Hope you had a good weekend! — Dan

Air travel can be expensive. And international travel, even more so. A one-way flight from London to Perth — roughly halfway around the world — can easily cost well over $1,000 even on a budget airline. For someone short on cash, that’s an insurmountable barrier.

But there are other ways to get from A to B — if you’re willing to take a major risk, or, perhaps, desperate enough.

Reginald Spiers was that desperate. Growing up, he had a talent for throwing a javelin, and in 1962, competed on behalf of his home nation of Australia in the Commonwealth Games. He had hoped to qualify for the 1964 Olympics, but suffered an injury during the summer of 1963-1964. (Australia, being in the Southern Hemisphere, has its summer from December through February.) But he didn’t give up. He travelled to England, competing there in the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, hoping to earn enough points to make Australia’s national team. But he failed yet again. He finally gave up and decided to come home, but he had a problem — his time in England was expensive, and he didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket home.

So he did what anyone else would have — he found a job. But unfortunately, that didn’t turn out well, either. As the BBC reported, “his plans changed when his wallet, containing all his savings, was stolen. With a wife and daughter back home, Spiers wanted to get back to Adelaide, but ‘there was one catch,’ he explains. ‘I didn't have any money.’ And with his daughter's birthday looming, he was in a hurry.”

That’s when he came up with a plan: If he couldn’t afford a passenger ticket, he’d travel another way: he would ship himself home as cargo.

To be clear, shipping an adult human — beyond being illegal — isn’t cheaper than sending the same person on a plane in regular passenger seat. But cargo can often be shipped COD, or “cash on delivery.” The company shipping the goods doesn’t pay for the postage; the recipient does, and only when the parcel arrives at its ultimate destination. Spiers found an Air India cargo flight from London to Perth, and put his plan into action: he was going to ship himself home.

With the help of a friend and fellow javelin thrower, John McSorley, Spiers built a wooden crate measuring roughly 5 feet by 3 feet by 2½ feet — the largest size Air India allowed for cargo shipments at the time. The box label stated that it contained paint, destined for an Australian shoe company. In fact, it was outfitted with “some tinned food, a torch, a blanket and a pillow, plus two plastic bottles — one for water, one for urine,” and of course, one full-sized human adult male. Spiers, per Vice, would later recall that “It was a big box. I could stretch my legs out or curl up and go to sleep. There’s gotta be worse ways to travel I guess.”

Or, so he thought before taking the trip. Because traveling cargo class turned out to be a lot worse — and longer — than he expected.

Spiers departed London on October 17, 1964, and he barely made it home alive. Per Ripley’s, his flight out of London was delayed 20 hours due to fog, and he, of course, had to say in the crate the whole time. After landing in Paris, he briefly climbed out of the crate to empty his urine bottle — but forgot to bring the container back inside. It remained sitting on top of the crate when workers loaded the shipment back onto the plane. (Parisian workers thought someone was playing a prank and loaded the crate back on the Air India plan without incident.) In Mumbai, workers left the crate on the tarmac in blistering heat — Spiers somehow managed to survive from dehydration and heat exhaustion. He finally arrived in Perth on October 20, three days after his original departure. And he still had to get home to his family in Adelaide, a 24+ hour drive even in the best of circumstances.

Spiers was able to successfully hitchhike to surmount that final stretch, but by then, a new problem arose — the trip had taken so long that McSorley started to worry. McSorley alerted the press to the gambit in hopes of tracking down his friend (or his friend's remains).

Finally, Spiers found himself with some good luck. The story had already begun spreading in the press. Air India, perhaps embarrassed — or perhaps amused — ultimately chose not to pursue the COD charges against Spiers or the fictional shoe company listed on the crate.

Against all odds, he had pulled it off: Reginald Spiers had traveled halfway around the world inside a wooden box — and made it home without paying a cent.

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Today’s Bonus fact: In 2015, a Singapore Airlines flight from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur had to divert after only about 45 minutes into its five-hour flight because of smoke detected in the cargo hold. The flight made an emergency landing in Bali, and pilots and crew alike were relieved when they realized what had happened. The aircraft’s sensors had detected extremely high levels of methane. Fortunately, the source wasn’t a gas leak or mechanical problem. As the Aviation Herald explained, the flight was carrying more than 2,000 sheep in its cargo hold, and “the smoke indication was identified to be the result of exhaust gases and manure produced by the sheep.”

From the Archives: The Slave Who Shipped Himself to Freedom: Another person who mailed himself.

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And thanks! — Dan