A Traveller's Year

Book excerpt: A collection of anecdotes for each day of the year on the subject of travel and exploration from Charles Darwin, Michael Palin, Evelyn Waugh, and others. With an emphasis on the period 1750–1950—the classic era of both European exploration and diary-writing—this anthology features excerpts that convey men and women’s experiences of travel and discovery from the sixteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The authors of the pieces range from famous explorers such as Captains Cook and Scott to modern travel writers journeying through the contemporary world, from people who pushed back the boundaries of geographical knowledge to people who wrote about what they did on their summer holidays. The book includes an introduction, explanatory notes and mini-biographies of all the contributors, including: Gertrude Bell (woman traveller in the Middle East) James Boswell (travels in Scotland and the Hebrides) William Cobbett (Rural Rides through England) Christopher Columbus (journals of his voyages to America) Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle) Captain James Cook (voyages in the Pacific) Washington Irving (American writer travelled in Europe in first decades of nineteenth century) Edward Lear (landscape painter and nonsense writer produced journals of his travels in Greece, Corsica, Near East etc) Lewis & Clark (journals of famous journey of American exploration) William Morris (wrote a journal of a trip to Iceland in 1870s) Michael Palin (a Python abroad) Mungo Park (African explorer in early nineteenth century) Captain Robert Falcon Scott (doomed journey to South Pole) Evelyn Waugh (diaries of 1930s travels in Mediterranean and beyond) William John Wills (explorer of Australia)