The Exposition Flyer
I’ve been spending a lot of time in 1893 lately, and have come to the conclusion that all historical roads of the time led to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exposition is hard to avoid if you’re a history nerd living in Chicago for more than a year or two, so I feel like a have a good handle on the bigger story of the fair and how it was created. But in recent months I keep coming across smaller stories. Or at least tidbits that make my understanding of the fair a little richer.
For example, the creation of the New York Central Railroad’s Exposition Flyer,[1] which I stumbled across while researching what the woman I’m thinking about would have experienced traveling from Chicago to New York City in 1893.
This image of the Exposition Flyer is from 20th Century by Lucius Beebe.
The Columbian Exposition was expected to bring millions of people to Chicago in the summer of 1893—an expectation that was fulfilled. An estimated 27 million people visited the attraction during its six-month run. Railroads from east and west alike were eager to capture their share of those travelers.
The New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad were already competing over passenger traffic between Chicago and New York in the years before the Chicago exposition. Between 1881 and 1891, the two companies had managed to reduce the time their fastest trains took to make the trip from more than 30 hours to roughly 24, mostly by reducing the number of stops and limiting or eliminating cargo cars.[2] The fare was slightly higher to reflect the time saved.
On the eve of the exposition, the New York Central’s general passenger agent, George H. Daniels,[3] envisioned a train that would take only 20 hours to make the trip between New York and Chicago, building on the techniques of the various “limited” and express trains currently traveling the route. The Exposition Flyer, billed as the “fastest train on earth,” was a small train, usually limited to a “buffet smoking and library car,” which was a haven for male passengers, a dining car, and two or three sleeping cars. It was also a “solid train”: all of its cars went the entire distance so no time was lost adding cars or leaving cars behind. And it made only seven maintenance stops on the route—no passenger stops.
None of this will appear in the proposal I am (still) struggling with. It probably won’t even turn up in the final book, if I am lucky enough to get to write it. My subject would have taken the cheapest train possible, not the Exposition Flyer nor one of the various limited or express trains that traveled from Chicago to New York . But knowing that she had to make a choice, and what those choices were, adds to my understanding. of her experience.
This is the way you write a book, one detail at a time.
[1] Not to be confused with a train of the same name that carried travelers west from Chicago to San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939
[2] Both railroads continued to run slower trains, which took more than 36 hours but made all the stops on a route that traveled through Michigan and New York State. For which people who wanted to travel to Kalamazoo. Battle Creek, Buffalo, or Albany were doubtless grateful.
[3] Remembered by railroad buffs and advertising history nerds for his innovative promotion of the railroad, including the use of travel brochures to encourage people to take the train on their vacations. Much of his work rested on the tagline “Send a stamp to George H Daniels.” Anyone who wrote to Daniels for information and enclosed a 2¢ stamp would get travel information tailored to their interests in return, whether it related to the railroad or not. He and his team created a wide range of brochures, dubbed the Four-Track series. The most popular was a reprint of Elbert Hubbard’s inspirational essay “A Message to Garcia” (1899)–the story had nothing to do with the railroad, but the pamphlet included a map of the New York Central’s routes. The railroad published hundreds of thousands of copies of the essay, keeping an essay that originally appeared in an obscure magazine that reached a small audience in the public eye.
From the Archives: A Spy in the Spice Trade
One more post from the past dealing with the spice trade
You know the beginning of this story. In the fifteenth century, Portugal under the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator(opens in new tab) * began maritime exploration along the coast of Africa. More or less a hundred years later, a Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama reached India. After a certain amount of bumbling around, Portugal transformed itself into a maritime empire(opens in new tab) with a lock on the spice trade.
For almost a hundred years, the Portuguese successfully protected their control over the sea routes to the Indian Ocean. Foreign ships caught sailing to the Indies were seized and their crews sentenced to a lifetime in the galleys. Suspected spies were arrested and shipped back to Lisbon for trial; those from the Protestant countries of England and the independent northern Netherlands were charged with heresy as well as espionage.**
Things changed in 1580, when Phillip II of Spain*** conquered Portugal and united the two countries. The enemies of Spain became the enemies of Portugal, especially England and the Netherlands. The two Protestant countries could no longer buy spices from Portugal. Suddenly free trade was a religious as well as a political issue. The English took the direct approach and attacked Portuguese ships as they returned from the Indies. The Dutch preferred to trade rather than raid, but establishing trade with the Indies would require information they didn’t have.
Dutch merchants sent a spy overland to the Indies. Before he returned, they received all the information they wanted from a source they didn’t expect: a Dutch spy who worked right under the nose of the Portuguese.
Jan Huygen van Linschoten was a Dutch Catholic, born in the Netherlands in 1563. When he was seventeen, he traveled to Lisbon, where he worked for a Portuguese merchant. In 1583, he traveled to India as secretary to the new Archbishop of Goa, the Portuguese capital in India.
Linschoten worked in Goa from 1584 to 1589. As secretary to the Archbishop he had access to protected information regarding trade routes and sailing conditions. He questioned any European traveler who came through “golden Goa” about the countries further east. When the Archbishop died in 1589, Linschoten began a four-year-long voyage home to the Netherlands, learning even more about the Portuguese trading empire on the way.
Back in the Netherlands, Linschoten wrote Voyages to the East Indies, an account of everything Dutch merchants needed to know if they wanted to trade in the Indies. He described the sea routes to the east, including where to get fresh water and vegetables and what time of year the weather was best for safe sailing. He explained that they would need silver to buy spices because the Asians weren’t interested in European products. He described the countries and customs of Asia from India to Japan. He even provided up-to-date maps. Most important, Linschoten revealed that the once powerful Portuguese army, which had defended the trade routes with blazing guns in the past, was no longer so powerful. The sea routes to the east were open to anyone who dared take them.
In 1595, Dutch ships sailed for Java, with a copy of Linschoten’s Voyages aboard as a guide. Portuguese control of the spice trade was over.
*A misnomer applied to him by nineteenth century British historians for nineteenth century British reasons
**A serious matter in the days when the Spanish Inquisition was more than Monty Python routine.
***Just to remind you, he’s the guy who was married to Queen Mary Tudor from 1554 until her death in 1558, tried unsuccessfully (and illegally) to marry her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, and sent the equally unsuccessful Spanish Armada against England in 1588. He was also one of the most powerful rulers in Europe at the time. Sometimes its hard to tell the players without a program.
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From the Archives: Asia’s Inland Trade, or How the Spice Trade Worked
While writing my most recent newsletter(opens in new tab), I had reason to spend some time thinking about my historical roots, and looking for an old blog post about the organization of the Dutch and British East India Companies. I evidently never wrote that post, but I found a couple of related posts from 2016 and 2017 that I think hold up.
The official trading area of the Dutch East India Company
The way we learn the story in elementary school in the United States, European trading companies sailed East in search of spices and other luxury goods. What those merchants took with them to trade is generally left unmentioned–perhaps because it makes it clear that Europe was a backwater in the global marketplace until well into the eighteenth century.
The truth is that in the early centuries of the Asian trade most European-made merchandise was a dud in the Asian marketplace. Some products, like mechanical clocks and toys, were too expensive for any but the wealthiest to purchase. Others, like heavy woolen cloth, were simply not useful or appealing. The only thing Europeans had that Asian were interested in was precious metal from the mines in Latin America.
The Portuguese, who controlled the trade routes from Europe to Asia for almost a hundred years, were content to pay silver for the luxury goods that reached their Indian stronghold at Goa. When the Dutch entered the spice trade in 1595 , they didn’t have the luxury of paying for everything with hard currency. It was too expensive to simply trade with the Indies. Instead they learned to trade within the Indies: carrying goods from one Asian market to another as part of what they called the “inland trade”.
The Dutch didn’t invent the inland land. Merchants from all over Asia bought and sold goods at busy seaports along the Red Sea, on the coast of India, throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and in China and Japan. Islamic merchants in the Persian Gulf shipped raw cotton, coffee, dried fruits and nuts, and attar of roses across the Indian Ocean. Chinese merchants sold silks, tea, porcelain and zinc. India produced printed cotton textiles that were popular throughout Asia. South East Asia was the source for pepper, sandalwood, spices, and ivory.
Asia ships seldom sailed all the way from the Persian Gulf to China. Instead, an Arab ship would sail from Mokha to Surat and back. An Indian merchant would travel between Surat and Java. Chinese junks controlled the trade between Canton and Bantam. A chest of tea or a load of pepper would be bought and sold several times , and transported from port to port in several different ships.
Instead of concentrating on trade between two ports, the way most Asian merchants did, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded throughout the entire system, trading one type of goods for another, which was then used to buy a third. From one end of the chain to the other, Dutch traders handled more than one hundred Asian products, including raw silk, sandalwood, saltpeter, tin, opium, and cowry shells. Each item was bought for a low price in the place where it was made and then sold for a higher price in another part of Asia in which it was in demand.
In order to make the most of this complicated series of trades, the VOC set up a network of permanent trading stations along the major trade routes in Asia–a process that often involved violence against local rulers and other European merchants. By 1785, the company had roughly 20,000 employees in twenty settlements spread across Asia, including company-owned spice plantations in Indonesia and walled warehouses in port cities in China, Japan, and India.
The spice trade–more than just pepper.