I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the marvelous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to distil me into itself.
—
Twilight in Italy
(1913)
Stephen Crane in "The Open Boat": A day and a half, from late afternoon on January 1 to noon on January 3, 1897, off the Florida coast. Subtitled "A Tale Intended to Be After the Fact," this story is regarded as a classic in ordeal literature. But the ordeal (Crane and three others splashing fifteen miles to Daytona Beach in a dinghy after their ship, the Cuba-bound Commodore, sank) is a landlubber's exercise in mythomania and hyperbole. Though a literary critic was later emboldened to write, "Captain Bligh's account of his small boat journey ... seems tame in comparison," it is a matter of record that Bligh's treacherous voyage of four thousand miles in a small lifeboat took him six weeks, compared to Crane's thirty-six hours.
Kipling in Mandalay: He never went there, though he was briefly in Rangoon in 1889 and was impressed by the golden stupa of the Shwe Dagon pagoda. "Briefly" meant a few hours, as he explained in From Sea to Sea (1899):
My own sojourn in Rangoon was countable by hours, so I may be forgiven when I pranced with impatience at the bottom of the staircase [of the pagoda] because I could not at once secure a full, complete and accurate idea of everything that was to be seen. The meaning of the guardian tigers, the inwardness of the main pagoda, and the countless little ones, was hidden from me. I could not understand why the pretty girls with cheroots sold little sticks and
HOW
Long did
THE TRAVELER
spEnd TRAVELing?
colored candles to be used before the image of Buddha. Everything was incomprehensible to me.
There are obvious howlers in the poem "Mandalay" (written in 1890 and published in Barrack-Room Ballads): the old Moulmein pagoda is hundreds of miles from Mandalay, and the dawn does not come up "like thunder out er China 'crost the bay," yet the poem is persuasively atmospheric, as in the last verse:
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder out er China 'crost the bay!
Travel Wisdom of Samuel Johnson
Some of the wittiest remarks on the subject of travel are Johnson's, and though he hated to leave London, he spoke about wanting to embark on voyages to Iceland and the West Indies; instead, he shuttled up and down England, made a long journey to Scotland in 1773, and a year later spent three months rattling around North Wales. He was one of the most passionate readers the world has known—his dictionary is proof of that. Born in 1709, he was a contemporary of Fielding, whom he called a "blockhead" (and remarked that Tom Jones was "corrupt" and "vicious"). ¶ Through his wide reading, Johnson knew the world much better than most of his contemporaries. He could talk easily about Abyssinia (he had translated Father Jerónimo Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, and his novel Rasselas is set there) and Corsica (Boswell introduced him to the Corsican patriot Pascal Paoli) and the classical Mediterranean. He discussed Tahiti with Boswell, who'd had dinner and discussed circumnavigation with Captain James Cook in London ("and felt a strong inclination to go with him on his next voyage"). Johnson had a neurological disorder that was probably Tourette's, with gout, and with melancholia, yet he stirred himself at the age of sixty-four to travel to the Western Isles of Scotland—far-off and strange—with Boswell, who also published his Journal of the trip.
***
In traveling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
—Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell,
Life of Johnson
***
He talked with an uncommon animation of traveling into distant countries; that the mind was enlarged by it, and that an acquisition of dignity of character was derived from it. He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care. "Sir, (said he,) by doing so, you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a luster reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, Sir."
—Life of Johnson
***
It will be observed, that when giving me advice as to my travels, Dr. Johnson did not dwell upon cities, and palaces, and pictures, and shows, and Arcadian scenes. He was of Lord Essex's opinion, who advises his kinsman Roger Earl of Rutland, "rather to go an hundred miles to speak with one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town."
—Life of Johnson
***
Boswelclass="underline" Is not the Giant's Causeway worth seeing? Johnson: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
—Life of Johnson
Travel light
We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disincumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags, and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burthen; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself.
—Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
The importance of seeing more at first hand
It will very readily occur, that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveler; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath, and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labors, which neither impregnate the imagination, nor enlarge the understanding. It is true that of far the greater part of things, we must content ourselves with such knowledge as description may exhibit, or analogy supply; but it is true likewise, that these ideas are always incomplete, and that at least, till we have compared them with realities, we do not know them to be just. As we see more, we become possessed of more certainties, and consequently gain more principles of reasoning, and found a wider basis of analogy.
—Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
7. The Things That They Carried
TRAVEL MAGAZINES ALWAYS MAKE A POINT of telling you the essential thing to carry on your trip, and it used to be a Swiss Army knife—that is, until air travelers were screened, x-rayed, patted down, and presented with a list of forbidden items. Now it is likely to be a cell phone, in my view one of the great impediments to a travel experience. I always take a small shortwave radio, to give me the news and weather of the place I'm in and to keep up with world events. The writer and traveler Pico Iyer says he never travels without a book to read; I am of the same mind. ¶ William Burroughs, a lifetime addict and also a traveler, never went anywhere without a drug of some kind, usually heroin. Kit Moresby, in Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky, carried evening gowns in her bag in the Sahara Desert. Bowles told me once that he traveled to India and South America in the old style, "with trunks, always with trunks." Bruce Chatwin, a self-described minimalist in travel, said that all he needed was his Mont Blanc fountain pen and his personal bag of muesli. But his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, claimed Chatwin always took much more. One of his friends, seeing Chatwin's typewriter and pajamas and book bags on an Indian train, said, "It was like traveling with Garbo."