Isabella Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan was published in 1880 and recounts her travels in the Far East, begun four years earlier. Bird was recommended an open-air life from an early age as a cure for her physical and nervous difficulties. She toured the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the Sandwich Islands, before travelling to the Far East in order to strengthen herself to marry Dr John Bishop and live in Edinburgh. Based on the letters Bird wrote home, primarily to her sister, Volume 2 covers her journeys to Yeso, Tokyo, Kyoto, and the Ise Shrines, and includes her experiences of staying with the Hairy Ainu, the indigenous inhabitants of northern Japan. As with the first volume, it includes much detail of the lifestyles, customs, and habits of the people she encountered, as well as a chapter on Japanese public affairs.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. A member of a noble Roman family, Pietro della Valle began travelling in 1614 at the suggestion of a doctor, as an alternative to suicide after a failed love affair. The letters describing his travels in Turkey, Persia and India were addressed to this advisor. This 1664 English translation of della Valle's letters from India, republished by the Hakluyt Society in 1892, contains fascinating ethnographic details, particularly on religious beliefs, and is an important source for the history of the Keladi region of South India.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Vasco de Gama (c. 1460 1524) was a Portuguese explorer who commanded the first European expedition to sail directly to India. He was later appointed Viceroy of Portuguese India in 1524. This volume, first published in 1869, contains an account of his expeditions written by the Portuguese historian Gaspar Correa (c. 1496 c. 1563), taken from his book Lendas da India. His work is an important contemporary history of Portuguese colonialism in India, using contemporary sources not available to later Portuguese historians.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume contains the first English translation (in 1863) of a Latin manuscript written in about 1330 and published in France in 1839. Jordanus was a Dominican missionary to India, who became bishop of Columbum (probably a town on the Malabar coast). He recorded anything he thought noteworthy on his travels from the Mediterranean to India via Persia and back again, and his remarks on the climate, produce, people and customs of the countries he passed through are a valuable source of information.

Western exploration of the Arabian Desert began in the mid-eighteenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the British officers of the Indian colonial government undertook surveys of the areas remote from the major pilgrimage routes. Charles Doughty (1843 1926) spent two years among various nomad tribes and wrote in 1888 what would be the first comprehensive Western work on the geography of Arabia, in an attempt, as he says in the preface, to 'set forth faithfully some parcel of the soil of Arabia smelling of s mn and camels'. His classic and justly famous account is a fantastic piece of travel writing that shows full understanding of the area, the people and all aspects of nomadic life in the desert.

The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, first published in 1899, contains the account by the redoubtable Isabella Bird (now Mrs J. F. Bishop) of a journey through central China in 1896 1897. The volume focuses on her travels though the province of Szechuan and among the Man-tze of the Somo territory. Many of the areas she explored and carefully described were almost unknown to European visitors and had not been mentioned in any earlier English publications. The volume is based on journal letters and the diary written during her journey, and it is generously illustrated with photographs and Chinese drawings. Bishop's work was warmly received in England and praised especially for the information included on agriculture and industry. The Geographical Journal heralded the work as 'undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to English literature on that country'. It remains a key source for late nineteenth-century British perceptions of China.

First published in 1863, this is the enchanting account of the travels of George Fleming (1833 1901) in the far north of China. Fleming began his epic journey in Tien-tsin, where he was stationed as an army doctor at a British military garrison; there he was granted special permission to travel almost 700 miles as far as Moukden and to Manchu Tartary, the birth place of the Manchu dynasty. Fleming's route took him through many regions that had been inaccessible to western travellers until the Treaty of Tien-tsin (1858 1859). His vivid account describes the people and customs he met; the landscape; the climate; the language and dialects; the agricultural practices of the various regions; and the struggles and hardships he faced during his journey. Fleming's work is a monument of Victorian travel literature and an important source in understanding Victorian perceptions of China and of Chinese culture.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This 1863 volume contains a Victorian translation of Ludovico di Varthema's account of his travels, originally published in 1510, and translated into many European languages within a few years. Ludovico set off from Italy in 1502 (determined, he says, 'to investigate some small portion of this our terrestrial globe') and travelled first to Egypt and Syria; he then journeyed through the Arabian peninsula (where he was imprisoned as a spy), Persia and India, and reached the Molucca islands before returning to Europe in 1508.

The diary of Malthus's Scandinavian tour, which forms the main part of this book, was discovered in 1961 by Mr Robert Malthus, a surviving family member. It has been transcribed and edited by Patricia James. The journals reveal Malthus as a lively and entertaining travelling companion and an amusing observer of the social scene. There is a good deal about food and drink, pretty girls and eccentric men; there are close accounts of social habits, descriptions of country scenes, villages, towns and libraries and reflections on wages, prices, trade and occupations of the people as well as on marriage and population. James provides notes to the text and a good biographical introduction. Social and economic historians will clearly need this book; but above all it can be read as an engaging personal record of an eager traveller.

This book gives a complete account of all that Locke saw, did and heard during his four years in France. The entries vary from laconic jottings to detailed accounts - full of colour and wit - of life in Paris and the provinces. Locke's variety of interests presents a vivid and thorough account of France at that time. He observed and recorded the absolutism of Louis XIV and the poverty of the peasants, the growing persecution of the Protestants and the external manifestations of Catholicism, recent developments in science and technology - even agricultural methods and the system of taxes. So that this is a book for the general reader as well as for the student of Locke, the social historian and the historian of science.

This book is one of the first studies of twentieth-century travel literature in French, tracking the form from the colonial past to the postcolonial present. Whereas most recent explorations of travel literature have addressed English-language material, Forsdick's study complements these by presenting a body of material that has previously attracted little attention, ranging from conventional travel writing to other cultural phenomena (such as the Colonial Exposition of 1931) in which changing attitudes to travel are apparent.
Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures explores the evolution of attitudes to cultural diversity, explaining how each generation seems simultaneously to foretell the collapse and reinvention of "elsewhere." It also follows the progressive renegotiation of understandings of travel (and travel literature) across the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of travel narratives from France's former colonies. The book suggests that an exclusive colonial understanding of travel as a practice defined along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity has slowly been transformed so that travel has become an enabling figure--encapsulated in notions such as James Clifford's "traveling cultures"--central to analyses of contemporary global culture. Engaging initially with Victor Segalen's early twentieth-century reflection on travel and exoticism and Albert Kahn's "Archives de la Planete," Forsdick goes on to examine a series of interrelated texts and phenomena: early African travel narratives, inter-war ethnography, post-war accounts of Citroen 2CV journeys, the travel stories of immigrant workers, the work of Nicholas Bouvier andthe Pour une litterature voyageuse movement, narratives of recent walking journeys, and contemporary Polynesian literature. In delineating a francophone space stretching far beyond metropolitan France itself, the book contributes to new understandings of French and Francophone Studies, and will also be of interest to those interested in issues of comparatism as well as colonial and postcolonial culture and identity.

'The Natural History Museum, South Kensington, supply full directions for preparing animal skins, which should be carefully studied, and a mouse or two should be skinned by the would-be collected before leaving England...' Such is the advice given to fellow hunters by the author of this work, C.V.A Peel, the celebrated Victorian writer, traveller and big-game hunter. In an age when conservation of wildlife stands at the forefront of zoological study, it is sobering to recognise that so much of our knowledge stems from the writings of men who would sooner have an animal's head on the wall than its photograph in an album. Nevertheless, men such as peel were acute observers of nature and this account of hunting in Somaliland provides a unique record of the flora and fauna of that region in East Africa which lies between the Equator and the Gulf of Aden. First published in 1889, and here republished in facsimile, complete with photographs, drawings and diagrams, the book is a fascinating study of East Africa through the eyes of a hunting man.

Soon after returning from his celebrated journey to Mecca disguised as an Arab, Burton set out on a similarly perilous trip to the city of Harrar in the heart of little-known Somaliland. As related in the Preface to his journal: "He disappeared into the desert for four months...The way was long and weary, adventurous and dangerous, but at last the 'Dreadful City' was sighted, and relying on his good Star and audacity, he walked boldly in...His diplomacy on this occasion, his capacity for passing as an Arab, and his sound Mohammedan Theology, gave him ten days in the city, where he slept every night in danger of his life."His journey to Harrar, the account of his stay, and the gruelling story of his return across the desert, are here contained in this fine facsimile of the two-volume memorial edition of 1894, complete with maps, plates and diagrams.

Soon after returning from his celebrated journey to Mecca disguised as an Arab, Burton set out on a similarly perilous trip to the city of Harrar in the heart of little-known Somaliland. As related in the preface to his journal: 'He disappeared into the desert for four months...The way was long and weary, adventurous and dangerous, but at last the 'Dreadful City' was sighted, and relying on his good Star and audacity, he walked boldly in...His diplomacy on this occasion, his capacity for passing as an Arab, and his sound Mohammedan Theology, gave him ten days in the city, where he slept every night in danger of his life.' His journey to Harrar, the account of his stay, and the gruelling story of his return across the desert, are here contained in this fine facsimile of the two-volume memorial edition of 1894, complete with maps, plates and diagrams.

This book is a major contribution to the study of the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans in the early modern period and to a neglected aspect of the cultural transformation of Europe throughout the Renaissance. Focusing on European travelers in India and their analysis of Hindu society, politics and religion, it also offers a detailed and systematic study of the variety of travel narratives describing South India from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In addition, the book proposes a novel approach to the study of European attitudes toward non-Europeans.

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.

This is a collection of journals written by Japanese men and women--from samurai and other government officials to novelists and poets--who journeyed to America, Europe, and China between 1860 and 1920. The diaries faithfully record personal views of the countries and their cultures and sentiments that range from delight to disillusionment. At once an intimate account of the travellers' lives and a testimony to the greater struggles and advances of their cultures, Donald Keene's eloquent translation and commentary invites the reader to partake in the world as each person experienced it.

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of `The Beach at Falese, the folktale plots of `The Bottle Imp' and `The Isle of Voices', and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world. 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.

A sparkling new translation of one of the greatest travel books ever written: Marco Polo's seminal account of his journeys in the east. 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.

The critical and biographical introduction tells of Lady Wortley Montagu's travels through Europe to Turkey in 1716, where her husband had been appointed Ambassador. Her lively letters offer insights into the paradoxical freedoms conferred on Muslim women by the veil, the value of experimental work by Turkish doctors on inoculation, and the beauty of Arab poetry and culture.

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.

It is widely believed that people living in the Middle Ages seldom traveled. But, as Medieval Travel and Travelers reveals, many medieval people - and not only Marco Polo - were on the move for a variety of different reasons. Assuming no previous knowledge of medieval civilizations, this volume allows readers to experience the excitement of men and women who ventured into new lands. By addressing cross-cultural interaction, religion, and travel literature, the collection sheds light on how travel shaped the way we perceive the world, while also connecting history to the contemporary era of globalization. Including a mix of complete sources, excerpts, and images, Medieval Travel and Travelers provides readers with opportunities for further reflection on what medieval people expected to find in foreign locales, while sparking curiosity about undiscovered spaces and cultures.

Meet the drunken Mexicans, the gorgeous girls, the desperate drug-dealer, and the snoring dog... as the author describes his first reading-tour across America. This book is a writer's notebook, intimate travelogue, and a chronicle of experiences both commonplace and extraordinary.