The Art of Travel Part 31

St.i.tches.--The enthusiastic traveller should be thoroughly grounded by a tailor in the rudiments of sewing and the most useful st.i.tches. They are as follows:--To make a knot at the end of the thread; to run; to st.i.tch; to "sew';" to fell, or otherwise to make a double seam; to herring-bone (essential for flannels); to hem; to sew over; to bind; to sew on a b.u.t.ton; to make a b.u.t.ton-hole; to darn; and to fine-draw. He should also practise taking patterns of some articles of clothing in paper, cutting them out in common materials and putting them together. He should take a lesson or two from a saddler, and several, when on board ship, from a sail-maker.

Needles, to make.--The natives of Unyoro sew their beautifully prepared goat-skins in a wonderfully neat manner, with needles manufactured by themselves. "They make them not by boring the eye, but by sharpening the end into a fine point and turning it over, the extremity being hammered into a small cut in the body of the needle, to prevent it from catching."--Sir S. Baker.

MEMBRANE, SINEW, HORN.

Parchment--The substance which is called parchment when made from sheep or goat skins, and vellum when from those of calves, kids, or dead-born lambs, can also be made from any other skin. The raw hide is buried for one or two days, till the hair comes off easily; then it is taken out and well sc.r.a.ped. Next a skewer is run in and out along each of its four sides, and strings being made fast to these skewers, the skin is very tightly stretched; it is carefully sc.r.a.ped over as it lies on the stretch, by which means the water is squeezed out; then it is rubbed with rough stones, as pumice or sandstone, after which it is allowed to dry, the strings by which the skewers are secured being tightened from time to time. If this parchment be used for writing, it will be found rather greasy, but washing it will oxgall will probably remedy this fault. (See "Ox-gall," p. 331.) In the regular preparation of parchment, the skin is soaked for a short time in a lime-pit before taking off the hairs, to get rid of the grease.

Catgut.--Steep the intestines of any animal in water for a day, peel off the outer membrane, then burn the gut inside out, which is easily to be done by turning a very short piece of it inside out, just as you would turn up the cuff of your sleeve; then, catching hold of the turned-up cuff, dip the whole into a bucket, and scoop up a little water between the cuff and the rest of the gut.

[Sketch of making catgut as described].

The weight of this water will do what is wanted: it will bear down an additional length of previously unturned gut; and thus, by a few successive dippings, the entire length of any amount of intestine, however narrow it may be, can be turned inside out in a minute or two.

Having turned the intestine inside out, sc.r.a.pe off the whole of its inner soft parts; what remains is a fine transparent tube, which, being twisted up tightly and stretched to dry, forms catgut.

Membrane Thread.--Steep the intestines of any animal in water for a day; then peel off the outer membrane, which will come off in long strips; these should be twisted up between the hands, and hung out to dry; they form excellent threads for sewing skins together, or indeed for any other purpose.

Sinews for Thread.--Any sinews will do for making thread if the fibres admit of being twisted or plaited together into pieces of sufficient length. The sinews lying alongside the backbone are the most convenient, on account of the length of their fibres. After the sinew is dried straight strips are torn off it of the proper size; they are wetted, and sc.r.a.ped into evenness by being drawn through the mouth and teeth; then, by one or two rubs between the hand and the thigh, they become twisted and their fibres are retained together. A piece of dried sinew is usually kept in reserve for making thread or string.

Glue is made by boiling down hides, or even tendons, hoofs, and horns, for a long time, taking care that they are not charred; then drawing off the fluid and letting it set.

Isingla.s.s is made readily by steeping the stomach and intestines of fish in cold water, and then gently boiling them into a jelly: this is spread into sheets and allowed to dry. The air-bladder of the sturgeon makes the true isingla.s.s. (See "Paste and Gum," p. 332.)

Horn, Tortoisesh.e.l.l, and Whalebone.--Horn is so easily worked into shape that travellers, especially in pastoral countries, should be acquainted with its properties. By boiling, or exposing it to heat in hot sand, it is made quite soft, and can be moulded into whatever shape you will. Not only this, but it can also be welded by heating and pressing two edges together, which, however, must be quite clean and free from grease, even the touch of the hand taints them. Sheets of horn are a well-known subst.i.tute for gla.s.s, and are made as follows:--The horn is left to soak for a fortnight in a pond; then it is well washed, to separate the pith; next it is sawn lengthwise, and boiled till it can be easily split into sheets with a chisel; which sheets are again boiled, then sc.r.a.ped to a uniform thickness, and set into shape to dry. Tortoisesh.e.l.l and whalebone can be softened and worked in the same way.

POTTERY.

TO GLAZE POTTERY.--Most savages have pottery, but few know how to glaze it. One way, and that which was the earliest known of doing this, is to throw handfuls of salt upon the jar when red-hot in the kiln. The reader will doubtless call to mind the difficulties of Robinson Crusoe in making his earthenware water-tight.

Subst.i.tute for Clay.--In Damara land, where there is no natural material fitted for pottery, the savages procured mud from the interior of the white-ant hills, with which they made their pots. They were exceedingly brittle, but nevertheless were large and serviceable for storing provisions and even for holding water over the fire. I have seen them two feet high. What it was that caused the clay taken from the ant-hills to possess this property, I do not know.

Pots for Stores and Caches.--An earthen pot is excellent for a store of provisions or for a cache, because it keeps out moisture and insects, and animals cannot smell and therefore do not attack its contents.

CANDLES AND LAMPS.

Candles.--Moulds for Candles.--It is usual, on an expedition, to take tin moulds and a ball of wick for the purpose of making candles, from time to time, when fat happens to be abundant. The most convenient mould is of the shape shown in the figure. The tallow should be poured in, when its heat is so reduced that it hardly feels warm to the finger; that is, just before setting. If this be done over-night, the candles will come out in the morning without difficulty. But, if you are obliged to make many at a time, then, after the tallow has been poured in, the mould should be dipped in cold water to cool it: and then when the tallow has set, the mould should be dipped for a moment in hot water to melt the outside of the newly-made candle and enable it to be easily extracted. By this method, the candles are not made so neatly as by the other, though they are made more quickly.

[Sketch of candle mould].

It is well to take, if not to make, a proper needle for putting the wicks into the moulds. It should be a hooked piece of wire, like a crochet needle, which catches the wick by its middle and pulls it doubled through the hole. A stick across the mouth of the mould secures the other end.

When the tallow is setting, give an additional pull downwards. A gun-barrel, with a cork or wad put the required distance down the barrel, has been used for a mould. Pull the candle out by the wick after heating the barrel. Two wads might be used; the one strongly rammed in, to prevent the tallow from running too far, the other merely as a support for the wick. Perhaps, even paper moulds might be used; they could be made by gumming or pasting paper in a roll.

Dip Candles.--Candles that are made by "dipping," gutter and run much more than mould candles, if they have to be used as soon as made. The way of dipping them is to tie a number of wicks to the end of a wooden handle, so shaped that the whole affair looks much like a garden-rake--the wicks being represented by the teeth of the rake; then the wicks are dipped in the tallow, and each is rubbed and messed by the hand till it stands stiff and straight; after this they are dipped all together, several times in succession, allowing each fresh coat of tallow to dry before another dipping. Wax candles are always made by this process.

Subst.i.tute for Candles.--A strip of cotton, 1 1/2 foot long, drenched in grease, and wound spirally round a wand, will burn for half an hour. A lump of beeswax, with a tatter of an old handkerchief run through it, makes a candle on an emergency.

Materials for Candles.--Tallow.--Mutton-suet mixed with ox-tallow is the best material for candles. Tallow should never be melted over a hot fire: it is best to melt it by putting the pot in hot sand. To procure fat, see "Greasing Leather," p. 343.

Wax.--Boil the comb for hours, together with a little water to keep it from burning, then press the melted ma.s.s through a cloth into a deep puddle of cold water. This makes beeswax. (See "Honey, to find," p. 199.)

Candlestick.--A hole cut with the knife in a sod of turf or a potato; 3, 4, or 5 nails hammered in a circle into a piece of wood, to act as a socket; a hollow bone; an empty bottle; a strap with the end pa.s.sed the wrong way through the buckle and coiled inside; and a bayonet stuck in the ground, are all used as makeshift candlesticks. "In bygone days the broad feet, or rather legs, of the swan, after being stretched and dried, were converted into candlesticks."--Lloyd.

Lamps.--Lamps may be made of hard wood, hollowed out to receive the oil; also of lead. (See "Lead," p. 340.) The shed hoof of an ox or other beast is sometimes used.

Slush Lamp is simply a pannikin full of fat, with a rag wrapped round a small stick planted as a wick in the middle of it.

Lantern.--A wooden box, a native bucket, or a calabash, will make the frame, and a piece of greased calico stretched across a hole in its side, will take the place of gla.s.s. A small tin, such as a preserved-meat case, makes a good lantern, if a hole is broken into the bottom, and an opening in the side or front. Horn (see p. 347) is easily to be worked by a traveller into any required shape. A good and often a ready makeshift for a lantern, is a bottle with its end cracked off. This is best effected by putting water into the bottle to the depth of an inch, and then setting it upon hot embers. The bottle will crack all round at the level of the top of the water. It takes a strong wind to blow out a candle stuck into the neck inside the broken bottle. Alpine tourists often employ this contrivance when they start from their bivouac in the cark morning.

[Sketch of candle in bottle].

ON CONCLUDING THE JOURNEY.

Complete your Collections.--When your journey draws near its close, resist restless feelings; make every effort before it is too late to supplement deficiencies in your various collections; take stock of what you have gathered together, and think how the things will serve in England to ill.u.s.trate your journey or your book. Keep whatever is pretty in itself, or is ill.u.s.trative of your every-day life, or that of the savages, in the way of arms, utensils, and dresses. Make careful drawings of your encampment, your retinue, and whatever else you may in indolence have omitted to sketch, that will possess an after-interest. Look over your vocabularies for the last time, and complete them as far as possible. Make presents of all your travelling gear and old guns to your native attendants, for they will be mere litter in England, costly to house and attractive to moth and rust; while in the country where you have been travelling, they are of acknowledged value, and would be additionally acceptable as keepsakes.

Memoranda, to arrange.--Paste all loose slips of MSS. into the pages of a blank book; and st.i.tch your memoranda books where they are torn; give them to a bookbinder, at the first opportunity, to re-bind and page them, adding an abundance of blank leaves. Write an index to the whole of your MSS.; put plenty of cross-references, insert necessary explanations, and supplement imperfect descriptions, while your memory of the events remains fresh. It appears impossible to a traveller, at the close of his journey, to believe he will ever forget its events, however trivial; for after long brooding on few facts, they will seem to be fairly branded into his memory. But this is not the case; for the crowds of new impressions, during a few months or years of civilised life, will efface the sharpness of the old ones. I have conversed with men of low mental power, servants and others, the greater part of whose experiences in savagedom had pa.s.sed out of their memories like the events of a dream.

Alphabetical Lists.--Every explorer has frequent occasion to draw up long catalogues in alphabetical order, whether of words for vocabularies, or of things that he has in store: now, there is a right and a wrong way of setting to work to make them. The wrong way is to divide the paper into equal parts, and to a.s.sign one of them to each letter in order. The right way is to divide the paper into parts of a size proportionate to the number of words in the English language which begin with each particular letter. In the first case the paper will be overcrowded in some parts and utterly blank in others, in the second it will be equally overspread with writing; and an ordinary-sized sheet of paper, if closely and clearly written, will be sufficient for the drawing up of a very extended catalogue. A convenient way of carrying out the principle I have indicated is to take an English dictionary, and after having divided the paper into as many equal parts as there are leaves in the dictionary, to adopt the first word of each leaf as headings to them. It may save trouble to my reader if I give a list of headings appropriate to a small catalogue. We will suppose the paper to be divided into fifty-two s.p.a.ces--that is to say, into four columns and thirteen s.p.a.ces in each column--then the headings of these s.p.a.ces, in order, will be as follows:--

A dul pal son adv eve per sta app fin ple sir bal gin pre sur bil hee pro tem bre imp que tos cap int rec tur chi k reg umb col lan ria une com mac sab ven cra mil sca wea dec nap sha wor dis off siz x y a

Verification of Instruments.--On arriving at the sea-level, make daily observations with your boiling-point thermometer, barometer, and aneroid, as they are all subject to changes in their index-errors. As soon as you have an opportunity, compare them with a standard barometer, compare also your ordinary thermometer and azimuth-compa.s.s with standard instruments, and finally, have them carefully re-verified at the Kew observatory on your return to England. A vast deal of labour has been wholly thrown away by travellers owing to their neglecting to ascertain the index-errors of these instruments at the close of their journey. A careful observer ought to have eliminated the effects of instrumental errors from his s.e.xtant observations; nevertheless it will be satisfactory to him, and it may clear up some apparent anomalies, to have his entire instrumental outfit re-verified at Kew.

Observations, to recalculate.--Send by post to England a complete copy (always preserve the originals) of all your astronomical observations, that they may be carefully recalculated before your return, otherwise a long period may elapse before the longitudes are finally settled, and your book may be delayed through the consequent impossibility of preparing a correct map. The Royal Geographical Society has frequently procured the re-calculation of observations made on important journeys, at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and elsewhere. I presume that a well-known traveller would never find a difficulty in obtaining the calculations he might desire, through the medium of that Society, if it was distinctly understood that they were to be made at his own cost.

Lithograph Maps.--It may add greatly to the interest which a traveller will take in drawing up a large and graphic route-map of his journey, if he knows the extreme ease and cheapness with which copies of such a map may be multiplied to any extent by a well-known process in lithography: for these being distributed among persons interested in the country where he has travelled, will prevent his painstaking from being lost to the world. Sketches and bird'[S-eye views may be multiplied in the same manner. The method to which I refer is the so-called Anastatic process; the materials can be obtained, with full instructions, at any lithographer's shop, and consist of autographic ink and paper. The paper has been prepared by being glazed over with a composition, and the ink is in appearance something like Indian ink, and used in much the same way.

With an ordinary pen, with this ink, and upon this paper, the traveller draws his map; they are neither more nor less difficult to employ than common stationery, and he may avail himself of tracing-paper without danger. He has one single precaution to guard against, which is, not to touch the paper overmuch with his bare and, but to keep a bit of loose paper between it and the map as he draws. As soon as it is finished, the map is taken to a lithographer, who puts it face downwards on a stone, and pa.s.ses it under his press, when every particle of ink leaves the surface of the paper and attaches itself to the surface of the stone, precisely as though it had originally been written there; the glaze on the paper, which prevents the ink from soaking into it, makes this transference more easy and complete. The stone can now be worked with, just as a stone that has been regularly lithographed in the usual manner; that is to say, printing ink may be rubbed over it and impressions may be taken off in any number. It will be observed that the writing on the paper is reversed upon the stone, and is re-reversed, or set right again, in the impressions that are taken from it. The lithographer's charges for furnishing autographic ink and paper, working the stone, striking off fifty copies of a folio size, and supplying the paper (common white paper) for the copies--in fact every expense included--need not exceed ten shillings, and may be much less. If before drawing his map the traveller were to go to some working lithographer and witness the process, and make two or three experiments in a small way, he would naturally succeed all the better. A map drawn on a large scale, though without any pretension to artistic skill, with abundance of profile views of prominent landmarks, and copious information upon the routes that were explored, written along their sides, would be of the utmost value to future travellers, and to geographers at home.