In Indian Mexico by Frederick Starr

Pushy American studies the Natives

I’ve traveled around Mexico quite a bit and developed an avid interest in that country’s history, art, and natural beauty. I don’t get down there much anymore, but I do frequently read books on Mexico. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of Mexican literature available in English translation, not old books by dead guys anyway. There are, however, plenty of old travel narratives by Europeans and Americans who visited that country, beginning with the early reports of Spanish colonists and continuing up through the Mexican Revolution. In Indian Mexico, by Frederick Starr, is one such travel memoir. Starr was an anthropologist and ethnologist with the American Museum of Natural History. He made five or six trips to Mexico between 1896 and 1901 to gather data on the Indigenous inhabitants of the country. He published his findings in several scientific volumes aimed at an audience of scholars. In Indian Mexico, published in 1908, is the so-called popular narrative of his travels aimed at the general reading public.

The goal of Starr’s expeditions was to take measurements, photographs, and plaster casts of Natives of the “pure blood Indians” in different parts of the country in order to compile an ethnographic physiological profile of the various tribes or nations in Mexico. He travelled all over the country with a small team that included an interpreter, a photographer, a plaster worker, and usually one or two Indian laborers as assistants. Starr’s studies brought him to many small and remote villages, although all of the Indians were familiar with Whites and assimilated into the Spanish colonial culture to varying degrees. In hindsight, the ethnographic techniques of Starr’s party seem rather amateurish, but their documentation was well-intentioned and at least served as a forerunner for later, more extensive research. Many pictures taken by Starr’s photographer are included in the book. The quality of printed photographs wasn’t so great in 1908, so it’s hard to make out much detail, but you get a basic feel for the scenery, the dress of the native inhabitants, and their religious festivals.

In a typical chapter, Starr and his crew arrive in a predominantly Indian town. His first comment is that everyone is drunk. Armed with letters of introduction from provincial governors and other “jefes,” Starr expects the locals to treat him like a visiting dignitary, and he becomes petulant when they don’t. He then sets about measuring and photographing the inhabitants. If anyone decides they don’t want to be measured, Starr threatens to tattle to the governor and have them imprisoned. Eventually, Starr always gets his way, as he smugly relates. Almost every chapter has one of these chest-thumping episodes. Starr clearly wants the reader to think he’s a cool tough guy, but it just comes across as pathetic. Aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without him ordering them around like some Great White Lord? The whole book is a self-aggrandizing manual on how to coerce poor Indians into doing what you want.

Starr does, on the other hand, provide decent descriptions of the scenery he encountered in his travels. He explains the different handicrafts, folk arts, and agricultural productions of each Indian group he visits, and also describes in detail the typical garments worn in each village. The first half of the book is mostly the gripes of a bitchy traveler, as mentioned above, but the second half of the book is an improvement and provides more information on local customs and culture. This isn’t one of the best Mexican travel narratives I’ve read, but I still did experience some vicarious wanderlust from Starr’s tour through old pre-Revolution Mexico. For alternatives, I would suggest Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), the brief Travels to Oaxaca by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville (1812), and The Ancient Cities of the New World by Désiré Charnay (1887).

One thing about Starr that I admire is that he edited and published an anthology of 19th-century Mexican literature entitled Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (1904). English-language readers get hardly any opportunities to learn about Mexico’s pre-Revolution writers, and Starr’s anthology may be the best and perhaps the only on-ramp to that subject. 

My Life with the Eskimo by Vilhjálmur Stéfansson

Traveling to hunt, hunting to travel

Vilhjálmur Stéfansson (1879–1962) was a Canadian-American explorer and ethnographer. He was born in Manitoba, the son of Icelandic immigrants. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to the Dakota Territory of the United States. He was educated at the universities of North Dakota, Iowa, and Harvard. As an explorer, his area of interest was the Arctic, and as an ethnographer, his expertise was the Inuit or Eskimo (the former is the more proper term, but the latter was more widely used in Stefansson’s lifetime). From 1908 to 1912, Stéfansson lived among the Eskimo on the north coast of Alaska and Canada, studying their ways and collecting artifacts and data for the American Museum of Natural History, which afterwards published his scientific findings. In 1912, Stéfansson also published a popular account of his expedition, intended for general readers, entitled My Life with the Eskimo. At that time, Stéfansson’s more than three year sojourn in the frozen North was the longest Arctic expedition on record.

But did he use all that time wisely? If this book were all you had to go on, it wouldn’t seem so. Stéfansson’s stated aim was to travel eastward to find bands of Inuit who have previously had little or no contact with White people. He bounces around the Alaskan coast for two years, however, and 162 pages of the book go by before he even gets started towards that goal. Even then, the book makes it unclear what exactly he’s trying to accomplish. The bulk of the text is about hunting caribou and seals. Stéfansson needs to hunt to feed himself, his assistants, and his sled dog team. He travels hundreds of miles to shoot the food necessary to travel hundreds of more miles to shoot more food to travel hundreds of more miles, and so on. Almost every animal they see, they kill, either for the meat, the skin, or as a specimen for the AMNH. Also a member of the expedition is a zoologist named Dr. Anderson, but he and Stéfansson are never in the same place, and the two are constantly traveling hundreds of miles to look for one another.

While all this is going on, Stéfansson is conducting scientific research, but he doesn’t tell you much about it. He’ll say, “I collected folklore from the people in this village.” That’s great. Would you like to tell us a little about that? No, let’s get back to another hunting story. Not until after page 360 does he finally discuss some of the archaeological digs, ethnological research, and linguistic studies that he conducted. These topics, much more interesting than all the caribou hunting, are relegated to the last few chapters of the book, treated as if they were appendices. If the entire book were more like these last 70 pages, My Life with the Eskimo would have been a much more satisfying read.

Reminiscent of another popular expedition narrative, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1948), Stéfansson also has an ethnological thesis to argue in My Life with the Eskimo. In his travels, he encounters what he calls “Blonde Eskimo”—Inuit with light hair, light skin, and blue eyes. Stéfansson theorizes that these may be the descendants of Danish and/or Norwegian settlers who disappeared from the west coast of Greenland centuries ago and perhaps drifted westward. Unlike Kon-Tiki, Stéfansson does not belabor the point. This theory is not the book’s raison d’etre, just one matter discussed among many. Though Stéfansson’s hypothesis of the Blonde Eskimo’s Norse origins does not seem so farfetched, as with Heyerdahl’s theory, 21st-century DNA testing has since disproved it.

I read quite a few explorer memoirs, and this one is just mediocre. Stéfansson is clearly very knowledgeable about the Inuit, but writing for the general public does not seem to have been his forte. Again, the last 70 pages of this book are quite good, but up to that point there’s a fair amount of boredom between nuggets of interest.

Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl

Chasing secrets on Easter Island

Thor Heyerdahl was an explorer who achieved worldwide fame in the 1950s and ‘60s—not quite as famous as Jacques Cousteau, perhaps, but close. The Norwegian adventurer and experimental archaeologist is best-known for riding a raft across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to French Polynesia, a journey he recounted in his book and Oscar-winning documentary film, both entitled Kon-Tiki. His follow-up to this much-celebrated achievement was an expedition to Easter Island in 1955 and 1956, which is recounted in his book Aku-Aku, published in 1957.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is known for its giant stone heads carved out of lava rock. At the time of Heyerdahl’s trip, little was known about who made them, how they were made, and how the incredibly heavy rocks were transported to and erected at their various locations around the island. The thesis that Heyerdahl spent his life trying to prove is that Polynesian islanders are of American origin, essentially descendants of seafaring Inca or other Indigenous Peruvians. On Easter Island, he looked for evidence to support that theory and did find some correspondence between the artworks of Easter Island and those of the Inca. Heyerdahl was not an academic scientist, which opens him up to criticism by those with PhDs who regard him as merely an adventurer and pseudoscientst, so on this expedition he invited three professional archaeologists along on this expedition.

What amazed me the most about this book was learning that when Heyerdahl’s team arrived on Easter Island, all of the famed statues had been toppled face down in the dirt. This happened during a civil war on the island a couple centuries earlier. Heyerdahl, with the help of Indigenous workers, used traditional non-mechanical techniques to raise one of the statues upright. This was the first of such modern re-raisings. When you see photographs of a dozen monolithic heads lined up along the coast of Easter Island, all of those were raised after Heyerdahl, most of them not until the 1990s, when major restoration efforts were undertaken to encourage tourism. Heyerdahl was really the spark that set that flame of tourism alight, for better or for worse. On the one hand he brought attention to the cultural heritage of Rapa Nui; on the other hand his tactics trained the Natives to exploit that heritage for commerce.

While the giant stone heads, or moai, are quite fascinating, most of the book is not about that. It’s about Heyerdahl trying to convince the islanders to grant him access to their secret caves or hand over to him the artifacts that are contained therein. Heyerdahl’s methods of persuasion were not entirely ethical by today’s standards, nor is what ultimately happened to the artifacts (I think he just took them away on his boat). He starts out by bartering cloth and knives for small statues. He then moves up to chicanery in the form of exploiting the Natives’ superstitions to his advantage. Not only is this disturbing, it’s also rather boring. Long chapters go by in which Heyerdahl is just conning his way into these families’ caves, then not much is really said about the artifacts themselves and what they reveal about the island’s cultural history.

Heyerdahl’s theories on the Peruvian colonization of Polynesia have not stood up well to scientific scrutiny. Still, he’s usually very good at writing the adventure stories of his expeditions. Kon-Tiki is an excellent read, and I also enjoyed Fatu-Hiva, his account of roughing it in the Marquesas. Aku-Aku, however, is not as engrossing as those other books. It gets dull and repetitive, and Heyerdahl doesn’t talk much about the discoveries of the archaeologists who accompanied him. Other than collecting a lot of statuettes that aren’t thoroughly described to the reader, it’s unclear what exactly Heyerdahl and his team accomplished on Easter Island. Perhaps more is revealed in his more scientific publications, such as Archeology of Easter Island (2 volumes), published in 1965.

The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates

An exemplary narrative for armchair explorers

Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892) was an English naturalist. His area of expertise was entomology, the science of insects, but in the 19th century scientists were allowed to be generalists, so he made discoveries in other areas of biology as well. In 1842, Bates embarked on an expedition to explore the Amazon rainforest and gather specimens of the animals and plants that live there. Upon completing an expedition, 19th century naturalist-explorers would compile volumes of scientific texts describing the species they brought back with them. In addition, many would publish a narrative account of their travels intended for a general audience of non-scientists. In Bates’s case, the popular memoir he wrote of his South American journey is The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863.

This Amazon expedition started out as a joint undertaking with fellow British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who is now better-known than Bates for having formulated the theory of evolution about the same time as Charles Darwin. Once in Brazil, Wallace and Bates seem to have often split up and conducted their own research, and Wallace returned to England several years before Bates. It’s hard to tell how much time the two spent together. Bates only mentions “Mr. Wallace” a few times in this memoir. That’s not unusual for scientific memoirs of this period, however. There seems to have been a gentleman’s agreement that each explorer would talk about himself and leave his traveling companions to write their own books. Wallace published his account, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, in 1889.

Bates’s mode of operation was to travel up the Amazon to a certain city, acquire a house on the outskirts of town, and live there for a few years. From these home bases, he would make hiking or boat trips deeper into the wilderness to explore and gather specimens. In this memoir, Bates’s explorations center around three main locations: Pará, near the Amazon delta (today there is a state named Pará, but the city is named Belém); Santarém, several hundred miles further up the river; and Ega (now called Tefé), a small village on the upper Amazon near the Peruvian border. The Amazon region was already somewhat “civilized” by this time. Bates interacted mostly with Whites (Portuguese) and Mamelucos (people of mixed Portuguese and Indigenous heritage, the Brazilian equivalent of Mexico’s Mestizos), but he did encounter some Native tribes living a relatively untouched existence, as well as Blacks of African descent, both slaves and free. Despite the extent of Portuguese colonization, very few European scientists had explored the Amazon by this time, so new, undescribed species were ripe for the picking. In the book’s introduction, Darwin states that Bates collected specimens of 14,712 species, about 14,000 of them being insects, and about 8000 of those species (not just insects) being previously “unknown to science.”

The problem with a lot of exploration narratives of this era is that despite attempts at accessibility for a popular audience, they end up being too academically scientific. Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), though still widely read and highly regarded, is a difficult read for the non-scientist, as is Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814). Bates, however, really strikes the perfect balance between travel memoir and scientific text. He really armchair travelers a vivid impression of what the Amazon region was like in these frontier days, but if you’re interested in biology, there’s also plenty of good stuff in here about the bugs, birds, monkeys, reptiles, and plants of Brazil. You also learn a great deal about the people of Brazil—communities of all different races and levels of economic and cultural development. While Bates was certainly not the anti-colonial liberal that Alexander von Humboldt was, he does not display a great deal of expected Victorian-era racism in this memoir. He does have a tendency, however, to judge people by their level of “civilization” and view those living further in the bush as dumb hicks, regardless of race. All in all, the strengths of Bates’s writing add up to an exemplary exploration narrative. For those who envy the lives of these pioneering naturalists—traveling to exotic lands, studying the natural environment, and discovering “new” species—Bates’s book is a dream come to life.

My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

Deadly treks through Asia with a Swedish adventurer

When Sven Hedin was a young boy in Stockholm, he dreamed of being an arctic explorer. As a young man, however, his early career led him to far Eastern Europe. There he realized that he could still be an explorer, but he directed his sights eastward to Asia instead. From 1885 to 1890, Hedin made two trips into Iran and several of the “Stans” of the Near East. He then organized a series of more extensive expeditions deeper into Asia, where his journeys took him to India, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Hedin’s main goal was to fill in the “white spaces” on European maps, to chart uncharted territories. He was one of the first, if not the first, European to set foot in many of the sites he explored. In fact, Tibet didn’t want Westerners in their country, so Hedin had to sneak in. Often he and his all-Asian crew would go two months without seeing another human being, and they once went two years without seeing another European. Hedin’s explorations made him the undisputed firsthand authority on the mountainous region known as the Transhimalaya. In his autobiography My Life as an Explorer, Hedin recaps his daring, adventurous, globe-trotting life. I believe the book was written in 1924, and the first English edition came out in 1925. Despite all the amazing achievements catalogued within, this is not even a complete career memoir because Hedin continued to explore Asia for another decade after this book was published.

While engaged in his expeditions, Hedin surveyed and mapped the terrain and gathered geographic, geologic, zoologic, and ethnographic information. The problem with My Life as an Explorer, however, is that you don’t really get to learn a lot about his discoveries in the places he explored. Hedin published that sort of data in more specialized volumes, such as Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899–1902 (12 volumes). My Life as an Explorer, however, is devoted more to tales of survival and adventure aimed at general readers: nearly starving to death or dying of thirst in the desert, nearly freezing to death in the mountains, nearly drowning in rivers and lakes, nearly suffocating in sandstorms, etc. You will be amazed at the scores, nay hundreds, of horses, camels, mules, and dogs, and even about a dozen humans, who perish over the course of this book. The tenacious Hedin plows ever forward, regardless of body count. The last quarter of this memoir, in which he recounts his third expedition to Tibet (1905–1908), is the exception to this adventure-only style of narrative. There he does go deeper into what he observed of Buddhist culture in his visits to Tibetan holy sites. The first half of the narrative is a bit slow, but the book finishes on a high note.

It’s not too easy to follow along with where Hedin is at any given moment or where he’s going. Many of the place names he uses aren’t current, though a Wikipedia search can usually clear up such uncertainties. The book includes a few simplified cartoony maps, but they don’t help much. Hedin’s detailed, professional maps are printed in other books like the Scientific Findings mentioned above. In addition to the maps, this autobiography is loaded with illustrations drawn by Hedin himself. With his sketchbook, he chronicled the people, places, and memorable moments encountered along the way. He’s a pretty good artist, but his drawings don’t come across very clearly on a Kindle Paperwhite. (He also took photographs, but they’re not in this book.)

Armchair explorers will envy Hedin’s travels but not his hardships and near-death experiences. If you like to read historical explorer accounts, this is a good one, though maybe too long and arduous for casual readers. Reading this autobiography makes me want to look into Hedin’s previously published reports of each individual expedition. They’re probably less exciting than this book, but I think one would learn more about the places visited.  

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan

Eye-opening political history of Southeastern Europe

Robert D. Kaplan is an American journalist who writes on foreign affairs. In his book Balkan Ghosts, first published in 1993, Kaplan relates his experiences working and traveling in Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, and the former Yugoslavia. Kaplan wrote Balkan Ghosts after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the Bosnian War. The 2005 ebook contains some supplemental material that Kaplan wrote more recently, but the book is largely about the state of the Balkans circa 1990.

To fully understand the state of affairs in the 1990s, however, Kaplan looks much farther back in history, sometimes as far as the Middle Ages, and provides a quite comprehensive overview of the 19th and 20th century history of the region. This historical background goes far in explaining how the Balkans ended up at the end of the 20th century. This region didn’t just become an explosive powder keg in the 1990s. The fire of sectarian hatred and violence has been simmering for centuries. It is common knowledge that World War I started with the Balkans (a Serbian assassin). Kaplan also makes the case that the Balkans influenced the origins of Nazism and World War II. His examination of recent dictators in Serbia, Romania, Greece, and elsewhere should serve as a cautionary tale of where America might be headed if we continue to dispense with our constitutional system of checks and balances.

Though Balkan Ghosts is advertised as a travel memoir, the bulk of the book is really history rather than travel writing. A travel writer would try to convince you to visit these places. As a journalist, Kaplan seems set on convincing you to stay away from them. He does want you to understand them, however, and does a very good job of helping you do so. Kaplan is a journalist and a war correspondent with the knowledge base of a geographer in Balkan Studies. His look at these Balkan nations is deeper than what you’d get in say, National Geographic, which would give you an inkling of the political climate, war trauma, and societal woes interspersed with scenes of hopeful resilience like a wedding ceremony or a newly opened museum. Kaplan, on the other hand, takes a more journalistic “if it bleeds, it leads” view that writing about anything other than politics and war would be frivolous. With the exception of visits to a few medieval monasteries, the text focuses almost entirely on ethnic violence, fascism, anti-Semitism, genocide, torture, and other atrocities. His perspective on the Balkans is more real and visceral than what you’d get in any popular media venue. Kaplan has almost nothing good to say about Romania, which from his account sounds like a horror show. He expresses a bit more warmth for Bulgaria and Greece.

In addition to his own observations and research, Kaplan gives the reader a literature review into the Western writers who traveled the region before him. In particular, he frequently makes reference to John Reed’s The War in Eastern Europe (1916) and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), and even delves as far back as Byzantine historians Procopius (AD 500-565) and Michael Psellus (c. 1018-c. 1096). While you feel like you’re getting a pretty thorough study of the Balkans from Kaplan, he also makes you want to seek out some of these earlier writings on the region.

This region of the world is not covered much in the American news media or our modern history books. Understanding the Balkans, however, is necessary to forming a compete picture of European history in recent centuries. Those looking for a travel memoir of the region might be disappointed in Kaplan’s approach to the subject, but those looking for an education in world history and politics will find Balkan Ghosts to be an eye-opening and rewarding read.  

I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

Kansas couple explores the world

Martin Johnson was a young man from Independence, Kansas, when Jack London hired him as a crew member on his yacht, the Snark, as detailed in Martin’s book Through the South Seas with Jack London (1913). London became ill and had to return to the U.S., but Johnson continued his journey and actually made it all the way around the world. After returning to Kansas, he married Osa Leighty from the equally small town of Chanute. Rather than settle down with his new bride, Martin was determined to continue his life of adventure. He invited Osa to share in his exotic exploits, and she was game for the challenge. The couple traveled the world and achieved fame for their wildlife photography, documentary filmmaking, and travel books. After Martin’s death, Osa published her autobiography I Married Adventure. It was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1940.

I Married Adventure recounts the couple’s youth and courtship in Kansas and details their subsequent adventures in the Solomon Islands, Borneo, and four trips to Africa, where they lived for a few years. Martin, the photography expert, bought the camera equipment and developed all the film. Osa was not just a passive passenger, however. She served as Martin’s right-hand woman. In addition to appearing on camera, Osa shot photos and film, shot dinner when necessary, drove a truck, managed staff, and entertained visiting dignitaries to camp like George Eastman of the Kodak company and the Duke and Duchess of York.

I admire Martin and Osa for their adventurous spirits, and I envy their travels. As a Kansan for most of my life, I also enjoyed the small-town-couple-make-it-big aspect of the story. The era in which the Johnsons traveled, however, wasn’t known for its ecological or ethnographical consciousness. The Johnsons hire 250 native porters to carry their supplies through hundreds of miles of wilderness, knowing full well that some of those porters are probably going to die along the way. If the porters aren’t moving fast enough, Martin whips them. When they reach their destination, they level swaths of forest to build a small, semi-permanent town, complete with decorative curtains and other frivolous amenities that some poor laborer had to schlep to the site. Osa brags about scattering invasive American flower seeds all over Africa. The couple have no qualms about shooting with guns the animals that they are shooting with cameras. Many anecdotes explain how the Johnsons would get as close as they could to the animals they were filming—lions, rhinos, water buffalo—until the animal would charge one spouse, and then the other would shoot the animal dead. Although the Johnsons occasionally traveled with zoologists from the American Museum of Natural History, Martin and Osa were photographers not scientists, not even amateur scientists. As a result, from this account by Osa you don’t really learn a whole lot about the animals or indigenous people that they encountered.

Although Osa clearly loved Martin, you don’t get much of a sense of his personality from this book, in which he comes across as something of a cipher. You almost get the impression that Osa really didn’t know him very well. That’s not a comment on their marriage, but rather a comment on her writing. This, however, was my grandparents’ generation, when people were more private and dignified when discussing their relationships. If spouses ever disagreed on anything, you wouldn’t hear it from Osa or my grandmother.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the Johnsons are still fondly remembered in their home state of Kansas. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute is devoted to their lives, travels, and works. Reading this entertaining biography definitely makes we want to check it out.

Among the Tibetans by Isabella Bird

Travel to exotic lands, meet new people . . . and criticize them

Englishwoman Isabella Bird was a pioneering female explorer of the Victorian Era. She traveled to exotic lands all over the world and published several books on her adventures. What was most unusual, for a woman of her time, was that she traveled solo, unaccompanied by a husband, brother, or similar male chaperone. She led her own expeditions and hired local servants, porters, guides, etc. to assist her. Bird became quite popular through her published writings in books and magazines, which were often illustrated with her own photography. She was the first woman to be elected as a fellow of Britain’s Royal Geographic Society.

In 1889, at around the age of 60, Bird departed on a trip to India and Tibet, then into Central Asia and on to the Middle East. She recounted the Tibetan portion of this journey in her book Among the Tibetans, published in 1894. The book opens with Bird in Kashmir as she’s leaving India to enter into Tibet. From the Kashmiri city of Srinigar, she travelled to the Tibetan city of Leh and from there explored the Nubra Valley. By today’s maps, these sites are located in the Ladakh region of Indian-administered Kashmir, not in the Tibet Autonomous Region. At the time of Bird’s travels, it is unclear to me who actually had political control over the lands she visited, but historically the inhabitants and culture of Leh and Nubra are Tibetan.

Bird deserves to be seen as a feminist heroine for her accomplishments, and I admire and envy her travels. Her writing, however, as exhibited in this book at least, leaves a lot to be desired. It suffers from many of the faults also seen in writings of her male contemporaries. This was the golden age of British imperialism, and many British authors of the era write as if the whole world was merely meant to provide comfort and amusement to British travelers. Whatever fails to do so is deemed “primitive” and “savage.” Bird goes on and on about how the people she encounters are ugly, dirty, stupid, and unreliable. (The fact that she deems the residents of this or that region more handsome than another doesn’t really make up for that.) Although not averse to roughing it in the mountains, once Bird enters a city or town she complains about the squalid accommodations as if she were writing spiteful hotel reviews on Tripadvisor. She also laments that she can’t get a decent cup of tea, even though she’s in the birthplace of tea.

The primary standard by which I judge this book is how much did I really learn about Tibet. The answer, unfortunately, is not much. Bird devotes more ink to her horses than she does to Tibetan culture. Perhaps readers of her time would have enjoyed reading all this horse talk as an integral part of the adventure they could identify with. Considering the general public of Britain likely knew almost nothing about Tibet in 1894, Bird’s book might very well have been a breath of fresh air for them. It does dispense some rudimentary insight into Tibetan life and Buddhism. There’s maybe one good chapter out of five. For today’s readers, however, who grew up on National Geographic, the Travel Channel, and Wikipedia, Among the Tibetans is unlikely to offer any surprise revelations, and the relentless tone of imperialist condescension is off-putting. While today’s travel writers usually adopt an attitude of “When in Rome, do as Romans do,” Bird’s travelog is more, “When in Rome, complain that you’re not in London.”

Bird was a fascinating person, but her writing on Tibet did not fascinate me. I would probably prefer reading a recent biography of Bird (if one exits) rather than her own travel accounts written in antiquated prose with antiquated perspectives.

Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature by Thor Heyerdahl

Polynesian Walden

Norwegian explorer and author Thor Heyerdahl achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s with his book and documentary film Kon-Tiki, about his voyage from South America to Polynesia on a primitive wooden raft. The Kon-Tiki expedition was not his first adventurous journey, however. As early as his teenage years, Heyerdahl had dreamed of escaping civilization to live a self-sufficient life in an unspoiled wilderness. He decided on Fatu-Hiva, an island in the Marquesas, as the ideal destination in which to live this dream of getting “back to nature.” Heyerdahl deliberately searched for a wife to share this vision, and he found one in Liv Coucheron-Torp. The day after their marriage in 1936, the couple sailed for the Marquesas, where they would be dropped on the shore with little more than the clothes on their backs. In 1938, Heyerdahl published in Norway an account of this unconventional honeymoon entitled Hunt for Paradise. After achieving worldwide fame from his later expeditions, he revised the account and published it in English in 1974 as Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature.

At the time, Fatu-Hiva was home to a few small coastal Indigenous communities and a handful of white men. The Heyerdahls ventured into the interior of the island to live a semi-isolated existence in the jungle. They relocated a few times to different locations around the island, where they built their own homes and mostly foraged for fruit and shellfish. Heyerdahl doesn’t just describe what they saw and did but also, much like Henry David Thoreau in Walden or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, philosophizes quite a bit about nature and man’s place in it. This includes much eloquent lamenting on environmental degradation. In this travelog, Heyerdahl’s account goes beyond the romantic stereotype of a South Pacific paradise and presents the realistic pros and cons of living on a tropical island.

It was here in the Marquesas that Heyerdahl first got the idea that Polynesians are descended from seafaring Peruvians, an theory he tested with his Kon-Tiki expedition. On Fatu-Hiva, the Heyerdahls encountered many Polynesian ruins and anthropological artifacts. Heyerdahl points out the stylistic similarities between the art of the Polynesians and Indigenous South Americans. He also discusses in much detail the migration or transplantation of plant and animal species between the Americas and Polynesia. He hypothesizes on which species were brought to Fatu-Hiva by white explorers and which preceded them (thus brought by ancient South American mariners). This theory of the American ancestry of Polynesians was controversial for its time, since most scientists believed that Polynesians were descended from mainland Asians who migrated Eastward. Today, Heyerdahl’s theory is considered racially problematic pseudoscience, and DNA evidence doesn’t support it. Nevertheless, when it comes to expedition narratives, Heyerdahl knows how to write a good book. For those who like exotic adventure, Kon-Tiki is an excellent read; Fatu-Hiva is merely good. For a better account of roughing it in the Marquesas, read Herman Melville’s Typee.

Given Heyerdahl’s background in zoology, I was disappointed that he didn’t write more about the wildlife of Fatu-Hiva. He focuses more attention on the human inhabitants of the island. Despite being far off the beaten path, Fatu-Hiva was not entirely uncivilized nor untouched by European influence. In fact, the greatest danger faced by the Heyerdahls is unexpected: Catholic islanders who persecute the couple for being Protestants. Heyerdahl readily admits that his experiment in getting “back to nature” was only partially successful because the negative aspects of human nature and modern civilization were to some degree inescapable. Nevertheless, his attempt at a tropical idyll is admirable and makes for an interesting read.

Idle Days in Patagonia by William Henry Hudson

Too many idle thoughts, not enough Patagonia

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was born in Argentina, the son of settlers from the United States. He was raised in the pampas near Buenos Aires. He became a British citizen in 1900, and over the course of a literary career that spanned roughly four decades, he published many books on Argentina and England, including ornithological treatises, travelogues, memoirs, and novels. His book Idle Days in Patagonia, published in 1893, is about his first trip South into the vicinity of Argentina’s Rio Negro.

In the opening chapter, Hudson tells us that this journey to Patagonia is a lifelong dream of his. He has always wanted to study the birds of that region. On his way down the Atlantic Coast from Buenos Aires, the steamer in which Hudson is traveling is inadvertently grounded on a beach. All of the passengers have to get out and walk to their destination, a journey of a couple days. Shortly after reaching the Rio Negro, an English acquaintance of Hudson’s accidentally shoots him in the foot. This injury puts a limit on his birding and botanizing expeditions, and, as Hudson explains, results in the “idle days” of the title. Nevertheless, Hudson does manage to venture out a bit on horseback and observe the scenery, wildlife, and vegetation of the region, his descriptions of which constitute much of the book..

Although Hudson is an ornithologist, this book is not a scientific text. He mentions many bird species by name and gives a sentence or two about how pretty they are, but there is very little to learn here about the anatomy or behavior of South America’s birds. This is more a work of travel literature, and not a very good one at that. Successful travel literature requires that the author give the reader a sense of place in regards to the location that’s being discussed, and Hudson doesn’t really accomplish that. In fact, he doesn’t even seem to care whether he writes about Patagonia or not. He drew several of the chapters from papers and articles he had previously published in periodicals. There is an entire chapter in which he rambles on about snow, whiteness, and Herman Melville that has nothing to do with Patagonia at all. Two chapters on eyes and eyesight only vaguely touch upon the people and birds of South America. A chapter on the sense of smell is even more irrelevant. There is even a brief passage in which Hudson advocates for nudism. Hudson frequently departs from his Patagonian narrative to go off on all sorts of asides, which might be forgivable if they approached the philosophical profundity of Henry David Thoreau’s digressions. Instead, Hudson’s musings are mostly just common sense and personal opinion.

Hudson strikes me as one of those authors who decided early in life, “I’m a writer, by God!” and then proceeded to crank out a relentless stream of books about anything that crossed his mind without any consideration of whether what he was saying would be interesting to others. Many writers, once they’d been shot in the foot, might have decided “OK, I guess I’m not going to write this book,” but not Hudson. As a birding enthusiast, I have a high tolerance for writers who just like to talk about birds. Idle Days in Patagonia, however, left me with the feeling that, if I went and spent some time in Argentina, even I could write a better book about it than this.
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Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John Lloyd Stephens

Dueling presidents and Mayan ruins

John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) was an American diplomat and travel writer. In 1839, President Martin Van Buren appointed him Ambassador to Central America. Soon after, he traveled to Central America to assume his new post. It’s unclear what exactly his mission was, however, since Stephens just seems to travel around doing whatever he wants. Stephens’s journey lasted several months, during which time he also ventured into Mexico. His account of his expedition, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán was published in two volumes in 1841. This book should not be confused with his 1843 publication Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, which covers a second trip Stephens made to Mexico.

In 1839, the several nations of Central America were united under one government, the Federal Republic of Central America. When Stephens arrived in Central America, however, the presidency of that government was in dispute between two warring generals, Rafael Carrera and José Francisco Morazán. Stephens doesn’t seem to favor either would-be presidente but rather curries the favor of whichever he happens to be facing at the time. Stephens spends much of the book chronicling the political and military conflict between these two figures. He met with both generals and witnessed some battles fought and atrocities committed by both parties. Although borders may have been different back then, I believe Stephens’s travels took him through every country in Central America except maybe Panama. He doesn’t venture into Mexico until halfway through Volume 2.

Stephens also explored the ruins of several Mayan cities, three of which are discussed at some length: Copán in Guatemala, Palenque in Chiapas, and Uxmal in the Yucatán. Accompanying him on these explorations was the artist Frederick Catherwood, who documented the sites in drawings and paintings. Stephens had no archaeological training, so his discussions of the Maya don’t really hold up to today’s standards. Catherwood, on the other hand, is the real deal. His illustrations of Mayan ruins are quite remarkable in their attention to detail, particularly when you consider he had almost no precedent to build upon. This book contains dozens of engravings of Catherwood’s drawings, but he also published his own book Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan with color lithographs. I don’t want to overemphasize the archaeological content of the book, however, because it’s really only a small portion of the text. The bulk of the two volumes deals with the politics and military matters of Central America, which will likely be of interest mostly to historians of Latin America.

There’s also quite a bit of complaining about unsavory accommodations, incessant mosquitos, and unsatisfactory hired hands. Stephens is more interested in getting to know wealthy Spaniards than the poor Indigenous population, because the former can offer him better lodgings and dinners than the latter. As an explorer and travel writer, Stephens is no Alexander von Humboldt. You’re not going to get a really liberal and enlightened account of Latin American culture and politics, but Stephens is at least a conscientious observer and chronicler of what he sees.

This book is valuable as an outsider’s historical account of what Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatán were like during this time period. Much of the information imparted, however, won’t hold much interest for today’s reader. Before reading this book, one really needs to consider if it will be worth roughly 24 hours of your reading time. For those only interested in the archaeological sites, just read the illustrated chapters on the Mayan cities.
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Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght

Moderately interesting field-work memoir

In 2005, Jonathan Slaght was working on a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. To achieve his degree, he formulated a research project to study the Blakiston’s fish owl. This majestic bird, the largest owl species in the world, lives in the forests of Eastern Asia. Slaght decided to conduct his research in the Russian province of Primorye, along the Pacific coast northeast of Vladivostok. Though an American by birth, through his father’s occupation and some time in the Peace Corps Slaght had previously lived in Primorye, spoke the language, and was familiar with the region’s customs. Over the course of the next few years, Slaght made repeated trips to Primorye to find Blakiston’s fish owls, capture them, and fit them with radio telemetry devices to track their movements, with the end goal of crafting a conservation plan for the fish owl and completing his dissertation. Slaght’s 2020 book Owls of the Eastern Ice is a memoir of his time spent in Primorye conducting this research project.

Owls of the Eastern Ice is basically a 24-page National Geographic article that has been drawn out into a 300-page book. There isn’t enough of interest here to merit such a lengthy treatment. At least half of the book consists of Slaght and his team looking for owls and not finding any. The reader gleans a little bit of a feel for what life is like in this remote portion of Russia, but Slaght doesn’t delve much deeper into the culture than many episodes of drinking in hunting cabins. The most memorable passages of the book involve Slaght and his Russian colleagues escaping some natural threat or obstacle, such as a flood or blizzard.

Other than the fish owls that Slaght is searching for, he doesn’t offer much discussion of the rest of the ecosystem beyond a few mentions of other species spotted here and there. The reader never really gets the feeling of what it’s like to be among these forests. Although this is a book about nature, it’s not really nature writing. A naturalist like Bernd Heinrich might combine concrete bird science with broader Thoreau-like musings, but Slaght’s book is strictly focused on his research. For other zoologists engaged in projects involving the tagging and radio-tracking of animals, this might be a helpful case study in methods and techniques. As an average bird-lover, however, I was disappointed to find that I learned more about capturing fish owls than I did about the birds themselves. This is a perfectly sound volume on an ornithological research project, but I’m not sure why the publisher decided to give this book the full-on trade book treatment and market it to general readers.

I envy Slaght’s adventures: exploring remote wilderness in a foreign land, observing beautiful birds, uncovering previously unknown facts about them, and working to conserve wildlife. His writing, however, while exhibiting the perfectly competent and articulate voice of a scientist, didn’t really generate much excitement in the relating of his travels. This memoir isn’t colorful enough to succeed as a travelogue. The audience most likely to enjoy this book are Slaght’s fellow ornithologists, not for its scientific findings—which would be presented in his dissertation or other academic publication—but for its relatable anecdotes of field work.
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Rambles in Yucatan by Benjamin Moore Norman

A supercilious American looks at Mayan Mexico

Benjamin Moore Norman was a book dealer in New York and New Orleans before he took up writing. He was somehow associated with the explorer and writer John Lloyd Stephens, who traveled to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico in the early 1840s to study the Mayan culture. Inspired by Stephens, Norman made his own expedition to the Yucatan, which resulted in his book Rambles in Yucatan. Norman’s and Stephens’s books on the Yucatan were both published in 1843. Regardless of who published first, it is the consensus among informed readers that Stephens’s book is the better of the two.

Norman is to be commended for his adventurousness in journeying to territory far off the beaten path, but his narrative of the trip is nothing to rave about. Rather than displaying the rugged adaptability of an explorer, Norman takes a very condescending attitude towards his Mexican hosts and constantly complains about the squalid accommodations he is forced to endure. He demonstrates very little respect for the present-day Indigenous Mexicans, repeatedly portraying them as lazy, stupid, or shifty. In the cities of Mérida, Valladolid, and Campeche, he mostly stays with Mexicans of Spanish descent, whom he doesn’t always depict in a flattering light either. One humorous episode finds Norman lodging in a monastery, where one of the monks offers him a whip, which he declines. The monks then blow out all the candles and flog themselves for 15 minutes while Norman can only sit there in the dark and listen.

Despite looking down on 19th-century Mexicans, Norman expresses much admiration for their ancestors, the ancient Maya. He recounts his visits to the ruins of Chichén Itzá, Kabah, and Uxmal. These sites were largely unexcavated at the time and covered with much vegetation, but apparently still quite impressive to behold. Norman makes himself out to be the first White man to visit Chichén Itzá, but his description of the archaeological sites he visited are rather rudimentary, mostly consisting of measurements of the buildings and brief descriptions of their sculptural elements. The book does, however, include a few helpful illustrations. Norman speculates on the uses of the buildings, and at one point describes as a “temple” what we clearly know today to be a ball court. The book ends with a series of appendices that summarize the knowledge of the region that was available at the time, compiled from the writings of others. The best of it is taken from Alexander von Humboldt; the worst of it is pure fiction. Norman repeatedly proposes that Indigenous Americans are the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel, or immigrants from Egypt or China. He just can’t bring himself to give a bunch of Indians credit for creating their own advanced civilization.

One word that Norman frequently uses that may confuse the reader is “sonato” or “sonata” (His spelling is inconsistent). What he’s really talking about are cenotes, the sinkholes frequently found in the limestone bedrock of the Yucatan. Filled with clear water, these cenotes are not only geological curiosities but also often popular swimming holes for locals and tourists alike.

I made my own rambles in the Yucatan decades ago, and I enjoyed reading Norman’s descriptions of what sites I visited were like in an earlier era. Personally, it’s hard for me not to enjoy a travel book about Mexico. Norman, however, was really just a dilettante in the areas of Mexican history and archaeology. Even in his day, there were better books on the subject, including Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán (1843), and Frederick Catherwood’s Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1844).
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The Travels of William Bartram

Botanizing the civilized South

Back when Thomas Jefferson and colleagues were signing the Declaration of Independence, naturalist William Bartram was exploring the wilds of the Southeastern United States. From 1773 to 1777, Bartram, a Philadelphia naturalist, traveled throughout the South, from Charleston, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, and from the Everglades to the Great Smoky Mountains. Bartram published an account of his Travels (the original title is much longer) in 1791. His primary pursuit was botanizing—collecting and describing the plant species of the region. Bartram also, however, noted many observations about the animal life, topography, and human inhabitants of the places he visited. Although one might imagine Bartram trekking through remote, pristine wilderness, the picture he paints of the South is surprisingly populated and civilized. He never seems to lack for a hospitable plantation, convenient trading post, or sizable Native American settlement at which to spend the night or eat a hearty meal at the behest of generous hosts.

One really has to be a botanist to appreciate all of what Bartram has to say in his Travels. As many a nature-loving hiker might do, Bartram noted the different species of plant life he spotted on his outings. Each chapter contains about three or four of such species lists, but they are all in Latin. He also uses many Latin botanical terms to describe the characteristics of various plants. When he’s discussing animals, however, he writes in plain English, using the common names (some of which have changed over the past two and a half centuries). In particular, he has a lot to say about crocodiles, which were plentiful and hostile.

The Revolutionary War is not mentioned at all in Bartram’s Travels. Slavery is mentioned, though not as much as one would expect, given the locale. More often than not, when Bartram visits a plantation in Georgia or Florida, he just doesn’t mention the Black population at all. Only when he is loaned a slave as a temporary guide or paddler does he ever single out a Black person for mention, and never by name. Bartram gives much attention in this book, however, to the Native American population of the American South. He interacts with and discusses at length the people of the Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, and Muscogulge nations. Bartram frequently expresses a great respect for the Native peoples and takes particular care in his detailed descriptions of their lifestyle, customs, government, and society.

Many scholars consider the modern genre of nature writing to have begun with the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, the German Romanticist who combined empirical scientific observation with subjective emotional reflection in such works as Views of Nature. Bartram, however, writing a few decades earlier, was at least making baby steps in that direction. Though he doesn’t digress into extended flights of personal philosophy like Henry David Thoreau is wont to do, Bartram does take the time to note his personal impressions of place and often praises the glory of God as manifested in His natural creations. Bartram also mixes plenty of travel anecdotes among his scientific descriptions of the land and its wildlife.

Unfortunately, much of Bartram’s Travels consists of tedious descriptions of topography and waterways that wear on the reader after a while. The nature writing on plants and animals is much more interesting, even if one doesn’t have a fluent knowledge of botanical Latin. The most valuable aspect of Bartram’s Travels, however, is his writing on the Native Americans of the South. This book amounts to a time capsule of the delicate balance that existed between frontier settlers and Native civilization before the former drove away the latter.

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Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volume 4 by Alexander von Humboldt

Disorganized and repetitive afterthoughts

Alexander von Humboldt

In the midst of his exploratory expedition to the Americas from 1799 to 1804, Prussian scientist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt spent a year in Mexico. His Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, published in 1811, is the detailed summation of his researches in that nation, which at the time also included parts of what are now California and the Southwestern United States. Also in 1811, an English translation of the Political Essay was published in London in five volumes. Because Volume 5 is a thin book of maps and charts, Volume 4 is really the conclusion of Humboldt’s essay on Mexico. Far from a crucial capstone to the work, however, this fourth volume of the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain is less interesting or necessary than the previous three installments.

The phrase “Political Essay” is really not an accurate description of Humboldt’s study. This is really a comprehensive geographic overview of Mexico encompassing many natural and social sciences. In Volume 3, Humboldt mostly discussed the natural resources of Mexico. He begins Volume 4 by discussing transportation—the roads and ports of Mexico—to explain how those resources are exported to the rest of the world. This opening section is really the only original information in the fourth volume. Everything else seems redundant from previous works. After discussing Mexico’s main seaports of Veracruz and Acapulco, Humboldt then goes into an extensive discussion of the country’s tropical diseases, mainly yellow fever and the “black vomit.” Then, based on detailed statistical research, Humboldt estimates the amount of specie (coinage) circulating in Mexico, and the total monetary value of the nation’s trade in imports and exports. These are topics that Humboldt already discussed at length in previous books. All monetary values are expressed in piastres, which I believe is the Spanish coin of the time (other nations have also had coins called piastres), so today’s reader can only get a general relative idea of the amounts being discussed.

The text of the book is interspersed with many tables, which are a convenient relief from Humboldt’s data-heavy paragraph prose. Roughly the second half of Volume 4 is devoted to notes pertaining to subjects discussed in Volumes 1 through 4. One wonders why such a volume would need notes, since the main text of the book is so minutely specific in its presentation of data that it reads like notes anyway. The answer is likely that these notes present data that Humboldt compiled after the first three volumes were already in the process of publication. Only the most specialized historians will find these notes useful. To the general reader they just seem like digressions and afterthoughts.

In total, The Political Essay on New Spain really is an impressive, monumental work. The book is a pioneering masterpiece of what geographers today would call area studies. It serves as a detailed time capsule of the state of Spanish America at the dawn of the nineteenth century. That said, Volume 4 is the least vital piece of that grand design. Even the most ardent admirers of Humboldt and the most avid scholars of Mexican history are likely to find the volume a disorganized and repetitive mess.
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My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir

Observations among the trees of California

Scottish-American naturalist John Muir’s memoir My First Summer in the Sierra was published in 1911. In chronicling the events of Muir’s life, chronologically, this book comes after The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, but the books were not published in that order. At the end of A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, Muir traveled by ship to California, which is where this memoir begins. Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Muir takes a job as an assistant shepherd with a Mr. Delaney, who owns a flock of about two thousand sheep. Guiding this flock to high-altitude pasture lands gives Muir the opportunity to satisfy his longing to immerse himself in the California wilderness. The events Muir recounts occurred from June to September 1869 and were presumably transcribed from his diaries, as the prose takes the form of dated entries. During this first summer in the Sierra, Muir makes his first trip to Yosemite Valley, a country with which he would forever be identified.

Before arriving in Yosemite, however, Muir spends a lot of time examining and discussing trees. Seeing many of the California species for the first time, Muir describes each species he encounters as if he has stumbled upon a rare treasure. The first half of My First Summer in the Sierra often reads like a field guide, but with Muir’s verbal descriptions of leaves, seeds, cones, and bark in lieu of pictures. (The original edition did feature some landscape photographs and drawings by Muir, but those illustrations aren’t necessarily included in later editions.) Some discussion is also given to the mammals and birds of the region, with Muir providing his impressions of each species he encountered. Bears, in particular, were a constant nuisance to the shepherds. When Muir gets to Yosemite the tone of the book changes to less microcosmic observations of wildlife and more grandiose descriptions of mountain peaks and sweeping vistas.

Personally, I found this book less interesting than other books I’ve read by Muir, including those aforementioned. Though Muir does give some insight into the life of a California shepherd, there’s less of an autobiographical narrative to this book, and it reads more like a sketchbook of impressions. Muir’s writing is similar to that of Henry David Thoreau in that it combines natural observation with philosophical musings, but Thoreau went more heavy on the philosophy while Muir doubles down on the nature. Most of the text of My First Summer in the Sierra is Muir’s empirical observations of plants and animals, interspersed with occasional paeanic comments about the glory of the gods. The contemplative passages in this book feel shallower than those in some of Muir’s other books, and as far as the natural details go, I think I would prefer to just read a field guide to understand the uniqueness of each tree species.

I’m sure any frequent visitor to Yosemite National Park, however, would love this book as a literary record and tribute to a beloved landscape. No doubt many a home in Northern California bears a copy on its shelves. Those who have never been to Yosemite, however, may have a hard time getting the gist of the landscape from the way Muir flits around from topic to topic. Muir is one of our nation’s greatest nature writers, and My First Summer in the Sierra is certainly a fine piece of nature writing; I just think he’s done better.

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Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson

Backpacking through Protestant France

Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson is best remembered as a novelist of classic books like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In his own lifetime, however, Stevenson was known and respected as an all-around man of letters who also penned nonfiction, poetry, and travel writing. Among the latter category, one of Stevenson’s earliest works is Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, published in 1879.

In 1878, Stevenson made a 12-day trip through the Cévennes, a mountainous region of South Central France. He purchased a donkey named Modestine to carry his belongings, which included a prototypical sleeping bag in lieu of a tent. “Backpacking” (for lack of a better word, since it’s really the donkey’s back that’s doing the work), for pleasure rather than out of necessity, was practically unheard of at this time, so Stevenson was an eccentric rarity. These days we see all kinds of outdoor travel memoirs, but the genre barely existed in the 1870s, so Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was a pioneering work of travel literature.

Stevenson and his donkey trek from town to town through rugged rural terrain, stopping to spend the night at inns, monasteries, or campsites in the open air. Stevenson interacts with the locals and provides insight into the regional culture. The Cévennes is (or was, in 1878) a predominantly Protestant stronghold in an overwhelmingly Catholic France. The area has a history of religious warfare. In the early 18th century, Protestant insurgents of the Cévennes, known as Camisards, rebelled against France’s King Louis XIV, who had declared Protestantism illegal. Louis made his point by destroying many of the towns in the region. At the time Stevenson visited the Cévennes, the Catholics and Protestants were living side by side in relative peace and harmony, but he is very familiar with this history and occasionally goes off on extended asides to discuss the past events of the religious conflict. Judging by the number of novels written on the subject, British novelists of the 19th century seem to have been fascinated by Catholic vs. Protestant warfare, but to today’s reader such conflicts often seem less romantic and heroic and more of a foolish waste of human life over theological hair-splitting.

Every work of travel writing is a mix of first-person memoir and third-person geography lesson. In this case, I would have preferred less personal reminiscences of Stevenson and his donkey and more revealing insight into the Cévennes and its people. Stevenson does include a fair amount of local color in his encounters with the people, but since this is an outdoor adventure narrative one would expect more attention paid to the natural landscape, which comes across a bit generic here. In his discussions of the local inhabitants, Stevenson gets so wrapped up in the Catholic/Protestant distinction that other aspects of Cévennes life get neglected. It’s almost as if nobody has jobs because they’re too busy practicing their religions. Even so, the most interesting portion of the book is Stevenson’s stay at the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows, because one really does get some insight into the lifestyle of the monks who live there.

For those who have ever dreamt of wandering the French countryside, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is a pleasant journey but not one overwhelmingly memorable. This book may have been cutting-edge for its time, but travel writing has come along way since the 1870s, and this could have used a touch more National Geographic-style secular investigation into the environment and culture of its setting.
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