EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CARRIAGES
In selecting the means of transportation the choice was between the rough, clumsy public vehicles and one's private carriage. A posting-wagon meant something very different in Germany from what it did in France or even Italy, and was practically a comfortless sort of stage-coach. For the public posting-wagons of Germany no one has a good word. Misson calls them "a miserable sort of cart," and adds: "They often move very slowly, but to make amends, they jog on night and day. This is the most troublesome of all carriages, as I found it to my cost."[1]
Travelers throughout the eighteenth century and even much later are in entire accord with Misson. Nugent does, indeed, say: "There is no country in Europe where the post is under better regulation than in Germany," but he immediately adds: "The common way of travelling is in machines which they call post-waggons,[2] and which very well deserve that denomination. These are little better than common carts, with seats made for the passengers, without any covering, except in Hesse Cassel, and a few other places. They go but a slow pace, not much above three miles an hour, and what is still more inconvenient to passengers, they jog on day and night, winter and summer, rain or snow, till they arrive at the place appointed. … But this is a way of travelling recommendable to those only who cannot be at the expense of a more commodious manner."[3]
If the three-mile rate had been actually kept up day and night, one would of course have covered seventy miles or more in twenty-four hours. But such dizzy speed was not always possible, and sometimes the record for a day did not exceed eighteen miles.
As for the companions of one's journey in the post-wagon some travelers are not over-enthusiastic. "My company consisted of a swine of an Oldenburgh dealer in horses, a clodpole Bremen broker, and a pretty female piece of flesh, mere dead flesh, lying before me on the straw. There was not a word spoke all the way from Göttingen here
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