The Traveller's Daybook

The Traveller's Daybook invites the reader to journey to the four corners of the earth in the company of Viking seafarers and Spanish conquistadors, explorer-scientists and intrepid mountaineers, urbane gentleman-travellers and obsessive seekers-out of the wildest places of our planet. Fergus Fleming's calendrically arranged anthology of travel writing ranges widely across time as well as place: from the trans-American expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804-6 to Dame Freya Stark's solitary wandering in the Arabian desert in the 1930s and Bill Bryson's travels across the 'small island' of Britain in the 1990s. Each quoted extract is accompanied by a brief commentary introducing the writer and establishing the quotation's historical context. In many cases, the chosen extract is a traveller's diary entry for the actual day in question. Fleming's itinerary offers not only a multiplicity of exotic and extraordinary destinations but also a many-hued patchwork of moods, rich in striking juxtapositions and surprising serendipities: the delight of the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn at the spring mildness of Naples in February; the tenacious courage of Captain Scott as he faces death at forty degrees below zero; the exasperation of the poet Dylan Thomas at finding himself in a 'stifflipped, liverish, British Guest House in puking Abadan'; Peter Fleming's forthright revelation of the drawbacks of travelling by donkey ('After a few days... you come to see life from the... unstimulating viewpoint of a sack of potatoes'); and the philosophical introspection of Fridtjof Nansen as he drifts in an 'interminable and rigid world' of Arctic ice. Whether undertaken on foot, on horseback, by sail or by dog-sled, or across arid desert, rugged mountain, stormy sea, or polar wasteland, these 366 journeys will spur the reader's wanderlust and tempt him to explore further the work of the quoted writers. But, most of all, they will transport the soul and liberate the imagination.