Before Cars: The Dangers of Travel Told in Three Stories

SPEAKER_00 0:03 It's the year 1325. You're just 21 years old, and you're standing in Tangier, the vibrant port city of northwestern Morocco, on the edge of the known world, preparing to leave home. You don't know exactly how long you'll be gone, who you'll be traveling with, or if you're ever gonna come back. All you know is you're going to walk across deserts, through unfamiliar cities, over seas you've never seen. People who make journeys like this fall ill, they're robbed, some of them die far from home without record or ceremony. And yet, you're about to go anyway. You see, before cars, travel wasn't something you scheduled, it was something you survived. Today, a journey is something that we expect to end. You want to pop from Scotland to London, you just check the route, watch the time tick down, and assume that you're going to return home. In fact, have you ever zoned out for a few minutes at a time only to realise that you've travelled ages without even realizing? Well, travel is kind of forgettable now, but not that long ago. It really wasn't forgettable. It was incredibly memorable. Before cars, before timetables, before roadside rescue could save you in a pinch if you get into trouble, travel wasn't just slower, it was dangerous. It was more taxing on your body, on your mind, and certainly not for the faint of heart. So, to explore the difficulties of navigating ancient travel routes and archaic roads, I want to take you on a few journeys, real journeys that actually happened, to explain exactly what it would have been like for our ancestors. I'll show you travel through the lens of Ivan Batuta, one of the most extensive travelers of all time. Celia Fines, who travelled the length and breadth of the United Kingdom several times throughout her life, and through the eyes of the Victorians, who, for some, travel was essential for survival. All of these routes challenge the very core of those who traveled them and give us a real insight into what travel was like for our ancestors before cars existed, which remember, only became a common form of transport in the 1920s. I'm Ollie, and this is What We Did Before, a podcast which charts the history of modern inventions, and this is what we did before cars. In 1325, Ibn Battuta left his home in Morocco, intending to complete the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. It should have taken just a few months. Instead, he was on the road for nearly 30 years. By the time he returned home, he had travelled an estimated 75,000 miles across North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and China. Most of it without roads as we know them today, much of it on foot, horseback, or fragile ships. And crucially, none of it safely planned in advance. And luckily for us, he wrote it all down. Ibn Battuta rarely travelled alone, not because he loved company, but because alone you were vulnerable. Caravans weren't just social groups, they were survival strategies. Safe travel depended on a load of different things. In many countries, there are strong social or religious rules that said a traveller should be fed, that a stranger should be given shelter, and that refusing hospitality was shameful or sinful. And in the Islamic world that Ibn Battuta travelled, hospitality was a religious obligation. But none of these were laws, so you were relying on the specific hospitality customs of the specific regions that you were traveling through. Journeys would often pass through territories controlled by rulers such as city governors, tribal leaders, kings or sultans. If a ruler welcomed you, then travel was safe. If they were suspicious, then you could be taxed, imprisoned, or even killed. So travel depended on those in power to allow you safe passage, and there was no universal right to pass through land. And on the road, of course, everyone that you met could hurt you. There was little enforcement, help would could have been really far away, and for the most part, the people that you encountered, you know, they just simply chose not to take advantage of you. Not because there were strict rules stopping them from doing that, just because generally humans are good, right? But travel, you know, it really worked because enough people did behave decently. But there were, of course, the odd stranger who wasn't so kind. They may rob you, or worse. So you had to be dependent on those around you because every mile was a negotiation. Throughout his travels, Ibn Battuta repeatedly fell seriously ill. In one account, he describes continuing to travel despite being barely able to stand, because stopping wasn't necessarily safer than continuing to move, even if it meant battling through illness. If you stopped, you ran out of money. Ibn Battuta wasn't travelling with a fixed salary or savings. Throughout his journey, he often earned his living by arriving at courts and being welcomed as a learned visitor, receiving gifts, stipends, or appointments from rulers, sometimes being fed and housed by religious institutions along major routes. Crucially, these opportunities existed at destinations, not in between. If he stopped in one place while he was ill, the gifts stopped and the patronage dried up. Ibn Battuta also often travelled with caravans, especially across dangerous regions. Caravans meant shared food and supplies, shared protection from bandits, and lower individual costs as well. But caravans did not wait indefinitely. If illness caused him to fall behind, he lost all of the perks that came with the caravan. And also, stopping for too long could make you seem suspicious. Ibn Battuta himself was detained more than once because he was unfamiliar and difficult to place socially. In pre-modern societies, movement was normal only if it had a clear direction. Travellers were expected to be pilgrims, merchants, messengers, or scholars. If you lingered for too long, people questioned why you were there. You no longer fit a recognized category, and authorities or locals might assume you were a spy or some sort of criminal up to no good. And since there was no welfare system and you were often relying on the kindness or the morals of strangers, if you stayed too long because you were ill, you became a burden to those people. Hospitality customs assumed temporary need, not long-term care. So before cars, you couldn't just pause a journey if you became ill, because things would get complicated. And Ibn Battuta was robbed more than once as well. He narrowly avoided execution, in fact, while serving a ruler in India. Ships he travelled on were wrecked, companions died. He went through a lot on his 30-year journey. Ibn Battuta travelled along major caravan routes in the eastern Mediterranean, including the roads between Cairo and Damascus. And if he was to become separated from the larger group, he would find himself without the protection of numbers, so he would be vulnerable to an attack by bandits. Often this did happen, he would have been robbed of money, even if it was him and just a small group rather than a big one, and a lot of their supplies and their valuables would have been taken as well. But weirdly, he doesn't describe this as shocking, it's just sort of matter of fact, making it clear that robbery at this time wasn't unusual. Just a reminder of the rules of travel, I suppose, in medieval times. Because on these roads, there is no police force, no jurisdiction that follows you, no guarantee that help is nearby. Once the caravan dissolves, the social contract dissolves with it. In India, Ibn Battuta entered the service of Sultan Mohammed bin Tughluk, one of the most powerful and volatile rulers of the fourteenth century. For a while, this is the safest Ibn Battuta ever was, until he wasn't. Without warning, the political climate in Delhi shifts. Ibn Battuta falls under suspicion. He's imprisoned and fully expects execution. Nothing in his behavior has changed, only the ruler's favour. Safety in this times was temporary and precarious. Ibn Battuta travelled extensively by sea, particularly across the Indian Ocean, relying on seasonal monsoon winds. This is advanced navigation for its time, but still brutally unforgiving. He was shipwrecked at least twice, depending on the interpretation, including a ship that was lost while he was travelling to China on a diplomatic mission, and with vessels wrecked by monsoons and storm conditions. Now, when a medieval ship goes down, there is no lifeboats, no coordinated rescue mission. Your companions might drown, your cargo could vanish, and although the shipwreck doesn't definitively end the journey, it certainly changes it. Survivors are scattered, plans evaporate, and movement continues by necessity. Across Ibn Battuta's accounts, he has companions die from illness, violence, accidents, and shipwrecks. But what's striking isn't the deaths themselves, it's what doesn't happen afterwards. People don't spend ages mourning or reflecting, the journey just keeps onwards. Before the car, grief had to be compressed. People died on Ibn Battuta's journey, sometimes suddenly or horribly, and then the journey continues, just like that. And these aren't dramatic outliers in his story, they happen almost casually. Danger wasn't the exception to travel, it was part of the calculation. Now, Ibn Battuta didn't continue travelling for 30 years simply because he loved it. I mean, how could it be about pure joy when it was as dangerous as that? Really, he kept travelling because stopping was often more risky than continuing to move. Each destination led to the next, each opportunity depended on being in motion. Returning home early offered no guarantee of safety or income, but continuing forward often did. So the journey stretched out way beyond his initial pilgrimage to Mecca. Before Carr's travel didn't necessarily have neat endings. Sometimes a journey would absorb an entire life. In fact, the journey becomes the thing itself. Ibn Battuta's journey was extraordinary in scale, but the experience of the travel that he describes wasn't unique to him at all. You didn't need to cross continents to feel the full weight of distance. You just needed to try crossing your own country. You wake before sunrise, your body is stiff from travel, your clothes are cold, the air smells damp, it rained overnight hard. You know what that means, even before stepping outside. Your horse shifts its weight as you tighten the straps. Not injured, just tired. And today that matters. More than 300 years after Ibn Battuta's journey, in the late 17th century, Celia Fine set out to do something unusual. She decided to see England. Not as a pilgrimage, not for trade or war, but out of curiosity. She travelled almost the entire length of the country on horseback, starting from her family home in Wiltshire in the south, heading up to the north of England and back again. She made several trips, always returning to her family home over the course of 20 years, and at one point she made it as far as Carlisle near the Scottish border, and she wrote it all down. The late 17th century is a time without railways or paved national roads, with no guarantee that the route you planned yesterday still exists today. And today the road is about to test Celia's limits. At first it's manageable, the ground is soft but passable, the horse's hooves sink slightly, then pull free. Progress is slow but steady. Then the road begins to change. The surface darkens, the mud deepens. Each step takes more effort than the last. By mid-morning, the road starts to fight back. Mud clings to the horse's legs, thick and heavy. The horse struggles to lift its feet cleanly. Celia dismounts because staying mounted is actually making things worse. Now she's leading the horse by hand, step by step, boot sinking with every movement. This is something Celia writes about repeatedly. Roads becoming so deep and miry after rain that horses can barely move. Routes that slow suddenly without any warning. One moment you're travelling, the next the road has failed completely, and now a decision has to be made. Push on and risk exhausting the horse beyond recovery, or turn back and lose hours, maybe days. Because if the horse goes lame here, the journey ends. So Celia turns back, taking an alternative route, longer and unfamiliar. Locals tell her the usual road is impassable. They say it casually as if roads failing is normal, because at this time in history it is. The detour costs time, by the late afternoon the light is already starting to thin. She had planned to reach an inn by nightfall, and now she's not sure that she can. Celia rides towards where an inn should be, but when she arrives it isn't what she'd hoped. It's either full or unwilling to take her. This happens more than once in her journey. Inns that are overcrowded or inns that are dirty, inns that simply turn travellers away. And inns are important. In her writing she suggests that a good inn could save a journey, and a bad one could break it. And being refused, it's dangerous because once daylight fades, your options collapse quickly. Eventually she finds shelter, she eats what she can, she rests the horse, she sleeps, and the next morning she does it all over again. And what's striking in Celia Fine's writing is how calmly she explains all of this. From the mud to the rerooted roads and uncertainty of shelter, there's no sense of heroism, just of the mundane. Exhaustion appears constantly in her account, but before cars, being tired just came part and parcel of travelling life. And then there's the weather. Rain makes travelling unpleasant and reshapes it completely. Journeys that should take days stretch into weeks. And this isn't some faraway land for Celia. This is a country that she knows. This is England, with people who speak her language and share her customs, and yet travel is still slow and punishing. I was driving the icy roads this morning, and that was hairy enough. That's dangerous to do in a car. Just think what it was like when you were travelling for long distances on foot or by horseback, what an icy road could potentially do, the kind of danger that it poses to you. And on a modern map, these distances they do look small. Wiltshire to the north of England takes a few hours for us today. But as we discovered with Ibn Battuta, whether you're crossing continents in the 1300s or crossing England in the 1600s, the rules were the same. A life without cars meant movement was uncertain, and arriving anywhere at all was never guaranteed. Now, Celia did choose to travel, she did it because she wanted to. In fact, in some parts it was for her health. She visited many spa towns along the way, as well as doing it for a sense of personal adventure. Oh, and she was sometimes accompanied by two servants, so although it was tough, she had certain luxuries. And Ibn Battuta, well, he kept moving ultimately because it benefited him and got him fed. Movement gradually became the only stable way to survive. But not everyone in the past travelled because they wanted to. For huge numbers of people, movement wasn't a desire, a personal ambition, it was a demand. Travel happened not because it promised something better necessarily, but because staying put promised something much worse. By the 19th century, Britain is changing rapidly. Factories are rising, cities are expanding, and long-established forms of rural and artisanal work are disappearing. New technology, enclosure, and changes in landownership and industry took away the jobs that kept people anchored in certain areas. When work disappears, people move, with no work comes no money, no food, so you walk. This is Victorian Britain, often imagined as a world transformed by steam power and railways. And it's true that railways exist at this point, but this does not solve the problem. They are expensive, unevenly distributed, and designed primarily for profit rather than for people with nothing to lose. For the working poor, the unemployed, for people moving speculatively, you can't afford to even buy a ticket. You can't afford to gamble money that you don't have. Even horse and cart wasn't a realistic option. And this isn't something that happened infrequently or rarely. Seasonal agricultural workers would walk long distances to find harvest work. Navis, the men who build canals, roads, and railways, walk from one end of the country to the other following rumours of employment. Entire families move together on foot, carrying what little they own, children included. There is no safety necessarily waiting for them. If you collapse on the road, you rely on charity, or you might not survive. Much of what we know about this world comes from Henry Mayhew, a journalist and social investigator writing in the mid-19th century. In his detailed accounts of the working poor, later collected as London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew records the lives of people who are constantly on the move. Mayhew describes men and women who walk for days looking for work, sleeping where they can, often outdoors or in overcrowded lodging houses, spending what little money they have just to remain upright and moving. And even now, even this late into history, travel remains exhausting and dangerous. He records just how quickly shoes can wear through, how hunger weakens the body, how illness spreads easily among people already worn down by constant travel. These journeys are not framed as dramatic though, but routine. Mayhu never tells us how many people died on these journeys because it was basically impossible to measure. People died between towns, in lodging houses, or shortly after arriving somewhere new. They slipped out of records, out of statistics, and often out of notice altogether. What Mayhu shows us instead is something more unsettling. That exhaustion, hunger, illness, and sometimes death were accepted risks of movement for the poorest in Victorian England. So even as near in our history as the 1800s, there was no sticking on a CD and counting down the hours to your next destination. Travel was grueling. This brings me to a final point that I was thinking about the other day while driving, something that's so mundane that it usually goes unnoticed, and that is the road itself. For all of the journeys you've just heard about across deserts, across England, across an industrialized nation, there is something missing. The road doesn't guide anyone. There are no painted instructions on the ground, no centre lines, no lanes, and no visual agreement about who goes where. Roads exist, but they offer little help. For most of human history, roads are simply surfaces. They don't tell you what to do or organise behaviour. Navigation relies on habit, memory, landmarks, and negotiation with other travellers. In Britain, white lines don't start appearing on roads until the early 20th century, just over a hundred years ago. Even after cars were invented, roads remained visually chaotic for years. There were still no standard markings painted on the ground. It's only when cars became faster, heavier, more common in the 1920s and the 1930s, that roads were finally designed to control movement. Painted center lines appear, lanes are formalized, and the road itself begins to manage risk. When that happens, something profound changes. Travel stops being about negotiation. You no longer have to read the land in the same way or constantly bargain with strangers or uncertainty. The road itself begins to tell you where to go and how fast to move. And responsibility shifts from the traveller's own judgment to the infrastructure itself. For thousands of years, travel meant judgment, risk, and endurance. Even shockingly late into our history, movement could cost you your health or your life. Cars didn't just make travel faster, they made it predictable. They turned movement from something that you had to endure into something you barely even notice. And that is what we did before cars. So next time you're stuck in traffic or moaning at the guy doing 30 and a 50, consider how lucky you are that that is your only worry. This is what we did before. I'm Ollie, and if you have any ideas for another episode or anything that you'd like us to explore, then drop a line in the comments and we will try to pick it up. And if we choose your idea, we'll also credit you in the outro of that episode. Do subscribe if you enjoyed this episode, it helps us out massively, and I'll see you next time.