Sarah Parker Remond (1826-1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom. Remond eventually moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a degree at one of Europe's most prestigious medical schools. Her language skills enabled her to join elite salons in Florence and Rome, where she entertained high society with musical soirees even while maintaining connections to European emancipation movements.Remond's extensive travels and diverse acquaintances demonstrate that the nineteenth-century grand tour of Europe was not exclusively the privilege of white intellectuals but included African American travelers, among them women. This biography, based on international archival research, tells the fascinating story of how Remond forged a radical path, establishing relationships with fellow activists, artists, and intellectuals across Europe.

During the Jim Crow era, African American travellers faced the prospects of violence, harassment, and the denial of services, especially as they made their way throughout the American South. Those who journeyed outside the United States found not only a political and social context that was markedly different from America's, but in their international mobility, they also discovered new ways of identifying themselves in relation to others. In this book, Gary Totten examines the global travel narratives of a diverse set of African American writers, including Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Matthew Henson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston. While these writers deal with issues of identity in relation to a reimagined sense of self -- in a way that we might expect to find in travel narratives -- they also push against the constraints and conventions of the genre, reconsidering discourses of tourism, ethnography, and exploration. This book not only offers new insights about African American writers and mobility, it also charts the ideological distinctions and divergent agendas within this group of writers. Totten demonstrates how these travellers and their writings challenged dominant ideologies about African American experience, expression, and identity in a period of escalating racial violence. By setting these texts in their historical context and within the genre of travel writing, Totten presents a nuanced understanding of both popular and recovered work of the period.

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.

Elderly British men display a variety of annoying habits. They write letters to the newspapers; they drink too much; they reminisce about the old days; they make lewd comments to younger women; they shout at the television screen; and they go for long walks and get lost. Jeremy Cameron chose the last of these options. Trying to emulate Patrick Leigh Fermor's feat of 1933, he walked from Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Leigh Fermor was a legendary figure. Scholar, multilinguist, beautiful prose stylist, war hero, tough guy, charmer and famous lover: Cameron is none of these things and he also suffers from a heart condition. Rest assured that there will be no tedious details of operations or stoicism in this book. Nor will there be descriptions of understated generosity, quiet irony or British phlegm. The main point of travel is to recognise the virtues of staying at home. When at home, it is not possible to get bogged down in Alpine snow, fall over on one's face on Kosovan tarmac or suffer a comprehensive mugging on deserted roads in Greece. Nor does one have to speak foreign languages, eat foreign food or, above all, drink terrible tea. It is about two thousand miles from Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Thirteen countries lie in wait for the walker. They have many wonderful sights and much fascinating history. Readers will not find them in this book. They will, however, find a number of stories of varying authenticity and some very dubious observations about life. By the time Turkey arrived, Cameron was utterly and completely fed up with the whole process. Never again would he do anything quite so stupid. He is currently walking round all the places in England beginning with the letter Q.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War Macmillan published a much-loved and extremely successful series of books under the title of 'Highways and Byways'. In them, the authors took readers on a delightful guided tour of the country, county by county, pointing out places of interest, key historical events and local lore and legend. Now, Macmillan is reissuing - in one beautifully designed volume - a selection of those highways and byways, which affords contemporary readers both a charming period piece and a wonderful glimpse of the very best of Britain.

This collection of Alaskan adventures begins with a newspaper article written by John Muir during his first visit to Alaska in 1879, when the sole U.S. government representative in all the territory's 586,412 square miles was a lone customs official in Sitka. It closes with accounts of the gold rush and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Jean Meaux has gathered a superb collection of articles and stories that captivated American readers when they were first published and that will continue to entertain us today. The authors range from Charles Hallock (the founder of Forest and Stream, a precursor of Field and Stream) to New York society woman Mary Hitchcock, who traveled with china, silver, and a 2,800 square foot tent. After explorer Henry Allen wore out his boots, he marched barefoot as he continued mapping the Tanana River, and Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck mushed by dog sled in Arctic winters across a territory encompassing 250,000 miles of the northern interior.

Although the United States acquired Alaska in 1867, it took more than a decade for American writers and explorers to focus attention on a territory so removed from their ordinary lives. These writers-adventurers, tourists, and gold seekers-would help define the nation's perception of Alaska and would contribute to an image of the state that persists today. This collection unearths early writings that offer a broad view of American encounters with Alaska accompanied by Meaux's lively and concise introductions. The present-day adventurer will find much to inspire exploration, while students of the American West can gain new access to this valuable trove of pre-Gold Rush Alaska archives.

Before returning to New Orleans to practice family law, Jean Morgan Meaux lived in Alaska from 1971 to 1985, where she earned a master's degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage and did freelance writing for the Anchorage Daily News.

The classic travel narrative of a Don Quixote-of-the-seas – the first man to circumnavigate the world singlehandedly.

Joshua Slocum’s autobiographical account of his solo trip around the world is one of the most remarkable – and entertaining – travel narratives of all time. Setting off alone from Boston aboard the thirty-six-foot wooden sloop Spray in April 1895, Captain Slocum went on to join the ranks of the world’s great circumnavigators – Magellan, Drake, and Cook. But by circling the globe without crew or consorts, Slocum would outdo them all: his three-year solo voyage of more than 46,000 miles remains unmatched in maritime history for its courage, skill, and determination.

Sailing Alone around the World recounts Slocum’s wonderful adventures: hair-raising encounters with pirates off Gibraltar and savage Indians in Tierra del Fuego; raging tempests and treacherous coral reefs; flying fish for breakfast in the Pacific; and a hilarious visit with fellow explorer Henry Stanley in South Africa. A century later, Slocum’s incomparable book endures as one of the greatest narratives of adventure ever written.

Alec Waugh first saw the West Indies on a trip round the world in 1926 when his ship called in at Guadeloupe. Fifteen months later he returned for a long stay at Martinique; it was the beginning of a lifelong interest in these fascinating islands that were to provide him with the material for many books and articles. In "The Sugar Islands," a book to be dipped into at leisure, Mr. Waugh has selected pieces from his writings, with the intention of compiling both a travelogue (there is a wealth of interesting information for the would-be traveller about the ways of life and customs of each island) and a chronological commentary on the development of the islands during the last thirty years.The book is divided into four parts. In the first, the author gives an idea of the background of the West Indies by drawing a detailed picture of the colourful life of Martinique. He tells the story of a 17th-century Frenchman who joined the famous pirates of Tortugja and the history of the long bloodbath that preceeded the declaration of independence of Haiti, the Black Republic. The second part of the book comprises four character sketches, including three stories of black magic, and two sections deal with the individual charm and interest of each of the islands: Montserrat, Barbados, Anguilla, Trinidad, St. Vincent, Tortola, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Saba, Antigua, Dominica and Puerto Rico.

Unpublished for 90 years, Agatha Christie's extensive and evocative letters and photographs from her year-long round-the-world trip to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America as part of the British trade mission for the famous 1924 Empire Exhibition. In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a 10-month voyage around the British Empire with her husband as part of a trade mission to promote the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. Leaving her two-year-old daughter behind with her sister, Agatha set sail at the end of January and did not return until December, but she kept up a detailed weekly correspondence with her mother, describing in detail the exotic places and people she encountered as the mission travelled through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada. The extensive and previously unpublished letters are accompanied by hundreds of photos taken on her portable camera as well as some of the original letters, postcards, newspaper cuttings and memorabilia collected by Agatha on her trip. Edited and introduced by Agatha Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, this unique travelogue reveals a new side to Agatha Christie, demonstrating how her appetite for exotic plots and locations for her books began with this eye-opening trip, which took place just after only her second novel had been published (the first leg of the tour to South Africa is very clearly the inspiration for the book she wrote immediately afterwards, The Man in the Brown Suit). The letters are full of tales of seasickness and sunburn, motor trips and surf boarding, and encounters with welcoming locals and overbearing Colonials. The Grand Tour is a book steeped in history, sure to fascinate anyone interested in the lost world of the 1920s. Coming from the pen of Britain's biggest literary export and the world's most widely translated author, it is also a fitting tribute to Agatha Christie and is sure to fascinate her legions of worldwide fans.

""I stand in portico hung with gentian-blue ipomeas ... and look out on a land of mists and mysteries; a land of trailing silver veils through which domes and minarets, mighty towers and ramparts of flushed stone, hot palm groves and Atlas snows, peer and disappear at the will of the Atlantic cloud-drifts""
A classic of travel writing, "In Morocco "is Edith Wharton's remarkable account of her journey to the country during World War I. With a characteristic sense of adventure, Wharton set out to explore Morocco and its people, recording her impressions and encounters. She traveled--by military jeep--to Rabat, Moulay Idriss, Fex and Marrakech, from the Atlantic coast to the high Atlas. Along the way she witnessed religious ceremonies and ritual dances, visited the opulent palaces of the Sultan and was admitted to the mysterious world of his harem. Her narrative is as rich as the souks through which she wandered, peopled with story-tellers and warriors, slaves and silk-spinners; an evocative and intimate portrait of an extraordinary country.

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.

Part of a seven-volume facsimile set, this volume comprises firsthand accounts of France in the 1790s. It includes Helen Maria Williams' letters which narrate the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and her 1798 book on Switzerland which comments sceptically on the necessary coexistence of liberty with peace.

This seven-volume facsimile set comprises first-hand accounts of France in the 1790s. Helen Maria William's letters narrate the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and her 1798 book on Switzerland comments sceptically on the necessary coexistence of liberty with peace. Charlotte West (who, like Williams, celebrated the fall of the Bastille but was later imprisoned by the Republic) records the corruption, paranoia and violence of the Terror both in the provinces and in Paris. All texts, the majority of which have never been republished, are reproduced in full, augmented by a substantial general introduction to each set, headnotes, endnotes, and a consolidated index in the final volume. Selected for their rarity, the texts are drawn from the unparalleled Chawton House Library collection; each facsimile page has been digitally cleaned and enhanced, significantly improving on the quality and legibility of the original.

This volume includes William Penn's firsthand account of his 1677 travels in Holland and Germany while visiting Quaker congregations and preaching his message of religious toleration. It includes daily entries, in which Penn recounts his visits and meetings with various parties. Penn details numerous interactions with Quakers and those of other faiths, and the persecution he faced on the journey. Daily recollections are interspersed with texts of numerous letters, addresses, and epistles on Penn's religious philosophy, along with notes on his own religious awakening and the religious climate of Europe at the time.

This document serves to help readers understand Penn's early years, before he obtained the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681, and his background as a member of the Religious Society of Friends alongside its founder, George Fox.

The decades between 1770 and 1840 are rich in exotic accounts of the ruin-strewn landscapes of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico. Yet it is a field which has been neglected by scholars and which - unjustifiably - remains outside the literary canon. In this pioneering book, Nigel Leask studies the Romantic obsession with these 'antique lands', drawing generously on a wide range of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel books, as well as on recent scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology. Viewing the texts primarily as literary works rather than 'transparent' adventure stories or documentary sources, he sets out to challenge the tendency in modern academic work to overemphasize the authoritative character of colonial discourse. Instead, he addresses the relationship between narrative, aesthetics, and colonialism through the unstable discourse of antiquarianism, exploring the effects of problems of credit worthiness, and the nebulous epistemological claims of 'curiosity' (a leitmotif of the accounts studied here), on the contemporary status of travel writing. Attentive to the often divergent idioms of elite and popular exoticism, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing plots the transformation of the travelogue through the period, as the baroque particularism of curiosity was challenged by picturesque aesthetics, systematic 'geographical narrative', and the emergence of a 'transcendental self' axiomatic to Romantic culture. In so doing it offers an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and empire in the late Enlightenment and Romantic periods.

William John Bankes (1786-1855) was a brilliant and remarkable man. In 1812 he went to Spain and Portugal to pursue a Bohemian lifestyle among the gypsies. This was followed by travels in the Near East. Bankes amassed a vast portfolio of notes, manuscripts and drawings by the artists who accompanied him on his Egyptian travels. Their extremely high degree of accuracy makes them a very valuable record of the ancient monuments, many of which have since been damaged or lost. His intuitive detective work and the many copies of hieroglyphic inscriptions he accumulated were instrumental in the struggle to decipher hieroglyphs. This book tells Bankes' story, describing his travels in detail and assessing his contribution to Egyptology.

The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. "Preserving the Self in the South Seas" charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed.
Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. "Preserving the Self in the South Seas" also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.

Long after the Aztecs and the Incas had become a fading memory, a Maya civilization still thrived in the interior of Central America. "Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples" is the first collection and translation of important seventeenth-century narratives about Europeans travelling across the great "Ocean Sea" and encountering a people who had maintained an independent existence in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize.
In these narratives--primary documents written by missionaries and conquistadors--vivid details of these little known Mayan cultures are revealed, answering how and why lowlanders were able to evade Spanish conquest while similar civilizations could not. Fascinating tales of the journey from Europe are included, involving unknown islands, lost pilots, life aboard a galleon fleet, political intrigue, cannibals, and breathtaking natural beauty. In short, these forgotten manuscripts--translations of the papers of the past--provide an unforgettable look at an understudied chapter in the age of exploration.
"Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples" will appeal to archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians interested in Central America, the Maya, and the Spanish Conquest."
"

This fully-annotated edition of Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) and Mary Ann Parker's A Voyage Round the World (1795) brings together the first published accounts by women of these new sites of British colonization. Laying the texts alongside one another brings into conjunction Britain's concurrent, late-18th-century systems of transportation and resettlement, convictism and slavery.

While French sea captain Auguste Duhaut-Cilly may not have become wealthy from his around-the-world travels between 1826 and 1829, his trip has enriched historians interested in early nineteenth-century California. Because of a poor choice in goods to trade he found it necessary to spend nearly two years on the Alta and Baja California coasts before disposing of his cargo and returning to France. What was bad luck for Duhaut-Cilly was good luck for us, however, because he recorded his impressions of the region's natural history and human populations in a diary. This translation of Duhaut-Cilly's writing offers today's readers a rare eyewitness account of the pastoral society that was Mexican California, including the missions at the height of their power.
A veteran of the Napoleonic wars, Duhaut-Cilly was an educated man conversant in Spanish and English. He was also Catholic, which gave him special access to the California missions. Thus his diary allows the reader an insider's view of the padres' lives, including their dealings with the military. Through his eyes we see the region's indigenous people and how they were treated, and we're privy to his commentary on the behavior of the Californios.
This translation also contains Duhaut-Cilly's account of the Sandwich Islands portion of his voyage and provides an authentic rendering of life at sea during the early nineteenth century. In the spirit of Richard Henry Dana's "Two Years before the Mast," Duhaut-Cilly's reflections are a historical gem for anyone with a love of personal narratives and original accounts of the past.

John Muir first saw Alaska in 1879, only twelve years after it was purchased from Russia by the United States. Four more times, in 1880, 1881, 1890, and 1899, he was drawn back to this land of rivers and glaciers, sunsets and northern lights, campfires and Arctic stars. Few people have lived so many adventures, yet Muir was not a mere collector of adventure; the hazards he encountered - and many were spine-tingling - came as a result of his intense desire to examine new aspects of the natural world.

Muir kept this journal on his first extended trip to Yosemite in 1869. Here he faithfully recorded his impressions of the dazzling animal and plant life he encountered in the magnificent Sierra.

The republication of the memoirs of Colonel John McDonell of Scottas (1728-1810) will be welcomed by Highlanders the world over. Neither romantic novel nor learned history can conjure up for us so vividly as this unashamedly prejudiced eyewitness account of the atmosphere of the aftermath of "the '45," the fierce loyalties and bitter hatreds, the high principles and barefaced villainy. We meet the ineffectual Stuart King, the saintly Duke of York, the unspeakable Captain Fergusson and many a minor character, each playing his part in the long drawn out British War of Succession and the death throes of Celtic society. The monograph traces John McDonell's story from his adventurous journey from Scotland to Rome at the age of 12 to his emigration to North America thirty-three years later.