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.

'How is the mind agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world!' - William Bartram 'Thus you see, dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would have us believe.' - Mary Wortley Montagu With widely varied motives - scientific curiosity, commerce, colonization, diplomacy, exploration, and tourism - British travellers fanned out to every corner of the world in the period the Critical Review labelled the 'Age of Peregrination'. The Empire, already established in the Caribbean and North America, was expanding in India and Africa and founding new outposts in the Pacific in the wake of Captain Cook's voyages. In letters, journals, and books, travellers wrote at first-hand of exotic lands and beautiful scenery, and encounters with strange peoples and dangerous wildlife. They conducted philosophical and political debates in print about slavery and the French Revolution, and their writing often affords unexpected insights into the writers themselves. This anthology brings together the best writing from authors such as Daniel Defoe, Celia Fiennes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, Mungo Park, and many others, to provide a comprehensive selection from this emerging literary genre. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript was only discovered amongst his papers long after his death, but has not hitherto been made available in the UK or the USA. The book is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city - and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today, given that the majority of the sights described are still to be found. A fascinating scrap from the master's table....

Captain Joshua Slocum's solo circumnavigation aboard the 37-foot sloop SPRAY in 1895 stands as one of the greatest sea adventures of all time. This classic account of his 46,000-mile voyage continues to enjoy immense popularity all around the world, and Sheridan House is proud to preserve the original edition in this attractive, affordable hardcover.

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.

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.

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.

In 1326, Ibn Battuta began a pilgrimage to Mecca that ended 27 years and 75,000 miles later. His engrossing account of that journey provides vivid scenes from Morocco, southern Russia, India, China, and elsewhere. "Essential reading . . . the ultimate in real life adventure stories." -- "History in Review."

" The crossing of America's first great divide -- the Appalachian Mountains -- has been a source of much fascination but has received little attention from modern historians. In the eighteenth century, the Wilderness Road and Ohio River routes into Kentucky presented daunting natural barriers and the threat of Indian attack. Running Mad for Kentucky brings this adventure to life. Primarily a collection of travel diaries, it includes day-to-day accounts that illustrate the dangers thousands of Americans, adult and child, black and white, endured to establish roots in the wilderness. Ellen Eslinger's vivid and extensive introductory essay draws on numerous diaries, letters, and oral histories of trans-Appalachian travelers to examine the historic consequences of the journey, a pivotal point in the saga of the continent's indigenous people. The book demonstrates how the fabled soil of Kentucky captured the imagination of a young nation.

" In 1908 John C. Campbell was commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to conduct a survey of conditions in Appalachia and the aid work being done in these areas to create "the central repository of data concerning conditions in the mountains to which workers in the field might turn." Originally published in 1921, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland details Campbell's experiences and findings during his travels in the region, observing unique aspects of mountain communities such as their religion, family life, and forms of entertainment. Campbell's landmark work paved the way for folk schools, agricultural cooperatives, handicraft guilds, the frontier nursing service, better roads, and a sense of pride in mountain life -- the very roots of Appalachian preservation.

Journal of a Tour of Discovery Across the Blue Mountains in New South Wales in the Year 1813 was first published in 1823. It is a romantic and descriptive narrative of the journey to find a path across the Blue Mountains and received a great reception both in England and in Australia.

Of the 300 Spanish explorers who set out to discover and conquer the wilderness of North America, only four returned--after covering about 6,000 miles in the course of eight harrowing years. Cabeza de Vaca's incredible account of his 1528-1536 expedition of what is now the southern and southwestern United States and northern Mexico is unparalleled in the history of exploration. The first European to see and report sightings of the buffalo and the Mississippi River, he presents a narrative that crackles with excitement and suspense, from interactions with friendly and hostile Indians and observations on their culture, to passionate descriptions of the pristine beauty of the American wilderness. Unabridged republication of"

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.

Liveright is proud to make available in paperback its reissue of the classic 1926 edition of The Travels of Marco Polo. Working from the traditional lyrical Marsden translation, editor Manuel Komroff corrected it against Henry Yule's magisterial two-volume work, including a chapter missing from the Marsden, to create a wonderfully readable and authoritative version. The artist Witold Gordon created thirty-two two-color woodcut illustrations for the original edition, published again here for the first time in over fifty years. Chronicling the thirteenth-century world from Venice, his birthplace, to the far reaches of Asia, Marco Polo tells of the foreign peoples he meets as he travels by foot, horse, and boat through places including Persia, Tibet, India, and, finally, China. There he serves in the court of Kublai Khan, then the leader of the most advanced and powerful country in the world. Polo also ventures to Shangtu, made immortal in Coleridge's poem "Xanadu."

This important archive of a five year window in Arthur Evans's diaries of his work in Crete celebrates the 1000th publication in the Archaeopress BAR series. Meticulously researched and transcribed by Ann Brown, research assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, Evans's notebooks include observations, drawings, descriptions and ideas. The introduction provides the background to the arrogant, single-minded, .. yet] extremely hardworking, quick-minded' man and his fascination with the archaeology of Crete. Also includes a gazetter of sites and short biographies of people mentioned in the text and as well as a catalogue of objects referred to.

From 1773 to 1777, naturalist William Bartram journeyed through the American South from the Carolinas to Florida to the Mississippi River. Bartram's classic account, "Travels," documents what he saw: a world of flora, fauna, cultures, and terrains unknown to most readers of his time--and, we too often assume, lost to us today.

"An Outdoor Guide to Bartram's Travels" reconstructs as closely as possible the original routes Bartram took. Featuring some fifty thoroughly tested and researched tours, the guide takes today's outdoor enthusiasts and history buffs along Bartram's path through what were once colonial towns and outposts, native kingdoms, and unspoiled wilderness. Some tours can be taken by car or bicycle; others can be taken only as Bartram himself would have traveled--on foot, by canoe, or on horseback. The tours are supplemented with more than 140 maps and photographs as well as informative sidebars and listings of nearby points of interest.

As the guide points out details of both the natural and manmade environments to be seen along each tour, it imparts an understanding of the forces at work on the landscape. Visitors to Paynes Prairie in north central Florida, for instance, are urged to notice not only networks of manmade dikes built in the last century but also evidence of current efforts to dismantle them and let the wetlands again manage itself.

At one level, the guide is an invitation into the past, to travel along with Bartram as he visits the lands of the American colonists, the Creek, the Seminole, and the Cherokee--all on the eve of the American Revolution. At another level, it is an invitation to the present: to see how the some parts of the American Southeast have changed in the last two centuries while others have survived in all their wild splendor. From the mountain grandeur of the Blue Ridge to the coastal beauty of Cumberland Island, from the formal gardens of Charleston to the False River plantations near the Mississippi River, the present answers the past in "An Outdoor Guide to Bartram's Travels."

In the early spring of 1358 Francis Petrarch was invited by his friend Giovanni Mandelli, a leading military and political figure of Visconti Milan, to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pleased at the invitation, Petrarch nevertheless declined to undertake the journey. Fear of the sea, of shipwreck, and of "slow death and nausea worse than death" held him back. While Petrarch would not make the literal journey he offered Mandelli a pilgrimage guide instead of his companionship: "nevertheless, I shall be with you in spirit, and since you have requested it, I will accompany you with this writing, which will be for you like a brief itinerary."

Composed over three days between March and April of 1358, the Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostri Yesu Christi takes the characteristic Petrarchan form of an epistle to a friend. Delivered to his correspondent in the form of an elegant booklet, the work presents a literary self-portrait that was meant to stand as "the more stable effigy of my soul and intellect" as well as "a description of places." Although the Holy Land is the ostensible destination of the pilgrimage, more than half of this charming guidebook is devoted to Petrarch's leisurely and loving descriptions of Italy's physical and cultural landscape. Upon reaching the Holy Land, Petrarch transforms himself into one of the greatest ten-cities-in-four-days Baedekers of all time, as Mandelli and the reader race through sacred landmarks and sites and end up, not at the sepulchrum domini nostri, but at the tomb of Alexander.

Theodore Cachey has prepared the first English-language translation of the Itinerarium. Based on an authoritative 14th-century manuscript in the BibliotecaStatale of Cremona, which is, according to the explicit declaration of the scribe, a copy of Petrarch's 1358 autograph, the translation is accompanied by the manuscript reproduced in facsimile and by a transcription of the Latin text. Cachey's extensive introduction and notes discuss Petrarch's text within the multiple contexts of travel in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and contemporary political and cultural issues, including Petrarch's relation to emergent forms of "cartographic writing" and Renaissance "self-fashioning." Petrarch's little book reveals him to be a man of his time, but one whose voice speaks clearly to us across centuries. The Itinerarium is a jewel rediscovered for the modern reader.

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.

In April 1805 Lewis and Clark and their party set out from Fort Mandan following the Missouri River westward. This volume recounts their travels through country never before explored by white people. With new personnel, including the Shoshone Indian woman Sacagawea, her husband Toussaint Charbonneau, and their baby, nicknamed Pomp, the party spent the rest of the spring and early summer toiling up the Missouri. Along the way they portaged the difficult Great Falls, encountered grizzly bears, cataloged new species of plants and animals, and mapped rivers and streams.