Beholding sundry places

Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents.

Where to begin? How about Herodotus, Father of History, affable Greek aristocrat and probably the world’s first travel writer to boot? Here we find him musing on the unfathomable geography of Europe, ending his erudite aside with the splendidly modern conclusion, ‘But that is quite enough on this subject.’

In a very entertaining introductory section, ‘Notes on Travel’, Newby introduces the reader to Thomas Coryate, a 16th- century English eccentric and traveller (why do these three words tend to go together so easily and so often?). Coryate, fresh from a 2,000-mile walk across Europe, wonders whether travel is simply ‘a certayne gadding about, a vaine beholding of sundry places’, as my wife occasionally suggests. But no, he goes on:

It is travel that stirreth up wisdom, purchaseth fortitude … makes us from barbarous to be gentle and milde natured: it rooteth out a fond selfe love … and sheweth us the nearest way to the solid learning of all things. What need many words? Let travell be the plentifull institution of all our life.

There are all sorts of practical advice, like the suggestions from Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, on how to prevent feet from blistering by soaping the inside of one’s stockings into a thick lather and breaking a raw egg into leather boots before setting out. If that messy tip doesn’t do the trick, then rub the feet with spirits mixed with tallow at night.