Johnson's 'Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland' is not only a narrative of personal experience, rare in the canon of his writings, but also a deeply reflective survey of the Highlands and Isles--their social and economic structure, their traditions and customs. Beyond this, Johnson undertakes a subtle, penetrating analysis of a people in the throes of change, and examines the predicament they face as a result.

When she couldn't find hiking boots that fit, Laura White Brunner explored Yosemite backcountry barefoot, and at times alone, in an era when grizzly bears still roamed the park. When told she couldn't hike in pants, she pinned up her skirt. Brunner showed admirable pluck, but, more remarkably, she did it as a teenager in the 1910s-and she wrote it all down. Her memoir, recovered from the Yosemite archives and published here for the first time, recounts two summers spent working and hiking in Yosemite Valley during a time of great change-in the park and in the world beyond. In captivating prose Brunner describes her unlikely adventures in the summers of 1915 and 1917, as well as what she calls "the interlude" between them. Sometimes funny, sometimes painful, always engaging, her account captures the "trails" and tribulations of a young woman coming of age in America's most beautiful national park. Lightly edited and put into biographical, geographical, and historical context by Jared N. Champion, the book is also illustrated with historic photographs, many taken by Brunner herself. It provides an indelible picture of a bygone time, of awakening young womanhood in a pristine natural world just opening to tourism on a grand scale. Late in life, Laura White Brunner (1899-1973) told a reporter that she had always wanted to be a national park ranger, but, sadly, was "born too soon." Nonetheless she made Yosemite her own-in her hiking, photographs, and memoir, but also in a practical sense, when her ascent of Half Dome by the "Clothes-Line Rope" inspired the park administration, who feared more women might summit the monolith, to install the iconic "Cables on Half Dome" route that remains in place today. Brunner went on to a career in journalism and though she tried for decades to publish her memoir, this is its first appearance in print.

The incredible story of Marco Polo's journey to the ends of the earth has for the last seven hundred years been beset by doubts as to its authenticity. Did this intrepid Venetian really trek across Asia minor as a teenager, explore the length and breadth of China as the ambassador of the ruthless dictator, Kublai Khan, and make his escape from almost certain death at the hands of Kublai Khan's successors? Robin Brown's book aims to get to the truth of Marco Polo's claims. Covering his early life, his extraordinary twenty-four-year Asian epic and his reception in Italy on his return, Marco Polo places the intrepid Venetian in context, historically and geographically. What emerges confirms the truth of Polo's account. Polo, scholars now agree, opened vistas to the medieval mind and stirred the interest in exploration that prompted the age of the European ocean voyages. All who now enjoy the fruits of Marco Polo's incredible journey through Asia - whether in the form of spectacles, fireworks, pasta or any of the many products of the Silk Road - will find in Robin Brown-Lowe's book a fascinating portrait of a man who made history happen by bringing about the meeting of East and West.

In June 1862, Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, he also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting Russia. Over the course of his journey he visited a number of major cities, including Berlin, Paris, London, Florence, Milan, and Vienna. His impressions on what he saw, "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions", were first published in the February 1863 issue of Vremya (Time), the periodical he edited.

In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas. Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, 'If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two.' Towards the end of the last century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country's uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture and spiritual values. It was for these reasons that Yeats suggested Synge visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships - between an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic loveliness and savagely unpredictable moods, and Synge himself, formed by modern European thought but in love with the primitive.

Ernest Shackleton sailed to the South Pole as the First World War broke out in Europe, intent on making the first ever trans-Antarctic crossing. South! is Shackleton's first-hand account of the epic expedition, which he described as 'the last great journey on earth'. During the journey their ship, the Endurance, became trapped by ice and was crushed, forcing the men to survive in and escape from one of the world's most hostile environments. With no hope of rescue, Shackleton and four others set sail in a small open boat on a 600-mile crossing to South Georgia. Shipwrecked on the uninhabited side of the island, they were forced into making the first ever winter crossing of the island, all the time threatened by brutal cold and hunger. South! made Shackleton's name as an explorer. The dramatic story, one of the most astonishing feats of Polar escapology, remains as enthralling now as when it was first published in 1919. Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language, with authors hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. Every title has been reset in a contemporary typeface to create a series that every lover of fine travel literature will want to collect and keep.

Published in 1851, this is the first book written by the famed Victorian explorer Richard F. Burton. It is an account of his journey through portions of southwest India while he was on sick leave from the British Indian army. Traveling through Bombay to the Portuguese colony of Goa, he went through Calicut and other cities on the Malabar coast, ending up in the Nilgiri mountains at the hill station of Ootacamund. The observant traveler, not the intrepid adventurer, is the narrator of the account, and its intended audience was the voracious Victorian consumer of travel literature. Coupled with a critical introduction by Dane Kennedy, this facsimile edition provides a revealing look at the people who inhabited a part of India that was generally off the beaten track in the nineteenth century. The Portuguese and Mestizo inhabitants of Goa, the Todas of Ootacamund, as well as the fellow Britons Burton meets on his journey are all subject to his penetrating scrutiny. Burton's clever, ascerbic, and unorthodox personality together with his irreverence for convention and his bemused disdain for humanity come through clearly in these pages, as does his extraordinary command of the languages and literatures of various people. 'What a glad moment it is, to be sure, when the sick and seedy, the tired and testy invalid from pestiferous Scinde or pestilential Guzerat, 'leaves all behind him' and scrambles over the sides of his Pattimar'. 'His what?' 'Ah! we forget. The gondola and barque are household words in your English ears, the budgerow is beginning to own an old familiar sound, but you are right - the 'Pattimar' requires a definition'.

This work examines the travel account of a German baroque author who journeyed in search of silk from Northern Germany, through Muscovy, to the court of Shah Safi in Isfahan.

Adam Olearius introduced Persian literature, history, and arts to the German-speaking public; his frank appraisal of Persian customs foreshadows the enlightened spirit of the eighteenth century (influencing Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" as well as Goethe's "West-Eastern Divan") and prepares the way for German Romanticism's infatuation with Persian poetry.

Brancaforte focuses on the visual and discursive nexus uniting Olearius's text with the numerous engravings that supplement the book. The emphasis falls on contextualized readings of Olearius's decorative frontispieces and his new and improved map of Persia and the Caspian Sea, as expressions of early modern subjectivity.

A reissue of a truly classic title on the Batsford backlist. First published in 1935, it is a wonderful snapshot of our capital before the Second World War, and a charming insight into our attitudes to urban life back in the Thirties. Our posh guide Cohen-Portheim offers us his interpretation of life in London through her people, her buildings and her history.The chapters include:Towns withinTown Streets and their LifeGreen LondonLondon and the ArtsLondon Amusements and Night LifeHotels and RestaurantsTraditional LondonLondon and the BritishLondon and the Foreigner (surprisingly liberal!)It includes the iconic Brian Cook cover illustration of Ludgate Circus and St Pauls, and should be sought after for that alone. Add in the charm of the authentic voice of a 1930s Londoner, it should be enjoyed by all Londoners.

One of the most revealing things about national character is the way that citizens react to and report on their travels abroad. Oftentimes a tourist's experience with a foreign place says as much about their country of origin as it does about their destination. A Happy Holiday examines the travels of English-speaking Canadian men and women to Britain and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the experiences of tourists, detailing where they went and their reactions to tourist sites, and draws attention to the centrality of culture and the sensory dimensions of overseas tourism. Among the specific topics explored are travellers' class relationships with people in the tourism industry, impressions of historic landscapes in Britain and Europe, descriptions of imperial spectacles and cultural sights, the use of public spaces, and encounters with fellow tourists and how such encounters either solidified or unsettled national subjectivities. Cecilia Morgan draws our attention to the important ambiguities between empire and nation, and how this relationship was dealt with by tourists in foreign lands. Based on personal letters, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals from across Canada, A Happy Holiday argues that overseas tourism offered people the chance to explore questions of identity during this period, a time in which issues such as gender, nation, and empire were the subject of much public debate and discussion.

This book features a young explorer caught in the torments of civil war. This volume is the first-ever English translation of the memoirs of Karl Heller, a twenty-year-old aspiring Austrian botanist who traveled to Mexico in 1845 to collect specimens. He passed through the Caribbean, lived for a time in the mountains of Veracruz, and journeyed to Mexico City through the cities of Puebla and Cholula. After a brief residence in the capital, Heller moved westward to examine the volcanoes and silver mines near Toluca. When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846-47 conditions became chaotic, and the enterprising botanist was forced to flee to Yucatan. Heller lived in the port city of Campeche, but visited Merida, the ruins of Uxmal, and the remote southern area of the Champoton River. From there Heller, traveling by canoe, journeyed through southern Tabasco and northern Chiapas and finally returned to Vienna through Cuba and the United States bringing back thousands of samples of Mexican plants and animals. Heller's account is one of the few documents we have from travelers who visited Mexico in this period, and it is particularly useful in describing conditions outside the capital of Mexico City. In 1853, Heller published his German-language account as ""Reisen in Mexiko"", but the work has remained virtually unknown to English or Spanish readers. This edition now provides a complete, annotated, and highly readable translation.

An adventure story from the wilds of early America, "The Land between the Rivers" recreates the journeys of the English botanist Thomas Nuttall, one of American history's most well-traveled scientists.
During the early nineteenth century, Nuttall explored the waters, valleys, plains, and mountains of the Great Lakes, Ohio River, Mississippi River, as well as the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, and Canadian river valleys of the former Louisiana Territory.
In this fascinating account of Nuttall's travels through the wilderness of the middle west, author Russell Lawson-using Nuttall's own journal-captures the sense of excitement of the early wanderer. As much a delight for the mind as the senses, The Land between the Rivers details the unremitting weather and rugged geography of uncharted lands within the Louisiana Territory. A sense of discovery pervades the narrative as Nuttall's odyssey builds to its climax in the prairie wilderness of what is now Oklahoma. Sickened by "ague"-in his case, malaria-Nuttall at times was barely able to go on; yet he continued to search for and catalog plants and animals.
"The Land between the Rivers" expands our knowledge of the work of one of the country's earliest botanists. We also learn a great deal about the early explorers, the inhabitants of the unsettled land, and about the land and culture of the times.

In 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson escaped from his numerous troubles--poor health, tormented love, inadequate funds--by embarking on a journey through the Cevennes in France, accompanied by Modestine, a rather single-minded donkey. The notebook Stevenson kept during this time became Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, a highly entertaining account of the French and their country. The Amateur Emigrant describes his travels to and around America: the crowded weeks in steerage, the cross-country train journey. Filled with sharp-eyed observations, it brilliantly conveys Stevenson's perceptions of America and the Americans. Together, these writings reveal as much about the traveler as the places he travels to.

Reverend Antun Rabbat, a respected Jesuit scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discovered these extraordinary writings in a Jacobite diocese in Aleppo, Syria. Rabbat immediately transcribed into Arabic those portions relating to the remarkable experiences of Reverend Elias-al-Musili, a priest of the Chaldean Church, the first person ever to come to the Americas from Baghdad. Surrounded by a world seemingly filled with exotic miracles, al-Musili shares his perceptions of native peoples, their customs, beliefs, and treatment by Spanish conquistadors. Because of the uniqueness and significance of his journey, al-Musili was supported by the pope himself and authorized by the queen regent of Spain. He provides insightful descriptions of high-level officials and clerics in the New World. And he tells of uncommon visits to royalty in Catholic Europe prior to embarking on a voyage that would turn into a twelve-year adventure (1668-1680). Also featured are rare notes culled from a manuscript in a monastery of the Chaldean Christian rite in Baghdad. Aesthetically appealing and historically important, this unique account remains an invaluable document for scholars of early modern history and of the church in Latin America.

Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.

This set of the celebrated Nebraska edition features the seven core volumes--those written by Lewis and Clark--and incorporates a wide range of new scholarship dealing with all aspects of the expedition, including geography, Indian languages, plants, and animals, in order to recreate the expedition within its historical context.

"If my fellow-traveller had lived, he intended to have put together in book form such information as we had gathered about Southern Arabia. Now, as he died four days after our return from our last journey there, I have had to undertake the task myself. It has been very sad to me, but I have been helped by knowing that, however imperfect this book may be, what is written here will surely be a help to those who, by following in our footsteps, will be able to get beyond them, and to whom I so heartily wish success and a Happy Home-coming, the best wish a traveller may have." So Mabel Bent (Mrs J. Theodore Bent) begins her Preface to Southern Arabia, one of the classic travel books written in English about this ever-fascinating region, in which she details the couple's travels over a ten-year period. A testimony to the book's high regard is that, since publication in 1900, it has rarely been out-of-print. Mabel Bent continues in her Preface to inform the reader that her volume is drawn in part from the note-books of her husband, her fellow-traveller, the redoubtable J. Theodore Bent (1852-97), and also "...from the 'Chronicles' that I always wrote during our journeys". After more than a hundred years, and for the first time, these personal Chronicles on 'South Arabia' are published in World Enough, and Time: The Chronicles of Mabel Bent. Vol. III and are of significant interest to Arabists and those enthusiasts who will want to have Mabel's on-the-spot account of their adventures and archaeological and ethnographical discoveries. Also included in this present volume is Mabel Bent's previously unpublished Chronicle of their long journey through Persia, from south to north in 1889. Contents: Bahrein and Persia, 1889: The Hadhramaut, 1893-5; Socotra and the lands of the Fadhli and Yafai, 1896-7. Personal letters, documents, maps, and Mabel Bent's own photographs contribute to this important insight into the lives of two of the great British travellers of the nineteenth century.

Real ladies do not travel - or so it was once said. This collection of women's travel writing dispels the notion by showing how there are few corners of the world that have not been visited by women travellers. Jane Robinson takes us on an exhilarating journey through sixteen centuries of travel writing, in the company of Isabella Bird, Karen Blixen, Christina Dodwell, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Freya Stark, Rebecca West, and many more.

'She has written the best travel books of her generation and her name will survive as an artist in prose.' - The Observer Written just after the Second World War, Perseus in the Wind (named after the constellation) is perhaps the most personal, and haunting, of all Freya Stark's writings. She muses on the seasons, the effect light has on a landscape at a particular time of day, the smell of the earth after rain, Muslim saints, Indian temples, war and old age. Each chapter is devoted to a particular theme: happiness (simple pleasures, like her father's passion for the view from his cabin in Canada); education (to be able to command happiness, recognise beauty, value death, increase enjoyment); beauty (incongruous, flighty and elusive - a description of the stars, the burst of flowers in a park); death (a childhood awareness of the finality of time, the meaningfulness of the end); memory (the jewelled quality of literature, pleasure, love, an echo or a scent when aged by the passage of time). For those who have loved her travel writing, Perseus in the Wind illuminates the motivations behind Freya Stark's journeys and the woman behind the traveller.

Johann Georg von Hahn - a nineteenth-century Austrian diplomat and explorer - is generally considered to be the founder of Albanian Studies as a scholarly discipline. It was he who first studied the Balkan country and its people, and who brought them to the attention of the academic world. Despite this acclaim, his work has not been widely available in English until now. In this volume, Robert Elsie has translated Hahn's most important works relating to his travels and studies in Albania during the mid-nineteenth century. Hahn's interests were broad, but he was especially interested in the tribes of Albania and Kosovo and made several ethnographic studies of the cultures and traditions of the tribes he encountered on his travels - including the Kelmendi, Hoti and Kastrati tribes. This volume will be invaluable readers for scholars of Balkan history and anthropology.

"Then we went to the other bath. Here I found I was being again taken to the men's place, so I said, 'I'm not going in here'. But a great outcry was raised and loud exclamations of invitation and constant assurances that there was nobody naked, so when T said fiercely, 'Come in and don't make a fuss. They all wish it', I entered a large hall with the raised divans peopled by gentry in cloaks and turbans of towels. There was fortunately no one in the hot bath as it deserved a careful examination. The wide platform round the tanks was inlaid with beautiful marbles and there were recesses with pumps, etc., also inlaid..." (Bursa, February 1888)On August 2nd 1877, the English explorer and archaeologist James Theodore Bent married an extraordinary Irishwoman, Mabel Virginia Anna Hall-Dare, the second of the four daughters born to Mr Robert Westley Hall-Dare of Co. Wexford and Essex. Mabel was 31, Theodore 25, and within a few months they had embarked on their pattern of annual travels that continued until his early death in 1897. Their trips began fairly close to home, visiting northern Italy, but by 1883 they were in the Eastern Mediterranean (in modern Greece and Turkey), searching out the antiquities, landscapes and lifestyles of a region that was to captivate them for the next fifteen years. Their researches led to a number of highly regarded monographs, papers and articles (such as Theodore's 'The Cyclades, or Life Among the Insular Greeks', 1885, and the many publications of their various discoveries in locations such as 'Rugged Cilicia', the island of Thassos, and elsewhere) that were to place the couple securely amongst the foremost British travellers of the latter half of the 19th century.The publication, therefore, of Mabel Bent's personal notebooks from the archive of the Joint Library of the Hellenic and Roman Societies, London, represents the discovery of a lost and notable milestone for scholars and travel enthusiasts of all kinds. This series of volumes begins with Mabel's account of the couple's adventures around the Aegean and beyond, extracted from her fifteen-year sequence of notebooks and presented chronologically. Specifically, we follow Mabel and Theodore to the Greek mainland and the islands known now as the Cyclades and the Dodecanese, as well as the northern Aegean islands; their journeys along the Turkish littoral lead them from bustling Istanbul to provincial Mersin in the far south-west. Contents include: Chapter 1) 1883-1884: The Cyclades - Mabel's own accounts of the couple's two tours of the Cyclades. Theodore relied on these Chronicles for the writing up of his classic travelogue 'The Cyclades; or Life Among the Insular Greeks' of 1885; Chapter 2) 1885: The Dodecanese - including Rhodes, Tilos and Karpathos; Chapter 3) 1886: The Eastern Aegean - including Samos, Patmos, Kalymnos and Astypalea; Chapter 4) 1887: The Northern Aegean - including Meteora, Thessaloniki, Thassos and Samothraki; Chapter 5) 1888: The Turkish Coast - from Istanbul to Kastellorizo; Chapter 6) 1890: 'Rough Cilicia' - extensive explorations around south-west Turkey.

In 1865, twenty-three-year-old William James began his studies at the Harvard Medical School. When he learned that one of his most esteemed professors, Louis Agassiz, then director of the recently established Museum of Comparative Zoology, was preparing a research expedition to Brazil, James offered his services as a voluntary collector. Over the course of a year, James kept a diary, wrote letters to his family, and sketched the plants, animals, and people he observed. During this journey, James spent time primarily in Rio de Janeiro, Belem, and Manaus, and along the rivers and tributaries of the Amazon Basin.

This volume is a critical, bilingual (English-Portuguese) edition of William James's diaries and letters and also includes reproductions of his drawings. This original material belongs to the Houghton Archives at Harvard University and is of great interest to both William James scholars and Brazilian studies experts.

Born in 1831, Isabella, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes in 1872 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode on her spirited horse Birdie through the American 'Wild West', a terrain only recently opened to pioneer settlement. Here she met Rocky Mountain Jim, her 'dear (one-eyed) desperado', fond of poetry and whisky - 'a man any women might love, but no sane woman would marry'. He helped her climb the 'American Matterhorn' and round up cattle on horseback. The wonderful letters which make up this volume were first published in 1879 and were enormously popular in Isabella Bird's lifetime. They tell of magnificent unspoilt landscapes and abundant wildlife, of small remote townships, of her encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers.

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) was a ship's doctor serving in south-east Asia, and is one of the most important twentieth-century Dutch-language writers. His 1934 novel Adrift in the Middle Kingdom (Het leven op aarde), is an epic sweep of narrative that takes the reader from 1920s Shanghai to a forgotten city beyond the Great Wall of China. Slauerhoff's narrator is a Belfast ship's radio operator, desperate to escape the sea, who travels inland on a gun-runner's mission. He moves through extraordinary settings of opium salons, the house of a Cantonese watch-mender, the siege of Shanghai, the great flood on the western plains, and the discovery of oil by the uncomprehending overlord in the hidden city of Chungking. The fantasy ending transforms the novel from travelogue and adventure to existential meditation. But running like a thread of darkness through the story is opium, from poppy head harvesting to death through addiction. This translation by David McKay, winner of the 2018 Vondel Prize, is the first English edition of Slauerhoff's most accessible and enthralling novel. The Introduction is by Slauerhoff expert Arie Pos and Wendy Gan of the University of Hong Kong.

Poems for Travellers transports the reader to lands far and near in the company of some of our greatest poets such as Walt Whitman, John Keats and Christina Rossetti.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.

As internationally acclaimed author Paul Theroux writes in his introduction, ‘Here is a collection of travel poetry composed by real travellers, weekending tourists, feverish fantasists, bluffers, dreamers, brave adventurers and resolute stay-at-homes. It succeeds in what poetry does best – inspires and consoles, reminds us of who we are, where we’ve been, and where we might want to go next.’

'A roaring tale ... remains as vivid and exciting today as it was on publication in 1697' Guardian The pirate and adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, and took notes wherever he went. This is his frank, vivid account of his buccaneering sea voyages around the world, from the Caribbean to the Pacific and East Indies. Filled with accounts of raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, it also contains precise observations of people, places, animals and food (including the first English accounts of guacamole, mango chutney and chopsticks). A bestseller on publication, this unique record of the colonial age influenced Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and consequently the whole of English literature. Edited with an Introduction by Nicholas Thomas