218 Wild Birds and their Haunts 



messages as the birds arrived, and to pass the intelligence 

 on by means of others. The communication was written 

 on a thin slip of paper, and enclosed in a very small gold 

 box, almost as thin as tne paper itself, suspended to tne 

 neck of the bird. The time of arrival and departure was 

 marked at each successive tower, and, for greater securitj^, 

 a duplicate message was always despatched a couple of 

 nours after the first. 



Military men will see in this piece of ingenuity a simi- 

 larity between this system and the cipher method of 

 signalling messages in our day. The intelligence, how- 

 ever, was not invariably enclosed in a gold box, but was 

 sometimes merely wrapped in paper, in winch case, to 

 prevent the bird being injured by damp, the legs of the 

 bird were bathed in vinegar, with a view to keep them 

 cool, so that there might be no settling to drink or wash 

 on the way. 



The light, active body and long wings render the pigeon 

 peculiarly adapted for speed, and for very many years it 

 remained the fleetest means of communication which the 

 world possessed. As instances of its velocity, it may be 

 mentioned that on November 22, 1819, thirty-two pigeons 

 which had " homed" at Antwerp were liberated from 

 Iyondon at 7 a.m., and at noon the first bird reached its 

 destination, having accomplished the distance of 210 

 miles in (allowing for difference of time) about four and 

 three-quarter hours, or at the rate of something like 45 

 miles per hour — the speed of a railway train. A few 

 years later fifty-six pigeons were brought over from 

 Holland, and having been set free in London at 4-30 

 a.m., the swiftest bird traversed the distance of 300 miles 

 at the rate of 50 miles per hour, the slowest doing it in 

 37 \ miles in the hour, on an average. But a much quicker 

 flight than this is on record ; for we find it chronicled 

 that in 1842 a pigeon flew from Ballinasloe in Ireland to 

 Castle Bernard, a distance of twenty-three Irish miles, in 

 eleven minutes which gives the almost incredible velocity 

 of 160 English miles per hour, a speed nearly equal to 

 that of the common swift, which is, without doubt, the 

 fleetest of all birds. As a bearer of military despatches, 



