The Traveller's Daybook

A Tour of the World in 366 Quotations

Fergus Fleming

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848878136
• eBook ISBN: 9780857899286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Literary Collections

The Traveller's Daybook invites you to cross ocean, desert, mountain and ice-cap in the company of the world's greatest explorers, wanderers and writers... Fergus Fleming's day-by-day anthology of travel writing ranges widely across time as well as place: from Christopher Columbus's 'discovery' of the West Indies in 1492 to Anton Chekhov's journey through Siberia in the nineteenth century and on to Wilfred Thesiger's wanderings in Arabia's 'empty quarter' in the 1940s. Each quoted extract is accompanied by a brief commentary that intro­duces the writer and establishes the context of the excerpt. Fleming's itinerary offers both a wealth of exotic destinations, and a many-hued patchwork of moods: the astonishment of the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn on beholding the size of women's shoes in Venice; the stoic courage of Captain Scott facing death at forty degrees below zero; the exasperation of Dylan Thomas at find­ing himself in a 'stifflipped, liverish, British Guest House in puking Abadan'; and the philosophical introspection of Fridtjof Nansen as he drifts in an 'interminable and rigid world' of Arctic ice. Here you will find Napoleon's travel tips to his niece, a flight over Germany with Hitler, and an ex-pat dinner in Morocco where human blood is served from the fridge by the pint. Covering the whole calendar, including leap years, these 366 journeys are by turn lyrical, witty, tragic and bizarre - but always entertaining.

CONTENTS

Introduction

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

Sources and Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

An invitation to edit an anthology of travel writing is a rare privilege. Of all literary genres, travel is one of the most rewarding and diverse. The very act of moving from A to an unknown B seems to bring out the best in authors. Some travel in order to write, some write because they have travelled, while others have such eye-opening experiences that it doesn’t matter if they can write well or not. Even in the dullest, most dutiful Victorian tome you can usually detect some stirring of the soul. To be let loose in a travel section of a library – and in this case to be paid for it! – is a splendid thing.

The challenge set by my publishers was to compile a calendar of extracts written on – or, failing that, within the vicinity of – each of the 366 days of the year, including the elusive 29 February. The task was both frustrating and stimulating: frustrating because many of the best travel writers do not supply dates; and stimulating because it introduced me to a host of others who do. Take the Marquis de Beauvoir, a soigné, globe-trotting teenager of the nineteenth century who began one paragraph with the words: ‘When we left the harem, we went to see the tigers.’ Or Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-American in Meiji-era Japan who conjured the magic of sea-demons lurking off its western coast. There is a beautiful melancholy to Joseph Roth’s description of Berlin’s parks in the 1920s. And then the irrepressible Nicolas Bouvier, who feared his car had shot its pistons in a Turkish desert, only to find that the knocking came from a landscape of tortoises engaged in their autumn amours. Perhaps my favourite is Archer Crouch, a Victorian engineer who laid submarine cables off the West African coast and was so intimidated by the exploits of greater explorers that he dared not put his name to his journal: his high point, endearingly, was the discovery of a small monument to forgotten soldiers who had died in an out-of-the-way place that nobody had heard of.

Credit for this book must first of all be given to the writers who have made it possible. At Atlantic Books I would like to thank Anthony Cheetham, who came up with the idea for the book; Richard Milbank, who asked me to write it; Sarah Norman and Sachna Hanspal, who ensured its smooth passage through to press; and Mark Hawkins-Dady for his attention to the text. I would also like to thank my agent Gillon Aitken; and the staffs at the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Kensington and Chelsea Libraries, the London Library and the Royal Geographical Society. I would like further to dedicate this book to the memory of an old friend and colleague, Alan Lothian, who died on 12 September 2010.

FF, London, 2011

JANUARY

1 JANUARY

ALL BY MYSELF, 1900

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) was a young Swiss woman, disturbed and prey to addictions, who sought adventure in the Sahara dressed as a man. On the coast of Sardinia, she contemplated in her diary a nomadic future.

I sit here all by myself, looking at the grey expanse of murmuring sea... I am utterly alone on earth, and always will be in this Universe so full of lures and disappointments... alone, turning my back on a world of dead hopes and memories...

I shall dig in my heels and go on acting the lunatic in the intoxicating expanse of desert as I did last summer, or go on galloping through olive groves in the Tunisian Sahel, as I did last autumn...

Right now, I long for one thing only: to lead that life again in Africa... to sleep in the chilly silence of the night below stars that drop from great heights, with the sky’s infinite expanse for a roof and the warm earth for a bed, in the knowledge that no one pines for me anywhere on earth, that there is no place where I am being missed or expected. To know that is to be free and unencumbered, a nomad in the great desert of life where I shall never be anything but an outsider. Such is the only form of bliss, however bitter, the Mektoub [Fate] will ever grant me, but then happiness of the sort coveted by all of frantic humanity, will never be mine.

ISABELLE EBERHARDT, THE PASSIONATE NOMAD.

2 JANUARY

NORDIC AUGURIES, 1895

On this date, the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) welcomed the start of the year aboard his ship the Fram. Unique among polar vessels, the Fram had a rounded hull that allowed it to rise above the floes rather than be crushed by them. In 1893 Nansen had embedded his ship in the Arctic pack and let it drift with the ice, ostensibly to collect scientific data but also to provide a springboard for an attempt to ski to the North Pole.

Never before have I had such strange feelings at the commencement of the New Year. It cannot fail to bring some momentous events, and will possibly become one of the most remarkable years in my life, whether it leads me to success or to destruction. Years come and go unnoticed in this world of ice, and we have no more knowledge here of what these years have brought to humanity than we know of what the future ones have in store. In this silent nature no events ever happen; all is shrouded in darkness; there is nothing in view save the twinkling stars, immeasurably far away in the freezing night, and the flickering sheen of the aurora borealis. I can just discern close by the vague outline of the Fram, dimly standing out in the desolate gloom, with her rigging showing dark against the host of stars. Like an infinitesimal speck, the vessel seems lost amidst the boundless expanse of this realm of death. Nevertheless under her deck there is a snug and cherished home for thirteen men, undaunted by the majesty of this realm. In there, life is freely pulsating, while far away outside in the night there is nothing save death and silence, only broken now and then, at long intervals, by the violent pressure of the ice as it surges along in gigantic masses. It sounds most ominous in the great stillness, and one cannot help an uncanny feeling as if supernatural powers were at hand.

FRIDTJOF NANSEN, FARTHEST NORTH, VOLUME II.

3 JANUARY

MANDARIN JUSTICE, 1879

A semi-invalid in her native Britain, Isabella Bird (1831–1904) found the only cure for her ailments was to travel, which she did obse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction
• JANUARY
• FEBRUARY
• MARCH
• APRIL
• MAY
• JUNE
• JULY
• AUGUST
• SEPTEMBER
• OCTOBER
• NOVEMBER
• DECEMBER
• Sources and Acknowledgements
• Index