Memories of Africa, pre-civil war New England, political turmoil in Russia, the end of slavery in Jamaica, and Caribbean pirates; an intrepid black woman experiences many turning points in world history. Nancy Prince paints a blunt picture of the struggle of free blacks to make a living in the North. When Boston failed to provide her with a livable wage, she and her husband found employment on a boat bound for Russia. A black household servant was a rare commodity in the land of the czars, and Prince was well compensated in St. Petersburg.

An unflagging traveler and diarist, the Reverend Andrew Burnaby embarked on a two-year tour of the American colonies in 1759. Originally published in England in 1775, his account of his travels includes commentaries about people, politics, taxes, trade, and the state of the arts and sciences; detailed descriptions of the natural surroundings; amusing anecdotes; and predictions about the future of the colonies. It remains a vivid and valuable primary source on life in the American colonies before the Revolution. Also included in this volume is Burnaby's "Diary of the Weather," kept between January 1760 and December 1762.

Andrew Burnaby's Itinerary: Virginia (Williamburg, King William, Fredericksburg, Colchester, Mount Vernon, Winchester) Maryland (Annapolis, Fredericktown) Delaware (New Castle) Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) New Jersey (Trenton, Princeton, Perth-Amboy) New York (New York City, Long Island) Rhode Island (Newport, Providence) Massachusetts (Boston) New Hampshire (Portsmouth)

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.

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.

Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue vividly captures the experiences of prominent Indian intellectual and scholar Shibli- Nu'ma-ni- (1857-1914) as he journeyed across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1892. A professor of Arabic and Persian at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College at Aligarh, Nu'ma-ni- took a six-month leave from teaching to travel to the Ottoman Empire in search of rare printed works and manuscripts to use as sources for a series of biographies on major figures in Islamic history. Along the way, he collected information on schools, curricula, publishers, and newspapers, presenting a unique portrait of imperial culture at a transformative moment in the history of the Middle East. Nu'ma-ni- records sketches and anecdotes that offer rare glimpses of intellectual networks, religious festivals, visual and literary culture, and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. First published in 1894, the travelogue has since become a classic of Urdu travel writing and has been immensely influential in the intellectual and politicalhistory of South Asia. This translation, the first into English, includes contemporary reviews of the travelogue, letters written by the author during his travels, and serialized newspaper reports about the journey, and is deeply enriched for readers and students by the translator's copious multilingual glosses and annotations. Nu'ma-ni- 's chronicle offers unique insight into broader processes of historical change in this part of the world while also providing a rare glimpse of intellectual engagement and exchange across the porous borders of empire.

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.

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.

Enchanted by the landscape and people of Spain, Maugham had long resolved to write a picaresque novel about the country. Instead, he wrote a living commentary assessing a great people in their greatest hour. DON FERNANDO, considered by Graham Greene to be Maugham's best work, is a paean to Spain's golden age of enormous creative energy. Beginning with the vivid tale of Loyola's life and conversion, it discusses the writings of St Teresa and the painting of El Greco, and comment with sagacity and wit on such illustrious figures as Cervantes, Luis de Lyon, Lope de Vega, Velasquez and the creator of Don Juan. DON FERNANDO is full of happy surprises, curious facts and stimulating opinions that reflect Maugham's lifelong love and admiration for Spanish culture and civilisation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This wonderfully written book tells of the first Herculean expeditions to Antarctica, from astronomer Edmond Halley s 1699 voyage in the "Paramore" to the sealer John Balleny s 1839 excursion in the "Eliza Scott," all in search of land, glory, fur, science, and profit. Life was harsh: crews had poor provisions and inadequate clothing, and scurvy was a constant threat. With unreliable often homemade charts, these intrepid explorers sailed in the stormy waters of the Southern Ocean below the Convergence, that sea frontier marking the boundary between the freezing Antarctic waters and the warmer sub-Antarctic seas. These men were the first to discover and exploit a new continent, which was not the verdant southern island they had imagined but an inhospitable expanse of rock and ice, ringed by pack ice and icebergs: Antarctica."

"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.

" 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 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."

" 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.

Seafaring merchant Amasa Delano kept adventure-filled journals through three commercial voyages that now offer a keen view of customs, culture, and trade two hundred years ago. Lively and readable, Delano's work gives a fascinating account of the world before industrialization, and is as accessible to today's reader as it was in 1817.