The World Champion of Free Travel — He Rides 160,000 Kilometers and Pays No Fare!

Hans Ithard has become famous as the world champion of riding steamships by stealth. He has so far ridden some 78 steamers, thanks to his amazing skill in slipping aboard without his presence being discovered, and has covered 160,000 kilometers without paying a fare. And with all that he is still only thirty years of age, and he intends to make 922 more free journeys, to bring the total to a thousand.

It is well known that the watch kept, even on the small steamers, against stowaways who try to travel free and slip aboard unseen is extremely strict. The watchers usually number four.

Hans began riding steamers in this fashion at the age of eight! — by hiding in a barge or a hold on the river Rhine, on a journey of 80 kilometers, and throughout the trip he lived on nothing but apples. His success in his first adventure was the making of his skill and craft, for after that he was emboldened to travel by this trick and took to this strange habit; on the second occasion he traveled hidden under a seat in the de-luxe train from Cologne to Berlin!

Above the seat under which he hid sat an officer, an old lady, and a boy; and it happened that the boy dropped a piece of chocolate and bent down to pick it up, and Hans was all but discovered — yet for all that he reached Berlin in safety. He tried to get past the barrier set up in the station for checking the travelers' tickets, and loitered beside the barrier, pretending that he had been with his mother, had become separated from her, and had lost his way in the crowd.

And so, the older he grew, the greater grew his daring and the bolder his nerve.

He was able to roam the whole of Europe, and reached Istanbul in goods wagons, moving from train to train, earning his day's food by telling a tale of his adventures to the guests of the hotels.

When he had mastered "travel" by land, he turned to trying his hand on the decks of steamships, and managed to cross the ocean more than twenty times. His neat trick was to choose a great luxurious steamer on which, because of the high fares, several first-class cabins were likely to remain empty; he would take one of these cabins as a hiding-place once footsteps had quieted and movement had stilled.

Hans bought a monkey and reared it and made it accompany him on his travels, and trained it to slip in and climb down the ventilation pipes of the steamers to steal food from the galley and bring it to him. Once the head cook caught sight of the monkey and followed it until he saw it enter a luxurious cabin, and Hans's secret was all but exposed, had he not rushed to hide in one of the cupboards.

The cook impounded the monkey, and Hans nearly went mad thinking of a way to rescue it; before long he stole a white jacket belonging to the ship's head steward and walked off with the monkey quite calmly, saying, "The captain wants to see it" — and hid himself anew.

Scarcely had the cook learned that the captain had not asked for the monkey than every corner was searched — but in vain.

Perhaps his cleverest trick of all was his journey in the airship "Graf Zeppelin," when he disguised himself that day as a draftsman and spent the whole voyage drawing the route of the journey to America; no one noticed that he was a stranger to the airship's staff, and he enjoyed the trip to the end in perfect peace and safety. — "Lisan al-Hal"