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Journeys of discovery are my favorite kind of story and my favorite vehicle for (mental) travel. From Gilgamesh to last week’s bestseller, they embody how we live and learn: we go somewhere, and something happens. We come home changed and tell the tale. The tales I love most take me where the learning is richest, perhaps to distant, exotic places—like Darwin’s Galapagos—perhaps deep into the interior of a completely original mind—like Henry Thoreau’s. I cannot live without such books. Amid the heartbreak of war, greed, disease, and all the rest, they remind me in a most essential way of humanity’s redemptive capacity for understanding and wonder.
This is a hero’s journey, right out of Joseph Campbell: a young man goes to sea, circumnavigates the globe, and experiences marvel after marvel of nature. What he learns on his journey matures into a kind of wisdom that transforms the world.
Darwin’s adventures keep me on the edge of my seat; his descriptions seduce me; his ideas inspire me. I want to be there with him as he recoils from the horrors of slavery in Brazil or observes the aftermath of a Chilean earthquake. And I feel I truly am with him, collecting birds and lizards on the islands of the Galapagos, as he begins to divine the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the world.
Charles Darwin's travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world's beauty and sublimity which language could barely capture. Words, he said, were inadequate to convey to those who have not visited the inter-tropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences'.
Yet in a travel journal which takes the reader from the coasts and interiors of South America to South Sea Islands, Darwin's descriptive powers are constantly challenged, but never once overcome. In addition, The Voyage of…
My first experience of sailing was in an open dinghy in the North Sea in winter; the second was capsizing in the path of a hovercraft at Cowes. I was put off for years. But once Jenny and I moved to spectacular British Columbia, we were inspired to try again. In 1985 we left on what would become a 4-year circumnavigation of the world; more recently and over several years we made our way back under sail from Cape Town to BC, spending a year in Patagonian waters. My other (paying) career has been as a diplomat, which is everything long-distance-sailing is not: people, rules, compromises, convention. Over the years, things have more-or-less balanced out.
As a young teacher in Buenos Aires, two of my students were the Goodall sisters, direct descendants of Anglican missionary and pioneer Thomas Bridges, who settled on the north shore of the Beagle Channel in 1886. Thomas’s second son Lucas’s account of life at Harberton Estancia – which truly was at the edge of the world at that time – is a luminous but saddening account of the last days of the Ona, Selknam, and Yahgan peoples. It’s full of sailing adventures too. As we threaded our way through snow-lined Acwalisnan Channel – between the Beagle and the Straits of Magellan – we leafed to page 113 of our sepia-illustrated 1949 edition of the book. We read how Lucas became the first European to pass this way, with his Yahgan friend Acwalisnan as pilot. I’m hoping to catch up with Abigail Goodall, whom I last saw in 1981, this (southern)…
"E. Lucas Bridges provides in his brilliantly written book our most valuable resource on the lost heritage of the Yamana." The Daily Beagle
Famous for being the southernmost city in the world, the wild and windswept port of Ushuaia sits at the inhospitable southern tip of Tierra del Fuego in South America. That rugged, rocky landscape of sharp mountains, beech forests, and barren outcrops was originally home to hunter-gatherer Yaghan Indians, the southernmost indigenous people on the planet. The western world’s colonization of the area (sometimes called “Fireland”) began in the 1800s when explorers and missionaries established settlements. The Bridges…
My first experience of sailing was in an open dinghy in the North Sea in winter; the second was capsizing in the path of a hovercraft at Cowes. I was put off for years. But once Jenny and I moved to spectacular British Columbia, we were inspired to try again. In 1985 we left on what would become a 4-year circumnavigation of the world; more recently and over several years we made our way back under sail from Cape Town to BC, spending a year in Patagonian waters. My other (paying) career has been as a diplomat, which is everything long-distance-sailing is not: people, rules, compromises, convention. Over the years, things have more-or-less balanced out.
Bill Tilman was a war hero and an accomplished Himalayan climber – reaching 27,000 feet on Everest without oxygen in 1938 – who turned in later life to sailing as a means of accessing obscure mountain ranges. In 1956 he sailed his Bristol Channel pilot cutter (Mischief) from England to the Chilean channels and made the first successful crossing of the Patagonian ice cap. Tilman was likely not easy to get on with – he tolerates no women on board, and on this particular cruise we never learn the first name of his deputy – but his writing is erudite and amusingly self-deprecating. This narrative concludes with the dry comment: “Ships are all right – it's the men in them.” Tilman sailed to the very end. He disappeared at sea in 1977, in his eightieth year, en route to climb a remote island peak in Antarctica. Would that…
'So I began thinking again of those two white blanks on the map, of penguins and humming birds, of the pampas and of gauchos, in short, of Patagonia, a place where, one was told, the natives’ heads steam when they eat marmalade.'
So responded H. W. ‘Bill’ Tilman to his own realisation that the Himalaya were too high for a mountaineer now well into his fifties. He would trade extremes of altitude for the romance of the sea with, at his journey’s end, mountains and glaciers at a smaller scale; and the less explored they were, the better he would…
My first experience of sailing was in an open dinghy in the North Sea in winter; the second was capsizing in the path of a hovercraft at Cowes. I was put off for years. But once Jenny and I moved to spectacular British Columbia, we were inspired to try again. In 1985 we left on what would become a 4-year circumnavigation of the world; more recently and over several years we made our way back under sail from Cape Town to BC, spending a year in Patagonian waters. My other (paying) career has been as a diplomat, which is everything long-distance-sailing is not: people, rules, compromises, convention. Over the years, things have more-or-less balanced out.
In the 1960s and 70s, Americans Hal and Margaret Roth popularized long-distance ocean cruising in the USA much as Eric and Susan Hiscock did in the UK. In a series of accessible and well-illustrated books Hal narrated their adventures sailing all over the world, aboard a 35-ft sloop called Whisper. The climactic moment of his story of their 1978 voyage from California through the Chilean channels is starkly summed up at the end of Chapter Eight: “We were shipwrecked on uninhabited islands only a few miles from Cape Horn.” Whisper’s crew live on a beach for nine days, are rescued by the Chilean navy then come back to re-float her. Our copy of this book still has stains, from four years on board Bosun Bird in those same waters. Every time I look at the double-page spread of Whisperon the rocks I shiver and think: “There but…
Tells of two veteran sailors who set out to sail to a little-known archipelago and then around Cape Horn and succeeded only after their boat was wrecked on their first attempt
I am a British novelist and biographer who lived on and off in Latin America from the 1960s to the late 1980s. I was a boy in Brazil during the Death Squads; an adolescent in Argentina during the Dirty War; and a young journalist in Peru during the Shining Path insurgency, publishing a reportage for Granta on my search for Abimael Guzman. I gave the 2010 Borges Lecture and have written two novels set in Peru, the second of which, The Dancer Upstairs, was chosen as the best novel of 1995 by the American Libraries Association and turned into a film by John Malkovich.
Neither novel nor travel book, this classic journey defies category.
Purportedly a quest for a scrap of giant slothskin, which the author finds in a cave in southern Chile, it zig-zags through time and space, alighting on travellers from Magellan to Butch Cassidy, while trampling down conventional boundaries.
“Everyone says: ‘Are you writing a novel?’ No, I’m writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. That seems to me to be what they are. I don’t quite know the meaning of the word novel.”
Bruce Chatwin sets off on a journey through South America in this wistful classic travel book
With its unique, roving structure and beautiful descriptions, In Patagonia offers an original take on the age-old adventure tale. Bruce Chatwin's journey to a remote country in search of a strange beast brings along with it a cast of fascinating characters. Their stories delay him on the road, but will have you tearing through to the book's end.
'It is hard to pin down what makes In Patagonia so unique, but, in the end, it is Chatwin's…
The first time I left home, at 21, I ran out of money after three months, but I was so dead set on staying abroad that I pushed on. I ended up being gone for 18 months and traveled through 40 countries. Before I turned 30, I completed 10 six-month trips abroad, each with a long overland journey built-in, and hit close to 100 countries. Most of my travel was in the last decade before cell phones and the internet. I’ve been a member of The Explorers Club for twenty+ years and chair its Southwest Chapter.
Even after I became a traveler, I found myself pulled into Bruce Chatwin's writings because of his ability to make you feel more than just a location.
His stories about nomadic people and exotic places blend fact with fiction to give a fuller picture. I’ve read all of his work, but this book made me feel he was a kindred spirit.
One story in particular, Milk, captured the raw yearning to dive head-first into a foreign culture and made me a lifelong fan.
It is commonly supposed that Bruce Chatwin was an ingenuous latecomer to the profession of letters, a misapprehension given apparent credence by that now famous passage in his lyrical, autobiographical "I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia," in which we are told that this indefatigable traveler's literary career began in midstride, almost on a whim, with a telegram announcing his departure for the farthest-flung corner of the globe: "Have gone to Patagonia." Such a view overlooks the fact that from the late 1960s onward Chatwin was already fashioning the tools of his future trade in the columns of a variety…
I am now a full-time author, and I worked for 25 years for the RSPB at Sandy and BirdLife in Cambridge. An oil painting of W. H. Hudson hangs above the fireplace of the house at Sandy – so he was a familiar face, like an ancestor about whom little is recalled and surprisingly little is ever said. I began to dabble in his books and got drawn in. I wanted to understand him and his female colleagues who created the organisation we know today and that has been such a big part of my life. I have a sense of repaying a debt.
I particularly enjoyed this book. Hudson’s ornithological expedition in this desolate wilderness was made partly ‘idle’ by the mishap he had when examining a faulty pistol, shooting himself in the knee.
He described his solitary confinement in a remote cabin while his sole companion went off to seek help. He shared his bed with a venomous snake, and was later ferried to hospital by bullock cart, a journey of many hours over rough terrain.
"My miserable journey ended at dawn at the Mission House. Later in the day, on awakening, I found myself in the hands of a gentleman who was a skilful surgeon as well as a divine. My bullet, however, refused to be extracted. Every morning for a fortnight my host, with a quiet smile on his lips, would present a succession of probes – oh those probes of all forms, sizes and materials: wood, ivory, steel and…
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank…
Some thirty years ago, on a frozen waterfall near an old logging town in Montana, my life changed forever. A friend took me climbing. Almost instantly, upon leaving the ground, the mountains became my singular passion. I lived in run-down shacks and worked dead-end jobs, freeing myself to travel and to climb. Along the way I stumbled into an editorial job with the American Alpine Journal, where I worked for twelve years, deepening my knowledge of mountains, including the incomparable Cerro Torre. I know that climbing is overtly pointless. What we gain from it, however—what it demands and what we give in return—has immeasurable power.
I love how this book captures the spirit and obsession of climbing in Patagonia; the characters, the landscape, the majesty of the peaks, and our struggles to climb them. Crouch took me there years before I ever went. His devotion to climbing and his depth of experiences, from the harrowing to the mundane (in the endless boredom of waiting for good weather he declares himself “the Muhammad Ali of killing time”) shine in his writing. The book speaks to the obsessed, by the obsessed. It’s a cult classic among Patagonia alpine climbers for good reason.
Patagonia is a strange and terrifying place, a vast tract of land shared by Argentina and Chile where the violent weather spawned over the southern Pacific charges through the Andes with gale-force winds, roaring clouds, and stinging snow. Squarely athwart the latitudes known to sailors as the roaring forties and furious fifties, Patagonia is a land trapped between angry torrents of sea and sky, a place that has fascinated explorers and writers for centuries. Magellan discovered the strait that bears his name during the first circumnavigation. Charles Darwin traveled Patagonia's windy steppes and explored the fjords of Tierra del Fuego…
The ocean has always been a sacred place to me, full of wondrous adventures and knowledge. I grew up in the Hawaiian islands with many hours frolicking in the waves, and swinging from the vines of nearshore banyan trees. One of my favorite books as a child was Treasure Island, anchored by the quest for Flint’s treasure map. Ironically, the details of that map are never revealed in the book. But I grew up to become a mapper of the ocean, making with my colleagues at Esri, a host of digital maps that reveal treasures of scientific insight. May the books on my list become treasures for you, too.
I often fail to see the close connection between the culture at sea in centuries past and how some of that has persisted to this day, both at sea and in many aspects of our culture, especially science.
This book hit me squarely between the eyes with that. I was deliciously captured within the pages of the story both for some of the unsettling, even shocking descriptions of hardships back in that day (and would I have been able to survive were I in that circumstance, even as a woman) and the cautionary tale it brings about loyalty, ethics, courage, and just plain doing your job to the best of your ability.
'The beauty of The Wager unfurls like a great sail... one of the finest nonfiction books I've ever read' Guardian
'The greatest sea story ever told' Spectator
'A cracking yarn... Grann's taste for desperate predicaments finds its fullest expression here' Observer
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER
From the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the…
In Nature’s Realm is my third book on the theme of exploration of Vancouver Island, my home for the past thirty years, and my first focussed on the history of natural history. In it, I call upon decades of experience in mapping hitherto scarcely known parts of the world, combined with a keen fascination with the fauna and flora of the many places where I have lived and worked. I have marvelled at the work of the exploring naturalists and am fascinated with their personal histories. I find it enthralling how they each added to the sum of human knowledge of the wonders of the natural world, now so sadly threatened.
A superbly written account of, perhaps, the most famous British naturalist-explorer, Charles Darwin, on his great voyage aboard HMS Beagleto Patagonia and the Galápagos in 1831-6. The author also covers the furious aftermath, the debate resulting from Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) findings and contentious, to some seemingly blasphemous, theory on the origin of species. Profusely illustrated in colour with contemporary material. I have read and long admired several of Moorhead’s books and particularly enjoyed this one as it deals with a personal hero of mine.
