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 ......
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, ......
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, ......
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 ......
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 ......
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 ......
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 ......