Sailing six thousand miles in eighty days, Allcard makes the classic southern route trade-wind crossing westward, and not without incident-severe gales, thief-catching in Spain, avoiding a seductive blonde in Gibraltar, encountering sharks and shoals of flying fish, and narrowly escaping falling overboard to his death when knocked out by gear falling from aloft. Allcard's plan to dodge the worst of the hurricane season on his return voyage is not accommodated by the elements. Through gales and headwinds, and one terrible storm, he takes seventy-four days to reach the Azores from New York, arriving minus his mizzen mast, desperately exhausted, injured, and hungry. The next leg, to Casablanca, is enlivened by a female stowaway, before he makes a safe return to England. Whether describing the pleasures or the trials, the phosphorescent nights or the storms, the operation of his ship or his own introspections, Edward Allcard eloquently conveys his deep appreciation of the sea, and the escape from modern civilisation it offers him.

Open boat cruising has never been more popular, in the doing or the reading of it; magazines, websites, associations and events around the world attest to this, and of course the countless sailors who just 'get on with it' in their own unassuming manner. Two such, some fifty years ago, long before today's explosion of activity, were Ken Duxbury and his wife B; Ken's three books recounting their adventures in the eighteen-foot Drascombe Lugger 'Lugworm' delighted many on their first appearance, yet they became unavailable for years. 'Lugworm on the Loose' describes how Ken and B quit the 'rat race' and explored the Greek islands under sail. 'Lugworm Homeward Bound' recounts their voyage home from Greece to England. 'Lugworm Island Hopping' has Ken and B exploring the Scilly Isles and the Hebrides. The light touch of Ken's writing belies the sheer ambition, resourcefulness and seamanship which infuse these exploits. And beyond pure sailing narrative, his books convey the unique engagement with land and people which is achieved by approaching under sail in a small boat.

In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channelling Muir, he uses humour, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special. Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem—at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida—that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region’s natural history, moving between John Muir’s vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land—scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator—who describe the changes they’ve witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature. A Road Running Southward is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.

Ever since Roman tourists scratched graffiti on the pyramids and temples of Egypt over two thousand years ago, people have travelled far and wide seeking the great wonders of antiquity. In From Stonehenge to Samarkand, noted archaeologist and popular writer Brian Fagan offers an engaging historical account of our enduring love of ancient architecture-the irresistible impulse to visit strange lands in search of lost cities and forgotten monuments. Here is a marvellous history of archaeological tourism, with generous excerpts from the writings of the tourists themselves. Readers will find Herodotus describing the construction of Babylon; Edward Gibbon receiving inspiration for his seminal work while wandering through the ruins of the Forum in Rome; Gustave Flaubert watching the sunrise from atop the Pyramid of Cheops. We visit Easter Island with Pierre Loti, Machu Picchu with Hiram Bingham, Central Africa with David Livingstone. Fagan describes the early antiquarians, consumed with a passionate and omnivorous curiosity, pondering the mysteries of Stonehenge, but he also considers some of the less reputable figures, such as the Earl of Elgin, who sold large parts of the Parthenon to the British Museum. Finally, he discusses the changing nature of archaeological tourism, from the early romantic wanderings of the solitary figure, communing with the departed spirits of Druids or Mayans, to the cruise-ship excursions of modern times, where masses of tourists are hustled through ruins, barely aware of their surroundings. From the Holy Land to the Silk Road, the Yucatan to Angkor Wat, Fagan follows in the footsteps of the great archaeological travellers to retrieve their first written impressions in a book that will delight anyone fascinated with the landmarks of ancient civilization.

In the summer of 1790 the Italian explorer Count Paolo Andreani embarked on a journey that would take him through New York State and eastern Iroquoia. Traveling along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, Andreani kept a meticulous record of his observations and experiences in the New World. Published complete for the first time in English, the diary is of major importance to those interested in life after the American Revolution, political affairs in the New Republic, and Native American peoples. Through Andreani's writings, we glimpse a world in cultural, economic, and political transition. An active participant in Enlightenment science, Andreani provides detailed observations of the landscape and natural history of his route. He also documents the manners and customs of the Iroquois, Shakers, and German, Dutch, and Anglo New Yorkers. Andreani was particularly interested in the Oneida and Onondaga Indians he visited, and his description of an Oneida lacrosse match accompanies the earliest known depiction of a lacrosse stick. Andreani's American letters, included here, relate his sometimes difficult but always revealing personal relationships with Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. Prefaced by an illuminating historical and biographical introduction, Along the Hudson and Mohawk is a fascinating look at the New Republic as seen through the eyes of an observant and curious explorer.

This an authoritative scholarly edition of Mansfield's camping journal, offering new understandings of her colonial life. Katherine Mansfield filled the first half of the 'Urewera Notebook' during a 1907 camping tour of the central North Island, shortly before she left New Zealand forever. Her camping notes offer a rare insight into her attitude to her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a nineteen year old still living in the colony. This publication aims to be the first scholarly edition of the 'Urewera Notebook', providing an original transcription, a collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of prior editors, and new information about the politics, people and places Mansfield encountered on her journey. As a whole, this edition challenges the debate that has focused on Mansfield's happiness or dissatisfaction throughout her last year in New Zealand to reveal a young writer closely observing aspects of a country hitherto beyond her experience and forming a complex critique of her colonial homeland. This is a new, more accurate transcription of the notebook, which can be read either as standalone text, or in tandem with commentary and textual notes. It's an introductory essay drawing on important new developments in New Zealand literary criticism, advances in historiography of the period and legal history, notably Judith Binney's Te Urewera: Encircled Lands (2009), Richard Boast's Buying the Land, Selling the Land (2008) and the Waitangi Tribunal Reports. It offers a route map, revised itinerary and authoritative annotation for the text, all based on fresh archival research of primary history material. It offers previously unpublished photographs from a Beauchamp family photograph album in the Alexander Turnbull Library and in the Ebbett Papers held at the Hawke's Bay Museum.

Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestico, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.

'A Latin American James Dean or Jack Kerouac' Washington Post 'It's true; Marxists just wanna have fun... a revolutionary bestseller' Guardian At the age of twenty-three, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set out from their native Argentina to explore their continent, with only a single 1939 Norton motorcycle to carry them, nicknamed La Poderosa ('the powerful one'). They travelled not to visit the usual tourist attractions, but to meet ordinary people and understand Latin American life. In amidst the tales of youthful adventures - of women, wine, thrilling escapes and the power of friendship - the young Che also learns first-hand about poverty, philosophy and philosophy and forms himself into the man who would become the world's most famous and admired revolutionary and freedom fighter. 'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time

'Matar has produced a valuable and stimulating piece of scholarship ...' - The Daily Telegraph

My First Summer in the Sierra is the incredible true story of John Muir's iconic time spent working in the California mountain range of the Sierra Nevada's. In this republished edition, read about his experience that shaped so much of environmental stewardship today. In the summer of 1869, a young John Muir joined a crew of shepherds working in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Spending countless hours working with the group, Muir also worked tirelessly to advocate for the land's protection. His efforts eventually transpired into the founding of Yosemite Valley as a national park, a landmark event in the history of United States environmentalism. A glimpse into Muir's private journals, My First Summer in the Sierra is the remarkable retelling of his time there. Full of humorous anecdotes and insightful prose, John Muir personal narrative will likely inspire you to pack up your belongings and head for the mountains.

A Year in Jamaica is a complex memoir telling the story of two simultaneous journeys: Diana Lewes' 1889 trip from England to visit her family's sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and more intriguingly, the internal rite of passage of a Victorian girl on her journey to adulthood. For it is in Jamaica that Miss Lewes tries to find a place for herself in the mysterious adult world, to understand its coded rules and hidden passions. Set primarily on a plantation called Arcadia, overlooking the sea and a distant Cuba from on high, Miss Lewes alternates between the acceptable pursuits of a Victorian gentlewoman - sewing, social visits, riding - and trying to find a more meaningful role for herself in this man's world. She delights in the exhilarating freedom of careering across the countryside on horseback with her sister, is cowed by the roaring rains and horrified at watching a hen peck a lizard to death. Against this background, we see this intelligent and competent young woman appraising the society around her, and struggling with its contradictions. Quite how complex those contradictions were is only finally revealed in the publisher's afterword.

'Eighty Days' tells the remarkable and little-known story of two American women who in 1889 were sent around the world in a contest to outpace not only Jules Verne's fictional 80-day voyage - but each other.

No work revealed more of the mysterious East to statesmen, explorers, readers, and writers of the late Middle Ages than the Book of John Mandeville. One of the most widely circulated documents of its day, it first appeared in French between 1356 and 1371 and was soon translated into nine other European languages. Ostensibly the account of one English knight's journeys through Africa and Asia, it is, rather, a compilation of travel writings first shaped by an unknown redactor. Writing East is a study of how Mandeville's Travels came to appear in its various versions, explaining how it went through a series of transformations as it reached new audiences in order to serve as both a response to previous writings about the East and an important voice in the medieval conversation about the nature and limits of the world. Higgins offers a palimpsestic reading of this "multi-text" that demonstrates not only how the original French author overwrote his precursors but also how subsequent translators molded the material to serve their own ideological agendas.

In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a "holiday" spirit,' commented Auden, 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.

A sparkling new translation of one of the greatest travel books ever written: Marco Polo's seminal account of his journeys in the east, in a collectible clothbound edition. Marco Polo was the most famous traveller of his time. His voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China, after which he served the Kublai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions. On his return to the West he was made a prisoner of war and met Rustichello of Pisa, with whom he collaborated on this book. His account of his travels offers a fascinating glimpse of what he encountered abroad: unfamiliar religions, customs and societies; the spices and silks of the East; the precious gems, exotic vegetation and wild beasts of faraway lands. Evoking a remote and long-vanished world with colour and immediacy, Marco's book revolutionized western ideas about the then unknown East and is still one of the greatest travel accounts of all time. For this edition - the first completely new English translation of the Travels in over fifty years - Nigel Cliff has gone back to the original manuscript sources to produce a fresh, authoritative new version. The volume also contains invaluable editorial materials, including an introduction describing the world as it stood on the eve of Polo's departure, and examining the fantastical notions the West had developed of the East. Marco Polo was born in 1254, joining his father on a journey to China in 1271. He spent the next twenty years travelling in the service of Kublai Khan. There is evidence that Marco travelled extensively in the Mongol Empire and it is fairly certain he visited India. He wrote his famous Travels whilst a prisoner in Genoa. Nigel Cliff was previously a theatre and film critic for The Times and a regular writer for The Economist, among other publications, and now writes historical nonfiction books. His first book, The Shakespeare Riots, was published in 2007 and shortlisted for the Washington-based National Award for Arts Writing. His second book, The Last Crusade: Vasco da Gama and the Birth of the Modern World appeared in 2011 and was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

"Afloat, "originally published as "Sur l'eau "in 1888, is a book of dazzling but treacherously shifting currents, a seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast that opens up to reveal unexpected depths, as Guy de Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation in a wholly original style. Humorous and troubling stories, unreliable confessions, stray reminiscences, and thoughts on life, love, art, nature, and society all find a place in Maupassant's pages, which are, in conception and in effect, so many reflections of the fluid sea on which he finds himself-happily but forever precariously-afloat. "Afloat" is thus a book that in both content and form courts risk while setting out to chart the meaning, and limits, of freedom, a book that makes itself up as it goes along and in doing so proves as startling and compellingly vital as the paintings of Maupassant's contemporaries van Gogh and Gauguin.

"As my sense of the turpitude and guilt of sin was weakened, the vices of the natives appeared less odious and criminal. After a time, I was induced to yield to their allurements, to imitate their manners, and to join them in their sins . . . and it was not long ere I disencumbered myself of my European garment, and contented myself with the native dress. . . ."--from "Narrative of the late George Vason, of Nottingham"
As George Vason's anguished narrative shows, European encounters with Pacific peoples often proved as wrenching to the Europeans as to the natives. This anthology gathers some of the most vivid accounts of these cultural exchanges for the first time, placing the works of well-known figures such as Captain James Cook and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside the writings of lesser-known explorers, missionaries, beachcombers, and literary travelers who roamed the South Seas from the late seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries.
Here we discover the stories of the British buccaneers and privateers who were lured to the Pacific by stories of fabulous wealth; of the scientists, cartographers, and natural historians who tried to fit the missing bits of terra incognita into a universal scheme of knowledge; and of the varied settlers who established a permanent European presence in Polynesia and Australia. Through their detailed commentary on each piece and their choice of selections, the editors--all respected scholars of the literature and cultures of the Pacific--emphasize the mutuality of impact of these colonial encounters and the continuity of Pacific cultures that still have the power to transform visitors today.

A remarkable account by a pioneering woman explorer who was described by Rudyard Kipling as 'the bravest woman of all my knowledge'. Until 1893, Mary Kingsley lived the typical life of a single Victorian woman, tending to sick relatives and keeping house for her brother. However, on the death of her parents, she undertook an extraordinary decision: with no prior knowledge of the region, she set out alone to West Africa to pursue her anthropological interests and collect botanical specimens. Her subsequent book, published in 1897, is a testament to understatement and humour - few explorers made less of the hardships and dangers experienced while travelling (including unaccompanied treks through dangerous jungles and encounters with deadly animals). Travels in West Africa would challenge (as well as reinforce) contemporary Victorian prejudices about Africa, and also made invaluable contributions to the fields of botany and anthropology. Above all, however, it has stood the test of time as a gripping, classic travel narrative by a woman whose sense of adventure and fascination with Africa transformed her whole life. This Penguin edition includes a fascinating introduction by Dr Toby Green examining Victorian attitudes to Africa, along with explanatory notes by Lynnette Turner. Mary Kingsley was born in north London in 1862, the daughter of the traveller and physician George Kingsley and his former housekeeper, Mary Bailey. Her education was scant: while her younger brother was sent away to school, she stayed at home. Later she lived in Cambridge, and cared for her bedridden mother. Following the deaths of her parents, Kingsley embarked on a voyage to West Africa in August 1893, with the object of studying native religion and law and collecting zoological specimens. In December 1894, she undertook a second trip to the region, during which she became the first woman to climb West Africa's highest mountain, Mount Cameroon. On returning home eleven months later, she wrote Travels in West Africa, which was published in 1897 and was followed by West African Studies in 1899. Kingsley made one final trip to Africa, enlisting as a volunteer nurse in South Africa during the Boer War. She had only been there for two months when she developed typhoid fever and died, on 3rd June 1900, before being buried at sea in accordance with her wishes. Lynnette Turner is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Edge Hill University. Toby Green is Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture at Kings College London. His book The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa appeared in 2011.

The late Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the most eminent American historians of the 20th century. The Great Explorers, an abridgement of his two-volume magnum opus, The European Discovery of America, vividly describes the early voyages that led to the discovery of the New World. Based on Morison's own trips, by plane, to the places the early discoverers landed, and on massive research into their maps, travelogues, and means of navigation, it tells, as no other book does, what the experience of these early explorers was. Morison describes their fear of sailing uncharted waters, their encounters with natives, their joy-and surprise-at discovering new land, and enriches his story with the photographs and maps he made while retracing the great voyages.

Travel was a way of life for the Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke, and it was integral to his work. Between 1897 and 1920 he visited Venice ten times. The city has inspired countless writers and artists, but Rilke was both enthralled and provoked by it, as eager to see and explore the city's deserted shipyards and back alleys as the iconic sights of St Mark's and the Doge's Palace. He would walk the city alone, staying in simple guesthouses or the grand palaces of his patrons. Birgit Haustedt guides readers through the city in the poet's footsteps, showing us the sights through Rilke's eyes.