Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language. Each title is reset in a modern typeface to create a series that every lover of fine travel literature will want to collect and keep.
The Road to Angkor describes a journey through Indo-China from the ancient capital of Champa (now south Vietnam) to Angkor, capital of the old Khmer empire in Cambodia. Christopher Pym originally went to Indo-China in 1956. He stayed 20 months and during 1957 made the seven-week journey described in this book. He travelled the 450 […]
“The Voyage of the Beagle” is Charles Darwin’s diary of his travels between 1831 and 1836, when he developed many of the ideas that eventually led to his theory of natural selection. Charles Darwin joined HMS Beagle when he was just 22 at the request of Captain FitzRoy, who wanted to have a naturalist on […]
“Travels in Egypt and Nubia” is the travel journal of Giovanni Belzoni, and tells the story of three ground-breaking journeys he made between 1815 and 1819, describing magical monuments such as the temple at Abu Simbel, the pyramid at Khafre and the tomb of Seti I. Giovanni Belzoni was one of the great 19th century […]
“A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains” gives a fascinating description of life in the untamed Colorado Territory at a time when it was only notionally under the control of the American authorities, having been brutally seized from the Indians. Her intrepid journeys through remote areas are relayed in the form of fluent, achingly beautiful, […]
“Following the Equator” the fifth and arguably the most interesting of Mark Twain’s travel narratives, is the one that most bears out the declaration that he once wrote to his mother: “I am wild with impatience to move – move – Move!” Mark Twain enjoyed immense public popularity during his lifetime, and was already one […]
“The Golden Chersonese”, named after the ancient name given to the Malay Peninsula by the Greek scholar, Ptolemy, is a collection of 23 letters written by Isabella Bird to her sister Hennie in Scotland Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman whose extensive travels and writings earned her the first female membership of the Royal Geographical Society, visited […]
Ambrose Rathborne was an Australian mining engineer, who moved first to Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) as a coffee planter, and then in the 1880s to the Malay States where he worked as a planter and entrepreneur. Camping and Tramping in Malaya: Fifteen Years’ in the Native States of the Malay Peninsula, first published in […]
Edith Wharton journeyed to Morocco in the final days of the First World War, at a time when there was no guidebook to the country. In Morocco is the classic account of her expedition. A seemingly unlikely chronicler, Wharton, more usually associated with American high society, explored the country for a month by military vehicle. […]
Henry James was a renowned observer of European culture, both in his fiction and in his life. In particular, he loved Italy, visiting it 14 times and setting several of his novels in the country. Between 1873 and 1909 he also wrote numerous essays and travelogues that were ultimately collected into one volume and published […]
“The Malay Archipelago” is a work of astounding breadth and originality that chronicles the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s scientific exploration of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and New Guinea between 1854 and 1862. An intrepid explorer who earned his living by collecting bird skins, Wallace also catalogued the vast number of plant and animal species that […]
Joshua Slocum spent a lifetime at sea.He ran away from his Nova Scotia home at the age of fourteen and for the next thirty-five years he sailed the world holding every shipboard rank. When a ship under his command was wrecked on the coast of Brazil in 1887, it seemed that his maritime career had […]
Ernest Shackleton sailed to the South Pole as the First World War broke out in Europe, intent on making the first ever trans-Antarctic crossing. South! is Shackleton’s first-hand account of the epic expedition, which he described as ‘the last great journey on earth’. During the journey their ship, the Endurance, became trapped by ice and […]
Mungo Park set off from his home in the Scottish borders in May 1795 at the age of 23 to discover the course of the River Niger in west Africa. When he reappeared in England more than two and a half years later, he had been presumed dead, and the tale of his perilous journey […]
Robert Louis Stevenson was not only a gifted writer, he was also an indefatigable traveller. His thirst for adventure was formed by his boyhood visits to remote Scottish lighthouses, and he spent much of his life fleeing the rigours of cold climes and social orthodoxy. Along the way he canoed through Belgium and France, booked […]