Just a few things about diaries kept by travelers and explorers. I hope this isn't too boring? How much can one say about diaries, right? But I'm finding it so fascinating, and writing something about what I've been reading helps me keep some of the details in mind. Once again I'm referring to Alexandra Johnson's A Brief History of Diaries published by Hesperus Press. One thing that was a little disappointing about this chapter is the scarcity of references to women travelers. Granted there may not have been a lot of women keeping travel diaries early on but surely by the twentieth there must have been some examples? What about all those Victorian women adventurers? I'll have to do a little research here.
The earliest examples of travel diaries are those kept by pilgrims making visits to holy sites. The diaries were for introspection and "moral self improvement", and then of course they were kept to share with the folks back home. And here we find the lone mention of a woman traveler/diarist.
"As early as AD 381-4, Egeria, a Gallic female pilgrim, left her mark in a travel journal written as an ongoing letter intended for a circle of women back home. The hardships and dangers of early Christian and Medieval travel doomed countless journals. Those that survive set the standard for all future travel journals: in undertaking perilous voyages, the ratio of physical difficulty mirrored the magnitude of inner struggle to overcome."
According to Johnson some of the earliest examples of diaries are in Arabic. I've heard of Ibn Battuta. He is the Muslim world's equivalent of Marco Polo. Now this man was a serious traveler. He set out in 1325 to make a pilgrimage to Mecca and didn't return to Tangier until 29 years later. Most of his journey was undertaken by foot or caravan and he traveled over 75,000 miles. He puts my own meager wanderings to shame.
"Without complaint he records surviving the Great Plague in Damascus in 1348; having to wear three fur coats and two sets of woollen boots in wintry Turkey; noting his feet are so swollen by desert heat that blood darkens under his toenails."
Battuta's travel account is the world's longest, which he orally dictated to a scribe, and weighs in at four volumes. It must have been like a 14th century Baedeker since he gave a run down of all the important shrines and sites of the Islamic world. A couple of centuries on and travel diaries switch from being for moral introspection to trade related.
But getting to the really good stuff--the best travel diaries (and I have to agree with Johnson) are the ones that take the reader out of everyday life and puts them where the action is. Escaping to a world that they'd otherwise never get to experience. There's Captain Cook and his exotic voyages around the world. And Lewis and Clark's mapping of new territory.
"The power of Lewis and Clark's journals is a world as first glimpsed, played off against the heartbreak of all that's now vanished--3,000 buffalo, herds of antelope and elk, rivers teeming with freshwater fish."
Lewis and Clark's journey took them 8,000 miles, traversing what would become ten states in two and a half years. While Lewis and Clark write about the animals they encountered, Charles Darwin noted how the animals struggled to survive. The more than fifteen notebooks he kept on his early 19th century journey on board the Beagle would be used in writing his The Origin of the Species.
While all this is interesting, it's the accounts by more ordinary travelers that I find especially interesting, and by mid-19th century it wasn't just explorers and scientists but average people who were undertaking dangerous journeys. Of course I think I might look for a diary with a more favorable outcome than Captain Robert Falcon Scott's journey to the South Pole. Unfortunately the Norwegians beat him to the top by just a hair.
"Scott's explorer diary is the most hauntingly dramatic of any travel journal; most of the entries are framed by precise coordinates as his party braves a frozen hell on their 800-mile journey back towards safety. His journal rivets despite our already knowing what's in store for Scott and his party."
800 miles in Antarctica? Maybe I should stop complaining about my fifteen minute walk to the bus stop in the cold early hours of the morning.
Now maybe I'll look for some travel accounts by the ladies.