those who have gone to the Greenland seas, round Cape Horn, to Australia, to India, and the Pacific islands, and have gone, again and again, induced by the divine passion for knowledge and travel. ”

“ The passengers beg the captain to reverse the engines, or boldly turn back and keep up the cruise until the autumn gales make us willing to return to the region of earthly cares and responsibilities, daily mails and telegraph wires. The long, nightless days never lose their spell, and in retrospect the wonders of the northland appear the greater. The weeks of continuous travel over deep, placid waters in the midst of magnificent scenery might be a journey of exploration on a new continent, so different is it from anything else in American travel. ”

“ To really enjoy the Continent it is not necessary—at least, for people bred and brought up as we have been—to be very rich; on the contrary, many—ay, and the greatest—advantages of Continental travel are open to very small fortunes and very small ambitions. ”

“ Passenger travel on the Western rivers has been greatly reduced in the last twenty years, owing to the creation of lines of railway parallel to the rivers, and the majority of the boats now running are far behind those of the palmy days between 1850 and 1860. ”

“ We have only to go back half a century to the time when a tour upon the Continent of Europe was attended by great expense, inconvenience, and even danger. It consumed much time, and no Englishman upon whom business did not lay a necessity to travel, could undertake any very extensive pilgrimage in these foreign countries unless possessed of ample means united to ample leisure. ”

“ No "maid and valet affectionate in the rumble." All the pomp and circumstance, all the ease and calm, of Travel have vanished, and with them all sense of independence and [206] responsibility. The modern traveller is shot like a bullet through a tunnel, or hauled like a parcel up a hill. He certainly sees the world at very little cost, but he sees it under wonderfully uncomfortable conditions. ”

“ In a foreign land, travel with baggage is nothing less than an ordeal; and the man who can convoy a fleet of trunks over a foreign tour and bring them all back without loss to the home port, may safely regard himself as an expert globe-trotter. ”

“ Many short trips may be taken from here either by boat or train, and he who would fill his portfolio with quaint and lovely pictures, will find his enthusiasm aroused, no matter in which direction he may venture, or whether his expedition be on land 135 or water. Interesting localities are always within easy reach, and the moderate rate for transportation and accommodation render all points accessible to the traveller whose purse is of the most slender dimensions. ”

“ One of the most remarkable developments of modern times has been the increase in the facilities for foreign travel, with the consequence that travelling has become the pastime of the many, and not the privilege of the few. In the 'sixties and 'seventies travelling was difficult. ”

“ People run abroad to see beautiful countries, and leave their own behind unknown, unnoticed—their own the most beautiful! And then, again, what a country for adventures! especially to those who travel it on foot, or on horseback. People run abroad in quest of adventures, and traverse Spain and Portugal on mule or on horseback; whereas there are ten times more adventures to be met with in England than in Spain, Portugal, or stupid Germany to boot. ”

“ And if we take the quickest journeys that have been made over the different portions of the route—the special trains that have passed across the Continent on two or three occasions, and the extraordinary runs of steamers on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, and in the China and Mediterranean Seas—add them together, and make no deductions for delays in port, we can have a theoretical journey around the world in less than sixty days. ”

“ Traveling in the unusual way means necessarily getting a view of things from an unaccustomed angle. House-boating, for instance, on inland waters from New York to Key West promises something new in the way of travel sensations. The writer’s zig zag journeyings take her across the southern states to California, down into Mexico, across to the gulf, thence to Spain and Morocco, on to India, back to England, over the fiords of Norway into Russia, across Siberia to Japan and thence to China. ”

“ It is quite sufficiently obvious that national customs and national peculiarities are being smoothed out of existence by facilities of travel. My father and mother, early in their married life, drove from London to Naples in their own carriage, the journey occupying over a month. They left their own front door in London, had their carriage placed on the deck of the Channel steamer, sat in it during the passage (what a singularly uncomfortable resting-place it must have been should they have encountered bad weather!) ”

“ You then enter your vessel again, and move on through a world, which is itself in motion, and which is full of life and fertility.
To so many changing forms and images a phenomenon was added, which, although derived from Germany, was quite in its place here—I mean two pilgrims, the first whom I have seen closely. They have a right to travel gratis in this public conveyance; but because the rest of the passengers dislike coming into contact with them, they do not sit in the covered part, but in the after-part beside the steersman. ”

“ Of all effort travel alone was congenial to them, and especially travel by sea, which, when they had first developed it, became for many centuries their monopoly and gave them the carrying of the world and the arbitrament of its exchanges. They dwelt in a small group of harbours on that extreme eastern shore of the Mediterranean, where a narrow strip of fertile land lay between them and the mountains. ”

“ If he is about to attempt a really bold exploration under fair conditions of success, he will no doubt be introduced to the best living authorities on the country to which he is bound, and will be provided with letters of introduction to the officials at the port where he is to disembark, that will smooth away many small difficulties and give him a recognised position during his travels. ”

“ The new facilities for transportation and travel by land and water bring all nations, European, American, Asiatic and African, next door to each other, and when the art of aviation is more advanced and people travel in the air as safely as they now cross oceans, the relationships of nations will become still closer. ”

“ TRAVEL AND COMMUNICATION.—If business calls him from home, he travels in comfort in a steamboat or a railway car, and goes farther in one hour than in 1660 he could have gone in two days, for at that time there was not a steamboat, nor a railroad, nor even a stagecoach, in North America. Men went from one colony to another by sailing vessel ”

“ All this necessitated highways of travel. Any one who has studied the West during Indian occupancy does not need to be asked to remember that travel in the earliest days in the interior was by land as well as by water. ”

“ The oversea voyage possesses a greater appeal to the imagination. Long distances, variation of the climes, storm and high ocean seas—a burthen of goods brought from a far country, all contribute to make an impression that the tale of a coasting voyage could not produce. Familiarity, perhaps, has robbed the short-carriers' sea-trip of what shreds of romance existed. In tide and out, the smaller vessels have grown to the sight as almost part of the familiar quays and wharves they frequent. ”

“ But as this would mean flying over the north and south poles, that was practically out of the question. It was assumed that those who took part would travel along about the fortieth parallel, as this would keep them over fairly civilized countries for the longest period. ”

“ His schemes for a north-west voyage, either for trade or discovery, being now wholly abandoned, he set about planning, as the only remaining expedient, a journey by land through the northern regions of Europe and Asia, then to cross Behring's Straits to the continent of America, to proceed down the coast to a more southern latitude, and to cross the whole of that continent from the western to the eastern shore. ”

“ The “voyageurs” form a kind of confraternity in the Canadas, like the arrieros, or carriers of Spain, and, like them, are employed in long internal expeditions of travel and traffic: with this difference, that the arrieros travel by land, the voyageurs by water; the former with mules and horses, the latter with batteaux and canoes. The voyageurs may be said to have sprung up out of the fur trade, having originally been employed by the early French merchants in their trading expeditions through the labyrinth of rivers and lakes of the boundless interior. ”

“ First, there are the travellers who skirt the continent in comfortable steamers, going from one great seaport to another, and occasionally taking a short railway journey to some big interior city not too far from the coast. ”

“ In this short sketch of what were in some cases certainly, in others only presumably, the original British main tracks we have to note three factors which have always determined travel in Britain: the centres of internal economic production, the ports, and the Channel crossings. ”

“ From Central Africa, Iceland and Singapore, from New York, Harburg 87 and Lithuania, from Mauritius, Rio and Cape Town, from London and Aberdeen, and, seemingly, all the cities of the world, we’d drifted towards this restless speck now wallowing in the run of a South Atlantic sea, as a witness that the call of adventure can never overpass the widest limits of the world. ”

“ Short Stages.--I may here remark that it is a good general rule for an explorer of an arid country, when he happens to come to water, after not less than three hours' travelling, to stop and encamp by it; it is better for him to avail himself of his good fortune and be content with his day's work, than to risk the uncertainty of another supply. ”