After Sir John Franklin's expedition had disappeared in the unknown Arctic world, many parties set out in search of him. The leader of one of these, Captain Austin, tried a new means of progression, and on one occasion attached sails and large kites to his sledges. This experiment seems to have met with some success, but we do not hear of it being attempted again, although ice-boats are sailed as an amusement during the winter months on the frozen lakes and rivers of Canada and the United States. Snow-shoes are widely used in Canada during the winter. Hunters and trappers make long journeys over the snow in search of fur or visiting their traps.

Sledges are used in other European countries and especially in Russia, where the winters are long and hard. The Russian sledges are very picturesque, with their four horses harnessed abreast and their drivers wearing great padded coats and fur gloves to protect them from the intense cold. Sledging in Russia is, however, not without its dangers, and there are many stories of travellers who have been frozen to death, and of others who have been overtaken and killed by wolves as they drove across the snow-covered plains and through the forests.

A writer of fifty years ago tells us of an exciting experience which he and a fellow-traveller had when journeying in the Volga district after a heavy snowstorm.

It was early morning when they started, and the road was a very lonely one. They had not gone far when six large wolves were seen, and although these animals were frightened away by a handful of burning hay being flung among them—for wolves cannot bear the sight of fire—they soon returned. Others joined them, and before long the sledge was tearing across the snow with a whole pack in close pursuit. The horses were terrified and the position seemed a hopeless one, but fortunately the travellers were armed, and when they had managed to shoot four of the wolves the others dispersed.

Sledges are also used in Austria, Germany, and Holland, and in many museums quaint old Dutch sledges can be seen, shaped like armchairs and richly gilded and painted.

These dainty sleds were pushed, not drawn, and in them the fair-haired Dutch maidens of former days were taken for merry excursions by their brothers and boy friends along the smooth highways of the frozen canals.

In England the winters are very seldom cold enough for sledging to be indulged in, but still it is not entirely unknown. An English sledge is, as a rule, more lightly built than those of other countries and is higher from the ground. It is drawn by one or more horses and the harness is hung with little bells.

We most of us think of Australia as a very warm, almost a tropical land, and it is quite a surprise to learn that even our cousins "Down Under" can sometimes enjoy real winter sports. Our illustration, however, shows us that this is the case, for here we see a picture of a sledge at Kosciusko, New South Wales, taken, perhaps, on some cold June mid-winter day. Kosciusko is situated in one of the mountainous districts of Australia, and there ice and snow—as we see in the picture—are by no means unknown. This sledge is low on the ground with two seats, one behind the other, and it is drawn by a pair of sturdy ponies.

CHAPTER X
STRANGE TRAVEL IN STRANGE LANDS

We have been to many countries and have seen many modes of travel, but there are still places, scattered over the globe, which have not been visited and yet which have strange and interesting vehicles of their own. Let us imagine, then, that we are taking a hurried voyage round the world, stopping here and there for a few moments to see those lands which we have left out on our previous tours.

We will start from Plymouth, and sail southward until we come to the beautiful Portuguese island of Madeira, and here some very curious conveyances are to be seen. These are the carros, light carts made of basket-work, which, instead of having wheels, are mounted on runners like sleds.

It seems very strange at first to think of sledges in connection with a country which boasts a semitropical climate, and where, except in the mountains, ice and snow are unknown, but the quaint carro is well-suited to its conditions and slides smoothly over the steep, paved roads.

Two kinds of these sleds are used in Madeira. The bullock carros, which are comfortably provided with springs, awnings, and curtains, and the more simple carros da monte, that look like large toboggans and run at a great speed down the hills. Hammocks are also used in the island to carry travellers into districts where rough and winding paths make the carro impracticable, and bullock carts are to be seen on the farms and vineyards. Some of these carts are very picturesque, especially those on which huge casks are carried.

In St. Michael's and the other islands of the Azores, there are very curious bullock carts made of basket-work, with solid wheels.

From the Azores, or Westward Islands, we journey on until we come to the West Indies, where, in Jamaica, we find that large, four-wheeled wagons are used in the sugar plantations. These have high sides so that great quantities of the canes can be carried, and are drawn by four or six oxen.

Small donkeys with panniers also have their share of work in Jamaica, but the negro inhabitants do much of their transport for themselves, and on market days chattering crowds of women may be seen making their way into the towns with great baskets of fruit or heavy bundles tied up in gay bandana handkerchiefs on their woolly heads.

After seeing the islands of the Atlantic Ocean we skirt round Africa and come to Madagascar, where we find litters in use which are much like those we have already seen in many countries and in many ages. A traveller who visited Madagascar in 1861 describes a royal procession when the queen rode in a palanquin that was richly gilt and embroidered with gold and scarlet.

We now cross Asiatic Turkey and reach to Persia, where, if we wish to see the country, we must engage horses for ourselves and baggage-mules to carry our goods and chattels. A traveller who went from Trebizond to Erzeroum in 1862 made the journey in this fashion, and a very romantic experience it must have been, for the scenery traversed was hilly and picturesque, and the climate left nothing to be desired. "Our caravan passed cheerfully along," he says, "the bells on our horses jangling merrily and the muleteers singing their chanting songs and entertaining each other with marvellous narratives. Much in the same way as we were travelling then, the old Crusaders rode to Palestine."

At that time, more than fifty years ago, the Bagdad railway had not been begun and riding was the only means of getting about the country. The same writer describes the gorgeously caparisoned horses with purple silk bridle reins and silver harness, on which the high officials of Persia rode through the streets of Teheran, and goes on to say that the people might be called a nation of horsemen, for even the royal despatches of the Shah and the public documents were dated "From the King's Stirrup."

Among other interesting sights to be seen in the towns of Persia are the itinerant beggars mounted on small humped bullocks, and the large panniers slung on to the backs of mules in which women travel.

These panniers, which are closely covered, look as if they would be very airless and uncomfortable, but in them long journeys are made, and the mules thus loaded may be met in company with bullock-carts and long lines of camels on the great caravan road which leads from Persia into the heart of Central Asia.

In Afghanistan women and children travel on camels, wooden panniers being hung on either side of the animal's hump, while between them is a kind of platform sheltered by a little tent-like awning.

On we go, through Thibet and over the Himalayas, where we see shaggy yaks coming across the steep passes with heavy loads on their backs, and so reach India, the strange vehicles of which have been already described.

There was, however, one province which was omitted when we visited India before, and this is Pondicherry, which belongs to France and is the only district of the great peninsula not under British dominion. In this place a very original conveyance called the push-push is to be seen. It is a light carriage with wheels, springs, and awning complete, but instead of being drawn by a horse it is, as its name implies, pushed from behind by two stalwart natives.

East of India, across the Bay of Bengal, is Burmah, a country where, as in Japan, everything seems to be picturesque and artistic. Here we see little gaily clad women driving in charming two-wheeled carts which have gracefully curved fronts like the bows of a boat. Over the heads of the passengers is arranged an umbrella-shaped awning, and the bullocks which draw these dainty conveyances wear elaborately decorated harness and have collars hung with tinkling bells.

From Burmah our journey takes us to Siam, where elephants are used both for transport purposes and to carry travellers into the mountains and forests of the interior. The howdahs of these elephants are very curious, having large hoods which project both in front and at the back.

Leaving the continent of Asia we cross the sea to the Dutch island of Java, where the women ride in palanquins suspended from a long pole and carried by two or four porters. Hammocks, which are very much like the kagos of Japan, are also used, and there are quaint ox-carts with little pent roofs and rough wheels made out of solid slabs of wood.

Not very far from Java are the Philippine Islands, which now belong to America. Here strange-looking animals called water-buffaloes, or carabaos, are employed to draw clumsy wooden carts. The carabao is guided by a cord attached to a ring in his nose, the driver sitting either on the shaft of the cart or on the animal's back.

CHAPTER XI
TRAVEL OF YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY

At the present time, when England, and indeed almost the whole of the civilised world, is covered with a network of railways, and the cuttings, the tunnels, and the high embankments seem almost to be physical features of the landscape that we see around us, it is difficult to realise that a hundred years ago none of these things were in existence. Our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, as we have seen, had to be content with very different modes of travel, and would have been amazed if they had been told that it would be possible before very long to make the journey from London to York in a few hours.

It is said that Lord Worcester in the reign of Charles II. was one of the first scientists to experiment with steam engines, and about a century later James Watt improved and utilised this invention. We have all heard of the little Scotch boy who used to sit watching the steam coming from the spout of a boiling kettle, who puzzled his head over its power and who, when he grew up, worked hard in order to earn money and be able to carry out his experiments.

The first railway was opened in 1825, but before that the steam engine invented by Watt had been in use for some time in collieries. One of these early engines, which was called "Puffing Billy," can still be seen in a London museum.

The railway trains of ninety years ago, wonderful as they were considered then, were very different from those of to-day, for there were no comfortable carriages with windows and cushioned seats, and the passengers had to travel in open wagons. There were no waiting rooms or platforms either, and the speed was very moderate, fifteen to twenty miles an hour being thought marvellous and even dangerous.

This is what a writer says in the year 1837:

"The length of the Liverpool railway is thirty-one miles, and the fact that passengers are regularly conveyed that distance by locomotive engines in one and a half to two hours produced an extraordinary sensation."

As the years went on, railways and the trains which ran on them improved very quickly and stage coaches became hopelessly old-fashioned, but for some time a railway journey was something of an adventure and many strange plans were made in order to prevent accidents.

One of the most eccentric of these ideas was that the last carriage or van on a train should have a roof sloping backwards towards the ground and fitted with railway lines, so that if the train to which it was attached were overtaken by another, there would be no collision, for the second engine would run up the sloping roof and travel along on the top of the slower train.

Nowadays, railway travelling has become much safer and also more luxurious, and our trains, with their sleeping berths and restaurant cars, would have been considered marvels by the early passengers who crowded contentedly into the jolting open trucks of 1839. One of the most interesting of modern trains is to be seen on the Sudan line. It is painted white for the sake of coolness and has wooden venetian blinds instead of windows.

The first of all cycles—if it can be dignified by such a name—made it début in 1808 in Paris. It was called a "hobby-horse" and consisted of two wheels placed one behind the other, and connected by a bar on which was a small saddle. The rider kept his feet on the ground, and when he came to a hill raised them and let the machine carry him down. At corners, however, he had to lift up the hobby-horse and turn it round.

The dandy-horse, which had a movable front wheel, came next, and then there was a long succession of strange inventions, many of which hailed from America. One of these consisted of a large rocking-horse mounted on two wheels, and another had one very large wheel in which the rider sat. Some of these machines were propelled with the feet, others with the hands. Croft's invention was punted along by two long poles in the hands of the rider, and Mey's machine had a large front wheel in which a dog ran round like a squirrel in a cage.

While experiments were being made with these extraordinary contrivances, more practical bicycles were already in use. They were called velocipedes, or bone-shakers, and very wonderful they were thought to be, although to our modern eyes the high bicycle of thirty years ago with its large front wheel on which the rider was perched and small back wheel, seems almost as curious as the quaint hobby-horse of earlier times.

The present form of bicycle was first made towards the end of the last century, after the invention of pneumatic tyres, but motor-cycles are now beginning to take its place, and we are all familiar with these wonderful little vehicles, many of which have a side-car for an extra passenger, and are able to travel at the rate of thirty, forty, or even fifty miles an hour.

From cycles we go to motor-cars, and now when the roads are thronged with these swift conveyances it is strange to think that for a long time "horseless carriages" were considered an impossibility and spoken of with jeering incredulity.

More than a hundred years ago, however, a Frenchman invented a steam carriage which could travel at the rate of two miles an hour, and during the next half-century other vehicles of the sort were patented besides several very curious mechanical carriages.

A picture and description of one of these appears in a magazine of the time, and we see that it was a large carriage with four wheels. One man sits in front, holding what are apparently quite useless reins, while a second man, standing behind in a kind of box, works a machine with his feet and so propels the heavy conveyance along. Another and an even more extraordinary-looking carriage was invented by a Mr. Boller in 1804. It was propelled by a very complicated arrangement of large and small cog-wheels.

Progress was made during the next few years, and in 1829 two inventors had constructed a steam carriage which could travel at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. A little later we learn that there was a regular service of steam coaches running between Gloucester and Cheltenham.

After that, however, many years elapsed before horseless carriages came into general use, one reason being that such conveyances were heavily taxed and subjected to many rules. It was not until 1896 that these were altered, and then immediately there was a change and cars driven by steam, electricity, and petrol came into use.

CHAPTER XII
THE TRAVEL OF TO-MORROW

The travel of to-morrow! It is a fascinating subject, for, as we look backward through the last century and see the marvellous progress that has been made, it is impossible to believe that now we have come to a standstill. How then shall we travel in the future? Will it be in some new form of railway train or motor-car, with increased speed and added comfort? Or shall we leave solid earth behind us altogether and make our journeys in great airships and aeroplanes?

We will begin with the more commonplace methods, and consider the possibilities of improvements and innovations in railway travel.

Lately a great deal has been said and written about the mono-rail, and it seems quite likely that alterations will take place in this direction, for a single-line railway is comparatively cheap to construct, and has many other advantages, among them that of greatly increased speed. It is estimated that this could easily reach two miles a minute.

In Africa we saw a very primitive form of mono-railway, and there is another in Algeria, where the trucks or baskets filled with agricultural produce hang on either side of a single line and are drawn along by mules.

A real mono-railway with engines, railway carriages, and trucks is already in existence in Ireland, where it runs between Listowel and Ballybunion. The line is raised some feet from the ground, and is about 10 miles in length. The engine is a very curious-looking machine, with a boiler on each side and two funnels. This is arranged so that the weight is evenly balanced. There are also methods by which the trains on a mono-railway may be steadied by means of a wonderful contrivance called a gyroscope.

Closely allied to the single-line railway is the hanging railway, which was first invented to carry loads of merchandise or minerals across rivers or over rough forest lands where an ordinary line would be difficult and expensive to construct. There is one of these hanging railways in Rhodesia, where a strong wire crosses from bank to bank of a river, and carries a chair-shaped seat which can hold two passengers. This is dragged backwards and forwards by means of a second wire.

Sometimes, instead of wire, rope is used, and these rope railways can be seen in use at many of the mines in South Africa.

Other and more elaborate railways in the air have been made in Germany, and there is one for passengers running between Barmen and Elberfield. In this case the single rail is raised on high trestles, and the carriage, which looks very much like a large tramcar, runs along the line suspended beneath the trestles.

Then, too, we may in the future have railways that will take us across the English Channel, either through a great tunnel or over a bridge, reaching, as was proposed in 1884, from Folkestone to Cape Grisnez.

A third plan that has been suggested for crossing to France is that of a submarine bridge, upon which a curious construction or platform would run, and on this the trains themselves could be taken from shore to shore, while still another proposal was that large ferry-steamers should be built, on the lower decks of which the trains could be carried.

And now we will leave the earth and look at the pictures of airships and the wonderful aeroplanes, which, although improvements are being made every day, can already travel at an almost incredible speed and with a security that only a little while ago would have been considered quite impossible. Nowadays air travel is not only a possibility but an accomplished fact, and it is hard to realise that it has come about during the last twenty years, and that before then practical flying machines were unknown.

We are not told what advantages this curious accomplishment gave to the little boys and girls of the thirteenth century, and, indeed, it may have brought them ill-fortune, for in those days inventors were often accused of witchcraft, and new ideas were looked upon with suspicion. Even centuries later, when the first balloons were causing great excitement in England, many people thought that it was wrong to spurn the laws of nature by attempting to fly.

The makers of balloons, meanwhile, met with more success, and they bravely experimented with their frail contrivances, which at first were filled with heated air and necessitated a fire in the basket-work car, fed with fuel of chopped straw. As may be imagined, many accidents occurred, but the inventors went on their way undaunted, and in the middle of the nineteenth century we find a man named Nadar constructing an enormous balloon called the "Giant," which seems to have been the forerunner of the great airships of to-day. This monster would, we hear, have exactly fitted into the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. It had a smaller balloon attached to it, and below both a car fitted with wheels. This was divided into compartments for the captain and the passengers, with beds, baggage, and provisions, while a printing office and a photographer's room were included.

Nadar's ambitions, however, did not stop at this marvel. Indeed, the "Giant" was only intended to be a means of raising funds for the making of a flying machine, which was to be called the aeronef and have wings and a screw propeller.

The difficulty then, and for many years afterwards, was to make an engine which at the same time should be sufficiently strong and yet light. It was not until another fifty years had passed that this problem was solved and then we find the modern aeroplanes and hydroplanes being gradually developed and improved.

In 1909 a French aviator crossed the Channel for the first time, and since then the progress has been extraordinary, so that now we think little of feats which a dozen years ago would have been considered quite outside the bounds of possibility.

Side by side with the aeroplanes, dirigible balloons have been developed, and we can hardly doubt that in the future this mode of travel will come to be as safe and almost as commonplace as our railways and motor-cars of to-day.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER