nick bennison

A Traveller’s Year is an anthology of extracts from diaries, journals and letters, two or three for each day of the year, on the subject of travel and exploration. The extracts convey men and women’s experiences of travel and discovery from the sixteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on the period 1750–1950, the classic era of both European exploration and diary-writing. The authors of the pieces range from famous explorers such as Captains Cook and Scott to modern travel writers journeying through the contemporary world, from people who pushed back the boundaries of geographical knowledge to people who wrote about what they did on their summer holidays.  The book includes an introduction, explanatory notes and mini-biographies of all the contributors.     Contributors include: Gertrude Bell (woman traveller in the Middle East) James Boswell (travels in Scotland and the Hebrides) William Cobbett (Rural Rides through England) Christopher Columbus (journals of his voyages to America) Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle) Captain James Cook (voyages in the Pacific) Henry Fielding (Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon) Washington Irving (American writer travelled in Europe in first decades of nineteenth century) Edward Lear (landscape painter and nonsense writer produced journals of his travels in Greece, Corsica, Near East etc) Lewis & Clark (journals of famous journey of American exploration) Henry Maundrell (traveller in Middle East at the end of the 17th century) William Morris (wrote a journal of a trip to Iceland in 1870s) Michael Palin (a Python abroad) Mungo Park (African explorer in early nineteenth century) Henry Peerless (middle-class holiday traveller in Edwardian era whose diaries have been recently published) John Ruskin (diaries of his travels in Europe, especially Italy) Captain Robert Falcon Scott (doomed journey to South Pole) Zacharias von Uffenbach (a German traveller in Georgian England) Evelyn Waugh (diaries of 1930s travels in Mediterranean and beyond) John Wesley (travelled throughout Britain and Ireland to preach and kept a journal) William John Wills (explorer of Australia)