Travelling back in time from the confines of your home
Travel has lost its magic today. There was a time when it was possible to meet indigenous peoples living with nature- or journey to wild lands from the African savannah to the South American rainforest.
Nothing today is remote as the cellphone has connected everything. But when we feel a yearning for those rolling plains with bison, or the Amazonian canopy, thankfully we have the old travel classics to turn to.
Among their yellowed pages we discover a world that still has many wonders to yield and many mysteries to penetrate.
Here we have a selection of those old yarns- from the Middle Ages down to the ‘roaring twenties’ when the motorcar was making its rather clumsy way down English country roads.
These compelling sagas are all available online for free.
The Travels of Marco Polo
A medieval bestseller from the 13th century- written before printing was invented- the fantastic tales of the Venetian Marco Polo’s travels in Asia were so opulent that he was called ‘Old Millions’ (in Italian)- denoting a million lies (maybe) or the millions of ‘impossible’ oriental jewels he described.
The Travels- not relatively big- is divided into four books spanning 1271 to 1295. The first describes the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia on the way to China. The second deals with China, where Marco was a diplomat for the emperor Kublai Khan. As a special envoy he was sent to parts of Asia never visited by Europeans before, and the third book is on countries like Japan, Burma, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
He carried a stamped metal packet as his official credentials from the emperor. In the fourth book Marco described the Mongol wars and northern lands like Russia.
Despite centuries of doubt- even as to whether Marco Polo so much as visited China- modern scholars concur there is no other way he could have known such historical detail- down to the six Christian churches in Hangzhou.
His tales were also pared of the usual fables by travellers to China- such as ‘monsters who were women while their menfolk were dogs’. Marco Polo’s book inspired Columbus on his voyage to discover America.
Read on Gutenberg.org
Travels with a donkey in the Cevennes
This journal by Robert Louis Stevenson is a classic travelogue where the romantic soul who wrote Treasure Island goes hiking with a very temperamental donkey called Modestine. They travel through the Cevennes Mountains in South Central France- barren, heather-filled, sparsely populated and impoverished.
Stevenson was in his late twenties. Cutting through the landscape similar to rural Scotland, he was mistaken for a peddler because of the donkey. The villagers were also horrified that he slept out alone, given the wolves and the robbers.
Stevenson slept in one of the first sleeping bags ever and said of his journey:
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move…. When the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future?”
Coming out in 1879, the book was a pioneering classic of outdoor literature- inspiring people from John Muir to John Hillaby.
Read on Gutenberg.org
The Worst Journey in the World
This epic, nightmare Antarctic journey was undertaken in 1911 to collect three emperor penguin eggs. The author, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, was part of the Terra Nova expedition, and was required to collect the eggs as emperor penguins were thought to be some of the most primitive birds in the world. Their embryos could possibly reveal links between all birds and their reptile ancestors.
But the penguin lays its eggs in June- the Arctic midwinter- and Cherry with Henry Boers and Bill Wilson set out in the freezing, pitch-black darkness to Cape Crozier- 70 miles from the Terra Nova base camp.
Their harrowing adventure in the name of evolutionary science- from which Cherry never really recovered- is told in this ever-popular book.
Two of the three crusading naturalists were to die soon. Only the three eggs remain in the London Natural History Museum- an enduring testimony to man’s dedication to science and nature.
Read on manybooks.net
The Call of England
Nostalgic like a curlew call- this book was written by the man once known as the world’s best-loved travel writer. The British journalist H. V. Morton evoked in his books the idea that old England- timeless pastoral England with old cathedrals, farmyards, churchyards and country inns- was still alive to be discovered outside cities in the 1920s.
Travelling in his Bullnose Morris, he wrote of a land touched with history, tradition, legend and lore- and whisked up an Arcadian old England even amidst burgeoning industry.
In the last decade however, Morton has ended up with a less savoury reputation due to new biographies- as an anti-Semitic adulterer- a shock for readers given the avuncular, jaunty tone of the whole Morton corpus.
But these claims in our tell-all age (where we are too quick to judge) should not stop you from enjoying the romantic call of England- which touches something deep and indescribably English amidst historic sites, villages, hedges, moors, cottages and country lanes.
Read on archive.org