Mail privilege – Alison Healy on Henry ‘Box’ Brown

What is the most exciting thing you’ve done in the past year? For me, it was when I had a good reason to venture outside my permitted 5km range. As I sat in the dentist’s chair, having a hole drilled in my jawbone, my overriding thought was that it was really lovely to get out of the house. Thrilling, in fact.

But while most of us are keen to escape from our current surroundings, we are unlikely to go to the extreme of getting into a box and posting ourselves to our desired location. This newspaper recently recalled the story of Welshman Brian Robson who tried to airmail himself, in a wooden crate, from Australia to London in 1965 ("The crate escape", Life, April 6th). He got to Los Angeles before being detected and was flown the rest of the way first class, like a celebrity.

But he wasn’t the first to try this stunt.

In fact, he was inspired by Reg Spiers who went in the opposite direction a year earlier. While the journey nearly killed Brian Robson, it doesn't seem to have taken a feather out of Reg Spiers. The javelin thrower had travelled to London with hopes of competing in the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 but injury put paid to his hopes. He soon found himself penniless and stranded in London.

The vaccinated

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Integrated education in Northern Ireland

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He took a job working with cargo at the airport and observed how animals travelled with ease on airplanes. His daughter’s birthday was looming, and he still could not afford to fly home.

He decided to ship himself home as freight, cash-on-delivery, reasoning that if it worked for animals, it would surely work for a human.

Fellow athlete John McSorley made the crate for him and Reg Spiers posted himself to Australia.

Barring an uncomfortable layover in Mumbai, where he was left in the hot sun for several hours, he appeared to weather the journey remarkably well.

Three days later, his crate was carried into a freight shed at Perth airport. He hopped out and cracked open a can of beer and drank it. Then he cut a hole in the wall of the shed, walked out and hitched a ride home, just in time for his daughter’s birthday.

Unfortunately, the rest of his life didn't run as smoothly, and he went from being a champion athlete to a champion smuggler. In the 1980s he went on the run after being sentenced for conspiracy to import cocaine. At one point he was wanted on three continents. He was sentenced to death for drugs offences in Sri Lanka but successfully appealed it and spent five years in an Australian jail. He is now in his 80th year and appears to be leading a quieter life these days, if online searches are anything to go by.

Many others have tried similar stunts but the most famous self-mailer of all has to be Henry "Box" Brown. He was born a slave in Virginia in 1815 but he mailed himself to freedom in 1849.

He was working in a tobacco factory in Richmond when his pregnant wife and three children were sold to another plantation in North Carolina. With nothing to live for in Virginia, he hit on the ingenious idea of getting himself posted as dry goods to a state where slavery had been abolished years earlier.

He got help from two friends – a fellow choir member and a white sympathiser – and had himself shipped to Philadelphia in March 1849. It was a rocky journey, involving wagons, trains and a steamer. At one state, his box was thrown onto the ground and he was knocked insensible, he wrote afterwards.

But after 27 hours, he found himself in Philadelphia and was deposited in the office a Quaker abolitionist. He recounted that when he got out of the box, he sang a psalm of joy.

Henry "Box" Brown made the most of his freedom and became a travelling entertainer, regaling spectators with tales of his escape, and campaigning against slavery. However, it was reported that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass was annoyed with him for revealing his plan because other slaves would not be able to use the same method.

Indeed, the two men who helped him to escape were arrested later that year as they attempted to free other enslaved people. Henry “Box” Brown was also criticised for not buying the freedom of his wife and children when the slave owner heard about his freedom and offered to sell them to him. But it was also speculated that the offer might have been a trap to enslave him again.

In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, which meant he could be captured and returned to Virginia, so he moved to Britain where he continued to tour before returning to the US and eventually settling in Canada.

During his eventful life, he also became a hypnotist, a magician and an author.

Now, there was a man who was always thinking outside the box.