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I didn't know you wrote for the star. Thanks Allan. YES! I'd like to see that film footage.
I'll delete this if I have to.
An adventure tour worthy of the name
Robert Edison Fulton Jr. captured his epic motorcycle journey in the early '30s on many hours of movie film
Feb 24, 2007 04:30 AM
Allan Johnson
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Motorcycling today is made up of a number of niche pastimes.
There are cruisers, custom riders, sport bikers, scooter riders, racers, touring riders and dual-sport riders. There's even a category the manufacturers call "adventure touring riders" for whom they turn out special models.
Those of us who have cable television can hardly have missed the Long Way Round series with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their BMWs, their camera crew and support vehicles going from London to New York by way of Europe, northern Asia, Alaska and Canada.
But long-distance motorbike touring is not new. The first such crossing of North America was in 1903. In 1913, New Yorker Carl Stevens Clancy appears to have been the first motorcyclist to circumnavigate the globe.
He produced photographic evidence of having ridden his 1912 four-cylinder Henderson 29,000 kilometres through Scotland, England, Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, northern Africa, India, Japan and across the United States, from San Francisco to New York.
By the 1920s, it was not uncommon for European riders to undertake long, adventurous motorcycling trips to the less-travelled points of the Middle East, India and Australia, usually with heavy sidecar outfits and backed by the motorcycle maker.
The intent was, of course, to advertise the ruggedness and reliability of a particular brand's product. There was much publicity immediately after a successful journey, but the memory of nearly all these expeditions has faded.
One of the most interesting of these tours, and one that has survived in more than memory to the present, started just 75 years ago at an English dinner party, in London. A young Harvard and University of Vienna graduate was asked how he was going to return to his home in New York. Robert Edison Fulton Jr., for reasons he never understood himself, blurted out that "he was not going west across the Atlantic, he was going to go east around the world – on a motorcycle."
Another guest at the dinner, an official of the Douglas company, then a prominent British motorcycle maker, piped up: "If you haven't your motorcycle yet, old man, then how about letting me furnish it?"
And so it was that Fulton, 23, with some command of French, German and Greek (as well as English), set out in midsummer 1932 for 17 months heading eastward through 22 countries. His motorcycle was a 1930 Douglas T6 model, an opposed twin, 600 cc side-valve motorcycle.
It had been supplied complete with a sidecar to carry all of Fulton's camping and cooking equipment, guidebooks and formal dress clothes. Fulton, whose prior motorcycle experience had been the brief ownership of an Indian Scout while an undergraduate, soon lost the sidecar in an accident in Belgium.
He rode the Douglas solo for the rest of the trip, relying on one small suitcase on the handlebars for his clothing, sleeping wherever he found shelter and eating local food. In rural Turkey, he slept each night for nearly a month in a succession of village jails.
Several very important parts of his equipment survived the crash, a 35 mm movie camera and the special carrier on the back of the bike that held 1,200 metres of film.
Most travelling motorcyclists of the day made as much haste as possible, documenting their progress with letters back to their sponsors or the motorcycling press, and then speeding on. Fulton dawdled along his route, taking movies of the countries and the people he encountered.
He had chosen a route that would take him into places with interesting architecture and cultures that, as an American, he had only read about. It was a world that was rapidly changing from ways of life that had persisted for thousands of years.
As a rather harmless vagabond traveller, Fulton visited places and countries that are still making headlines. After relatively easy travel across Europe from England through Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece, he tackled the sandy wastes of central Turkey where he said he averaged 15 spills from the Douglas every day for the 26 days it took to cross the country.
He then travelled through Syria, where his encounters with the camel caravans gave him the title for his later book, One Man Caravan. Then after a side trip to Jebel Druze and the Bedouin camps in Jordan, he crossed the 820 km of Jordan-Iraq desert from Damascus to Baghdad.
After seven weeks in a Baghdad hospital recovering from jaundice and with the winter snows in Persia (now Iran) preventing him from going by land, Fulton and the Douglas crossed the Arabian Sea on a tramp steamer to Bombay, where he spent six months on the subcontinent.
Over that time, Fulton filmed in Rajputana, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, Waziristan, Baluchistan, the United Provinces – all parts of India or ****stan today. He gained entry to Afghanistan, riding from Peshawar through the fabled Khyber Pass to Kabul and Kandahar under the watchful eyes and rifles of the Pashtun tribesmen. He managed to film the secret nocturnal sword dance of the Ghilzais tribe by somehow persuading them to perform it during the daytime.
After crossing central India again, he took another tramp steamer to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and motorcycled through Sumatra – and an earthquake.
Crossing to Malaya (now Malaysia), he travelled north up through Siam (now Thailand) and Indochina (now Vietnam and Laos) into China. While southern China's muddy roads defeated the Douglas, Fulton did better riding west from Shanghai and getting almost 1,500 km inland to Sianfu.
Then it was on to Japan, landing at Nagasaki and travelling through Hiroshima to Kobe, where the 33-rider strong Kobe Motorcycle Club escorted him on to Osaka. Their parting speech to him included the statement, "Japan and America will come closer together through the motorcycles."
He rode on through Kyoto to Tokyo and after tea with the U.S. ambassador to Japan, who advised him to write a book on his travels, Fulton boarded a ship for San Francisco.
From there he rode the Douglas across the continent and home to New York, arriving on Christmas Eve of 1933 – after 64,000 km of travel.
One Man Caravan was published in 1937 and reprinted several times before World War II.
It was reprinted again in 1996. Also at that time, an hour-long video was produced from Fulton's 12,000 metres of movie film. It was narrated by Fulton himself. In the video, titled Twice Upon a Caravan, an 87-year-old Fulton appears with his faithful Douglas motorcycle.
Fulton died in 2004 at age 95. The book and video each give a remarkable insight into a world now vanished, but still in many ways important to all of us. They also are a record of one man's enduring relationship with his faithful "iron horse."
Both book and video (also on DVD) are available from many bookstores or from the publishers, Whitehorse Press at www.whitehorsepress.com
I'll delete this if I have to.
An adventure tour worthy of the name
Robert Edison Fulton Jr. captured his epic motorcycle journey in the early '30s on many hours of movie film
Feb 24, 2007 04:30 AM
Allan Johnson
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Motorcycling today is made up of a number of niche pastimes.
There are cruisers, custom riders, sport bikers, scooter riders, racers, touring riders and dual-sport riders. There's even a category the manufacturers call "adventure touring riders" for whom they turn out special models.
Those of us who have cable television can hardly have missed the Long Way Round series with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their BMWs, their camera crew and support vehicles going from London to New York by way of Europe, northern Asia, Alaska and Canada.
But long-distance motorbike touring is not new. The first such crossing of North America was in 1903. In 1913, New Yorker Carl Stevens Clancy appears to have been the first motorcyclist to circumnavigate the globe.
He produced photographic evidence of having ridden his 1912 four-cylinder Henderson 29,000 kilometres through Scotland, England, Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, northern Africa, India, Japan and across the United States, from San Francisco to New York.
By the 1920s, it was not uncommon for European riders to undertake long, adventurous motorcycling trips to the less-travelled points of the Middle East, India and Australia, usually with heavy sidecar outfits and backed by the motorcycle maker.
The intent was, of course, to advertise the ruggedness and reliability of a particular brand's product. There was much publicity immediately after a successful journey, but the memory of nearly all these expeditions has faded.
One of the most interesting of these tours, and one that has survived in more than memory to the present, started just 75 years ago at an English dinner party, in London. A young Harvard and University of Vienna graduate was asked how he was going to return to his home in New York. Robert Edison Fulton Jr., for reasons he never understood himself, blurted out that "he was not going west across the Atlantic, he was going to go east around the world – on a motorcycle."
Another guest at the dinner, an official of the Douglas company, then a prominent British motorcycle maker, piped up: "If you haven't your motorcycle yet, old man, then how about letting me furnish it?"
And so it was that Fulton, 23, with some command of French, German and Greek (as well as English), set out in midsummer 1932 for 17 months heading eastward through 22 countries. His motorcycle was a 1930 Douglas T6 model, an opposed twin, 600 cc side-valve motorcycle.
It had been supplied complete with a sidecar to carry all of Fulton's camping and cooking equipment, guidebooks and formal dress clothes. Fulton, whose prior motorcycle experience had been the brief ownership of an Indian Scout while an undergraduate, soon lost the sidecar in an accident in Belgium.
He rode the Douglas solo for the rest of the trip, relying on one small suitcase on the handlebars for his clothing, sleeping wherever he found shelter and eating local food. In rural Turkey, he slept each night for nearly a month in a succession of village jails.
Several very important parts of his equipment survived the crash, a 35 mm movie camera and the special carrier on the back of the bike that held 1,200 metres of film.
Most travelling motorcyclists of the day made as much haste as possible, documenting their progress with letters back to their sponsors or the motorcycling press, and then speeding on. Fulton dawdled along his route, taking movies of the countries and the people he encountered.
He had chosen a route that would take him into places with interesting architecture and cultures that, as an American, he had only read about. It was a world that was rapidly changing from ways of life that had persisted for thousands of years.
As a rather harmless vagabond traveller, Fulton visited places and countries that are still making headlines. After relatively easy travel across Europe from England through Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece, he tackled the sandy wastes of central Turkey where he said he averaged 15 spills from the Douglas every day for the 26 days it took to cross the country.
He then travelled through Syria, where his encounters with the camel caravans gave him the title for his later book, One Man Caravan. Then after a side trip to Jebel Druze and the Bedouin camps in Jordan, he crossed the 820 km of Jordan-Iraq desert from Damascus to Baghdad.
After seven weeks in a Baghdad hospital recovering from jaundice and with the winter snows in Persia (now Iran) preventing him from going by land, Fulton and the Douglas crossed the Arabian Sea on a tramp steamer to Bombay, where he spent six months on the subcontinent.
Over that time, Fulton filmed in Rajputana, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, Waziristan, Baluchistan, the United Provinces – all parts of India or ****stan today. He gained entry to Afghanistan, riding from Peshawar through the fabled Khyber Pass to Kabul and Kandahar under the watchful eyes and rifles of the Pashtun tribesmen. He managed to film the secret nocturnal sword dance of the Ghilzais tribe by somehow persuading them to perform it during the daytime.
After crossing central India again, he took another tramp steamer to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and motorcycled through Sumatra – and an earthquake.
Crossing to Malaya (now Malaysia), he travelled north up through Siam (now Thailand) and Indochina (now Vietnam and Laos) into China. While southern China's muddy roads defeated the Douglas, Fulton did better riding west from Shanghai and getting almost 1,500 km inland to Sianfu.
Then it was on to Japan, landing at Nagasaki and travelling through Hiroshima to Kobe, where the 33-rider strong Kobe Motorcycle Club escorted him on to Osaka. Their parting speech to him included the statement, "Japan and America will come closer together through the motorcycles."
He rode on through Kyoto to Tokyo and after tea with the U.S. ambassador to Japan, who advised him to write a book on his travels, Fulton boarded a ship for San Francisco.
From there he rode the Douglas across the continent and home to New York, arriving on Christmas Eve of 1933 – after 64,000 km of travel.
One Man Caravan was published in 1937 and reprinted several times before World War II.
It was reprinted again in 1996. Also at that time, an hour-long video was produced from Fulton's 12,000 metres of movie film. It was narrated by Fulton himself. In the video, titled Twice Upon a Caravan, an 87-year-old Fulton appears with his faithful Douglas motorcycle.
Fulton died in 2004 at age 95. The book and video each give a remarkable insight into a world now vanished, but still in many ways important to all of us. They also are a record of one man's enduring relationship with his faithful "iron horse."
Both book and video (also on DVD) are available from many bookstores or from the publishers, Whitehorse Press at www.whitehorsepress.com
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