Gallery: Adventure pioneers

We’ve got it so easy. The first man to motorcycle around the world did it over 100 years ago. Carl Stearns Clancy circumnavigated the globe on a 1912 Henderson Four in 1913.

In 1932, a 23-year-old Robert Edison Fulton Junior rode 25,000 miles from London to Tokyo on a 1930 Douglas Twin, crossing 800km of Syrian desert, escaping bandits and staying with the Raj of India. There were no phones, GPS or internet, a severe lack of petrol stations, maps and even roads.

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But these guys did it, and amazingly they did it on machines we’d consider wildly inappropriate by today’s standards. They were the original adventure bikes, but that has long since been forgotten. Instead the bikes which once crossed uncharted territories have now been relegated to museums for us to admire their engineering instead of pondering their real capabilities.

So for a small taste of what these adventure pioneers went through, we took a 1929 BSA Sloper and a 1939 Triumph Tiger 100 to the Peak District for our own mini adventure.

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