or the cause of a good dunking in summer. Flat-bottom ferries frequently
were capsized by frightened animals or storms, but they were, relatively
speaking, comfortable and in many places essential. Often a complex set of
means of travel was required. To trek from New York to Philadelphia in the
middle of the eighteenth century, the traveler began on a Hudson River
ferry, then changed to a stagecoach, and finally floated on a bateau down
the Delaware from just below the site of modern Trenton. Such travel took
organization, was subject to frequent delays, and was expensive. What was
true for people was also true of freight. Even more than half a century later,
in the 1830s, after much development of transportation infrastructure, car-
rying a ton of goods 30 miles inland from any of the coastal cities cost
about the same as shipping it from London or Liverpool to Boston.
Traveling was always an exhausting experience and sometimes a lethal
one. First of all, there was no such thing as waterproof covering. Every driz-
zle was a shower bath, often to be followed by a cold or influenza, for which
there was no treatment except perhaps a bloodletting that might be more
dangerous than the disease. Then there was an arduous, jolting, lurching
carriage or the tedium of riding on a hard saddle. Few parts of the country-
side had “ordinaries” (inns), and none had any equivalent of hotels; the
traveler was lucky to find a complaisant farmer with a spare pallet or a dry
floor. Travelers were more likely to have to sleep under a tree or on a
haystack—and even haystacks were still rare.
Even for hardened post riders, travel was difficult. In the relatively well-
populated East during the mid-eighteenth century, New York had only 57
miles of “post roads”: that is more or less leveled dirt trails wide enough for
a coach or wagon and generally free of rocks or fallen trees. Well into the
1780s, European visitors were shocked at how primitive these roads were.
Pennsylvania had seventy-eight more or less cleared tracks, and Massa-
chusetts had 143. Between Boston and New York, the mail moved only
once a week in the summer or once every two weeks in winter and took
four or five days. These were “best cases.” Elsewhere, conditions were
much worse. Governor Dobbs of North Carolina complained in 1762 that
letters coming to him from London were usually three to four months
en route and sometimes as long as twelve months; Governor Robert
Dinwiddie of Virginia said that the post from New York often took five to
The Growth of the Colonies 157