The Best American Travel Writing 2012 Read Online Free Page B

confronting the riddles of undiscovered worlds. They needed guiding hands. They needed how-to manuals.
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    Victorian adventurers rarely took a step into the wild without hauling a small library of how-to-explore books with them. Among the volumes Burton carried into East Africa was a heavily annotated copy of Francis Galton’s
The Art of Travel: or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries.
Originally conceived as a handbook for explorers, and sponsored by England’s Royal Geographical Society, the book was required reading for any self-respecting Victorian traveler. Before rolling up his sleeves and getting down to the hard business of exploring, he could turn to page 134 to learn the best way to do exactly that:
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When you have occasion to tuck up your shirt-sleeves, recollect that the way of doing so is, not to begin by turning the cuffs inside-out, but outside-in—the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way. In the one case, the sleeves will remain tucked up for hours without being touched; in the other, they become loose every five minutes.
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    The amiably neurotic Galton left nothing to chance. His index is studded with gems like “bones as fuel” and “savages, management of.” If Burton couldn’t find the advice he was looking for in Galton, he could always consult one of the other books in his trunk that were written with explorers in mind. The stated aim of Randolph Barnes Marcy’s
The Prairie Traveler: The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers,
which Burton himself edited in later editions, read like a manifesto for every handbook of this kind: “With such a book in his hand,” Marcy writes, “[the explorer] will feel himself a master spirit in the wilderness he traverses, and not the victim of every
new
combination of circumstances which nature affords or fate allots, as if to try his skill and prowess.”
    All of the books advertised practical intentions: if adventurers are compelled to wander the globe, why not teach them how to take note of details—be they geographical, anthropological, or whatever—that might prove useful to science, industry, or empire?
    I stumbled upon
The Art of Travel
while researching a book about African exploration, and continued on to the other titles, all of which are available for free on the Internet. After reading them, I can confidently report that the scientific, industrial, and political developments of the intervening century have thoroughly undermined the original intentions of most of their authors. These titles won’t help powerful nations lay claim to new territories and exploitable populations. As literary genres go, this one is about as dead as they get.
    But it deserves a resurrection.
    It’s true that the authors are generally eccentric, habitually obsessive, and at times comically misguided. A modern reader will find plenty of hopelessly dated assumptions to indulge a sense of cultural superiority. You might chuckle when someone writes about the best place to buy a pith helmet in London. But that stuff has little to do with these books’ contemporary relevance, which goes beyond entertainment value.
    While no one was looking, this neglected genre transcended its crudely utilitarian origins to occupy a higher sphere: the books are instruction manuals for the senses, lovingly compiled tip sheets on the acquired art of paying attention.
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    They’re not quick and easy reads. Arcane language and compulsive punctuation force the reader to decelerate. But that is exactly what many of the explorers of the period identified as the most important first step of any successful expedition.
    â€œWhile traveling in a strange country [I] should always prefer making my observations at a rate not quicker than five or six miles an hour,” wrote Richard Owen, the superintendent of the British Museum’s natural history departments and a scientific