The Road Less Traveled

For armchair historians, personal travel journals breathe life into the past as few other documents do. They are no substitute for broader histories to be sure. A few writers deliberately combine travelogue and history as Herodotus (c.430 BCE) did so extravagantly, but in most cases the historical notes in travel journals are incidental, as when Pausanias (c. 150 CE) gives background to the sights in his Travels in Greece, or when Bill Bryson describes a road trip around the 1980s USA. Nonetheless, journals give a far better sense of what it was actually like to experience a given time and place than a general history ever can. One short but interesting account, which I revisited this past weekend, is that of Sarah Kemble Knight who traveled from Boston to New York in 1704.

I live in the outer suburbs of NYC and have traveled to Boston and back numerous times over the years. The trip is less than 5 hours by car or 4 hours by train. (I’ve flown there, too, but that is pointless; yes, the flight itself is only 50 minutes but the time spent to, from, and at the airports wipes out any advantage.) I couldn’t help but imagine what the journey was like when the paths were less well-worn and the en route conveniences scarcer. In the center of my hometown a restaurant is still in business that opened as a stagecoach stop in 1742, but even this establishment was decades in the future from the perspective of Madam Knight.

The widow Sarah Kemble Knight ran a boarding house in Boston. Leaving her mother and offspring to run things in Boston, she embarked at age 38 on an overland trip on horseback to New York in order to settle her husband’s estate. I-95 was not an option. She was unaccompanied except for the several guides she employed in sequence along the way (most of them carrying post), often on routes that scarcely qualified as paths through largely unpopulated land, “the way being very narrow, and on each side the trees and bushes gave us very unpleasant welcomes with their branches and bows, which we could not avoid, it being so exceedingly dark.” Rivers needed to be forded or canoed: in the latter case the horses either swam or were rafted.

Sarah has chances to eat at the post stops on her journey but is rarely impressed by the rudimentary fare, “what cabbage I swallowed serv’d me as a Cudd the whole day after.” There are inns, of sorts, along the way, but most are no more than private homes with a room or two for travelers. She describes one room as “a little black Lento, which was almost filled with the bedsted, which was so high I was forced to climb on a chair to gitt up to the wretched bed that lay on it.” Sometimes, though, she was forced to rely on the kindness of strangers who did not host guests as a business; one night she stayed in a hut with clapboards “so asunder that the light came through everywhere…The floor the bear earth; no windows but such as the thin covering afforded; the door tyed on with a cord in the place of hinges… The family were the old man, his wife and two children; all and every part being the picture of poverty…I Blest myself that I was not one of this miserable crew.” She nonetheless appreciated the roof for the night and picked up a “Tattertailed guide” who also stopped by the hut: “as ugly as he was I was glad to ask him to show me the way to Saxtons.”

Sarah finally had a good breakfast when she reached New Rochelle. She liked New York when she got there: “The Cittie of New York is a pleasant, well compacted place.” New York at the time (population 4937 in 1700) was smaller than Boston (population 6700). She ate well there, too, and had good accommodations. The trip to NYC had taken two weeks. She did not return to Boston until 5 months after her departure. Her journal remained in manuscript until 1825 when it was published in tandem with another manuscript as The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham: From the Original Manuscripts, Written in 1704 and 1710. The Introduction to the 1825 edition remarks on the comparative ease of travel in the modern 19^th century with its comfortable inns and “elegant steamboats.”

It is striking to a 21^st century reader that at no point does Sarah Knight express any concern for her safety from any of the rough characters she encounters. This is not because she has a particularly brave nature: she has no qualms about expressing terror at other risks such as drowning in rivers or even just traveling at night, but she doesn’t fear harm from people. Nor is this proof of naiveté, for her trust proves well-founded. While some of the men and women she meets are gruff or rude (or drunk), none is in any way menacing and most are helpful, though a few need to be nudged in that direction.

John Waters thumbing to SF

This is still more often true today than we are apt to acknowledge. True, there are human predators out there as there always have been, and nowadays their crimes are very high profile. Yet, while petty thieves and con artists are common, the odds of encountering the lethal kind of predator are low. Film director John Waters in 2012 put this to the test at age 66 by hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco despite being told by all his friends that it was much too dangerous in “today’s world.” He was given rides by a cop, a male nurse, an indie rock band in a van, a Republican town councilman, and truckers, among others. All were at least polite. Most were kind. A farmer in Kentucky thought he was a homeless man and tried to give him $10 for a meal when he let him out of the truck. John made it to SF alive and well. This is as I would have predicted, but it says something about modern expectations that the experiment was deemed extreme enough to be worth a book (Carsick by John Waters).

I traveled more when I was younger than lately. My longest single road trip was about 10,000 miles (16,000 km) driving around the USA for a couple of months in 1975. Most of the time was spent on extended stopovers. When actually on the road I always exceeded each day the 216 miles (346 km) that Madam Knight journeyed in two weeks – not always by a lot (Phoenix to Las Vegas, for instance is just 300 miles) but it always was enough to have seemed a lot in 1704. (I didn’t keep a journal in ’75 but later reflected back on the peregrination in short pieces here and there as in The Roxy Caution.) In some ways, however, a horseback journey through semi-wild country sounds more fun than cruising the Interstates, even if the cabbage encountered on the way repeats.

Canned Heat - On the Road Again