202 RECORDS IN CIVILIZATION 



is — what could he do on continuous journeys ? 

 Charles XII. of Sweden rode in a hurry from 

 Constantinople to Dantzic, but what was the 

 time for that distance, and was it done by one 

 horse or by reliefs ? Dick King a despatch 

 rider, made good time on one horse from Port 

 Elizabeth to Port Natal, but I do not remember 

 his gait for the six hundred miles. Somebody 

 who was not Dick Turpin, but possibly 

 another rogue of the same name, made a single 

 march from London to York on a mare called 

 Black Bess, but that was a horse-killing 

 feat, as much disqualified by decent men as 

 the Inter-Army horse-killing rides which dis- 

 gusted the horsemen of Europe not many 

 years ago. 



In the nineties Lieutenant Peschkov, a 

 Cossack officer, rode ^ Dun pony from Vladi- 

 vostock to Petrograd. This at any decent gait 

 is a world record for a road ride, on a route with 

 hotels at every stage. But legend makes the 

 gait thirty-eight miles a day for six thousand 

 miles, and on that I have my doubts. Work- 

 ing across country I found that my best horse 

 did one thousand three hundred and seventy 

 miles at twenty-one miles a day ; and the next 

 best one thousand and forty at the same pace ; 

 but on the whole trip, made with four successive 



