|
Books > Sport & Leisure > Travel & holiday > Travel writing > Classic travel writing
This is the first English translation of the famous risala, letters
by the tenth-century traveler Ibn Fadlan, one of the great Medieval
travelers in world history, akin to Ibn Batutta. Ibn Fadlan was an
Arab missionary sent by the Caliph in Baghdad to the king of the
Bulghars. He journeyed from Baghdad to Bukhara in Central Asia and
then continued across the desert to the town of Bulghar, near
present Kazan. He describes the tribes he meets on his way and
gives an account of their customs. His is the earliest account of a
meeting with the Vikings, called Rus, who had reached the Volga
River from Sweden. His description of the Rus, or Rusiya as he
calls them, has produced much discussion about their origins,
shockingly free sexual morals standards, customs, treatment of
slaves and women, burial traditions, and trading habits, all
explained in detail by Ibn Fadlan. The story of his travels has
fascinated scholars and even prompted Michael Chrichton to write
the popular novel ""Eaters of the Dead,"" which was made into a
film entitled ""The 13th Warrior.
Travelling by dahabiah, a well-appointed sailing craft peculiar to
the Nile, and armed with sketch-book and measuring tape, Amelia
Edwards carefully recorded all she saw of the temples, graves, and
monuments - even discovering a buried chapel of her own- and
provided in A Thousand Miles Up The Nile the first general
archaeological survey of Egypt's ruins. The book is full of
historical footnotes and careful details. Amelia Edwards was
responsible for founding the first chair in Egyptology (a science
she helped create) at University College London, and was behind the
appointment of Sir Flinders Petrie. She established herself as one
of the authorities on the subject of Ancient Egypt and her book A
Thousand Miles Up the Nile has remained one of the most inspiring
travel books in the subject.
Marco Polo set off on his travels from Venice as a young man in
1271, and returned home in 1295 after spending 24 years away, 17 of
them in China. He isone of the few early adventurers whose name
nearly everyone knows. His book was one of the best-loved works of
the Middle Ages, and has remained popular ever since. At a time
when China is again assuming global importance, his account of
China under the Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan - the dazzlingly
splendid capital in Beijing, the great southern metropolis of
Hangzhou - is a classic reminder of the antiquity of Chinese power
and civilization. Marco Polo also portrays countries and cities all
along the trade route from the Mediterranean to Mongolia. He
reminds us that Iraq's present suffering is not unique by relating
the story of the attack on Baghdad by Mongol forces in 1258. He
conveys the daunting prospect of the deserts of central Asia and
the distant charms of Yunnan. And he reminds us of the huge
merchant ships dominating China's trade with foreign countries,
ships that far outstripped their European counterparts. He even
writes about Japan, the first European to do so. His book was often
thought of as a book of marvels, but one of its striking features
to a contemporary reader is its clarity, realism and tolerance. As
this new edition shows, he sometimes exaggerates, but his
reputation for making things up is quite unfair, as Colin Thubron
makes clear in his introduction. The original manuscript of Marco
Polo's book is lost, and in the many later versions names and other
details have become so garbled that it has been said that his
itineraries are impossible to follow. This new Everyman edition
shows this need not be so. It explains clearly all the references
in the book, and shows in detail with new maps the routes described
from Venice to Beijing, from Beijing to Burma, and from Beijing to
south-east China. It also provides an up-to-date history of the
book and the controversies surrounding it.
Annie, Lady Brassey was a very popular Victorian author. She
travelled with her husband, Thomas and their four children aboard
their yacht, the Sunbeam. Their eleven month sailing trip around
the world in 1876-7 was inmortalized in Anna's book "A Voyage in
the Sunbeam." The book ran through many English editions and was
translated into many other languages. During her travels, lady
Brassey collected many objects of the different cultures they
visited. Her large collection of ethnographic and natural history
objects were originally shown in a museum at her London house but
they were moved eventually to Hastings Museum in 1919. Annie
Brassey spent the last ten years of her life mainly at sea. She
died suddenly of malaria on the way home from India and Australia
in 1887 and was buried at sea at the age of 48.
 |
The Oregon Trail
(Paperback)
Francis Parkman; Edited by Bernard Rosenthal
|
R340
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
Save R22 (6%)
|
Ships in 12 - 19 working days
|
|
The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's
journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the
Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to
Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback
journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles. In
the course of his travels, Parkman encountered numerous Indians,
living among a Sioux tribe for a time, as well as meeting traders,
trappers, and emigrants searching for a new life. His detailed
description of the journey, set against the vast majesty of the
Great Plains, has emerged through the generations as a classic
narrative of one man's exploration of the American Wilderness. It
is a journey which has shaped our picture of mid-nineteenth-century
America and which has influenced our perception of American
civilization. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's
Classics has made available the widest range of literature from
around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's
commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a
wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions
by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text,
up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for
English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript
was only discovered amongst his papers long after his death, but
has not hitherto been made available in the UK or the USA. The book
is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city
- and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large
in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today,
given that the majority of the sights described are still to be
found. A fascinating scrap from the master's table....
Captain Joshua Slocum's solo circumnavigation aboard the 37-foot
sloop SPRAY in 1895 stands as one of the greatest sea adventures of
all time. This classic account of his 46,000-mile voyage continues
to enjoy immense popularity all around the world, and Sheridan
House is proud to preserve the original edition in this attractive,
affordable hardcover.
Travelling by dahabiah, a well-appointed sailing craft peculiar to
the Nile, and armed with sketch-book and measuring tape, Amelia
Edwards carefully recorded all she saw of the temples, graves, and
monuments - even discovering a buried chapel of her own- and
provided in A Thousand Miles Up The Nile the first general
archaeological survey of Egypt's ruins. The book is full of
historical footnotes and careful details. Amelia Edwards was
responsible for founding the first chair in Egyptology (a science
she helped create) at University College London, and was behind the
appointment of Sir Flinders Petrie. She established herself as one
of the authorities on the subject of Ancient Egypt and her book A
Thousand Miles Up the Nile has remained one of the most inspiring
travel books in the subject.
Isabella Bird was one of the greatest travelers and travel writers
of all time, and this is her last major book, a sympathetic look at
inland China and beyond into Tibet at the end of the 19th century.
In describing the journey, Isabella provides a rich mix of
observations and describes two occasions when she is almost killed
by anti-foreign mobs. It many ways, Isabella created the model for
travel writing today, and this one of her greatest works.
At the height of his fame, Mark Twain, the great writer and
humorist from Missouri, was facing financial ruin from one of his
failed business ventures. Broke but much loved he embarked on a
money-raising lecture tour around the equator, making a stop in
Australia. The Wayward Tourist republishes Mark Twain's Australian
travel writing in which he recounts impressions of Sydney ('God
made the Harbor but Satan made Sydney') and his view of Australian
history (' it reads like the most beautiful lies'). In his
introduction, Don Watson brilliantly pays homage to America's
'funny man' who brought his swagger, love of language and wicked
talent for observation to our shores.
Beatrice Grimshaw was born in Ireland. She was an adventurer at
heart since childhood and an independent soul who longed to travel
to far away places. Until 1903 she had been a freelance journalist,
a tour organiser and an emigration promoter but her dream was to go
to the South Pacific islands. Embarking from San Francisco in 1904,
she sailed first to Tahiti, followed by a four month voyage through
the South Pacific and an additional two months on the island of
Niue. During this trip, she visited Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Rarotonga
and some of the Cook islands. She returned to London and published
"In the Strange South Seas" in 1907. In the book, Grimshaw not only
recounts her adventures but she also describes the customs and
lifestyles of the native populations as well as giving an
exhaustive picture of the region's fauna and wildlife. The book
also contain accounts of cannibalism, head-hunting, poisoning and
tribal magic.
What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in
the English Renaissance? This innovative and wide-ranging study
argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect
on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their
own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such
analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers
contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by
foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart
England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings,
authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the
possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly
held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do
well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever
present - inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature
from 1580 onwards. This stimulating book examines fictional and
non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections
between the two made by early modern readers and the problems
involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past
with the categories available to us. Hadfield explores in his work
representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East,
selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a
total coverage. He also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare,
Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.
Eliza Rumaha Scidmore was born October 14, 1856 in Madison,
Wisconsin, United States of America and died November 3, 1928 in
Geneva, Switzerland. She was a journalist and a traveller and spent
long periods in in Alaska, Japan, China, Java and India. In this
book about Java written in 1912, Scidmore, who clearly loved the
subject is very enthusiastic about the country and the traditions
that have made Java such a unique place. It still remains a little
known country nowadays but by reading Eliza Scidmore, we are
transported to the beauty of the tropical gardens, the volcanoes,
the magnificent buddhist temple of Borobudur, the impact of the
conquest by Islam, its unique culture and so many places that I bet
you did not even know they existed.
This book, first published in 1911, is one of the most important
and best written travel books from old China. Edwin Dingle recounts
his adventures as he travels up the Yangtze River from Shanghai and
then by foot southwest across some of China's most wild and woolly
territory to Burma. Along the way, Dingle absorbed an enormous
amount of about life and society in southwest China, and describes
what he sees in a readable and sensitive way.
In Travels, the celebrated 1791 account of the "Old Southwest,"
William Bartram recorded the natural world he saw around him but,
rather incredibly, omitted any reference to the epochal events of
the American Revolution. Edward J. Cashin places Bartram in the
context of his times and explains his conspicuous avoidance of
people, places, and events embroiled in revolutionary fervor.
Cashin suggests that while Bartram documented the natural world for
plant collector John Fothergill, he wrote Travels for an entirely
different audience. Convinced that Providence directed events for
the betterment of mankind and that the Constitutional Convention
would produce a political model for the rest of the world, Bartram
offered Travels as a means of shaping the new country. Cashin
illuminates the convictions that motivated Bartram-that if
Americans lived in communion with nature, heeded the moral law, and
treated the people of the interior with respect, then America would
be blessed with greatness.
'The best conceivable guide to the city' - an essential cultural
history for all visitors of Florence The rich and glorious past of
one of the best loved cities in the world, Florence, is brought
vividly to life for today's visitor in this collection which draws
on letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to Florence and the
Florentines themselves. Of all Italian cities, Florence has always
had the strongest English accent: the Goncourt brothers in 1855
called it 'ville tout anglaise'. Though that accent is diminished
now, Florence remains for the English-speaking traveller what it
always has been - one of the best loved, and most visited, of
cities. In this Traveller's Reader, Florence's rich and glorious
past is brought vividly to life for the tourist of today through
the medium of letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to
Florence from past centuries and of the Florentines themselves. The
extracts chosen by cultural historain Edward Chaney include:
Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto's
Campanile; an eye-witness account of the installation of
Michaelangelo's 'David'; the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at
the Casa Guidi; and D. H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas on
twentieth-century Florentine society. Sir Harold Acton's
introduction provides a concise history of the city from its
origins, through its zenith as a prosperous city state which, under
the Medici, gave birth to the Renaissance, and up to the Arno's
devastating flood in 1966. Sir Harold Acton, man of letters,
historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, spent most of his life in
Florence. Among his best-known books is The Last Medici, Memoirs of
an Aesthete.
Restless, gripped by an overwhelming wish to make a name for
himself in a world ever more hemmed in by progress and
'civilization', Thesiger (1910-2003) embarked on his amazing
journeys across Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter to test himself and to
show what could still be done. The result was a monument both to
his resilience and to the Bedu who guided him and who emerge as the
book's real heroes. "Great Journeys" allows readers to travel both
around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back
into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different
ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that
of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: great
civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles,
deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to
science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to
rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each
other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which
so much was still to be discovered.
In 1326, Ibn Battuta began a pilgrimage to Mecca that ended 27
years and 75,000 miles later. His engrossing account of that
journey provides vivid scenes from Morocco, southern Russia, India,
China, and elsewhere. "Essential reading . . . the ultimate in real
life adventure stories." -- "History in Review."
" The crossing of America's first great divide -- the
Appalachian Mountains -- has been a source of much fascination but
has received little attention from modern historians. In the
eighteenth century, the Wilderness Road and Ohio River routes into
Kentucky presented daunting natural barriers and the threat of
Indian attack. Running Mad for Kentucky brings this adventure to
life. Primarily a collection of travel diaries, it includes
day-to-day accounts that illustrate the dangers thousands of
Americans, adult and child, black and white, endured to establish
roots in the wilderness. Ellen Eslinger's vivid and extensive
introductory essay draws on numerous diaries, letters, and oral
histories of trans-Appalachian travelers to examine the historic
consequences of the journey, a pivotal point in the saga of the
continent's indigenous people. The book demonstrates how the fabled
soil of Kentucky captured the imagination of a young nation.
" In 1908 John C. Campbell was commissioned by the Russell Sage
Foundation to conduct a survey of conditions in Appalachia and the
aid work being done in these areas to create "the central
repository of data concerning conditions in the mountains to which
workers in the field might turn." Originally published in 1921, The
Southern Highlander and His Homeland details Campbell's experiences
and findings during his travels in the region, observing unique
aspects of mountain communities such as their religion, family
life, and forms of entertainment. Campbell's landmark work paved
the way for folk schools, agricultural cooperatives, handicraft
guilds, the frontier nursing service, better roads, and a sense of
pride in mountain life -- the very roots of Appalachian
preservation.
Journal of a Tour of Discovery Across the Blue Mountains in New
South Wales in the Year 1813 was first published in 1823. It is a
romantic and descriptive narrative of the journey to find a path
across the Blue Mountains and received a great reception both in
England and in Australia.
|
You may like...
Bish Bash Bosh!
Henry Firth, Ian Theasby
Hardcover
(1)
R510
R455
Discovery Miles 4 550
|