BOOKS
"Great Journeys"..Pub. by, Penguin, 10 volumes, $10 each.
 
Man is perhaps the greatest migratory species on the planet. What other creature, not long -- relatively speaking -- after steadying itself on two legs on the African savannah for the first time, could be found on the top of the highest point on Earth? I count among the basic human desires the compulsion -- no other word will do -- to see what's over the hill or on the other side of the trees. The need, as Ishmael famously put it, to "sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."
 
And just behind wanderlust is the yearning to talk about what one has seen. It's not an accident that one of the oldest stories passed down through the ages is a travel book: "The Odyssey." Of course, the founding principle of the genre is that a good trip makes for a bad story. Hence the nine years it took Odysseus to get home (think of that the next time your flight is delayed).
 
Another corollary is that no matter how bad the trip, the dedicated traveler cannot wait to leave home again. Consider Olaudah Equiano, who, by his own 18th-century account, was kidnapped from his village in Africa and traded as a slave to another tribe before being sold to a succession of white owners who sent him to war and sea. As recounted in "Sold as a Slave," Equiano's life was one series of misfortunes after another. Yet he could barely sit still. "I longed to engage in new adventures," he wrote, "and to see fresh wonders."
 
Making journeys, even involuntary ones, can prove addictive. So can reading about them. Equiano's book is one of a score that make up Penguin's Great Journeys series. Each compact volume is an excerpt (typically a little more than 100 pages) from a classic travel account, with the selections ranging from the ancients (Herodotus) to the present (Ryszard Kapuscinski). Along the way, we encounter an array of writers, including Marco Polo, Cabeza de Vaca, Mark Twain and Anton Chekhov.
 
Some of the choices are curious. George Orwell fighting in the Spanish Civil War? "Homage to Catalonia" was a great book, yes, but it's quite a stretch, even bizarre, to call it a travel classic. Isabella Bird, an ailing British woman advised by her doctor to travel overseas to improve her health, wrote amusing letters describing her experiences in the Rocky Mountains in 1873, but her writing is hardly in the same league as anything John Muir penned about his rambles. And the series has one gaping omission: nothing from Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century Islamic scholar whose fantastic 24-year trip from Morocco to China made Marco Polo look like a package-tour devotee.
 
Still, all the entries in the Great Journeys series are worth reading, especially for what they tell us about how the concept of travel has changed over time. Originally there had to be a pretty good reason for undertaking an extended journey. War usually sufficed. Business was also a good excuse. Venturing on distant trips sheerly for pleasure is a fairly modern phenomenon.
 
Certain tropes obtain in classic travel pieces of any era. The food must be bad. (British adventurer Ernest Shackleton on one of his better meals: "hot milk, one of our precious biscuits and a cold penguin leg each.") The transportation suspect. (Walter Henry Bates in the Amazon: "The canoe leaked, but not, at first, alarmingly.") The destination uncertain or doubtful. Cabeza de Vaca, for example, survived shipwreck along the Gulf Coast in the 16th century only to be enslaved by Indians before escaping and embarking on a daunting walk from Texas through the Southwest into Mexico over the course of six years.
 
A bit of melancholy creeps in as one reads the Great Journeys series. The inescapable sense is that the epic travel of yore -- undertaken with the knowledge that life-or-death decisions loomed ahead -- truly was great. But eventually, it seems, the "great journey" became merely a long trip. Even a century before the Lonely Planet guides were invented, the gravitas had begun leaking out of travel. Mark Twain's trip to the Holy Land via Europe (excerpted by Penguin from "Innocents Abroad") barely fits the classic paradigm. Cruising to the Azores, Twain observes one of his earnest if naïve compatriots: "This young man asked a great many questions about seasickness before we left, and wanted to know what its characteristics were, and how he was to tell when he had it," Twain wrote. "He found out."
 
Funny, yes. Epic, no.

seek out a BOOK OF TRAVELLERS TALES assembled by Eric Newby (american edition pub. 1986) This is dedicated TO THE TRAVELLERS OF THE FUTURE. another of interest would be TASTE FOR TRAVEL by John Julius Norwich (an anthology.) 1985 jackflanders