Travellers' Tales

Abstract

WHY is it that nine out of ten modern books of travel are intensely dull and yet early travels never seem to fail in their appeal to the imagination or their hold on the attention of the reader? This is equally true whether they break what, in their author's time, was new ground, or follow a beaten track. In all these books under notice there is scarcely a dull page.

(1) The Book of the Marvels of India.

By Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar. From the Arabic by L. Marcel Devic. Translated into English by Peter Quennell. (The Golden Dragon Library.) Pp. vi + 164. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1928.) 6s. net.

(2) The Broadway Travellers' Series. Hans Staden: the True History of his Captivity, 1557.

Translated and edited by Malcolm Letts, with an Introduction and Notes. Pp. xx + 191. 10s. 6d. net. Thomas Gage, the English-American: a New Survey of the West Indies, 1648. Edited with an Introduction by Dr. A. P. Newton. Pp. xxxii + 407 + 12 plates. 15s. net. Travels in Persia, 1627–1629. By Thomas Herbert. Abridged and edited by Sir William Foster, with an Introduction and Notes. Pp. xl + 352 + 13 plates. 15s. net. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1928.)

(3) Adventures of an African Slaver: being a True Account of the Life of Captain Theodore Canot, Trader in Gold, Ivory, and Slaves on the Coast of Guinea; his Own Story as told in the Year 1854 to Brantz Mayer, and now edited with an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley.

Pp. xxii + 376 + 9 plates. (London: George Boutledge and Sons, Ltd., 1928.) 15s. net.