Pierre Loti was a member of a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco at Fez, and in this book he gives us an extraordinarily fascinating account of the journey. The departure of the caravan from Tangier, the encampments, the nightly arrival of the Mouna, the crossing of the Oued-M'Cazen in flood, the fantasies and powder-play of the Arab horsemen, and the magnificent state entry into Fez, are described in a succession of vivid vignettes.

Driven by the promise of prosperity and opportunity on the frontier, thousands of men and women traveled west in the mid-1800s to forge a new life. Accompanying them were their children, wide-eyed and excited about the adventures that awaited them as they headed toward the setting sun. Little did they know how treacherous and grueling the trip would be. The toil and danger of overland travel forced parents to depend on their children to assist in their ultimate survival. Girls were called upon to help cook, set up and break camp, and mind younger siblings. Boys were called upon to help drive the wagons, herd the oxen and horses, assist with wagon repairs, and guard the camp at night. Even with their endless chores, many pioneer boys and girls found time to record the details of their journeys in letters and diaries. This collection of short episodes from the lives of these children on the trail offers fresh perspectives on the experience.

This incredible journey began in 1887 and took King Kalakoua to the Unites States of America, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Siam, Singapore, Malaya, India, Egypt, Rome, London, Belgium, Vienna, Spain, Portugal, France, and back to Hawaii through the United States again. A unique and insightful glimpse into these states and elites at the end of the nineteenth century full of fascinating events, encounters, and stories.

"The text describes the discovery of a very remarkable variant of the reported spoken work of Jesus Christ, which will be of interest to all Christians and scholars. To this day I recall my reaction upon first reading the concluding chapter of In the Shadow of Sinai', with its discussion of a remarkable variant of the reported spoken word of Jesus Christ. Brought up with a start, I read the marked passage again and quickly went to the Bible. Sure enough, the reading Matthew xii. 36 was different. But why? Surely those in charge of biblical exegesis would have known of the publication of the Gibson sister's text. And so began a small personal odyssey to bring to light, once again, this remarkable finding." -- Anthony Grahame, From the Foreword.

Martineau's classic American travel narrative has long been unavailable. This new abridgment of the original 1838 edition offers an unsurpassed firsthand view of Jacksonian America. Here are Martineau's penetrating condemnation of slavery and her championship of abolition and women's rights; her incisive portraits of Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Garrison, Emerson, and the Beechers; her critical observations of American schools, asylums, colleges, and prisons; and more. Historian Daniel Feller, author of The Jacksonian Promise, introduces the narrative, identifies the major characters, and provides an index for easy use.

Martineau's classic American travel narrative has long been unavailable. This new abridgment of the original 1838 edition offers an unsurpassed firsthand view of Jacksonian America. Here are Martineau's penetrating condemnation of slavery and her championship of abolition and women's rights; her incisive portraits of Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Garrison, Emerson, and the Beechers; her critical observations of American schools, asylums, colleges, and prisons; and more. Historian Daniel Feller, author of The Jacksonian Promise, introduces the narrative, identifies the major characters, and provides an index for easy use.

Writes of Passage explores the interplay between a system of "othering" which travelers bring to a place, and the "real" geographical difference they discover upon arrival. Exposing the tensions between the imaginary and real, Duncan and Gregory and a team of leading internationa contributors focus primarily upon travelers from the 18th and 19th Centuries to pin down the imaginary within the context of imperial power. The contributors focus on travel to three main regions: Africa, South Asia, and Europe - wit the European examples being drawn from Britain, France and Greece.

Edward Said's oft cited claim that Orientalists past and present have spun imaginary geographies where they sought ground truth, has launched a plethora of studies of fictive geographies. Representations often reveal more about the culture of the writer than that of the people and places written about. Yet the study of imaginary geographies has raised many questions about Western writers' abilities to provide representations of foreign places; there is now much interest in Western mis-representations of places (imaginary geographies). This text explores the interplay between a system of "othering" which travellers bring to a place, and the "real" geographical difference they discover upon arrival. Exposing the tensions between the imaginary and real, James Duncan and Derek Gregory and a team of international contributors focus primarily upon travellers from the 18th and 19th centuries to pin down the imaginary within the context of imperial power. The contributors focus on travel to three main regions: Africa, South Asia, and Europe - with the European examples being drawn from Britain, France and Greece. This book presents a unique contribution from geographers - with their sensit

The early seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Coryate's five-month tour of Western Europe culminated in Coryats Crudities, one of the strangest travelogues published in early modern England. A charismatic raconteur, Coryate blends his detailed ""observations"" of churches, palaces, and local customs (including the firstaccount of forks in English) with lengthy historical digressions and lively accounts of personal misadventure. Coryate, who had strong connections to the political, legal, and literary circles of early modern England, became a figure well known for his eccentricity and odd style, though he was also respected for his antiquarian scholarship and facility with foreign languages. Now, he is remembered as one of the most unique travel-writing voices ever known in English letters. This edition abridges Crudities' more than 900 pages to a manageable size, focusing on episodes most likely to be of interest to students - such as Coryat's descriptions of Venetian mountebanks, courtesans, and Jews; his crossing of the Alps; and his attendance at a Corpus Christi celebration in Paris. An engaging introduction situates the book in the context of Coryat's fascinating life, and the text is helpfully annotated throughout. The selection of contextual materials includes illustrations from the first edition, along with a sampling from another eccentric feature of the Crudities: a collection of mock commendatory poems making fun of Coryate and his journey, contributed by dozens of noblemen and literati (including the poets Ben Jonson and John Donne). Coryate, who was in on the joke, carefully curated the comic persona emerging from these verses, making creative use of media culture to gain personal celebrity.

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia. An additional key feature of the volume will be its inclusion of different types of traveller. Several types of travellers and travel texts are considered in the collection. The volume includes studies of explorers, missionaries, artists and writers, Romantics and socialists, colonialists and indigenes. It covers, therefore, a range of travels, travellers, and travellers' texts, and aims to establish some of the contexts in which travel took place. This volume is as much about departure points as it is about destinations, revealing the prejudices and precepts of the nineteenth-century traveller.

In the spring of 1804 Coleridge sailed to the Mediterranean in the hope of restoring his health, recreating his poetic energies and solving his emotional problems. During the voyage he kept a very detailed diary, and from this and from his and his friends' letters Alethea Hayter has painted a close-up portrait of Coleridge - both the outer and the inner man - at a comparatively little studied moment of his life, but a pivotal one. It was also an increasingly critical period in the Napoleonic War, and the movements of warships and convoys in the Mediterranean, and the problems of Nelson - personal as well as strategic, and in some ways parallel to Coleridge's - are interwoven with the narrative. Sara Hutchinson, the Wordsworths, Southey, the Lambs and Coleridge's other friends at home are also shown going about their affairs amid their anxieties about him during the six weeks while he travelled through storm and calm to reach an intellectual and emotional destination which was not the one he set out for. As those readers already familiar with Alethea Hayter's work would expect, A Voyage in Vain combines the pleasures of thoroughly researched biography, and criticism and social history, with the narrative sweep of a novel.

First published in 1972, Shirley Guiton's account of life on the Venetian island of Torcello begins with her purchase of a dilapidated property and vineyard there, and goes on to describe the many difficulties she encountered in the course of renovating her new home and making the overgrown vineyard productive again. But, with her deepening understanding and experience of the island, the book comes to encompass the whole life of the people who live there, and includes a dramatic account of the disastrous Great Flood which occurred in 1966. This by-now familiar form of narrative was scarcely with precedent when first published. As Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson says, 'This was years before A Year in Provence or Driving Over Lemons reminded readers that they, too, could forsake the grey skies of northern Europe and find the sun - and a collection of locals who would make excellent copy for the books they might write. A publishing industry would blossom ... Shirley was, in a sense, there first.' 'She has even achieved what Mary McCarthy assured all and sundry was impossible - to say something about Venice which previous visitors had not said before ... These pages are touched with Venetian serenity and illuminated by the eccentric lights of the lagoon.' Michael Foot (Evening Standard) 'The most vivid description I've ever read of that fearful 4th of November when Venice was flooded.' John Julius Norwich (BBC Now Read On)

This title was first published in 2001: Hundreds of European travelogues produced by British travellers between 1750 and 1800 remain out of sight in most libraries and have generally been out of print since the 18th century. While many people with a working knowledge of the 18th century are familiar with works including Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey" and Smollett's "Travels through France and Italy", those produced by less "literary" travellers are largely unknown. This study aims to recreate the world of 18th-century travel writing in order to illuminate its central role in shaping Britain's emerging sense of national identity - an identity which proves to be more complex an less homogeneous than some cultural and historical studies would suggest. The author finds that the developing discourse of national character is bound up with questions of gender: national and authorial virtue are projected in terms of appropriately gendered behaviour, for male and female travel writers alike. In turn, gender intersects with class, most obviously in the tendency to denigrate aristocratic travellers as effeminate and celebrate the more manly activities of the middle-class traveller. These then - national identity, authorship and gender - are the central preoccupations of the study

What are the origins of the modern passion for Venice? During the two hundred years since its political extinction, the shabby relic of a despised tyranny has been transformed into a great modern cultural symbol celebrated by intellectual and literary figures such as Ruskin, Proust, Mann and Henry James. This engaging and novel interpretation explores the American and European obsession with the myth of a beautiful city, and in doing so reveals much about the development of modern Western sensibility. 'This book can be enjoyed whether or not you have been to Venice, or whether you never intend to go.' Daily Telegraph 'Full of fresh and little-known material; it is almost unfailingly interesting and invariably well written.' Tony Tanner, New York Review of Books 'An entirely fascinating history of the city as she has been seen, as image and icon ... convincingly argued and consistently entertaining.' Independent

H. G. Wells made three visits to Russia, this book being the result of his second in 1920. It's an understatement to say it was an interesting time to be in Russia. The Bolshevists were in power but still hardly in control, the Civil War having only just ended. The country was in a state of exhaustion and collapse. Wells visited St Petersburg and Moscow, and, most memorably, had an interview with Lenin (the chapter is called 'The Dreamer in the Kremlin'). The tone of the book is remarkably fair-minded and realistic, much to the annoyance of the right-wing press at the time in Great Britain, but Wells does have delicious fun at the expense of Marx. Here he is commenting on Das Kapital, 'his vast unfinished work ... a cadence of wearisome volumes about such phantom unrealities as the bourgeoisie and proletariat, a book for ever maundering away into tedious secondary discussions ...' And better still, here he is on Marx's beard: 'About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast, solemn, woolly, uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard, cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance ...' This book deserves a higher place in the H. G. Wells canon, it is journalism of the first order providing reading of interest and continuing relevance.

'It was because I was afraid that I had decided to attempt a crossing of the great Sahara desert, from west to east, by myself and by camel. No one had ever made such a journey before . . .' In October 1972 Geoffrey Moorhouse began his odyssey across the Sahara from the Atlantic to the Nile, a distance of 3,600 miles. His reason for undertaking such an immense feat was to examine the roots of his fear, to explore an extremity of human experience. From the outset misfortune was never far away; and as he moved further into that 'awful emptiness' the physical and mental deprivation grew more intense. In March 1973, having walked the last 300 miles, Moorhouse, ill and exhausted, reached Tamanrasset, where he decided to end his journey. The Fearful Void is the moving record of his struggle with fear and loneliness and, ultimately, his coming to terms with the spiritual as well as the physical dangers of the desert.

Wanderings in Arabia is an abridgement of Charles M. Doughty's masterwork, Travels in Arabia Deserta, which has been hailed as the finest travel account in the English language. It is the first book to be written, in any language, about wide tracts of the Arabian Penisula. Out of his remote and lonely wanderings, Doughty fashioned a lyrical evocation of the desert and the peoples who inhabit this mysterious world. In the estimation of fellow explorer Benedict Allen: 'The book, which brims with lively observations of human character, opened European eyes to the Arabian desert - not least Gertrude Bell, and later Wilfred Thesiger, who were profoundly influenced by it'. The great Arabist, T. E. Lawrence also enthused about Doughty's achievement: 'The book had no date and can never grow old. It is the first and indispensable work upon the Arabs of the desert'. For Jan Morris, the book is 'entirely unique ... Whether for the strange beauty of its language, its record of a tremendous adventure, or its accurate evocation of a landscape and a civilisation, Travels in Arabia Deserta is truly one of a kind'.

This anthology aims to challenge stereotypes of women travellers. Rather than simply presenting writings by Victorian women who travelled bravely around the world disregarding social convention and danger, the editors present a range of writing and possible ways of being a woman traveller. As well as the 'eccentric' woman traveller, the editors have included writings by those who might be seen as failed travellers, cautious and conventional travellers and those who did not conform to the adventurous heroine stereotype. Because travelling as a woman and writing as a woman presents the author with a number of textual problems which must be negotiated, Foster and Mills have chosen to include writings which confronted these problems and which resolved them (or did not resolve them) in different ways. These textual problems include the depiction of other women, the representation of spatial relations, the negotiations undertaken in relation to the adventure heroine narrative and character and the position taken by the author in relation to the representation of knowledge. These issues are all crucial in relation to travel writing by women , and the women, whose writing has been collected together in this anthology have made bold decisions in relation to them. -- .

Indian Travel Writing is a new five-volume collection co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse. Hitherto, the paucity of readily available travel writing produced by imperial subjects themselves has long been apparent, and this anthology addresses that lack. A veritable treasure-trove, it brings together scarce documents which are currently widely dispersed or very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use. The collection confirms the deeply cosmopolitan sensibility possessed by many Indian travellers, and their narratives provide insightful contemporary critiques of the British Empire and of Euro-American culture more generally. The gathered works often exhibit considerable expertise in local cuisine, politics, and poetry, as well as a keen interest in political theory, human rights, and class conflict. Beyond Britain, continental Europe, and the USA, the collection also includes writing by Indians who travelled to Russia, China, the Far East, Australia, and Africa. Indian Travel Writing draws on the narratives of a diverse range of writers, including Indian princes, statesmen, lawyers, reformers, sportsmen, artists and curators, politicians, and merchants. Each piece is reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. The collection will be particularly welcomed by historians and those working in colonial-discourse studies. It will also be of interest to anthropologists and literary scholars. Each volume is supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the editor, Pramod K. Nayar. The collection also includes a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered materials. *********************** Pramod K. Nayar is also the editor of the five-volume Women in Colonial India (2013) (978-0-415-52555-8), another Routledge and Edition Synapse co-publication.

This collection includes the first critical editions of both Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands, and Elizabeth Isabella Spence's Letters from the North Highlands (1816), a work that, while influenced by Grant's Letters, attempted to move the genre of the Scottish travelogue in new directions. Read together, these volumes offer complementary views of Scottish Highland life at a time of major historical transition: Grant was offering outsiders her perspective as a long-time resident of the region, while Spence was, unapologetically, writing as a tourist. The Highlands were central to Romantic-era debates on subjects ranging from landscape and aesthetics to national identities, and, as this collection demonstrates, women were making significant contributions to those debates. The four volume set, edited by Kirsteen McCue and Pam Perkins, is accompanied by new editorial material including a new general introduction and headnotes to each work.

The Women of Cairo: Scenes of Life in the Orient, first published in 1926, describes the trip to Egypt and other locations in the Ottoman Empire taken by French Romanticist Gerard de Nerval. The book focuses on both reinforcing and dispelling the old ways in which people saw the Orient, as well as examining their old and new customs. This book is perfect for those studying history and travel.

Throughout 1949 and 1950 H.W. 'Bill' Tilman mounted pioneering expeditions to Nepal and its Himalayan mountains, taking advantage of some of the first access to the country for Western travellers in the 20th century. Tilman and his party-including a certain Sherpa Tenzing Norgay-trekked into the Kathmandu Valley and on to the Langtang region, where the highs and lows began. They first explored the Ganesh Himal, before moving on to the Jugal Himal and the following season embarking on an ambitious trip to Annapurna and Everest. Manaslu was their first objective, but left to 'better men', and Annapurna IV very nearly climbed instead but for bad weather which dogged the whole expedition. Needless to say, Tilman was leading some very lightweight expeditions into some seriously heavyweight mountains. After the Annapurna adventure Tilman headed to Everest with-among others-Dr Charles Houston. Approaching from the delights of Namche Bazaar, the party made progress up the flanks of Pumori to gaze as best they could into the Western Cwm, and at the South Col and South-East Ridge approach to the summit of Everest. His observations were both optimistic and pessimistic: 'One cannot write off the south side as impossible until the approach from the head of the West Cwm to this remarkably airy col has been seen.' But then of the West Cwm: 'A trench overhung by these two tremendous walls might easily become a grave for any party which pitched its camp there.' Nepal Himalaya presents Tilman's favourite sketches, encounters with endless yetis, trouble with the porters, his obsessive relationship with alcohol and issues with the food. And so Tilman departs Nepal for the last time proper with these retiring words: 'If a man feels he is failing to achieve this stern standard he should perhaps withdraw from a field of such high endeavour as the Himalaya.'

'No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water.' So observes H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in this account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, 'to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many'. The second part of this volume contains the author's account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed successful, published together they give a fine insight into Tilman's character.

A vogue for travel 'stunts' flourished in England between 1590 and the 1620s: playful imitations or burlesques of maritime enterprise and overland travel that collectively appear to be a response to particular innovations and developments in English culture. This study is the first full length scholarly work to focus on the curious phenomenon of 'madde voiages', as the writer William Rowley called them. Anthony Parr shows that the mad voyage (as Rowley and others conceived it) had surprisingly deep and diverse roots in traditional travel practices, in courtly play and mercantile custom, and in literary culture. Looking in detail at several of the best-documented exploits, Parr situates them in the ferment of such ventures during the period in question; but also reaches back to explore their classical and mediaeval antecedents, and considers their role in creating a template for eccentric English adventure in later centuries. Renaissance Mad Voyages brings together literary and historical enquiry in order to address the implications of an interesting and neglected cultural trend. Parr's investigation of the rash of travel exploits in the period leads to extensive research on the origins of the wager on travel and its role in the expansion of English tourism and trading activity.