I didn't know who he was either and there seems to be very little on the internet about this very remarkable Long Distance Walker. And what there is suggests that he was not quite as famous as his self-promoting postcard made him out to be. Here's what I've been able to piece together.
Apparently he started his perambulatory exploits as the result of a wager and walked around the world, leaving New York in August 1897, in a newspaper suit and penniless. To complete the mental image, I should add that he only had one arm and invariably travelled with a large black dog as his companion. A newspaper reported, after the event, that his feat was unverified. I can't comment on that but I can say that I have come across brief press reports of when he was in the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. These make amusing reading as they were all somewhat bemused by what he was doing (a polite way of saying that they were all taking the piss!). Apart from selling his postcards as he went around, I can't find out how he supported his walks although there are hints that he was not averse to freeloading and stowing away.
He seems to have caught the walking bug in a big way because, after completing his first feat, he embarked on two more. The first of these, and the subject of the postcard I've got, was when he walked 20000 miles throughout Great Britain and the Continent pulling a 6 hundredweight airship (Why an airship?). Again for a wager, he started from London on February 18th 1908. And after this he went onto his next (and last?) undertaking: pushing a six-and-a-half hundredweight wooden globe (Why a wooden globe?) around the world. The globe was also his sleeping berth., and he presumably shared this with his faithful canine compadre.
And here the trail goes cold. What happened next? Did he really end up in an asylum? What happened to his dog? I've no idea but I would dearly love to find out more about this unsung and largely forgotten nutter, sorry, hero. It definitely makes for a fun postcard though!
2 comments:
I do hope that this is not a disguised rant against long-distance walkers who are, by my reckoning, an estimable bunch; perhaps foolish but not mad. I'd also suggest that the airship may have been quite a cunning idea - I see that it has a propeller so that it could have provided assistance in times of extreme stress or fatigue and would, in any case, have given shelter to the dog when it was knackered. The globe could have been a useful source of firewood when Schilling was stranded in the Alps. These are not the actions of a madman.
I should, of course, added "long-distance walkers I know excepted". Mr Schilling was not alone as, in that particular era, many others were doing similar things. It's speculated that improved communications and transport links help foster this activity. But I still think that Mr Schilling was at the far end of the spectrum of normal long-distance walking.
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