Described by one commentator as 'a man of sterling common sense, intellectual rigour and ability', the distinguished naval officer Sir Adolphus Slade (1804 1877) was one of the best-informed and engaging travel writers of the nineteenth century. Later in his career he was to spend 17 years on secondment to the Turkish navy, heading its administration and improving its efficiency, but already in his twenties, having served in Russia and South America, he was keen to commit his observations of foreign lands to paper. First published in 1832, Slade's two-volume account of his travels in the...

Described by one commentator as 'a man of sterling common sense, intellectual rigour and ability', the distinguished naval officer Sir Adolphus Slade (1804 1877) was one of the best-informed and engaging travel writers of the nineteenth century. Later in his career he was to spend 17 years on secondment to the Turkish navy, heading its administration and improving its efficiency, but already in his twenties, having served in Russia and South America, he was keen to commit his observations of foreign lands to paper. First published in 1832, Slade's two-volume account of his travels in the...

Sketches of Persia, although published anonymously in 1827, is attributed to Sir John Malcolm (1769 1833). Malcolm was a diplomat and administrator in India: arriving at the age of fourteen in 1783 to work for the East India Company, he was known during his long career as 'Boy' Malcolm. He swiftly moved into more political and diplomatic roles. He became fluent in Persian and was despatched to Persia for part of his career, though he would eventually return to India and become Governor of Bombay (1827 1830). Volume 2 begins on the edge of the desert in Cashan and ends in Sennah. Along the...

Clergyman and ornithologist H. B. Tristram (1822 1906), an early supporter of Darwin, became both a Fellow of the Royal Society and Canon Residentiary of Durham. His literary career began with an account of his ventures into the desert of Algeria, where he had journeyed seeking a salubrious winter climate. This 1873 volume, one of his many popular works on the Biblical Lands, records his adventures and discoveries east of the Dead Sea. Its engaging narrative recounts the hazards and vexations of travel amongst the local tribes, as well as the sites Tristram visited, many of them biblical...

Henry C. Barkley (c.1825 c.1895) was a civil engineer and author. His travel books included Between the Danube and the Black Sea (1876), which covers the five years in which he was working on the construction of a railway line linking the Danube and the Black Sea, and Bulgaria before the War (1877), written at the time of the Russo-Turkish war. (He also wrote a guide to rat-catching for public-school boys, and My Boyhood (1877), a collection of tales from his own childhood.) Published in 1891, this work recounts the author's adventures on a journey that took him in 1878 from Bucharest,...

After qualifying as a physician, Robert Richardson (1779-1847) joined the household of the earl of Belmore, and accompanied him and his family on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean in his yacht the Osprey, converted from a captured American schooner. Richardson dedicated this two-volume work to his patron in 1822. Having spent several months in Naples, the party travelled through the Greek islands to Constantinople, arriving in Alexandria in September 1817. Volume 2 describes further exploration in Egypt, before the party travelled into Palestine, where they visited Jerusalem and the Holy...