(Note that we are prying: Montaigne did not intend his travel journal for publication, but it is too rich a document to be forgotten, and we will be discreet.) [loc. 2529]
The travellers' tales in this volume are organised by geographical region, and then by period: so, under 'Central Asia and India' we find Fâxiân (a Buddhist monk) travelling in 399CE; Alexandra David-Neel, entering Tibet in disguise in 1924; and missionary Mildred Cable, travelling to Huozhou in 1901.
Statistically it's an interesting mix: 8 women, 13 men; the earliest is Herodotus, ~428BCE (his account was one of the finds at Oxyrhynchus), the most recent Gladys Aylward, 1932. Many journeyed for religious reasons, others for sheer love of adventure. (And one chap crossed America on a penny-farthing, because he could.)
I read this book over a period of several months, partly because some of the travelogues are better reading than others (I especially enjoyed the chapters on Robert Louis Stephenson, Alexandra David-Neel and Octavie Coudreau) and partly because I found it more pleasant to dip into these tales -- remote in time and space, but filled with timeless concerns and recognisable idiosyncrasies -- than to read them all in one rush. For one thing, a lot of the journeys start off with the problems of travel in that place at that time ...
A few minor issues ('white and guilt paintwork'; a claim that the lowest temperature on Earth was recorded in Tibet; a reluctance to call Byzantium by that name; references to 19th-century attitudes in a chapter about a 20th-century journey) but they didn't spoil an intriguing book, which introduced me to travellers that I hadn't heard of before.
No comments:
Post a Comment