Thomas Stevens (cyclist) - Europe

Europe

Stevens passed the winter in New York and contributed sketches of his transcontinental trip to Outing, a magazine. It made him a special correspondent and sent him on the steamer City of Chicago to Liverpool. He landed there 10 days later, on 9 April 1885. He left his bicycle in the underground storerooms of the London and North Western Railway and went by train to London to arrange his crossing of Europe and investigate conditions in Asia. He was helped by an interpreter at the Chinese embassy who discouraged him from riding across Upper Burma and China.

He returned to Liverpool on 30 April 1885 and on 4 May made a formal start to his ride at Edge Hill church, where several hundred people watched him leave. He wrote:

A small sea of hats is enthusiastically waved aloft; a ripple of applause escaped from 500 English throats as I mount my glistening bicycle; and with the assistance of a few policemen, 25 Liverpool cyclers who have assembled to accompany me out extricate themselves from the crowd, mount, and fall into line two abreast; and merrily we wheel down Edge-lane and out of Liverpool."

It began raining within minutes.

He rode, wearing a white military helmet through England, passing through Berkhamsted, where he had been born. He recorded that roads in England were better than in America. He took the ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe to cross to France and continued through Germany, Austria, Hungary (where he picked up a temporary cycling companion with whom he shared no language), Slavonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumelia, Turkey.

In Constantinople he rested among people who had heard of America, refitted with spare spokes, tires and other parts and a better pistol (a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson), waited for reports of banditry to subside, and then pedalled off through Anatolia, Armenia, Kurdistan, Iraq and Iran, where he waited out the winter in Teheran as a guest of the Shah.