Mary Jane Walker is a writer of historically well-informed travel memoirs that come with an autobiographical flavour. She has been described as a younger, female Bill Bryson, though with her own unique voice. Mary Jane first experienced world travel in an unusual way, as part of the crew on a Chinese junk named La Dame de Canton, the first to be built in the old way in decades. La Dame sailed from Canton, now Guangzhou, to Paris in the early 1980s. Just as in the old days of exploration by sail, the voyage took a couple of years to complete, with many stops along the way for fresh water and...