Robert Louis Stevenson was not only a gifted writer, he was also an indefatigable traveller. His thirst for adventure was formed by his boyhood visits to remote Scottish lighthouses, and he spent much of his life fleeing the rigours of cold climates and social orthodoxy. Along the way he canoed through Belgium and France, booked passage to and ......
Travels in Egypt and Nubia is the travel journal of Giovanni Belzoni, and tells the story of three journeys made between 1815 and 1819, describing magical monuments, such as the temple at Abu Simbel, the pyramid at Khafre and the tomb of Seti I.
Presents the author's account of his five-year journey aboard the Royal Navy ship HMS Beagle (1831-1836) as it surveyed the coasts of South America, New Zealand, Australia, and the famous Galapagos Archipelago. This title provides examples of the scientist's reasoning ability and intriguing glimpses into his thought processes.
The Road to Angkor describes a journey through Indo-China from the ancient capital of Champa (now south Vietnam) to Angkor, capital of the old Khmer empire in Cambodia. Christopher Pym originally went to Indo-China in 1956.
This special facsimlie of the original book provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of two artists and their journey of discovery in a world that would be soon be transformed and in parts lost forever. Altogether this affecting and intimate publication has an important place in the history of Surrealist literature.
Few thought of travelling to the Alps until John Ruskin extolled their rugged beauty in 1842. More than anyone, it was 25-year-old Edward Whymper who imbued them once again with a sense of alarming mystery after his Alpine memoir and first ascent of the Matterhorn.
Ernest Shackleton sailed to the South Pole as the First World War broke out in Europe, intent on making the first ever trans-Antarctic crossing. South! is Shackletons first-hand account of the epic expedition, which he described as the last great journey on earth. During the journey their ship, the Endurance, became trapped by ice and was crushed, ......
Joshua Slocum spent a lifetime at sea. He ran away from his Nova Scotia home at the age of 14 and for the next 35 years he sailed the world holding every shipboard rank. When a ship under his command was wrecked on the coast of Brazil in 1887, it seemed that his maritime career had ended in disgrace. Not one for retiring to earthly pastures, ......
The earliest surviving instance of sustained first-person travel narrative in Arabic Mission to the Volga is a pioneering text of peerless historical and literary value. In its pages, we move north on a diplomatic mission from Baghdad to the upper reaches of the Volga River in what is now central Russia. In this colorful documentary from the ......
Alfred Russel Wallaces The Malay Archipelago is a work of astounding breadth and originality that chronicles the British naturalists scientific exploration of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and New Guinea between 1854 and 1862. An intrepid explorer who earned his living by collecting bird skins, Wallace also catalogued the vast number of plant and ......
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, gives a fascinating description of life in the untamed Colorado Territory at a time when it was only notionally under the control of the American authorities, having been brutally seized from the Indians. Her intrepid journeys through remote areas are relayed in the form of fluent, achingly beautiful.
Robert Louis Stevenson was not only a gifted writer, he was also an indefatigable traveller. His thirst for adventure was formed by his boyhood visits to remote Scottish lighthouses, and he spent much of his life fleeing the rigours of cold climates and social orthodoxy. Along the way he travelled with a donkey through the Cevennes, booked passage ......
Edith Wharton journeyed to Morocco in the final days of the First World War, at a time when there was no guidebook to the country. In Morocco is the classic account of her expedition. A seemingly unlikely chronicler, Wharton, more usually associated with American high society, explored the country for a month by military vehicle. Travelling from ......
Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman whose extensive travels and writings earned her the first female membership of the Royal Geographical Society, visited Malaya, Singapore, Indo-China and Hong Kong in 1879.
Following the Equator is the fifth and most interesting of Twain's travel narratives, and the one that most bears out the declaration that he once wrote to his mother: "I am wild with impatience to move - move -Move!"
Ambrose Rathborne was an Australian mining engineer who moved first to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) as a coffee planter, and then in the 1880s to the Malay States, where he worked as a planter and entrepreneur. Camping and Tramping in Malaya: Fifteen Years in the Native States of the Malay Peninsula was first published in 1898, and is a lively ......
The ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the establishment of a substantial network of maritime trade across the Indian Ocean, providing the real-life background to the Sinbad tales. An exceptional exemplar of Arabic travel writing, Accounts of China and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes about the lands and peoples of this diverse ......