Can-Cans, Cats and Cities of Ash

One of the great derisive monuments to the imbecilities of the tourist experience, Mark Twain's account of his tour with a group of fellow Americans around the sights of Europe is both hilarious and touching, Twain's exasperation and dismay at the phoney and exploitative being matched by his excitement and pleasure in the genuinely beautiful.

Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own.  Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things:  Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science.  Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.   

penguin.co.uk talks to Simon Winder, publisher of the new Great Journeys series

HOW DID YOU SELECT THE BOOKS TO BE INCLUDED IN THE SERIES?
I thought it would be fun to have a series which was related to Great Ideas but which was more packed with derring-do.  In effect Great Ideas was about purely intellectual adventure while the new series is about intellectual adventure but stimulated by seeing amazing things.  Everyone in the series was challenged, surprised, delighted or horrified by what they encountered and by writing about it changed the way we ourselves see the world.

We tried very hard to have a broad spread of time-span, from Herodotus, the earliest of great historians, to Ryszard Kapuscinski, who is still very much alive and whose new book, Travels with Herodotus, we are publishing in the summer, which creates an attractive pattern.

There was also an effort to cover every continent – so the reader can travel from the Antarctic to Siberia, from California to Sri Lanka.  What I really like about the books is that all the writers are describing places that can still be visited – but you can never see what they see: the world has moved on and these books brilliantly preserve something which can only be reached through these writers’ skills.

The books were also all bestsellers when they were first published and very famous to those who know about the areas being described – many readers may not know, for example, about Mary Wortley Montagu, but for anyone who has fallen under the spell of Istanbul she remains one of the best possible writers.  It is the same with Walter Henry Bates – who is not only one of the greatest of field scientists but the expert on the Amazon and a figure still revered by those interested in tropical America.

DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE IN THE SERIES?
This is almost impossible to answer!  There is something incredibly attractive about Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent years wandering around the islands of what are now Malaysia and Indonesia – he seemed to have an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the people, landscapes, plants and creatures he encountered and gives a strong impression of having been genuinely really nice as well as a great scientist.  William Dampier is certainly the most entertaining – Britain’s worst pirate, who accidentally managed in the end to sail around the world three times.  Dampier was also accidentally the cause, directly or indirectly, of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe thereby starting up the English novel, and generally leading a career of commendable racketiness.

WHICH JOURNEY WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO FOLLOW?
If I could go back in time then Mary Wortley Montagu’s journey across Europe in the early 18th century would have been pretty unbeatable – being feted at the Habsburg court in Vienna and then, accompanied by a small army to ward off insatiable packs of wolves and gangs of brigands, crossing southeastern Europe before winding up in Constantinople and being surrounded by the joys of Ottoman culture – all those sherbets, curly-toed slippers and marble fountains.

AND WHICH FILLS YOU WITH MOST DREAD?
On the face of it Olaudah Equiano’s horrible story of slavery – but, at least in his case, there was a happy ending.  Cabeza de Vaca’s account of how a proud, substantial Spanish expedition to Florida ended with the deaths of almost everyone involved, picked off one by one by a vast range of terrors, is unbeatable – the original travel horror story.  He ends up crazily staggering all over the American southwest with a handful of companions, accidentally discovering places such as Texas centuries too early.  He went through a lot.  For sheer pointlessness Shackleton’s journey perhaps fills me with most dread – his genius as a sailor got him safely back from the ice-shelf to civilization, but it raises awkward questions about why he ever bothered going something so null and abstract in the first place.
 
CAN YOU GIVE US FIVE FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT SOME OF THE EXPLORERS AND JOURNEYS IN THE SERIES?
Sir Richard Burton, the great Victorian linguist, sexologist, writer and spy, genuinely did manage to disguise himself successfully as a Persian holy man and get from Alexandria to Medina and Mecca without being found out.  Surely, surely at some point someone must have said ‘Oh look, there’s an Englishman who has stained his skin and is talking Persian with a funny accent’ – but no – and in To the Holy Shrines he has left a completely extraordinary account of how he did it.

Alfred Russel Wallace, aside from having a patently misspelled middle name, during his eight years of wandering in southeast Asia, came to realize in a fevered dream off the coast of New Guinea the ‘origin of species’ completely independently of Darwin, who had been secretly mulling over the same concept for some years.  The shock of receiving Wallace’s letter announcing his discovery pushed Darwin into writing The Origin of Species, thereby changing the entire course of scientific history – but the timing was entirely thanks to Wallace’s ravings on the Arafura Sea.

Mary Wortley Montagu, when not disguising herself in harem clothing or memorably visiting Turkish baths and parties, noticed that small-pox (from which she herself had almost died when younger) was not a problem in the Ottoman Empire because of the Turkish habit of having ‘small-pox parties’. At these children would have ‘infected matter’ put into a specially made cut in their skin, develop a mild form of the disease, and then become immune.  Having had her own children innoculated, she brought this practice back to London and became an important advocate in an argument that ultimately led to immunisation from many illnesses.

Mary Kingsley, a genius, wandered around modern Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo and Gabon, spurred on by an overwhelming fascination for the people and places she found there.  She was attractively scornful both of British imperialism and of the missionaries who she saw as ruining an amazing part of the world.  She wrote unimprovable accounts of hippos, gorillas (only recently discovered by Europeans) and forest elephants and became the first European woman to climb Mount Cameroon.  She died of fever in South Africa while nursing Boer prisoners during the Boer War, aged 37.

Alexander von Humboldt, Prussia’s greatest natural scientist and possibly one of the most agreeable people ever to live, travelled up the Orinoco in 1800 and, among a myriad of other things, became the first scientist properly to study the electric eel.  A massive specimen was spotted in a bend in a shallow river and was captured by the horrific expedient of herding dozens of horses and mules into the river and letting the eel electrocute, stun and drown them one by one until its battery ran out.  His amazing account of this and many other adventures is given in Jaguars and Electric Eels.

IN YOUR OPINION, WHICH HAVE BEEN THE GREATEST JOURNEYS OF THE PAST 20 YEARS?
I guess the greatest journeys are those being made by thousands of Africans trying frantically and often fatally to cross over by boat into Europe.  The time of ‘heroic’ travel has surely been played out many years ago – Great Journeys are about a world fundamentally mysterious and with many of its inhabitants knowing nothing about each other.  By contrast two of the most recent writers in the series, Shackleton and Thesiger, could only track down something genuinely new by finding virtually sterile ice or sand interesting! 

Publishing Director of Penguin Press on the forthcoming Great Journeys series

Great Journeys
They have been nearly frozen to death, died of thirst, gone mad with fever, been eaten by crocodiles, bitten by a cobra, electrocuted by giant eels or clubbed to death by hostile tribesmen. They have clambered through jungles to see toucans and orangutans, sipped iced sherbet from gold dishes, seen great clouds of fruit-bats pour from the mouth of a cave in the Philippines, strolled through Paris at the height of its can-can decadence, encountered a family of gorillas in the depth of the Congo forest. They have endured monstrous waves in the Southern Ocean, a labyrinth of jagged icebergs, leech-infested tropical rivers, starvation, shipwreck, the merciless desert sun. They have been slaves, scientists, settlers, explorers, pirates, merchants, tourists, soldiers, total idiots. They have travelled by camel, pony, canoe, train, palanquin, steamer, jeep, galleon.

These are the writers of Great Journeys - 2,500 years of human ingenuity, idealism, folly and tragedy in 20 little books, spanning every continent and every ocean, every religion, every temperature and pretty much every altitude. These are all great journeys but not necessarily good ones - there can be few things grimmer than Orwell's journey to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Chekhov coming face to face with the reality of Siberian exile, Equiano sold into slavery. Cabeza de Vaca's story of how almost every one of his companions on what had been a proud, confident, well-funded expedition to Florida were killed one by one is the first and still the best (or worst) in the 'travel horror' genre. Others were more lucky: few more so than Isabella Bird cavorting around the Wild West, Mark Twain enjoying the follies of France and Italy, Mary Wortley Montagu visiting harems and seraglios disguised in Turkish clothing or Sir Richard Burton travelling to Mecca, absurdly pretending to be a Persian dervish. There are also the heroic scientist explorers: Humboldt on the Orinoco, Bates watching great armies of ants devouring everything in their path, Wallace on an ocean-going prau sailing through the Moluccas.

I have been asked to choose three favourites - a fiendishly hard task as every book in the series has been included because it is tremendous in one way or another. First off though has to be the wholly wonderful Mary Kingsley, an explorer of tropical Africa whose curiosity, scepticism and sense of humour remain incredibly vivid over a century after her tragic death - once read nobody can forget her magical accounts either of the deep forest and the people and creatures she meets there or of her breathtakingly foolhardy decision to climb Mount Cameroon. Next has to be the incomparable Mas'udi, one of the great Arab travellers and historians who in his Meadows of Gold collects amazing tales, the whole book being a sort of extraordinary time machine allowing us glimpses of empires, cities, civilisations and peoples all long vanished. And last and by no means least has to be William Dampier - perhaps Britain's worst pirate, a man who accidentally went three times around the world, unwittingly inspired both Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, gave the first (and horrible) account in English of Aborigines in Australia and left behind him a fabulous picture of a freebooting life in the margins of the world over three hundred years ago. His descriptions of a ludicrously botched pirate raid on a Spanish port in South America and of his chaotic attempt to get from the Nicobar Islands to Sumatra in a woefully inadequate little boat during the typhoon season have to be read to be believed. As with many of the authors of Great Journeys though, the main source of astonishment is that he lived to tell the tale.