Maps, Antiquarian Maps
This detail from the Spitsbergen map, above, shows the Seamorce, or walrus.
TraveLit--A blog about travel literature.
Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Book Review: Greater Nowheres
February 22, 2016
Greater Nowheres: A Journey Through the Australian Bush
By Dave Finkelstein and Jack London. Foreword by Philip Caputo. Harper & Row, 1988, 313 pp.
The challenge of traveling in the Australian bush is written in the names of its locations: “Skeleton Point,” “Disaster Bay,” “Foul Point,” “Disappointment Bight,” “Useless Loop,” “Point Torment.” Inhabited by lethal snakes and insects, afflicted by weatherly extremes, endowed with a landscape typically described as desolate, bleak, and stark, and so underpopulated that the unprepared traveler risks dying unaided, Australia’s vast Outback is not a destination for the frivolous tourist.
Undaunted by the challenge, Dave Finkelstein and Jack London, two “middle-aged dropouts”—the first a former lawyer and China specialist turned sometime journalist, the second a former college instructor turned fisherman—set out to tour the bush. Read More
Antiquarian Maps
February 11, 2016
Barentsz map
I've just returned from the Miami Map Fair, and I've been thinking about how antiquarian maps, which are based on journeys, represent a pictorial kind of travel writing.
This is the so-called "Barentsz map" of the arctic. It's a beautiful map--my favorite in my husband's extensive arctic collection. (I especially love the sea monsters.)
This map is claimed to be based on charts drawn by the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz, containing information gained from his three voyages to the north in 1594, 1595, and 1596-7 in search of the Northeast Passage. In the last of these voyages, Barentsz and his crew were trapped in the ice and forced to overwinter in Novaya Zemlya, where they fought off polar bears and struggled to survive. In the long retreat south in the spring, Barentsz died.
There are powerful stories in these old maps. Read More
Travel Quotation
February 10, 2016
"The wise traveller travels only in imagination...Those are the best journeys, the journeys that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your illusions."
―W. Somerset Maugham
Book Review: The Path to Rome
January 31, 2016
The Path to Rome
By Hilaire Belloc. Various editions and Project Gutenberg.
First published in 1902 and continuously in print ever since, Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome chronicles his journey from his birthplace near Toul in France to Rome, “the centre of the world.” An ardent Catholic, Belloc is decidedly on a pilgrimage. But, a canny writer as well—one of the most prolific writers of his era—he has also crafted a secular tale of adventure.
Like any good pilgrim, Belloc starts off with vows: “I will walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing,” he writes. “I will sleep rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St. Peter’s on the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul.” He is also determined to walk by night and sleep by day, when it will be too hot to hike, and to travel in a straight line.
One of the humorous threads running through the book is how, one by one, he breaks each of these vows Read More
Travel Quotation
January 24, 2016
I wish I Married a Travel Junkie, by Samuel Jay Keyser--a travel-averse spouse married to an intrepid traveler--had been better written and edited, but in view of my own experience in New Guinea, I definitely responded to this observation:
"The average traveler when asked why he or she travels almost always responds with something like, "I want to experience someone else's culture. That's a red herring. How can you experience someone else's culture from an air-conditioned bus going 20 miles an hour through the streets of Pusan? All right. Get off the bus and walk through the fish market. You haven't experienced someone else's culture. All you've experienced is a lot of fish for sale. Most anthropologists spend years trying to get inside someone else's culture. Many of them come back home to a nervous breakdown for their efforts. Culture hopping isn't easy." Read More
Book Review
December 27, 2015
Crete
By Barry Unsworth. National Geographic, 2004, 170 pp.
Even for the Greeks of old, “Crete was the most venerable and ancient place imaginable,” says the novelist Barry Unsworth in his chronicle of a trip he took to the island with his wife one spring. According to myth, Crete was the birthplace of Zeus, and it was where Zeus later carried Europa, daughter of a Phoenician king, having seduced her in the shape of a bull. “Crete then, not only gave Europe its name, it was where Europe began,” he says, “a truth Cretans have always known.”
Writing with imagery that is evocative but not flamboyant, Unsworth conveys the antiquity—as well as the spirit—of this rugged island which abounds in caves, gorges, and magnificent views of the sea. Visiting ruins, Read More
Links of Interest
December 23, 2015
Four "newish" travel magazines noted by Wynelle Evans, a writer interested in travel. "Have not read the magazines themselves" yet, she says, but thought they might of interest:
Avaunt
Sidetracked
The Travel Almanac
Roads & Kingdoms
If you do take a look at these publications, please let readers here know what you think.
Links of Interest
December 16, 2015
A list of favorite books from Ben Redmond (via Twitter):
The Best 11 Travel Books I Read in 2015