The Self-Propelled Voyager by Jamieson Duncan R.;

Author:Jamieson, Duncan R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Through Asia

The McIlraths received a glorious reception in Yokohama. After two very pleasant months of cycling in Japan, Hattie and Darwin sailed to Shanghai. While they waited a month for their Chinese passports, “the Inter Ocean correspondents seek the darker side of life in China, and find it in all the barrenness, yet hideous, cunning, ferocity, and cruelty of the middle ages.” Adding a shotgun to their arsenal, they carried their own bedding, food, and cooking utensils when they left Shanghai on March 3, 1896. Only one hundred miles inland, they clearly realized the difficulties of crossing the walled empire. Ever ethnocentric, “in the darkest of all lands, darker than the innermost recesses of Africa, amid a people more cruel, more barbaric than the Turk or the fierce Indian,” their American citizenship no longer protected them. At one point, Chinese officials insisted they proceed by boat to Suzhou. When they arrived, they realized it was to witness the execution by dissection of a woman convicted of murdering her husband’s two concubines. “What a horrible courtesy to be bestowed upon one!” Hattie refused, but Darwin went, although he declined to watch until the poor woman was mercifully dead.[13]

Approaching the Chinese border from the opposite direction, Fraser, Lunn, and Lowe presented their cards, with their names in Chinese ideograms: Fraser (“rich, impetuous, learned”), Lunn (“bright, tile”), and Lowe (“trail, rich, cold”). The customs officials told the Englishmen they were the first Europeans to attempt to cross China in that direction and that likely they would succumb to bandits, native tribes, disease, or flood. Nevertheless, they gathered their bearers and started across the three thousand miles of China. They split up several times, with one or two of them staying behind or traveling by ship while the other[s] continued to ride.[14]

The McIlraths got lost on several occasions, once in a region where the government exiled convicted felons. Instead of sending the couple back to Shanghai in irons, the local governor provided an escort to lead them to the right road, an unprecedented courtesy to foreigners. Another time, they accidentally rode through an army firing range. While he did not mention it to Hattie, Darwin believed that several of the soldiers used their fleeting forms as moving targets. Interior China remained so isolated that several missionaries had no knowledge of the traveling bicyclists until they actually appeared. The isolation of individual villages was so complete that even though the McIlraths followed a route very similar to that of Frank Lenz, they found little evidence of his passing.[15]

In the interior, Hattie suffered severely from an undisclosed illness. “To be ill in a civilized land, where one has all the advantages of medicine, proper food, bedding and pure air, is trying enough to one’s nerves and peace of mind, but to be stricken in a land 300 miles from a white face, confined in a dark, damp room, centipedes crawling along the walls, rain dropping from the roof, terrible odors from pig pens in the next room, and cesspools of filth in the rear, is calculated to affect any sufferer for the worse.

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