Marco does mention Buddhism and describes Buddha, calling him by his Mongol title, "Burkhan," the equivalent of "Enlightened." Nicknamed Il Milione for his reputation as a recounter of marvels (see Chapter 20, "Imaginary People"), he dictated his book to a well-known writer of romances, Rustichello (of Pisa), in 1298 while in prison for two years in Genoa. Rustichello may have overegged some of the events and descriptions, but the Travels (the first printed version appeared in Nuremberg in 1477) is still an astonishing eyewitness account of the then-known world and was regarded in Europe for centuries as a geography of Asia. Columbus carried an annotated copy with him on his voyages, which persuaded him in the Caribbean that he had reached the offshore islands of India, which is how the Indies got its name and why the natives of the hemisphere are known as Indians.
Xuanzang: Seventeen years (629–645). This Tang Dynasty monk, scholar, translator, and indefatigable traveler (his name is also rendered Hsuan-tsang), was twenty-seven when he set off on his journey to the West (the title of the Ming Dynasty novel that dramatized his travels), resulting in The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. This incomparable record of travel contains a precise account of distances, landscapes, commerce, and the numerous cultures, beliefs, and peoples along the Silk Road, to the edge of Persia, to what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Xuanzang's journey of thousands of miles is so well documented it enabled archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to find and excavate these ancient sites (see Chapter 13, "It Is Solved by Walking").
Lafcadio Hearn in Japan: The last fourteen years of his life, from 1890 to 1904. Hearn had traveled before this to the West Indies and elsewhere, and though he was not traveling the whole time he was in Japan, he lived as an alien, collecting grievances and insights into Japanese life, under his new name, Koizumi Yakumo.
William Bartram: Four years, 1773 to 1777, for his pioneering travels in the American South. There he botanized, gathered specimens, and studied the lives and habits of Native Americans for his groundbreaking and influential study of 1791, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions; Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians, often called simply Bartram's Travels, a book read and praised by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Fanny Trollope in America: Almost four years (1827–1831). During that time she was in and out of the Nashoba settlement, an institution for the education of slaves who were hoping to be emancipated, but "one glance sufficed to convince me that every idea I had formed of the place was as far as possible from the truth. Desolation was the only feeling." She removed herself upriver to Cincinnati ("Porkopolis" — pigs in the street), where she put on "theatricals," and then built and opened a "bazaar," renting space to stallholders to sell "fancy goods." When this business failed, she did what many desperate people have done in search of solvency: she wrote a travel book, The Domestic Manners of Americans ("six hundred pages of griffonage" — scribblings), most of it trashing Americans as overfamiliar slobs and hypocrites who did nothing but spit. There is so much spitting in Domestic Manners, she could have called it Great Expectorations.
Yet this clearsighted book (greatly admired by Mark Twain) is not an account of city-haunting and sightseeing in America but a work "describing faithfully the daily aspect of ordinary life." She went on to write many more books, including a number of novels, and though her son Anthony (whom, at age twelve, she left in England) complained in his Autobiography that she was "much from home or too busy to be bothered," Fanny remained an inspiration to him and showed him the way to be a novelist and traveler. We would not have Anthony Trollope's great novels or his masterpiece of travel, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, were it not for his mother's bold example.
Fanny's conclusion about Americans: "I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions."
Henry Morton Stanley crossing Africa: Three years, 1874 to 1877, for Through the Dark Continent. He traveled from east to west, Zanzibar to the heart of Africa and down the Congo River to Matadi and the Atlantic Ocean. A few years later he crossed Africa from west to east, a two-year trip.
Paul Du Chaillu in West Africa: Three years. Born in New Orleans (this is disputed; it might have been Paris) in 1835, he spent part of his youth in West Africa, where his father was a trader. He set off in 1855, when he was twenty years old. "I traveled — always on foot, and unaccompanied by other white men — about 8,000 miles. I shot, stuffed, and brought home over 2,000 birds, of which more than 60 are new species, and I killed upwards of 1,000 quadrupeds, of which 200 were stuffed and brought home, with more than 60 hitherto unknown to science. I suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, taking, to cure myself, more than fourteen ounces of quinine. Of famine, long-continued exposures to the heavy tropical rains, and attacks of ferocious ants and venomous flies, it is not worth while to speak." He traveled in and around Gabon and halfway up the Ogowe (or Ogooue) River, 300 miles into the African interior, where he confirmed the existence of several species of gorilla (Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, 1861). On a later trip, for another book, he encountered various bands of Pygmies (The Country of the Dwarfs, 1871).
He inspired the travels of Mary Kingsley, H. M. Stanley, Jack London, and many others, and perhaps the fiction of Saul Bellow, whose Henderson the Rain King seems to echo the account of Du Chaillu's being made king of the Apingi in Gabon (see Chapter 21, "Writers and the Places They Never Visited").
Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance Expedition: Almost three years, 1914–1917. One of the most moving parts of South (1920), Shackleton's account of this heroic journey, is his sense that there was a mysterious fourth person with him on one of his marches:
When I look back at those days I have no doubts that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, "Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us." Crean confessed the same idea. One feels "the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech" in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
Without crediting it precisely, T. S. Eliot alludes to the phenomenon in a line of The Waste Land: "Who is the third who always walks beside you?" In a footnote Eliot writes that the line "was stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which but I think one of Shackleton's)."