CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 4
THE KING'S COURIER
It was fortunate that Edwin Orr liked to travel. As a boy, he walked 100 miles a week for the sheer pleasure of walking. In the city he found the quickest ways along its streets, and out in the beautiful Irish countryside he discovered the best roads through its hills and valleys. He enjoyed company but did not mind being alone, camping in the woods in weather that scared other Scouts away.
The use of a bicycle increased his mobility, and thus he was prepared for the peculiar work of his early ministry, on the road day by day. If there was another way to return to base,
Edwin Orr generally travelled that way for the sake of exploring the country. Some would have accused him of seeking a good time but for the fact that trying out a new route usually brought hardships that an old way often travelled had overcome.
The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore was a man of the road, of the Indian road. Said he:
The road is my wedded companion. She speaks to me under my feet all day, she sings to my dreams all night. My meeting with her had no beginning; it begins endlessly at each daybreak, renewing its summer in fresh flowers and songs, and her every new kiss is the first kiss to me...
Orr could have used these words of himself and his love for the road. Tagore was used to the heat and the dust. Orr to the cold and the rain.
It was fitting that Edwin Orr should begin his extraordinary travels in a modest way, on a push bicycle, riding sixty miles a day, for the time was to come when he would fly 6,000 miles in the same'time. It was fitting that he should serve his travelling apprenticeship in ''the tight little island" of Lilliputian dimensions, for later he was to explore the corners of the greatest
Continents. He was to become a most travelled man.
In these days of incredible speeds covering boundless distances
in travel, when an ordinary passenger may breakfast in Bombay and dine in London that evening, most people would nominate a jet pilot as the world's greatest traveller.
But ask a shuttling pilot whether he has ever climbed a Himalayan foothill or penetrated an Amazonian jungle or tramped in the snows of Greenland or traversed the sands of Libya or scanned the cliffs of Pitcairn or viewed the Midnight sun in Lapland; he would likely say no.
The subject of this biographical sketch has visited all but ten of the world's 150 countries and 500 of its 600 major cities.
The Director of the historic Royal Geographical Society said simply of that record: 'In my experience, I have seen nothing to equal it.' It is certainly a record.
There are thirty-two counties in Edwin Orr's native Ireland and early in his career he visited all of them by road, generally by bicycle. There are forty shires in England, a dozen in Wales and thirty on the mainland of Scotland, and Orr toured all of them, more often by bicycle than otherwise.2 His adventures in the British Isles included hitting a stone bridge which hospitalized him in Wales for a fortnight, sleeping under haystacks as he did on Dartmoor in Devon, tramping from one end of the country to the other, and sleeping in the crypt of St. Martinin-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London.
There are thirty countries in Europe, and Orr toured all of them except tiny Albania, visiting 130 big cities of 100,000 population or more in the process.* His tours took him from the walls of the Kremlin to the parks of Madrid, where he was robbed at midnight, from the fjords of Norway to the islands of Greece.
In the Americas are thirty-five countries, and Orr traversed all of them from the Arctic shores of Canada to the Antarctic shores of Argentina—this included visits to all the capital cities and to each city over 100,000 population, 180 cities in all.*
He experienced mid-summer snow in Patagonia and humid heat in the Mato Grosso, winter darkness at noon on Baffin
Land and stifling fumes inside the crater of Irazu, an active Costa Rican volcano.
Orr's travels in Asia included visits to thirty-five out of forty countries and to seventy of their major cities.' He viewed the
lowest depths of the earth at the Dead Sea and its highest heights on the Himalayas at Mount Everest.
Orr's travels in Africa took him to forty of its countries, in fact to all major units then in existence.* The emergence of several unheard-of African republics added another five to the list yet to be visited. Orr visited forty of the major cities. These travels took him from the Cape of Good Hope near Capetown to Cape Bon near Tunis, from the bulge of Somalia to the point of Senegal, from Kilimanjaro's side to the Rift Valley bottom.
In the vast distances of Oceania, there are only fifteen administrative units, countries or island groups, and Orr visited them all with twenty of the larger cities, journeys encompassing all Australian states, most of the Indonesian and Philippine islands, every part of New Zealand, New Guinea from end to end, and islands scattered throughout the Pacific in Polynesia,
Micronesia and Melanesia.'
Orr toured faraway places with strange-sounding names scattered around the globe—Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, Kamaran in the Red
Sea, Kwajalein in the Pacific and Curacao in the Caribbean, and many more—just as he did the more familiar places in my own country—Srinagar in Kashmir, Nagercoil in South Madras,
Amritsar in the Punjab, Gauhati in, Assam.
This does not mean that Orr briefly touched countries in every case. I read that Brazil's leading churchman declared that Edwin Orr had far outdistanced every missionary and national known to him in visiting in 1952 every state and territory in Brazil. Orr also visited every state in the United States of America, crossing Canada from Newfoundland to British Columbia. He went as far north as Churchill in the Canadian north and as far south as Ushuaia in Argentine Tierra del Fuego, as far east as Recife on the Brazilian bulge and as far west as Kiska in the Aleutians.
Albertyn records a conversation between Orr and the Prime Minister of New Zealand who had expressed amazement that the traveller had seen North Cape, South Cape, East Cape and West Cape in that lovely land, and traversed territory marked
"unexplored" on their maps.® Australia is the world's loneliest inhabited Continent. Few Aussies have visited all the Australian
states and the Northern Territory, but Orr's tours took him through these and sixty of sixty-eight administrative divisions of the Commonwealth.® He crossed the Continent from east. to west and west to east and north to south and encircled the whole circumference of it.
I was amazed to learn that Edwin Orr already had visited each state of my own country, India, and also traversed. the neighbouring countries of Ceylon, Burma, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Nepal and other Himalayan states.'° Orr was on the "'wanted list" of the Japanese Secret Police during the Sino-Japanese War, so Japanese occupation of much of China restricted his travels in that vast country, yet he was able to visit ten provinces from Shanghai to Tibet and from Shantung to the Burma Road; and he also toured the neighbouring states of Vietnam, Burma, Thailand and Malaya.
An officer of our Indian Army encountered Edwin Orr in uniform in an out-of-the-way airport in the Pacific. The former was en route from rescuing some Gurkha soldiers from enemy camps in the Pacific and the latter was flying to occupied Tokyo.
They were forced to wait all night for an overdue military plane so, both being lovers of travel and geography, they kept awake and alert by quizzing each other on countries and capitals.
The Indian officer said afterwards that it was a most refreshing experience.
The intrepid British explorer, Sebastian Snow, who traced the Amazon from its Andean sources to its Atlantic mouths, tells of meeting en route ''an Irish-American missionary, who had just arrived from the River Xingu in the Brazillan backwoods" who befriended him in need.44 What was Orr doing there? He had come down the Rio Purts, preaching the gospel in the Green Hell of the Mato Grosso and Amazonia and had concluded a preaching mission in Manaos, 1,000 miles up the mighty Amazon."
At the end of the Second World War, Edwin Orr wanted to pursue researches in Oxford University but found a total absence of available transport from desolated Tokyo to bombed-out
London. So the undaunted Irishman hitch-hiked westwards over Korea, China, India and other Asian countries to Cairo, then traversed the length of Africa twice back to Casablanca,
arriving in England after six months of amazing and amusing adventures.® Roland Metzger, a Baptist missionary in the Congo, was on trek one day in the bush, headed away from civilization. He and an Englishman were at the head of a long line of bearers.
The sun was blazing hot overhead when the missionaries gave the word to halt for a rest. Gladly the natives lowered their burdens.
It was quiet, but for the buzz of insects and the noises of the jungle. The missionaries looked up in surprise at the sound of broken brush in the undergrowth. Who could be approaching?
They saw a Congolese in European clothes and, coming from behind a tree which obscured him, an officer in the uniform of the United States Air Force—surely not! A Belgian officer? No, an American! It was hot. Metzger was startled. It was too much out in the Congo bush. As the man came closer, Metzger noticed that his face was vaguely familiar—like that of an old college chum. The blood began to ebb away from his face. Had his old friend been killed in the Pacific War?
The approaching hiker held out his hand.
"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" he said.
"Who is it?" asked the missionary.
"Don't you know me?" protested the hiker.
"Who.is it?" repeated Metzger.
Metzger sat down again weakly when the hiker announced that he was his old friend Edwin Orr.
"That's who I thought it was!" said he.
Orr was hitch-hiking across the Congo on his way from Elizabethville to Matadi. He happened to have met a Congolese
Christian named Samuel Lutete who mentioned Roland Metzger quite by accident, and then agreed to help Orr find his old friend from Chicago college days.'® Orr's travel books sold by the hundreds of thousands. They abound in fascinating glimpses into travel adventure. In New
Guinea, he was engaged in his most taxing task of exploration, accompanied by Papuan bearers and cannibal savages through a virgin jungle so dense that he did not glimpse the sun for days while visibility was limited to ten yards or less:**
At 5 o'clock we stopped to make camp. The bearers cooked
rice and we opened another can of pork which tasted appetizing after ten hours' hiking. We were now at our farthest point inland, two days from the coast, separated by two mountain ranges therefrom. The place had never before been visited by men, though some had passed many miles
| east.
The natives cut down two forked saplings and rammed them into the ground six feet high and ten feet apart. Then they cut two more and made a square, the other two being four feet high. They placed some saplings across the forks, tied crossbars with creeping vines, and within half an hour there was a thatched house ready for our sleeping quarters.
Though I wore a warm field jacket, I was cold: and I felt glad when morning came. The Papuans took turns to watch by a camp fire for intruders.'
It was not only the cold that made Orr welcome the dawn.
The savages had told him the day before that they had eaten an enemy two weeks previously. (Orr told me that Dr. Rajendra
Prasad, our first President of India, had asked him more about the habits of cannibals than about anything else.
As a strict Hindu vegetarian, he was horrified!) The Chinese author, Andrew Gih, described his adventures travelling with Orr in war zones:1® We had rocks for breakfast and we were so hungry and thirsty. The truck driver got tired of the rope breaking and wanted to go on without us. By this time we had learned of a man who had been robbed and stabbed the night before, and we knew that we could not stay there any longer, for the bandits would have gotten word of our broken car, so we had to risk leaving the car behind and begged the driver to give us a lift ... it meant life or death for us.
In the mountain town of Presidente Soares in an inaccessible corner of Brazil, Edwin Orr was preaching in the local college to great crowds. Dona Cecilia, wife of the college President, was talking to a businessman in a neighbouring town.!®
"How can he travel without money ?" asked he.
Patiently Dona Cecilia explained the principle of simple trust in God. The businessman could not understand. He said, however, that he would like to meet the Irishman and offered
to fly him in his own private plane to Cachoeiro over the mountains.
"But I still don't understand how he can travel without money!" he said.
A critic of Orr's journeyings commented :"° To travel around without visible means of support is no impossible accomplishment. Hundreds of tramps and vagrants do it regularly. Even travel around the world, paying one's way, is no unusual experience. The late Ramsay Macdonald, as a young Socialist, travelled around the world studying political conditions and paying his way by journalistic activities. The annals of biography will reveal quite a number of similar exploits of travel.
Edwin Orr and his friends did not reject. such comparisons.
What they affirmed as different was a spiritual factor, that Orr was not travelling for pleasure or education but as a man with a message from God. He was more than a traveller. He was a courier, in fact, the King's Courier.