Famous Expeditions and Explorers

>>>/his/

>>7314350
>What are some of the best travel journals and adventure literature from the georgian/victorian/edwardian era?

>>7314350
>>>/his/
What did he mean by this?

>>7314350
>>7314363
well memed

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>>7314363
>>7314374
Man, I thought /lit/ was an intellectual board. Help me out here. guys!

>>7314398
>Man, I thought /lit/ was an intellectual board.
That was your first mistake

>>7314331

The whole Lost World genre sounds up your alley.

>>7314398
you thought wrong cunt

Verne is a good start. Around the World in 80 Days inspired a few other real travelogues (Nellie Bly's is probably the most famous)

Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle is a good source, but keep in mind he was treated with special favour to enjoy all the equipment and parties he did.

Charles Waterton inspired a lot of young explorers of the Victorian age with his Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles. It will also teach you how to preserve the wildlife when living or dead.

Richard Burton wrote so much stuff it's hard to say what's essential, but for pure exploration The Nile Basin, Goa and The Blue Mountains, or his translation of Lacerda's Lands of the Cazembe from an earlier period.

Most of Captain Cook's crew kept journals also.

If you don't mind fiction Lost Horizon by Hilton is a trip to Shangrila, based on earlier Jesuit accounts of entry into the Himalayas. [Jesuit explorers' diaries into China and South America are also good primary sources]

Erewhon by Butler is about adventuring and in part based on his travels to New Zealand.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness if you want something soul crushing about colonial life.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden is an alright book about being a settler on the islands, but the movie of the same name has more documents and more insanity.

Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World if you want to get really weird, but lots of seafaring, exploring, mustering, and laid.

travel journals from others eras :

Jean de Léry ( french XVIe traveller, went to Brasil, cool book)
Ibn Battuta works (berber traveller, XIVe)
Bougainville's travel in the pacific ocean (XVIIIe)
Diaz de castillo's true history (XVI century conquistador)
Claude lévi-Strauss : Tristes tropiques ( french ethnologist, XXe)

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>>7314433
Just looked it up, it really sounds quite like what I was looking for. Wikipedia even threw Lovecraft into the mix, which is really nice.

>>7314448
Awesome list, thank you! Are those real travel journals as easy to read as the fictionals? English is not my first language and I'm not that big of a reader, will I have a hard time with the real ones you recommended?

>>7314477
Ibn Battuta's Rihla is also good

>>7314476
Thanks, too. Also, if you write "XVIe", does it stand for 16th and e for century? Never seen that. Pardon my ignorance.

>>7314477
They're not especially hard, most of them would have been read by kids in the Victorian era, but most of them would have dated English.

I just remembered Ahmad ibn Fadlan was a 10th Century Arab traveller who has descriptions of Vikingr culture along with most of the Turks and Kazakhs he met on his travels.

What's your first language? If it's one of the major colonizing ones then it'll probably be able to find something written in it.

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>>7314514
I guess as a german I won't have any trouble to find travel literature in my language, I just haven't thought of that. Maybe Hagenbeck?

...I really don't know any other german explorer.

>>7314534
Barth has an account of his travels in Africa

>>7314534
There's one Burton helped but I don't know it's original name in German, about Hans Staden who was one of the earliest explorers of South America, and he wrote about how cannibals had captured him.

Heinrich Barth did a lot of stuff around the Mediterranean and North Africa.

Alexander von Humboldt did the same with South America, but he comes at it from less of a linguist's point of view and more of a botanist's and geographer's, like Darwin but with plants instead of insects.

I'll have a think about it.

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>>7314506
In french it's the same thing than in english

16th = the sixteenTH century = le seizièmE siècle = 16e/XVIe

Also check out the books of Alexandra David Néel "Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet when it was forbidden to foreigners."

>>7314534
btw, the Galapagos Affair settlers were German.

Check Layard's "Early Adventures" and Westcott's "Captain for Elizabeth". Other archaeologists from the 19th mid century boom you may want to check out (I'm using a phone and too lazy of they wrote books on their explorations): Rawlinson, Paul Emile Botta, C.J Rich, Casten Neibuhr (18th century though), Grotefend, W.K. Loftus, Schliemann, Arthur Evans, and Archibald Sayce. Most of the names I mentioned were very prominent figures especially related to ancient mesopotamia. Be careful, though: a lot of what they wrote about ancient civilizations is very outdated. Also see if you can find some documents or books related to Napoleon's visit to Egypt, as there was important progress regarding egyptology there. Oh, and if I recall correctly, there are actual filmings of ancient egypt excavations in the beginnings of the 20th century. You may wanna look over those too.

>>7314589
*too check if
Also I just saw you're german; you're in luck because a huge amount of papers in archaeology are written in your native language.

Burton's journey to Mecca disguised as an Afghan sufi is good, on volume 2 at the moment.

Captain Cook's journals

The Australian explorers are good reading, my favourite is Stuart, but Sturt and Eyre are good too. Read them with Google maps open so you can look at satellite photos of the dunes they're dying of thirst in, they usually give coordinates of where they are every couple of days.

>>7314631
Burton's so goddamn comfy reading, isn't he?

>Read them with Google maps open so you can look at satellite photos of the dunes they're dying of thirst in, they usually give coordinates of where they are every couple of days.
kek I like how you work.

>>7314631
>Read them with Google maps open so you can look at satellite photos of the dunes they're dying of thirst in, they usually give coordinates of where they are every couple of days.

That's awesome! But I guess you don't wanna zoom too far in with all the roads and other moderns sights that ruin your immersion.

>>7314589
Nice. I don't care if they are outdated. It adds to the kind of mystery I'm looking for.


Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far, really appreciate it.

>>7314645
Yeah I like it how he's so conversational, he tells a mean yarn but he also has an insightful remark to make about basically everything he comes across

>>7314663
Not in Central Australia... maybe in a couple of places but the wasteland they travelled through is mostly still wasteland. There was this theory that Australia had an inland sea, which was the reason for Eyre's and Sturt's expeditions

>>7314663
No problem m8

If you want more fiction, Treasure Island by Stevenson and Kim by Kipling are both excellent fun. Kim has the bonus of espionage, but it is in India and so society is developed more than a Jungle Book adventure.

>>7314663
Forgot to mention I actually made a crude web app to do this automatically - http://james-boswell.herokuapp.com/ . I managed to automatically extract quite a few of the latitude/longitude readings from the journal and plotted them on a Gmap. I'd quite like to continue but it's a lot harder with land-based expeditions and journals which were cleaned up for publication. Was an interesting diversion though

>>7314673
>Yeah I like it how he's so conversational, he tells a mean yarn but he also has an insightful remark to make about basically everything he comes across
Yeah, he's the gentlemanly uncle I always wanted :3 He writes a lot about psychology and social orders too, so it makes sense that he's always looking for insights.

>>7314686
Kim is dope. You might like Conrad too, OP he's big on mystery and the exotic. Lord Jim

>>7314692
Cook's journal*

Just read about Burton. Was he a muslim? I know that he traveled the middle east a lot, but he praises allah an aweful lot.

>>7314374
Same to you