Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a follow up of the author's A Collection of Classic Travel Narratives which provided extracts from his abridgments of the narratives of thirty five journeys spanning the great range of time from 1245 to 1896. With just one exception they are written in the first person by the traveller, and several are from translations into English where first given in another language. Also there was one abridgment that of Sergeant Bourgogne's account of the retreat from Moscow in 1812 as a member of Napoleon's National Guard. Travel Narratives over Five Centuries in three volumes fleshes out those extracts into about twenty five abridgments of those travels. This third volume of ten abridgments starts with Brother Felix Fabri's Journey to the Holy Land in 1480-3. Next comes the Abb Carr's account of his dangerous journey alone overland through Syria and Iraq in 1672. Then follow the narratives of four 18th century travellers including the remarkable Escape from an uninhabited Pacific island when the Anson's ship the Centurion was blown away in a storm. Also included here are William Wheeler's delightful Letters home as a soldier in Wellington's army of the Peninsular, the Waterloo campaign and the Allies' occupation army in Paris in 1825 and then Arminius Vambery's very dangerous journey in Central Asia in 1862-4 disguised as a Muslim holy man. Volume 3 ends with Isabella Bird's The Yangtse Valleyand Beyond, travelling alone in 1896 among ordinary Chinese who regarded all westerners as 'foreign devils'.
