20 Wild Things Travelers Endured Before Passports Existed

Between 1892 and 1924, millions of immigrants had to pass through the inspection halls of Ellis Island before they could enter the United States. Roughly 98 percent were admitted. Doctors gave arriving immigrants a cursory once-over, and they marked their coats with chalk if possible health problems were spotted. A mark of L indicated a limp, H indicated heart trouble, X indicated possible mental illness, and CT indicated trachoma, a disease US Public Health Service inspectors checked for by using a buttonhook to raise the eyelids.

On January 28, 1917, 17-year-old maid Carmelita Torres was crossing into the US for work when she led an uproar at the Santa Fe International Bridge, then a delousing station for Mexican domestic workers and laborers seeking entry. They were required to undress, be washed with a mixture of kerosene, gasoline, soap, and vinegar, and have their clothes fumigated with cyanide gas. You can see why Torres wasn’t having any of that! She refused to submit to the treatment, and the resulting rebellion became known as the Bath Riots.

Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 allowed an immigration official to require any applicant to demonstrate an understanding of 50 words dictated in any European language chosen at the official’s discretion. This was known as the Dictation Test. From its inception in 1901, officials could choose languages that applicants did not understand, and no one passed the test from 1909 onwards. Knowledge of English was irrelevant, so being fluent wouldn’t necessarily save you! The Immigration Restriction Act remained in force until 1958.

The history of photo identification in Canada has a deeply troubling chapter. When Canada introduced the Chinese Immigration Act in 1885, it imposed a $50 head tax on Chinese immigrants entering the country. The tax increased to $500 in 1903, approximately two years’ wages, and those who paid it received a receipt called a C.I.5. In 1910, Canada also introduced a travel certificate called the C.I.9 for Chinese residents wishing to leave the country, with exceptions for diplomats, merchants, clergy, and students. It included a photograph, making Chinese residents among the first people in Canada required to carry photo identification. Quite a grim origin for something we now consider an ordinary travel document. The certificate system remained in place until Canada’s 1923 Chinese Immigration Act replaced it with outright exclusion.

The Ottoman Empire formalized its migration controls in 1841 with a regulation titled Men-i Murur Nizamnamesi. The regulation required anyone making internal travel to other provinces or heading to the seaport for travel abroad to have a travel permit, the mürûr tezkeresi. The Ottoman passport, which included the emigrant’s hometown, destination city, profession, physical features, and the motivation for the journey, was considered a valid identity document for Ottoman emigrants by overseas immigration offices in some countries.

In 1414, Henry V introduced his Safe Conducts Act, which made breaking the King’s safe-conduct high treason. This was not an innovation, however. Clause 41 of Magna Carta, two hundred years earlier, already guaranteed the right of safe entry to and exit from England to foreign merchants. Neither document, however, allowed an ordinary traveler to obtain a personal safe-conduct. Personal safe-conducts were reserved for named individuals.

From the medieval period up until the 19th century in Europe, crossing a city wall was tantamount to crossing a border, with the attendant payment of tolls. Arriving at a town gate (Tor) involved paying an entry toll (Torzoll), and taking goods through the gate might require paying an additional tax called an octroi. On rural roads, one had to pay a Geleitgeld, a fee owed to a feudal lord as payment for providing an (armed) escort.

Before 1865, travel passes served as a system of racial control. When an enslaved person left their enslaver’s property, they were required to have a written pass from their owner, indicating their destination and length of authorized travel. Courts granted free Black people a certificate of freedom, which they used similarly. Armed men in groups called slave patrols could stop Black people on the road and demand to see their passes. Without documentation, many enslaved or free Black people were jailed in the nearest town or illegally enslaved.

While the Soviet version of the propiska was established by a decree in December of 1932, the practice of monitoring the actions of Russia’s subjects was not unprecedented. Beginning in 1724 and continuing throughout the era of Tsarist rule, the Tsarist-era precursor, the vid na zhitel’stvo, required peasants, merchants, and foreigners to carry an internal passport to leave their home district. The Imperial police would stamp these passports at each stop, monitoring domestic movement in the empire until 1917.

The word quarantine derives from the Italian word for forty, quaranta. From the 14th through the mid-19th centuries, ports trying to prevent epidemic diseases from entering held arriving passengers for 14 to 40 days in fortress-like quarantine stations, or lazarettos. The amount of time depended on the port and the ship. Luggage was fumigated with sulfur smoke or aired in ventilated warehouses. Only after being cleared could travelers receive free pratique, or permission to enter the port city. Waiting a few hours at immigration doesn’t seem quite so bad now!

Ships arriving from certain ports, such as those in the Ottoman Levant, could still face extended detention even after receiving a clean bill of health. In the 17th to 19th centuries, consuls classified the disease conditions of the port they represented as clean, suspect, or foul. The result of this assessment was documented in a health rating for ships leaving their port, the patente de sanidad, based on which the harbor master decided whether a ship should be quarantined. Clean health ratings thus did not automatically mean that ships were allowed to land.

Unlike present-day travelers, 19th-century travelers making the transatlantic crossing to the US did not carry a passport. Instead, the Steerage Act of 1819 required the ship’s captain to submit a sworn manifest listing each passenger’s name, age, sex, occupation, and country of origin, a requirement that continued under the Passenger Act of 1855. In other words, your captain’s paperwork mattered more than anything you carried yourself!

Prior to the introduction of the booklet passport, early travel documents were issued as a large sheet of paper, folded several times. When travelers crossed borders repeatedly, their safe-conduct might accumulate dozens of notations in the margins. These border markings—a stamp, wax seal, or ink signature by consuls validating a traveler’s papers—were known as visas. The name comes from a Latin expression for paper that has been seen.

Missing a single stamp could mean being chased out of town as a vagrant. The Wanderschaft, or journey, was a required stage of a young craftsman’s life throughout the German-speaking countries and Scandinavia. Journeymen would carry a document called a Wanderbuch, in which guild masters and the local police in every town they visited would note the traveler’s character, employment, and sojourn. The length of this period of travel (Wanderjahre) lasted at least three years and a day.

Although there was no passport necessary for peacetime travel in Western Europe from the 17th to the 19th centuries, travelers had to cope with regional police checks, quarantines, and gate fees. In practice, however, this right to free mobility for elites lasted only from roughly the 1660s to the 1840s. Grand Tour travelers were assisted by letters of introduction written by politicians, aristocrats, and ambassadors that confirmed their wealth and reputation and allowed them access to foreign courts, credit, and hospitality.

Tudor border control operated with more of a focus on preventing people from exiting England than on preventing entry. Port searchers, located in ports such as Dover and Sandwich, worked to prevent English from going abroad, with a special focus on the young and religious dissenters. Under the 1559 Act of Supremacy, travelers were required to take an Oath of Supremacy, acknowledging the monarch as head of the Church. Anyone who refused to do this would be arrested at the docks.

Before photographs became standard on identification documents, officials identified travelers using a brief physical description called a signalement. Clerks recorded details such as the height of the forehead, color of the brow, color of the eyes, shape of the nose and chin, height of the individual, and any scars or birthmarks. The description was then matched against the individual at the border. However, the vocabulary wasn’t fixed, so whether your nose was “blunt” or “aquiline” could depend on the clerk looking at you. I’d hate to hear what they’d write about mine! Around WWI, photo identification became standard.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, passports were commonly issued to male heads of household, with wives and children listed either by name or under the general description ‘and family.’ The legal doctrine of coverture applied to women in most cases, preventing women from acquiring an individual passport, and thus from traveling internationally apart from their husbands. Fortunately, this barrier to women traveling on individual passports eroded gradually during the mid-20th century.

As steamship and air travel became more popular, countries grew concerned about travelers bringing smallpox across their borders. The 1944 International Sanitary Convention required people to prove that they’d been vaccinated against smallpox before traveling internationally. Before allowing entry, border officials could examine the vaccination scar on a traveler’s arm or check proof of vaccination recorded in a yellow booklet. They could also vaccinate travelers or prevent them from entering. So yes, vaccination paperwork at the border goes back quite a while! The international system for these health requirements is managed today by the World Health Organization.

Although it did not give basic rights of citizenship to its holders, the Nansen Passport, created in 1922, was the first internationally recognized identity document for stateless refugees. During World War I, three empires (Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman) collapsed, leaving over 1,000,000 people without a country. Nansen was the League of Nations High Commissioner for such refugees and created a travel document accepted by 52 nations. Nansen was awarded the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

This content was created with the help of AI.