The News-Herald. [volume] (Hillsboro, Highland Co., Ohio) 1886-1973, 1896-01-02
CYCLING THE GLOBE.
The Feat Of Riding Around the
World on . Bicycle,


A traveller just back from Japan says
that the passengers on the Pacific Mail
and Canadian Pacific steamships get
much amusement from seeing the mar
velous exploits Of the daring men and
women who are now making their per-
ilous ways around the world on bicycles
in great numbers. Every ship takes
several of these heroes and heroines.
On the way to Asia the passengers do
not know the heroes, or even suspect
them. AS the wheels are stored in tho
cabin baggage rooms, it is impossible
for the rest of the passengers, looking
on at pallid boy who turns ill at the
smell of a cigar or a girl who lies next
to deaths door in her stateroom, to
dream that these are the people who are
going to write home to the papers that
they have been chased by Persian
bandits and lunched with Kaffir kings
as they annihilated Puck's record round
the globe. When the ship stops at
Yokohama out come the wheels, and
the heroes ride the full length of the
Bund-a commercial street about q
mile long. The rest of Yokohama is on
hill too steep for wheeling. AT Kobe
and Nagasaki the town sites are more
nearly level and the heroes ride perhaps
two miles, having their wheels lifted
back aboard the steamer as she voyages
from place to place. Having done
Japan by going ashore at three points,
they forge fearlessly ahead on the
steamship, yearning to brave the ter
rors of China on their flying tires.
China they discover to be one of the
finest fields for this phase of reckless
deviltry in all the world. The ship takes
them to Shanghai, where the Bund is
nearly two miles long and all lined with
churches, clubs, banks and brokers' and
shipping offices-as safe and occidental
as Broadway. They hear that they
can ride five miles on the Maloo and the
Bubbling Well road before they come
TO the muddy towpaths that form the
actual roads of that part of China,
along which no wheelman can ride.
With their hearts in their throats, fam
cying every poor devil of a coolie they
meet to be murderer fresh from sack
ing a missionary's house, they pedal
onward. When they come to the tea
gardens, whose gateways swarm with
Chinese. they all but faint, and could
the Chinese dandies and courtesans at
these gates read what the bicyclists
afterward report of their experiences
at the time they would find themselves
described as an undisciplined mob of
soldiers and lawless retainers in front
of mandarin's palace, with this ad-
ditional statement: "They scowled SO
fiercely and made such threatening
gestures that only the swiftness of my
wheel prevented another massacre be-
ing added to the list of crimes against
foreigners in China"
Back to the ship the wheeling hero
flies and writes notes of his hairbreadth
escapes in central China until the ves-
sci passes Woosungg and begins to rock
him back into seasickness. Hong Kong
is the next place at which the bicycle is
taken out-a British possession no more
to be regarded as dangerous for a for
cign lady of the most timid tempera-
ment to walk about alone in than is the
European republic of Shanghai or the
haunt of mountain desperadoes in New
Jersey called Tuxedo. So the journey
around the world continues-aboard
ship with the historic wheel safe in the
baggage room and only an occasional
chance occurring to take it out in places
like Singapore, Alden, Port Said, Alex
andria and the rest of the desperate
lurking places of European merchants
on the way to Europe. Terrible mo-
ments are experienced and recorded on
the way. For instance, on the Red set.
notes are kept of the ferocious charac-
ter of the inhabitants of the dark con-
tinert. On the Mediterranean the shin
passes Greece, with it's pirates, and
Italy, with its banditti, each of which
savage and relentless bodies of people
is worked into the wheelman's or wheel
girls diary in such an effective way az
to almost make the diarist turn pale as
he or she reads over what has been writ
ten.
Finally comes Southampton. or Liver
pool, or Havre, and there the now world
famous wheel makes it's last spin-so
that its owner can truthfully say it has
"done Europe"-before being hoisted
aboard a steamer homeward bound for
New York.-N. Y. Sun.