Oh, the places you’ll go! A History of Tourism

By Jude Knight

The privileged English tourists of the late nineteenth century reached further than ever before, but they were not the first to travel for education and entertainment. Tourism is probably as old as civilisation; it is certainly as old as writing. As soon as social structures produces a class with money to spare and time on their hands, the rich have travelled as a leisure activity, and some places and times have opened the opportunities to those merely comfortably placed.

Tourism’s ancient roots
Privileged groups of Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Chinese, and Harappans went up into the mountains for the summer, or up the river to see the newest edifice (my goodness, Cheops, take a look at the size of that pyramid), or to a famous temple to gawk at the statues and paintings, and leave an offering for the local God.

Letters of request from one king to another, requesting passage for a traveller, began at least in Babylon, and were applied intermittently from that time, eventually becoming passports.

Romans set up their own summer beach resorts, which became so crowded with the hoi polloi that the really rich took over private islands, where they could relax in peace. And with Roman roads stretching to the edges of Empire, possible destinations were limited only by the travellers’ pocket, imagination, and sense of adventure.

Pilgrimage for fun and (spiritual) profit
In medieval times, tourism took another guise. Scholars and journeymen travelled for education (and undoubtedly took in a little entertainment along the way. Pilgrims travelled for the education of their souls, and we have Chaucer’s word for it that some of them found it very entertaining.

A wealthy English pilgrim might choose to visit Rome or the Holy Land, but even the comfortably circumstanced could find an abbey or a holy well that boasted the relic of a saint.

The Grand Tour
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, young English noblemen took the Grand Tour, an educational journey between being recognised as a man and being expected to behave like one. Their sisters’ travel was usually much more curtailed, but they might enjoy a journey from England to Paris to attend court, refresh their wardrobes, and acquire a little foreign polish at French entertainments.

In seventeenth century France, Louis XIV required travellers to have a letter of request or passe port (literally, to pass through a port) and a visa given by his own government. Soon most of Europe had followed suit, and the age of queueing at the border had begun.

Tourism takes off
War closed much of the Continent at the end of the eighteenth century, but Napoleon’s final defeat opened it again. The English flooded out across Europe, in a tourist boom that gathered pace and continued until the First World War. From England alone, the volume of travel grew from 10,000 in 1814 to 250,000 in 1860, to one million in 1911. So great was the temporary migration of pleasure seekers that the passport system was abandoned in the mid-1860s, and not reinstituted until 1914 (as a temporary measure, but they kept it after the war).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, steam engines had opened the world, near and far, facilitated by entrepreneurs like the original Thomas Cook. If you were middle class, you could go near, so the super-rich needed to go far.

The rich go far, far, away
And New Zealand was as far as you could get: a one-way trip for working people, but a six month pleasure cruise for tourists. By the 1880s, the British Medical Journal was endorsing sea voyages as a cure for whatever ailed you, and steamships made travel easier, safer, and more certain.

Travel agencies in England would extoll the sights, and travel guides in New Zealand would take you to see them. Most people would manage to fit in the hot lakes of Rotorua, the cold lakes of Queenstown, and the glacier landscapes of the Southern Alps. In the words of one English traveller, James Froude:

“We could stand on the brim and gaze as through an opening in the earth into an azure infinity beyond. Down and down, and fainter and softer as they receded, the white crystals projected from the rocky walls over the abyss, till they seemed to dissolve not into darkness but into light. The hue of the water was something which I had never seen, and shall never again see on this side of eternity. Not violet…turquoise…sapphire. Comparison could only soil such inimitable purity. The only colour I ever saw in sky or on earth in the least resembling the aspect of the extraordinary pool was the flame of burning sulphur.”

Volcanic theme parks have one disadvantage
The town of Rotorua was built by the government in the early 1880s, to accommodate tourists (mostly English and German) coming to see the hot pools and the world-famed Pink and White Terraces, hillsides with cascading silica sheets grown over millenia from limestone deposits in the ever-seeping thermal water.

Up to thirty tourists a day arrived to stay at one of the four Ohinemutu hotels (Ohinemutu was the Ngati Whakaue town next to which Rotorua had been built), having travelled overland from Auckland or Tauranga. Another four hour trip would take them to the Maori village of Te Wairoa, and from there they would be taken by canoe to the terraces.

Until the night of the volcanic eruption that is the background for my novella Forged in Fire in this year’s Bluestocking Belles’ anthology. On 10 June, 1886, Mt Tarawera erupted, utterly destroying the terraces and burying nine villages, including Te Wairoa. The descriptions given by my fictional English tourists are drawn  directly from those of witnesses who survived that terrible night. Thermal activity is only fun until someone gets hurt.


Sources:
Gyr, Ueli. The history of tourism: Structures on the Path to Modernity. Retrieved from http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/the-history-of-tourism/ueli-gyr-the-history-of-tourism

The Rosbifs arrive. A review of The Smell of the Continent: The British Discover Europe, by Richard Mullen and James Munson. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/13940943

History of Passports, from http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/games/teachers-corner/history-passports.asp

Various articles about tourism in New Zealand, from https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/maori-tourism/, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/keyword/tourism, and https://teara.govt.nz/

Quote from James Froud, https://teara.govt.nz/en/visitors-opinions-about-new-zealand/page-2

Images:
Women travelling: Assyrian women travelling by ox cart
Lydgatepilgrims: Pilgrims on the road, attributed to Gerard Hornbout. C. 1516 to 1523
Steamer: The P&O Paddle Steamer William Facwett
Pink and White Terraces: The beautiful Pink and White Terraces, painted by JC Hoyte in the 1870s

~~~~~~~~~~

Jude Knight’s writing goal is to transport readers to another time, another place, where they can enjoy adventure and romance, thrill to trials and challenges, uncover secrets and solve mysteries, delight in a happy ending, and return from their virtual holiday refreshed and ready for anything.
She writes historical novels, novellas, and short stories, mostly set in the early 19th Century. She writes strong determined heroines, heroes who can appreciate a clever capable woman, villains you’ll love to loathe, and all with a leavening of humour.
Website and blog: http://judeknightauthor.com/

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Sailing to America - passenger travel by sea, from the Sirius to the Titanic

By Karen V. Wasylowski

On 15 April, 1912, on her maiden voyage, the magnificent Olympic Class Ocean Liner, RMS Titanic, struck an iceberg and sank, causing the deaths of 1,502 people.  One of three majestic ships owned by the White Star Line, built by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, she was the epitome of elegance, the grandest of her kind, and ultimately doomed to pass into history as the largest peacetime maritime disaster in modern history.

However, Titanic wasn't the first steam engine to cross the 'pond' - by far.  Nearly one hundred years before, in May 1819, the Savannah, a sailing packet with an auxiliary engine and collapsible paddle wheels, sailed from Georgia, USA, to make the first crossing of the Atlantic. She reached Liverpool in 633 hours, having steamed for only 80 of those hours, but her achievement greatly encouraged support for the steamship. By 1833 the Atlantic crossing time had been reduced to 22 days, a considerable improvement from the two month crossing on a strictly sail powered ship.  Steamships began to operate on the major imperial routes to India, South Africa and Australia as well.

In the 1830's three major shipping companies were formed.  The British and American Steam Navigation Company, the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company and the Great Western Steamship Company. The Sirius, a small chartered steamship owned by the British and American Steam Navigation Company, was the first vessel to cross the Atlantic with passengers - forty brave souls leaving from Queenstown in Ireland on April 4.  Four days later a ship from the Great Western also sailed across from Bristol, entering New York harbor only four hours after the Sirius arrived, completing a fourteen day crossing that had usually taken at least six weeks.

It was the beginning of the steamship era and also the beginning of the Blue Riband contest for the fastest crossing by passenger ships.  The race was on.

Enter Nova Scotia's Samuel Cunard.  Cunard had won the shipping rights to carry the mails between America and England and on 10 July, 1839, the 1000 ton Royal Victoria, renamed the British Queen, made her maiden voyage, London to New York, spurring his rival, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the dynamic engineer of the Great Western Steamship Company, to create a 3700 ton vessel called The Mammoth.

Brunel equipped his ship, the renamed Great Britain, with 350 staterooms as well as a luxurious dining room, setting the standard of ocean liners for years to come.  On 17 July, 1840 she docked in Halifax, having crossed the Atlantic in 11 days and 4 hours.

During the 1850's Cunard's ships were fast and punctual, but not very conducive to passenger travel. They were still more commercial at the time - no rival to the Great Britain, encouraging the mighty Brunel to design an even bigger ship. In 1854 he began work on the Great Eastern, a ship large enough to carry 4,000 passengers and enough coal to sail to Australia.  At 693 feet long, 120 feet wide and weighing over 18,900 tons, it's like would not be seen again until the creation of the Lusitania in 1907 and the Titanic in 1912.

The Great Eastern never could fill her berths, unfortunately, and as strong and safe as she was (Brunel pioneered the double hull system) her maiden voyage had only thirty-eight passengers.  In 1863, she was refitted as a commercial vessel and later was used as an amusement park in ports around Britain.

The Scotia

The last paddle steamer

It was around 1856 that Cunard began to rise.  His liners included the Persia, sailing across the Atlantic in nine days, and the Scotia, the last paddle steamer - both these ships often won the Blue Riband award for speed of crossing.

More and more shipping lines were founded over the following years.  Harland and Wolffe built and launched 16 ships, backing the White Star Line and their magnificent ship The Oceanic in 1871.  Cunard took back it's lead ten years later with the Servia, a ship of 17 knots and electric lights.

The British reigned supreme in the steamship industry but competition began rising from Italy, German, France, Holland.  The competition to be the fastest was fierce, with the Blue Riband award switching shipping lines year to year.  Then, disaster struck.

Capital Edward Smith, Titanic

Was it the long ingrained competitive nature within the industry then that caused the Captain of White Star Line's Titanic to ignore danger 15 April, 1912 ?  More than likely.  Titanic had received a series of warnings from other ships about the drifting ice in the area of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland; however, her Captain, Edward Smith, felt confident his ship was indestructible, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Titanic survivors aboard the Carpathia

The RMS Carpathia, carrying the survivors, arrived three days later in New York at 9:30 p.m., 18 April, with 40,000 people waiting at the dock.  Immediate assistance in the form of food, clothing and shelter was provided by the Travelers' Aid Society of New York, the Women's Relief Committee, and The Council of Jewish Women, among others.

The disaster was greeted with worldwide shock and outrage at the huge loss of life and the regulatory and operational failures that had led to it. Public inquiries in Britain and the United States led to major improvements in maritime safety. One of their most important legacies was the establishment in 1914 of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), which still governs maritime safety today.

The Blue Riband award to the fastest crossing of a passenger liner in the Atlantic is still alive today as well.

Karen V. Wasylowski's first book, 'Darcy and Fitzwilliam', was a continuation of Jane Austen's wonderful 'Pride and Prejudice', and is the only 'bromance' in Jane Austen Fan Fiction telling the story of the two cousins, the iconic Fitzwilliam Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam, their friendship and their battles.  A review in Jane Austen World and Jane Austen Today said of 'Darcy and Fitzwilliam' - "It is absorbing.  It is intoxicating.  It is excellent."

On 1 October, 2012, the family saga begun in 'Pride and Prejudice', continues with 'Sons and Daughters', Karen Wasylowski's Book Two of the Darcy and Fitzwilliam Tales.  The cousins are older now, married with children, and a bit wiser - but not by much.  The book follows their lives and the growth of their families through good times and bad.  A recent review in Amazon said "I read almost all of the continuing stories and 'what ifs' of Pride and Prejudice. This was my favorite.  I laughed all through this book"

To order either "Darcy and Fitzwilliam" or "Sons and Daughters" click here

Karen Wasylowski on Amazon. com.

And visit her blog too, for all the latest on British actors, plays and television

THE LEAGUE OF BRITISH ARTISTS