Category Archives: travel

by | 22 April 2011 · 4:22 pm

Kapuscinski: “The mzungu will eat you!”

From The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski, trans. by Klara Glowczewska (Vintage, 2002), Kindle Loc. 948-973:

Edu and several cousins from his clan … belong to the [Tanzanian] Sango-speaking people from the interior. They had been farmers, but their land grew barren, so several years ago they came to Dar es Salaam. Their first step: to find other Sango-speaking people. Or people from communities who are affiliated with the Sango through ties of friendship. The African is well versed in this geography of intertribal friendships and hatreds, no less critical than those existing today in the Balkans.

Following a ball of yarn, they will finally arrive at the house of a countryman. The neighborhood is called Kariakoo, and its layout is more or less planned—straight, perpendicularly aligned sandy streets. The construction is monotonous and schematic. The so-called swahili houses predominate, a type of Soviet-style housing—a single one-storied building with eight to twelve rooms, one family in each. The kitchen is communal, as are the toilet and the washing machine. Each dwelling is unbelievably cramped, because families here have many children, each home being in effect a kindergarten. The whole family sleeps together on the clay floor covered with thin raffia matting.

Arriving within earshot of such a house, Edu and his kinsmen stop and call out: “Hodi!” It means, in effect: “May I come in?” In these neighborhoods the doors are always open, if they exist at all, but one cannot just walk in without asking, so this “Hodi!” can be heard from quite a distance. If someone is inside, he answers, “Karibu!” This means: “Please come in. Greetings.” And Edu walks in.

Now begins the interminable litany of greetings. It is simultaneously a period of reconnaissance: both sides are trying to establish their precise degree of kinship. Concentrated and serious, they enter the primevally thick and tangled forest of genealogical trees that is each clan and tribal community. It is impossible for an outsider to make heads or tails of it, but for Edu and his companions, this is a critical moment of the meeting. A close cousin can be a great help, whereas a distant one—significantly less so. But even in this second instance, they will not go away empty-handed. Without a doubt, they will find a corner under the roof here. There will always be a little room for them on the floor—an important consideration, since despite the warm climate it is difficult to sleep outside, in the yard, where one is tormented by mosquitoes, by spiders, earwigs, and various other tropical insects.

The next day will be Edu’s first in the city. And despite the fact that this is a new environment for him, a new world, he doesn’t create a sensation walking down the streets of Kariakoo. It is different with me. If I venture far from downtown, deep into the remote back alleys of this neighborhood, small children run away at the sight of me as fast as their legs can carry them, and hide in the corners. And with reason: whenever they get into some mischief, their mothers tell them: “You had better be good, or else the mzungu will eat you!” (Mzungu is Swahili for the white man, the European.)

Once, I was telling some children in Warsaw about Africa. A small boy stood up and asked, “And did you see many cannibals?” He did not know that when an African returns to Kariakoo from Europe and describes London, Paris, and other cities inhabited by mzungu [the Swahili plural should be wazungu—J.] his African contemporary might also get up and ask: “And did you see many cannibals there?”

Most people who’ve done fieldwork in very different cultures have had the experience of being used by mothers and other caretakers to scare younger children.

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Filed under language, Poland, Tanzania, travel

by | 10 April 2011 · 4:55 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Binga, Befam

The dusty dirt road from Lolodorf to Ebolowa was only 107 km long, but it took us three hours to cover the distance in our hired Toyota sedan, over ten years old and without air-conditioning, so we often had to choose between keeping the dust out and the heat in, or letting some dust in to get some fresh air. By the time we reached the outskirts of Ebolowa, we were ready for a refreshing lunch stop in as nice a restaurant as we could find, so we began asking people on the street to direct us to the nearest hotel, which turned out to the brand-new, European-standard Florence Hôtel. (We found out too late that we would have had many more choices had we driven into the city center first.)

We felt out-of-place from the moment we entered the front gates and noticed the newer Mercedes and Land Cruiser parked inside. The feeling only increased as our parched and dusty party of four were ushered to a linen-covered table with fine silverware opposite a wooden bar counter with a premium selection of duty-free-shop liquors on the wall behind it. Despair mounted as we perused the menu. The cheapest main dish cost 4,000 francs CFA (< 10 USD), and the price of the table d’hôte buffet set out for a banquet meeting then underway of visiting dignitaries from the Société Nationale d’Investissement du Cameroun was 12,000 francs CFA.

We finally settled on vegetable soups for starters and fruit plates for dessert (each about 2,000 francs), with nothing in between, and bottled water to drink. Our waiter was pleasantly accommodating and even brought us extra water at no charge. He very likely assumed we were missionaries, especially after we quizzed him about the words that marked the women’s and men’s rooms, binga and befam, respectively. (It was like seeing wahine and kane on the restroom doors of a French brasserie in Honolulu.) The restrooms were otherwise to European standard, spotlessly clean, with hot and cold running water, airjet hand driers, and toilet paper. In fact, they were the nicest restrooms we used during our two weeks in Cameroon.

We stopped later in the afternoon at the Repere Bar on the outskirts of Yaoundé in order for our driver and my brother belatedly to eat their main courses, beef stew with manioc and rice, respectively, for 500 francs each, while my wife and I each had a large bottle of Guinness, for 900 francs each. (The facilities there were rather more basic.)

The language we had encountered on the doors was Bulu, a dialect of the Beti language group widely spoken across the rain forests of southern Cameroon and neighboring countries. The current president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, comes from the Beti-speaking region. According to our Florence Hôtel waiter, binga means ‘women’ and minga means ‘woman’, while befam means ‘men’ and fam means ‘man’ (a near homophone of French femme). Speakers of Castilian or Catalan can get a taste of the closely related Fang dialect online.

This kind of distinction is typical of Bantu languages, which mark different noun classes with prefixes that distinguish singular from plural in the case of count nouns. Or at least they do so in Narrow Bantu, if not so regularly in Wide Bantu (or Bantoid) languages. In fact, the word bantu means ‘people’, while muntu means ‘person’. And that’s why so many placenames in parts of Cameroon start with Ba-.

The most memorable introduction to this phenomenon that I’ve ever read was a passage in African Language Structures (U. California Press, 1974) by William Everett Welmers, who on p. 160 applies Bantu noun class and concord systems to words borrowed from English:

KiSwahili
kipilefti ~ vipilefti ’roundabout(s), traffic circle(s)’
digadi ~ madigadi ‘fender(s)’ (< mudguard)

KeRezi (a fictional Bantu language)
mudigadi ~ badigadi ‘bodyguard(s)’
mutenda ~ batenda ‘bartender(s)’
matini ‘martini’ (with ma- marking mass nouns for liquids)

UPDATE: We’re back from Cameroon and will have more tales to tell, but only after finishing taxes, posting more photos, and hitting the road for another week of travel.

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by | 13 March 2011 · 12:02 pm

Far Outliers Off to Africa for Two Weeks

The Far Outliers leave tonight for a two-week trip to Cameroon to visit my historian brother who’s on sabbatical there helping to document some languages from neighboring Central African Republic, where he served in the Peace Corps many years ago. It’s a long way for a short trip, but it’s the chance of a lifetime. It’ll be our first trip to the continent. We’ll be in good hands, but we’ll have very limited access to email and the web, so I may not be able to respond to blog comments. I hope to take plenty of photos to share via Flickr and to get some firsthand exposure to the English-based pidgin, Kamtok, which I understand still thrives in the northwest region (former British Cameroons).

With all the economic woes facing highly developed economies, it’s heartening to read some good news about economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The economic transformation that has taken place over the last decade has laid out a solid foundation from which to build on. According to the International Monetary Fund, real GDP in sub-Saharan Africa increased by 5.7% annually between 2000 and 2008, more than double the pace during 1980s and 90s.

The collective output of it’s 50-plus economies, meanwhile, reached US$1.6-trillion, far greater than, say, global industrial power Republic of Korea.

Not surprisingly, Africa’s impressive economic momentum over this period owes much to its natural resource wealth that includes a majority of the world’s platinum, chromium and diamonds and a large share of global oil and gas reserves and gold and uranium deposits. However, rising prices for these commodities is only part of the story. According to McKinsey, natural resources and related government spending accounted for 32% of Africa’s GDP growth, with the remaining two-thirds nicely distributed across other sectors, notably wholesale and retail, agriculture, transportation and telecommunications.

Underlying this economic breadth, says the report, is the African consumer. From 2005 to 2008, consumer spending increased at a compounded annual rate of 16% and rose in all but two countries. Millions of Africans have moved from the “destitute” level of income below US$1,000 a year to the “basic needs” level between US$1,000 and US$5,000. A smaller portion have moved into the middle income bracket of US$5,000 to US$25,000.

“There is a lot more going on than just natural resources,” Mr. Field-Marsham says. “The middle class is exploding. They are buying soap, they’re buying beer, they’re buying telephones, they’re building housing, and they’re buying cement. Now, everybody has a stake.”

We’re taking a few small electronic gifts for my brother’s friends and colleagues: flash drives, memory cards, rechargeable AA and AAA batteries, and such.

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by | 12 March 2011 · 5:12 pm

Railroad vs. U.S. Army Jobs, 1854

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), p. 188:

Similarly elaborate was a great excursion celebrating the completion of the Rock Island in 1854. Two trains of twelve cars each left Chicago loaded with 1,300 people to the cheers of a vast crowd. They proceeded through the prairie and stopped for people to gather wildflowers and grasses and to observe the substantial stone houses and gardens already established along the line. The prairie, a traveler on that train said, “was in its way as grand as the White Mountains, or Niagara Falls.” Arriving at Rock Island and the Mississippi to a cannonade, there was a banner at the depot reading- “The Mississippi and the Atlantic Shake Hands.” Drawn up to the wharf were six of the largest Mississippi River steamboats—War Eagle, Galena, Lady Franklin, Sparhawk, Golden Era, and Jenny Lind. Each had a band playing on the upper deck.

The “Conquests of Civilization” looked especially impressive that day comparing favorably with any military conquests of old. Wrote a man celebrating the excursion opening the Rock Island: “Our invasions, instead of desolating and laying waste the regions into which they are carried, spread fertility and abundance on their track, and they bring us back, instead of weeping captives to minister to our ostentation and pride, the fruits and riches of the earth, garnered from the most distant climes and kingdoms.” The Illinois Central Company was bigger than the U.S. Army. That army had 10,000 in 1854. The Illinois Central railroad employed 19,000 who earned a total in wages of nearly $4 million per year. In three years it would build 700 miles of railroad, whereas in thirty years the federal government had spent $200 million on the army “for which they have nothing to show but some old forts, guns, battered uniforms, and demoralized veterans.” Soon enough, in 1856, trains passed over the Mississippi on the great Rock Island Bridge, 1,581 feet long with a draw in the center. “Yes, the Mississippi is practically no more. It is spanned by the mighty artery of commerce and enterprise—the railroad.”

The uninhabited prairie might be sublime and a “solemn” sight, but seeing the plains of Illinois divided into farms was more exciting still The fields would “drop fatness” when in time “the old fogy sod, matted conservatism of centuries, is overturned by the revolutionists, the ploughshares, and penetrated by those radicals, the grain roots, and the wheat fields stretch out green and wavy as the seas.”

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by | 11 March 2011 · 8:48 pm

Railroads in the Antebellum South

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 169-171:

In 1849, [Georgia] was ahead of all southern states in rail mileage and estimated to be ranked third or fourth among all states in the Union. When the Western & Atlantic was completed in 1850, the company was still seeking more state appropriations, and there were still those who thought it could be better managed by a private concern than by the state. But many thought its shortcomings were based on unrealistic public expectations. Compared to most, it was a successful railroad indeed. Wrote the Macon editor: “Great confidence seems to be felt in whatever Georgia lays her hand to. I have often heard it wondered how the citizens of Georgia had succeeded so in building railroads, keeping out of debt, and making their roads pay well.” The reason was that Georgia, as its governor noticed in his 1855 address, had a “definite system” and a “uniform principle” in granting railroad charters. It had supported railroads with state aid and management without going overboard in doing so.

Already the myth of southern backwardness was strong in the North. Amid the tensions of the 1850s, which would lead so soon to civil war, the South defended itself partly by pointing out how well it had done in railroad building. “It is fashionable,” wrote a man in Louisville, “for a certain class of people at the North to taunt the people of the South with a want of enterprise. It is regarded as necessary to establish the evils of slavery, that it shall be shown that it encourages indolence, and represses enterprise; and to illustrate the truth of the positions assumed, the superior progress of the free States in railroad building is cited as proof positive.” History proved that false. The South had built some of the first railroads and some of the best railroads in the United States.

It was also false that southern railroads ran well because northern men ran them or because they used northern supplies and equipment. There were southern ironworks and southern locomotive and car builders. The South argued that slave labor would be a great advantage in railroad building. Just as cities were buying slaves to do urban tasks, so railroads would in the future, and the institution of slavery would become less tied to plantations and the growing of cotton. Northerners were speculators, and eventually there would be proof that the more conservative way the South had proceeded in building railroads was best. It had largely avoided the “chaos of panic and bankruptcy” that characterized northern rail enterprises….

Southern railroads were slightly slower in schedule than northern railroads, but they were safer and more comfortable. The food “would be hard to boast of,” but it was tolerable. The pace at depots in the South was more relaxed, with none of the “running headlong, with coat tails flying,” typical of boarding a train in the North. The conductor boarded the passengers in a leisurely way. Then “the whistle gives a gentle toot, and gradually, as a duck swims against a current, the train moves, and nobody is in a perspiration; no one has lost his baggage, or torn his clothes; no one is left lamenting his hard fate in being a moment too late.” Once aboard a train in the South, the passenger found sociable fellows, and the black “servant” who carried water, apples, and oranges through the cars also distributed ice cream. It made travel by rail actually enjoyable.

Far from being a sideshow, railroad development in the South provided a viable alternative to the way things were practiced in the North. Its example gave a strong indication that there was more than one way of adapting to railroads. The technology did not itself dictate its appropriate uses by people and states.

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by | 5 March 2011 · 12:21 pm

Railroads and State Debt, 1839

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 79-81:

The progress of the years preceding the 1837 Panic surely would resume, many wrote. Apparently insurmountable obstacles had been overcome. The “howling wilderness” was disappearing. “McAdamized highways, railroads and canals, have pervaded the country in every direction, giving free circulation to the products of mechanical skill, of art, and of labor, and animating the whole, immense, diversified country, with every sort of active business and intelligent enterprise.” That was no mean feat. No wonder, however, that types arose who tended to abuse the opportunity—people all too “shrewdly alive to their own interest.” There came a “universal mania” for wealth. “The old beaten track of plodding for our gains, was forsaken and contemned by the restless anxiety for change, and all seemed to engage in the alluring game of running hazards.” A long period of peace and prosperity emboldened them, as though the boom would never end. Yet there was wide consensus that the achievement was impressive. “We take the ground,” wrote a Baltimore man, “that the laborer who turns up a spadeful of earth in excavating a canal, or strikes a blow in constructing a railroad, becomes, by so doing, one of the builders up of a system, the benefits of which will endure so long as the continent on which we live shall endure.”

In the wake of the panic came a long and related crisis over state debts, a large proportion of which had been contracted in order to build railroads. The national debt was nonexistent; in fact there was often a surplus, but it was different with the states, which had borne the brunt of subsidizing rail finance. An Ohio editor estimated in 1839 that eighteen states had authorized public stock for canals and railroads amounting to $170 million, “which is as much a mortgage on our farms as was the national debt.” Interest ran about $12 million per year. It was ridiculous, the regional press thought, that Ohio had an agent in Europe to try to arrange more debt. The Ohio state legislature at its last session had, according to one critic, done more to “degrade the State abroad, and beggar its people at home, than the accumulated energy and labor of years can undo.”

Maybe it was not all bad, a New Yorker commented. Speculation had created 3,000 miles of railroad. “The parent may die, but the offspring will live to enlighten and bless.” A Massachusetts man argued that the Western Railroad there would be completed eventually and would be a good thing. Delays required credit, and credit required the payment of interest and the raising of taxes, but this was not “inconsistent with the business-like character of a business people.” The states received many indirect benefits from the railroads that did not show on their balance sheets proper.

To some that seemed cold comfort. People had been too extravagant in generally prosperous times, importing, for example, $41 million per year in foreign wines—half as much as was spent for railroad iron. Depressions came from overtrading. People seemed to have commenced business on too large a scale. There was a penchant for outright gambling. “Confidence has been destroyed; public and private faith and credit have been grossly abused, and foul deeds of iniquity have been committed.” Public business seemed to be influenced primarily by private business lobbies, and no producers appeared in proportion to the growth in borrowing. The credit of the states had been all too good. New York owed $23 million in 1839, Louisiana $23 million, Pennsylvania $27 million, Maryland $11 million, Massachusetts $4 million, Alabama $10 million, and Tennessee $7 million. And states were adding debt all the time. “Our credit is so good that it will ruin us, if we do not stop and think of the consequences of so severely testing it…. Are we not getting in jeopardy the dearest interests, the honor and independence of our country, and selling our glorious national birthright for a mess of pottage?”

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by | 5 March 2011 · 11:18 am

New Hampshire Skeptical of Railroads, 1840s

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 119-120:

Why were railroads so great? Who had benefited? When the Eastern [Railroad from Massachusetts to Maine] was proposed, stated one letter to the editor, people along the projected route in Massachusetts and New Hampshire were “lunatic” on the subject. “One would suppose that there was no other road in existence, that indeed to them belonged the discovery of the power of steam, engines, Railroads, &c, and that their fame exceeded the fame of any and all ancient and modern cities. It was said that the old men of the city assembled at the depot in the morning, and really forgot to go to their meals.” Yet by 1841 most of the towns that had been courted had become minor way stations, hearing only the buzz of the engine on the way to Boston. It seemed a bad bargain altogether.

New Hampshire debated the right-of-way issue into the mid-1840s. Enterprise should have full scope, wrote the paper in Concord, but the point in dispute was the right of the legislature to empower a private corporation for private gain to take from a man his land against his will. In that regard the New Hampshire debate was much like the modern controversy over the proper uses of the eminent domain power, and here the state did not regard railroads as a true public use. The chief purpose of a railroad, the legislators thought, was to make money, not to serve the public. “If the constitution must be violated and the rights of individuals molested, it seems no good citizen can favor any project, which shall encroach upon the rights of freemen.” This led one commentator to write in dismay that he was certain that in the state’s “lamentable” stance toward railroads, it had “shut itself out from one of the most beneficial improvements of modern times.”

Inevitably, the state eventually had more or less its share of railroads, and it learned to do what was necessary to accommodate them politically and socially. But New Hampshire remained proud that it had not swallowed the whole package. An editor in Portsmouth noted that credit could not be separated from character: “Integrity, industry, virtue, and character it is that commands the capital which changes the sailor boy in his tarpaulin to the captain of the beautiful packet ship.” So at least it should be. New Hampshire retained its strict laws about individual liability and its narrow interpretation of eminent domain for some years.

The Albany Argus wrote in 1841, in the wake of the Panic of 1837, that “New Hampshire may well congratulate herself, that she has never embarked in any of the wild and visionary schemes of internal improvements, which have plunged other states into such an embarrassing and wretched state of want and indebtedness. She has escaped the bitterness of learning by experience the folly of a large community attempting to carry on public works with prudence, economy or even honesty.” Would that Pennsylvania and Indiana, burdened with state works not paying even their current expenses and repairs on state railroad systems, not to mention the debt service, had done the same. The manic policy of the rest of the country was, according to some in New Hampshire, the “high road to beggary.”
…
Boston thought such a policy was a “dreaded obstruction” to its enterprise. It was suspicious of presidential candidate Franklin Pierce just because he was from New Hampshire.

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by | 19 February 2011 · 10:08 am

Naipaul on Schweitzer in Gabon

From The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, by V. S. Naipaul (Knopf, 2010), pp. 203-205:

Dr. Schweitzer came out to Gabon in 1915. The French colony had been established more than sixty years before, and missionary activity, both American and French, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, had been going on for almost all that time.

The English traveller Mary Kingsley came to Gabon in 1893 and 1895. Her famous book, Travels in West Africa, was published by the house of Macmillan in 1897. (This was the year in which Somerset Maugham published his first novel; it gives a kind of context.)

Mary Kingsley describes a busy river life in Gabon, with traders and missionaries. Dr. Schweitzer, when he came to Gabon twenty years later, in 1915, would not have had to live the life of Robinson Crusoe. Mission life by this time would already have been formalised. African children would have been trained in housework; the missionary whose energy was low needed only conduct a service in his church, which might be next door to his house.

Mary Kingsley writes especially about Dr. Nassau, a very early missionary from the American Presbyterian mission. He had been working among Africans for forty years when Mary Kingsley met him. She is full of praise for him; and he is clearly an unusual man, of high intellect, full of energy, and wise about the ways and beliefs of Africans. The subject of African religion interests Mary Kingsley, too. She consults Dr. Nassau at length about what she calls “fetish,” which is her portmanteau word for African belief, and she gives the subject five chapters in her book, a hundred pages.

Set beside Mary Kingsley and Dr. Nassau, Dr. Schweitzer doesn’t shine. Among Africans his reputation, which has lasted down to our own time, is that of a man who was “harsh” to Africans and was not interested in their culture. This perhaps is the true mystery of the man: not his ability in 1915 to turn his back on the civilisation of the time (though the 1914 war might have been a factor), but the—almost heroic—idea of his own righteousness that enabled him to live apart in Africa for all that time: the ideal of the missionary taken to its limit, the man less interested in serving men than in beguiling them.

Early on her travels Mary Kingsley saw the ruins of the first mission house Dr. Nassau built on the upper Oguwé. It was on one side of a ravine, and in front of it, “as an illustration of the transitory nature of European life in West Africa,” was the grave of Mrs. Nassau. The four or five lines about this—the ruined mission house above the grave—make a telling point about dedication and loss and the swift growth of bush.

Quite different is the cluster of granite crosses beside the Lambaréné hospital building. The crosses are close together. They seem not to leave room for anyone else. These are the Schweitzer family graves. They speak more of possession and triumph than tragedy. Nearby is a caged, depressed-looking pelican, padding about on trampled mud. Dr. Schweitzer had a pet pelican; and this unhappy pelican, flying nowhere, diving nowhere, is kept in his memory.

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by | 17 February 2011 · 4:36 pm

High-speed Rail in 1826

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 1-2:

A young lady wrote to a Pennsylvania newspaper in the summer of 1827 about her journey along the state-operated system of internal improvements. Having left Reading at three in the afternoon, she arrived at Mount Carbon the next evening after a passage of 49 miles by canal, “a great journey for me to make in one day.” The mountain scenery impressed her, as did the band on board the canal boat, but greater wonders awaited. From Mauch Chunk (population 1,300), she elected to ride to the nearby coal mines, 9 miles up a considerable slope, on the Mauch Chunk Railway. This line, built in September 1826, comprised, along with a shorter (3-mile) one from the Boston tidewater to a granite quarry at Quincy, Massachusetts, the first elements of the railway system in the United States.

There were three carriages that day each loaded with six passengers. A horse drew the train up the 3-foot, 7-inch gauge track to the mine, 900 feet above the Lehigh River, in 1 hour and 25 minutes. Coming down, there was no horse, only a rope wound at the top around a wheel with a friction brake to control the descent. That ride reached speeds of 30 miles per hour—faster than the passengers had ever experienced. The cars seemed at times on the verge of shooting off a cliff before a curve came into view and took the gasping tourists around. Wrote the young lady, clinging to her seat: “It really appeared like flying.”

The Mauch Chunk and Quincy Railroads were in those years (the mid-1820s) a national phenomenon, a tourist attraction of a magnitude far beyond their limited economic function. Newspapers competed for details. Also, they collected news from British journals of the architecturally impressive railroad lines completed in 1826 between Stockton and Darlington and Liverpool and Manchester.

At Quincy the attraction was the tremendous weights that could be moved with relatively little effort by means of rails. A load of 21 tons of stone made its way down a slight grade along the Quincy road in October 1826, pulled by a single horse. The horse easily pulled the empty cars back. “It is a matter of astonishment,” went a Massachusetts governmental report, “to consider how great an advantage is gained, by merely providing smooth iron tracks for the wheels of carriages to run on; and though, in every kind of machinery, simplicity tends to increase its value and beauty, yet in no instance, can we find, from so simple an arrangement, effects so striking, or which promise to be so extensively beneficial.” An extension of a railroad system, the report concluded, would impart energy to all kinds of business and produce circumstances that would improve the reputation of the state and of society in general. By the spring of 1827, people from around the nation were visiting the Quincy railroad, giving business to an inn and interfering substantially with the main business of the road in order to satisfy the demands of tourists. The little Quincy Railroad became an object of study for civil engineers and legislative committees thinking of more ambitious rail projects. The economic advantages were obvious. The railroad had made granite so inexpensive that in Boston a house could be built of that durable material more cheaply than with bricks, even when the bricks sold for as low as $4 per thousand.

The Mauch Chunk line drew more attention still, so much that one editor commented it had become a “place of notoriety” Pleasure cars made the round-trip once every day and were always booked in advance.” One passenger reported riding “in pleasure carriages, which have seats like sleighs, and precisely like the sleigh, but longer and without back and front, and have small iron wheels.” It seemed a pleasant way to travel, “not a jolt, jar, or movement, to the right or left.” Birds, cats, and cows flew for their lives before the train: “They must have thought the end of the world was at hand.”

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by | 25 October 2010 · 6:26 am

Dull Eating along the Tokaido in Edo Times

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 163-164:

After so much talk of famine, we too need some relief. Let us turn next to the food that travelers ate at the fifty-three stops of the Tōkaidō highway. In 1817 Yamagata Heiemon Shigeyoshi, the master of the scholar Yamagata Bantō (1748–1821), was summoned by the lord of Sendai. Yamagata left Osaka by boat on the eighteenth day of the first month and then traveled on highways to arrive in Sendai on the twelfth day of the second month. In his detailed travel diary, he recorded exactly what he ate at each of the inns at which he lodged.

For lunch on the nineteenth, while looking out over Lake Biwa near Atsuta, Yamagata ate corbicula soup; a dish of carrots, burdock, and kelp; and a dish of trefoil dressed with white sesame sauce. Toward evening he arrived at Kusatsu in snowy weather; here it was so cold that even the lamp oil froze. Supper consisted of a vinegared dish (namasu) of giant white radish (daikon), persimmon, and greens; a soup of greens and dried bean curds; a hira of kamaboko, gourd shavings (kanpyō), and burdock; and a broiled salted mackerel. The next morning he ate white beet soup; a hira of Japanese cabbage (mizuna), shiitake mushroom, and dried bean curd; a choku of pickled salted plums; and a roasted dried fish. Yamagata crossed Suzuka Pass in heavy snow and spent the night at the bottom of the opposite slope: the twenty-first found him in Kuwana; the twenty-second, in Miya. Although the surroundings changed considerably, food on the Tōkaidō highway stayed basically the same at every inn. As soups, hira, tsubo, or broiled fish were not varied by introducing locally available specialties, the cuisine was quite monotonous.

This was an official trip. Travel expenses for Yamagata and his attendant, a doctor, five porters, three packhorse drivers, and three horses were probably paid by the lord of Sendai. Thus meals at each post town must have been of a high quality. Although one must take into account that Yamagata’s journey took place in the middle of winter, the lack of variety in the cuisine is surprising. Soups always included giant white radish, either fresh or dried; the hira always featured combinations of dried gourd shavings (kanpyō), tofu, burdock, carrot, potato, kelp, shiitake mushrooms, and, as recorded on a few occasions, dried laver (nori) and kamaboko. The tsubo consisted of kokushō; of tofu boiled in water, soy sauce, and sake; of burdock; or of light wheat gluten cakes. Broiled fish usually meant mackerel, young sea bream, sole, or yellowtail. Exceptional meals included the eel served for supper at an inn at Arai and the “fluffy eggs” eaten for breakfast at Fukuroi. Today Japanese travelers would tire of such fare in two or three days. Such cuisine gives us yet another insight into conditions on the Tōkaidō during an age in which the pace of life was much slower than it is today.

Once Yamagata had passed Edo and headed for the northeast, some local color appears in his meals. At Kasukabe broiled carp (funa) was served; at Odawara he ate a wild duck. Broiled fish was almost invariably salmon or gurnard (kanagashira), but at Koshigawa he received dried cod flavored with sake. Nevertheless, both soups and hira featured nothing out of the ordinary. Even the fact that udo (probably yamaudo) was eaten at the stay at Kasukabe on the fifth day of the second month seems remarkable in this context. If high-class inns on the Tōkaidō and Ōshū-kaidō served this kind of fare during the late Edo period, one may assume that both the quality and preparation of food at townsmen’s homes must have been quite mediocre by today’s standards.

NOTES: Although I was familiar with kinpira (金平 lit. ‘gold ordinary’), I wasn’t aware that hira (平 ‘level, plain, common’?) could be used for all types of similarly prepared (sauteed then simmered together) vegetable dishes. Perhaps tsubo (壷) ‘pot, jar’ dishes differ from nabemono (鍋物 ‘hot pot‘) by being prepared in the kitchen rather than at the dining table. Kokushō (濃く漿, ‘thick sap/serum/plasma’?) seems more commonly known as 重湯 omoyu (lit. ‘heavy hotwater’) ‘thin rice gruel’, like okayu (お粥) ‘rice gruel, jook, congee’.

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