John Beaufoy Publishing

NATURAL HISTORY · DIVING & UNDERWATER · HISTORY · TRAVEL

Stanfords Travel Classics

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.

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman whose extensive travels and writings earned her the first female membership of the Royal Geographic Society, visited the Rocky Mountains alone during the autumn of 1873. 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 […]

Following the Equator

Mark Twain

Mark Twain enjoyed immense public popularity during his lifetime, and was already one the best-known authors in America when, in 1895, he set out on a worldwide lecture tour, undertaken to help him recover from bankruptcy following the failure of his publishing company. Starting in Paris, he journeyed across America to Vancouver, and thence, via […]

The Golden Chersonese

Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman whose extensive travels and writings earned her the first female membership of the Royal Geographical Society, visited Malaya, Singapore, Indo-China and Hong Kong in 1879. She wrote 23 letters describing her adventures to her sister Hennie in Scotland, and named the collection The Golden Chersonese after the ancient name given to […]

Afoot in England

W. H. Hudson

William Henry Hudson was born in Argentina, the son of American settlers from New England. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna, and, as a young man, travelled widely on horseback, visiting Brazil, Uruguay, and Patagonia. In 1869, at the age of 28, he settled in England and began a new life […]

Camping and Tramping in Malaya

Ambrose B. Rathborne

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 […]

An Inland Voyage

Robert Louis Stevenson

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 travelled through the Cevennes with a […]

In Morocco

Edith Wharton

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. […]

The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain

Mark Twain wrote a series of travel letters whilst on a tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1867 with a group of American ‘pilgrims’. These letters later formed the basis of The Innocents Abroad. Journeying from New York to Egypt via France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Russia, Turkey and the Holy Land, he observed […]

Italian Hours

Henry James

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

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago is a work of astounding breadth and originality that chronicles the British naturalist’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 […]

The Naturalist on the River Amazons

Henry Walter Bates

Henry Walter Bates and his co-naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace embarked together in 1848 on an expedition to the forests of the Amazon in search of plants and animals that would help solve the problems of the origin of species. Wallace returned to England in 1852, but tragically lost his entire collection in a shipwreck, while […]

Sailing Alone around the World

Joshua Slocum

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 […]

South!

Sir Ernest Shackleton

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 […]

Travels in the Interior of Africa

Mungo Park

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 […]

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

Robert Louis Stevenson

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 […]