Prints of these post-chaises are common. Rowlandson, in particular, loved to draw them. Gillray, too, shows the post-chaise in Scotland and Ireland, where apparently things were not quite so easy as in England. The Scottish post-chaise is shown breaking to pieces, and the Irish chaise is little better than a wreck, with the body held together by a piece of rope, with hardly a spoke left to the wheels, and a roof put roughly together of thatched straw. The unfortunate lady inside has put one foot through the panelling and another through the floor, which reminds one that it was of an Irish post-chaise that the famous story of the poor man who had to run with the carriage because the bottom had fallen out was originally told.
It remains to consider a few particular eighteenth-century carriages of other countries.
Early American Shay
(From “Stage Coach and Tavern Days” [A. M. Earle])
English Posting Chariot—Early Nineteenth Century
(From a Photograph)
Mr. Stratton thinks that the Indians of North America had rude litters at an early date. The Incas of Peru certainly possessed magnificently decorated sedans or palanquins, in which they progressed through their kingdom. It was not, however, until the seventeenth century that wheeled carriages appeared in America. Sir Thomas Browne quotes from an English traveller’s book, which states that by the middle of this century there were at least twenty thousand coaches in Mexico, and possibly this was true. But into North America carriages filtered but slowly. There had been coaches in Boston so early as 1669, and in Connecticut in 1685. William Penn, writing to Logan in 1700, bids his servants have the coach ready. The calash was also known at that time, but being “clumsy” was less popular than the French cabriolet or gig, which had been brought over by the Huguenots, and rapidly transformed into the well-known one-horse shay, which in its turn was supplanted by the more comfortable and certainly more distinctive buggy.
Bennet, travelling in America in 1740, saw many carriages in Boston.
“There are several families,” he records, “in Boston that keep a coach and a pair of horses, and some few drive with four horses; but for chaises and saddle-horses, considering the bulk of the place, they outdo London. They have some nimble, lively horses for the coach, but not any of that beautiful black breed so common in London.... The country carts and wagons are generally drawn by oxen, from two to six, according to the distance, or the burden they are laden with.”
A Boston advertisement of 1743 mentions “a very handsome chariot, fit for town or country, lined with red coffy, handsomely carved and painted, with a whole front glass, the seat-cloth embroidered with silver, and a silk fringe round the seat.” This was offered for sale by John Lucas, a local coachbuilder, and had most probably been built by him.