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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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 six narratives by Venetian diplomats of travel to Persia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Barbaro's account is given in a sixteenth-century translation; the others were made for this edition. These stories of travel, by land and by sea, to distant destinations are full of engaging detail about the customs of the countries visited, and also about the negotiations by which the Venetian Signoria and Uzun Hassan, the ruler of Persia, tried to form an alliance against the Ottoman Turks.

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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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.

The most comprehensive portrait yet of Richard Hakluyt, indefatigable promoter of English colonization in America Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts. Hakluyt's Promise demonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations-many unpublished since the sixteenth century-and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age. Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.

In the eighteenth century, the academic scholar Ibn al-Tayyib made a rihla (journey) from Morocco to the Hijaz, in modern day Saudi Arabia, documenting his travels in the translated manuscript "Rihla ila al-Hijaz", now stored in Leipzig University Library. Lahlali and Al-Dihan here introduce the manuscript and provide a commentary on this remarkable journey and the socio-political climate of the time in which it took place. Al-Tayyib's detailed manuscript contains accounts of observations he made during his travels and his comments regarding the social, economic and political conditions of the countries he visited, as well as comments about the scholars whom he was able to meet. The work is considered the most important reference to the author's life and culture, and is an important source in terms of the linguistic derivations of geographical names. Lahlali and Al-Dihan also provide an insight into al-Tayyib's life and work during the period that he spent outside North Africa. A full translation of the manuscript is provided in this book which serves as a reference for further study.

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)

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.

A series of letters composed by William Beckford as a result of a grand tour on the continent in 1780-81, 'Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents' is not simply a travel journal, but a composition which provides occasional glimpses into the inner thoughts and dreams of the author.

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.

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.

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"

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."

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."

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.

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.

Provence through the eyes of its writers - those who wrote of it in Provencal or French and also those visitors who were moved by its beauty - that is the inspiration behind A Literary Guide to Provence. In this compact travel guide, Marseilles native Daniel Vitaglione presents a literary panorama of the region of southern France from the Avignon of Mistral to Colette's St. Tropez. Including such sites as the birthplace of Nostradamus and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle, A Literary Guide to Provence presents a thousand years of history entwined with maps and photos that provide readers on tour with a sense of the historical import of this most beautiful of regions even as they experience it firsthand. Both authors of Provencal ancestry and those who came to love and live in Provence are featured in this comprehensive and enchanting picture of the garden place of France. The Riviera enticed Virginia Woolf. Toulon inspired two novels by Georges Sand. Robert Louis Stevenson resided in Hyeres, as did Edith Wharton. Le Lavandou was Willa Cather's favorite place. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in St. Raphael and Juan-les-Pins, where he wrote Tender is the Night. This illustrated guide follows in these writers' footsteps, and the practical information on hotels and restaurants (phones, web sites, email, etc.) make it the ideal traveling companion for armchair tourists and those who cannot resist seeing Provence for themselves.

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.

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.

For years, serious naturalists have treasured their copies of Francis Harper's naturalist's edition of The Travels of William Bartram as the definitive version of Bartram's pioneering survey. Complete with notes and commentary, an annotated index, maps, a bibliography, and a general index, this classic is now back in print for the first time in decades. Harper's knowledge of natural history transforms Bartram's accounts of the southern states from a curious record of personal observation from the past into a guidebook useful to modern biologists, historians, ornithologists, and ethnologists. In 1773 the naturalist and writer William Bartram set out from Philadelphia on a four-year journey ranging from the Carolinas to Florida and Mississippi. For Bartram it was the perfect opportunity to pursue his interest in observing and drawing plants and birds. Combining precise and detailed scientific observations with a profound appreciation of nature, he produced a written account of his journey that would later influence both scientists and poets, including Wordsworth and Coleridge. Bartram was among the first to integrate scientific observations and personal commentary. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he condemned the idea that nature was simply a resource to be consumed. Instead, he championed the aesthetic and scientific values of an "infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing." From his field journals he prepared a report for his benefactor and a larger report for the public. The former was rediscovered much later and published in 1943; the latter was published in 1791 and became the basis for the modern Bartram's Travels.

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.

At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a “sensibility on tour,” Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer’s impressions during his 1849 voyages. Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert’s traveling companion, Maxime Du Camp, Francis Steegmuller reconstructs his journey through the bazaars and brothels of Cairo and down the Nile to the Red Sea.

Volume 2 of great explorer's classic account of explorations of lakes of Central Africa, perilous journey down unexplored Congo River. Incredible hardships, perseverance. Total in set: 149 illustrations. Map.

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.