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 ......
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 ......
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!"
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.
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 ......
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 ......
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.
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 ......
