Two Remarkable Travellers.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XIX, Issue 6048, 13 September 1894, Page 3

Two Remarkable Travellers.

Recent English exchanges contain accounts of two travellers whose pedestrian feats are considerably out of the common. One of these (an Austrian painter named Scheidereit) recently returned to his native town of Rathenow after a pleasant stroll all the way from Calcutta. Apart from this Herr Scheidereit has passed through some troublous times during the past two years. Early in 1892 he received word that a relative had recently died in Australia and had left him a considerable fortune. Greatly elated, no doubt, by the welcome news, he set out with his wife and children to take possession of the inheritance, but on arriving at his j destination he found, it is said, " the fortune to be a little more than a fable, and he resolved to return home." The ship was burned on the voyage, and the unfortunate man lost his wife and his two children, but was himself marvellously rescued, and carried on board an English ship to Calcutta. There he quickly spent the small remnant of his property, and found himself utterly without means of livelihood. So he resolved that he would walk home to Austria. He travelled on foot across India, Afghanistan, Persia, south of Russia. Bulgaria, Roumania, and Hungary, into his Austrian fatherland. The journey on foot occupied him nearly the whole, of two years. The paper that chronicles this sad history ventures to think that Herr Schneidreit holds the record for pedestriauism, but his title to be considered the champion long-distance walker is challenged by the feats perforformed by a recent visitor to New Zealand. Dr G. E. Morrison, of Geelong, who was a passenger to Auckland by the Port Melbourne from Singapore. This gentleman, whose arrival at Nampoung, in Burmah, was lately referred to by a London contemporary, is described as a worthy successor of the roaming Laurence Oliphant, fresh from a tramp of over a thousand miles of Cathay, in parts hitherto untrodden by Europeans. _ " The venturesome doctor, without guide or escort, or weapon of war, made his way from {Shanghai to Bhamo, a distance of L3OOO miles, walking nearly the whole of the last 1600 at a rate of 25 to 30 miles a day. He was well received everywhere, and naturally saw strange sights, which his friends hope he will put into a book. Dr Morrison is only 32 years old, and Australian born. His career has been vagrant and exciting to a degree. When he was 22 years old he footed it across Australia from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Melbourne. Then he went as special correspondent to New Guinea, when he was speared by natives and left for dead. After graduating in medicine afc Edinburgh, he went before the mast on an emigrant ship to Philadelphia, and saw the States and the West Indies. Next he was the chief physician to the Rio Tinto Mining Company in Spain, then to the Sheriff of Wazan, and afterwards at the Ballarat Hospital. I Before his Chinese trip he went * blackbirding' in the South Seas to get at the bottom of the Kanaka question." If the doctor is as good a writer as he |s a traveller the book—which, it is to be hoped! he means to write—should make ipfendid reading.