Everyone wants to travel the world. For our ancestors, traveling the world would have been a nightmare.
Until the late Middle Ages, the word travel was synonymous with the word travail, which meant “to toil, labor.” That word came from the Anglo-French word travailer, which originally meant "to torment." That word, in turn, is descended from the Latin word trepalium, a device for torture!
Walking, carts and horses were the only options to get around, with walking being the most commonly used. Roads were terrible or nonexistent. Robbers, murderers, animals and disease lurked. Travelers on foot could expect to walk around 30 miles per day, potentially spending between eight to ten hours of walking per day. In fact, the word journey used to mean “a day’s mileage.”
Rooms were available at inns, but you'd have to deal with excessive noise, overheated or freezing conditions, and bad ventilation. Travelers may wait hours for their meals. Innkeepers were rude. Private beds were hard to come by and were expected to be plagued with cockroaches, bedbugs and fleas. Innkeeprs assigned private beds to multiple guests.
Sea travel, which was the fastest for long distance trips, was basically basic economy. On ships, non-crew passengers slept below the deck under cramped conditions. “The berths of the pilgrims are so arranged that, for the length of the ship, or rather of the hold, one berth is alongside the next without any space in between,” according to a 1483 account by Brother Felix Fabri. “One pilgrim lies by the side of the other, along both sides of the ship, having their heads towards the sides of the ship and their feet stretching out towards each other.”
You’d experience your travel "comforts" in darkness. Below the decks, light came through hatches in the main deck. ”The whole galley, within and without, is covered with the blackest pitch, as are even the ropes, planks, and everything else, that they may not easily be rotted by the water,” Fabri said in his account.
And the conditions reeked! Bilgewater accumulated around the well in the mainmast, bringing a stench to the cramped passengers. “All the water which visibly and invisibly enters the galley filters through and collects in that well, and a most loathsome smell arises from it, a worse smell than that from any latrine for human excrement,” Fabri recalled.
Here's an account from a German immigrant on his transatlantic voyage to the Americas amid the early 1700s:
During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress—smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and similar inflictions [sic], all of them caused by the age and the highly salted state of the food, especially the meat, as well as the very bad and filthy water, which brings about the miserable destruction and death of many. Add to all that shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and lamentation, as well as other troubles.
Slaves were also on those transatlantic trips, but their quarters were ten times worse. Slaves were even more cramped than passengers.
Dysentery and fevers were prevalent. The floor of their quarters were covered with bodily fluids like blood and mucus. One slave surgeon remarked, "It is not in the power of the human imagination, to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting."
Book Sources
1. Boorstin, Daniel (1961). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. New York, United States: Atheneum Macmillan Publishing Company
2. Paine, Lincoln P. (2015). The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.