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Gail Pool

TraveLit--A blog about travel literature. 

     Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

Book Review

April 11, 2015

The Last Grain Race
By Eric Newby. First published 1956. William Collins, 2014, 235 pp.

The Last Grain Race was Eric Newby’s first book, but it already has the essence of the travel works that would follow: the challenging journey, the wonderfully precise writing, the self-deprecating modesty, and, perhaps above all, the humor. In 1938, at the age of 18, fed up with his London job at an advertising agency and inspired by a friend’s eccentric father—who he is convinced was a member of the British Secret Service—he signed up as an apprentice on the Moshulu, a four-masted barque headed for Australia.

The Finnish-owned Moshulu, which left from Belfast, was one of the sailing ships that would pick up grain in Australia to carry back to Europe, and the return journey really was a race. In 1939, thirteen ships participated, including the Moshulu. As Newby says, although he didn’t know it at the time, this was to be the ship’s last voyage in the grain trade, and it was also to be the last of the races. His book not only records his own grueling if colorful experience, it takes us back to an era long gone. Read More 

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Book Review

April 2, 2015

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide
By Peter Allison. Lyons Press, 2007, 2014. 272 pp.

The contemporary African safari is a fascinating mix of the natural and the artificial, the wild and the touristic. Peter Allison captures these contradictions in Whatever You Do, Don’t Run, the first of several books he has written about his adventures as a safari guide.

Allison would not have seemed a likely candidate for a guide when he arrived in Africa from Sydney, Australia, at the age of 19. He was not especially athletic—indeed, he describes himself as uncoordinated. He didn’t know how to drive. But he fell in love with the animals and the land, and undertook the serious training necessary, learning about the wildlife, the plants, the insects, and the terrain. Read More 

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Book Review

March 25, 2015

Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North
By Peter Freuchen. Introduction by Gretel Ehrlich. Echo Point Books and Media. 400 pp.

Arctic Adventure isn’t strictly a travel book. But then travel itself isn’t a strictly defined category—it so often bleeds into memoir, autobiography, history. Freuchen’s book is all of these and ethnography as well. In 1910 he left his native Denmark to set up a trading post in north Greenland with the explorer Knud Rasmussen, and over the next 14 years he settled among the Inuit, married an Inuit woman, Navarana, and started a family. Arctic Adventure draws a vibrant portrait of the Inuit, whose fascinating culture is so different from ours in the West.

Of course, as its title suggests, the book recounts adventures as well. Inevitably, it is filled with hair-raising tales of survival—this is the Arctic, after all, and Freuchen is an explorer. “Traveling along an unknown coast,” he writes, “not knowing what or whom to expect next, is the most exciting experience in the world.” He and Rasmussen cross the Greenland ice cap by dog sledge, a feat that had not been accomplished on such a difficult route before. On one journey, he and his companions are caught by the ice breaking up all around them, and toward the end of his stay he—with a badly injured leg—and a young man just manage to make it on a trek through heavy clay. Exhaustion and near-starvation on these journeys are the norm.

Nevertheless, Read More 

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Book Review

March 10, 2015

The Way of the World
By Nicolas Bouvier. Translated from the French by Robyn Marsack. Introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Drawings by Thierry Vernet. Originally self-published in Geneva, Switzerland in 1963 as L’Usage du Monde. New York Review Classics, 1992, 318 pp.

It’s tempting to gush over The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier. The two blurbs on my paperback edition, both from respectable reviews, call the work a masterpiece, as does the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in his introduction—high praise indeed! I’ve always avoided the word masterpiece, but let me say at the start: this is truly a wonderful book.

Bouvier’s journey begins in 1953, when he sets out from Geneva to meet his artist friend, Thierry Vernet, in Belgrade and fulfill a childhood dream of traveling to the East. Their destination is the Khyber Pass, but their plans are vague: they have two free years to travel, money for four months, a beat-up Fiat, and a vast amount of youthful energy. Read More 

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Travel Quotation

February 23, 2015

"Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you—or unmaking you."
―Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World


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Book Review

February 21, 2015

Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849. Volume 1.
Edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes. Introduction by Anne M. Butler. University of Nebraska Press, 1983, 1996, 280 pp.

Like other American youngsters, I learned about the 19th-century pioneers heading west seeking a new and better life. But my knowledge about their travels was limited, an abstract concept. I certainly had no sense of the remarkable journeys fleshed out by the pioneers themselves in these letters and diaries.

Covered Wagon Women 1840-1849—the first in an eleven-volume series—brings together writings of thirteen pioneer women, including survivors of the Donner Party that went so tragically astray. Most of the women are Anglo Saxon Protestant, but among them are a young Quaker and a Mormon midwife, who delivers babies on her journey from Nebraska to Salt Lake City. The letters, and especially the extended journals, offer great detail about the daily travels, as the groups move slowly onward—“made 12 miles,” “made 20 miles,” “made 4 miles”—struggling with bad weather, bad water, steep inclines, hard-to-ford rivers, runaway cattle, illness, and many deaths.  Read More 

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Travel Quotation

January 25, 2015

"Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius."
―William Blake

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Book Review

January 10, 2015

Two Against the Ice: A Classic Arctic Survival Story and a Remarkable Account of Companionship in the Face of Adversity
By Ejnar Mikkelsen. Translated from the Danish by Maurice Michael. Foreword by Lawrence Millman. First published in 1955. Steerforth Press, 2003, 206 pp.

“Terrible trips make for excellent reading,” says Lawrence Millman in his foreword to Two Against the Ice, by the great Danish Arctic explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen. As a longtime reader of disaster journeys, I can only agree. These trips don’t have to take place in icy lands. I was certainly gripped by Cooper’s Creek, Alan Moorehead’s account of the Burke and Wills expedition into the center of Australia. But there’s no question that many of the greatest terrible trips have been set in Arctic or Antarctic regions. Think of the journeys of Shackleton, Scott, Mawson—and add Mikkelsen to the list.

Mikkelsen seems to have been destined for the north. When he was a youth, already an adventurer working on ships in the Far East, an Indian in Calcutta, he says, “foretold me a future in a land so white and desolate that he had never imagined anything like it.” This proved to be true. In the north, he found his calling: he went on to explore Greenland, Siberia, Alaska. “What are you to do,” he asks, “when you have been born with eternal unrest in your body and are drawn to none but those parts of the world that sensible people regard as fit only for fools?” Read More 

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Book Review

January 5, 2015

The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads
By Robert A. Kaster. University of Chicago Press, 2012, 124 pp.

Like many travel books, The Appian Way, by Robert A. Kaster is cast as a road trip—and what an extraordinary road it travels. The longest road in Italy, extending from Rome to Brindisi in the south, the Appian Way was conceived by Appius Claudius Caecus near the end of the 4th century bc. The first great road of Europe, it bears the ghostly imprint of the countless soldiers, tradesmen, farmers, and pilgrims who have traversed it. It is a road saturated with history.  Read More 

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Travel Quotation

December 30, 2014

“As well as willingness, humility, and optimism, a traveler needs the patience of a saint.”
―Paul Theroux

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