A Cruise across Europe; Notes on a Freshwater Voyage from Holland to the Black Sea

As John says, this is an engaging short read. The relationship between the length of the journey and the length of the book is such that the details are sometimes a bit sketchy, frustratingly so when Maxwell is describing things that have now vanished for good. Maxwell is evidently more of an artist than a writer, and the text is really only there to support the illustrations (by Maxwell and his travelling companion Cottington Taylor). But the pictures are nice to look at, and there are a few lively bits of description between all the Edwardian archness and slightly overplayed self-mockery.

The main interest of the book, of course, is in its description of a passage through the Ludwigs-Kanal. This had been opened sixty years earlier show more with a lot of brouhaha: Ludwig I of Bavaria as the new Charlemagne, opening a new transcontinental route from the North Sea to the Black Sea via Rhine, Main and Danube. But it never really caught on. There was no serious attempt to upgrade the Main and upper Danube navigations, so the idea of transporting cargoes from Rhine to Danube without transshipment was doomed from the start. Moreover, the 120-ton barges the canal was designed for were too small to compete in the railway age for anything more than local traffic (the new Main-Donau canal, opened in 1992, carries 1200-ton barges).

Thus the canal was already in serious decline by the time Maxwell used it in 1905, although it didn't actually close until 1950. It has now mostly disappeared to make way for an Autobahn and the new Main-Donau canal, although there are still a few bits of it left as monuments. Maxwell gives us a few nice cameo descriptions of the experience of travelling through the hills by boat, and the interest their unusual craft created among the local people along the route. But they are only really brief glimpses.

An odd little "pre-echo" that caught my attention was the overlap with Paddy Leigh Fermor's journey on land over much the same route, and at the same season of the year, thirty years later. Walking, he must have kept up roughly the same pace as Maxwell's motorless boat: both started in Holland in the depths of winter and got to Hungary in time for Easter Day on the Danube. show less

A charming three or four hour read of an astounding trip, “among the clouds”, the willow trees and swamps from Holland to the Black Sea in 1905 – undertaken by two mad artists, in a tiny yacht they sailed, poled, rowed or towed with rope over the shoulder.

Eighty odd years later the same trip was undertaken and described in The Unlikely Voyage of Jack De Crow, by A. J. Mackinnon an only a slightly eccentric Australian teacher in a Mirror dinghy. (http://www.librarything.com/work/385803/book/71235140) Yet few knew, even locally, of the existence of a navigable route over the Frankischer Jura mountain range by an ancient canal of Ludwig’s. Started by Charlemagne this canal – with one hundred locks – connected the Altmuhl, which show more flows into the Danube with the Regnitz river that forms a part of the Main. This link enabled “our intrepid voyagers”, and they were that, to pass from the North Sea into the Black Sea without the need of passage around Biscay and a long haul up the Mediterranean.

But it was still a long haul, on foot along the flooded towpaths, up those hundred locks into the clouds. Of course they were arrested as spies – artists with sketch pads – starved and feasted, given alms as poor pilgrims and malaria from Romania.

Maxwell, a son of a clergyman, was an self-described “mad artist”, but was actually sane enough to be nominated an Admiralty artist, and author and illustrate thirty odd books on history, counties and countries and several bizarre, adventurous sailing trips.

This scanned reproduction offers a chance for readers to once again enjoy this fascinating read. show less