Atkins visits most of the major deserts of the world and spends time in each, not so much exploring as experiencing and reporting. The only one he misses is the Namib/Kalahari, which is a shame; it’s one of the ones I know least about, too. His fascination is evident, as is his close observation and description of the places and people he encounters.
I was horrified to read about the violence done to Aboriginal ancestral homelands in the Australian desert by British nuclear testing in the 1950s; the sheer callousness and cavalier attitude is truly shocking. I have to say I was not surprised by what I read, though, given the imperialist past of the British state. We should be truly ashamed at what was supposedly done in our name.
The Gobi and other surrounding areas of desert and wilderness are what I have read most about and yet they still remain enigmatic in many ways. The Silk Route necessarily skirted either the north or the south of these regions and so, whilst uninhabitable and desolate, were nevertheless known. Atkins is interesting and informative about current issues the Chinese state has with the largely Uighur and Muslim population of the Xinjiang region, and his journey there often seems rather perilous.
I learned much from Atkins’ travels in the United States, too. He visits the desert areas along the border with Mexico and recounts some dreadful tales of what refugees attempting to reach the ‘land of opportunity’ endured, and that killed many others. All this is currently hidden behind President Trump’s machinations and lies and attempts to build a wall. I was heartened to read of Americans taking risks and breaking laws in order to support and rescue refugees in danger of dying in the desert regions. In many ways the visits to the deserts of the US were the most disturbing, weird and unnatural of all.
Atkins also visits the Egyptian deserts and spends time in some of the ancient Egyptian monasteries that date from the earliest centuries of Christianity. Here he walks in similar footsteps to William Dalrymple in his excellent book From The Holy Mountain.
This was a lovely books in so many ways, written by an intelligent and enquiring traveller who taught me a lot; his evident fascination with deserts, as well as his observant and reflective approach make it a read I seriously recommend.
I don’t know how avidly some of my readers consume my pieces about travel-writing, whether texts I’ve read, or pieces about my own travels, but I thought I’d share some of my recommendations with you.
Over the years I’ve acquired – second-hand, for the series is no longer in print – many volumes of the Penguin Travel Library, which flourished in the seventies and eighties. It’s a very wide-ranging collection, and although it suffers from the poor production values of that period, used copies of most of the volumes do turn up for sale pretty regularly. Much harder to acquire, but more interesting because of the rarity of some of the volumes, are the famous cerise-coloured Penguins from the 1930s and 1940s. Some booksellers are trying to put silly prices on these, but mostly they can be found for reasonable prices; there’s an amazingly helpful website I discovered (isn’t the internet wonderful: it’s for things such as this that it needed to be invented!) which lists them all, with brief notes, here.
The Century Travellers series from Hutchinson had an interesting list, but many of their re-issues seem to have been photographic reprints of old editions, sometimes with dreadful antique fonts which are tiring to read. And among the backlists of the American budget publishers Dover Books there are many travel gems to be found, again often photographic reprints.
For a while – I think they’ve stopped now – a German publisher,Könemann, who produce beautifully clothbound hard-cover editions at very sensible prices, produced editions in English; a series with blue dust-jackets offered classics of English literature, and a series with deep reddish-brown covers were classics of travel literature in English: I can recommend both highly.
Reprints of travel classics are currently being issued by Eland, and there are some interesting rarities in their lists. And – though these are very expensive – it’s now possible to get reprints of any of the publications of the renowned Hakluyt Society from the very inception. These are very serious and often very dry academic works, though.
Finally, if you can read French, the publishers Payot Rivages, in their series Petite Bibliothèque Payot, have a long and very interesting list of travel writing comprising translations from English, which you won’t need, current writing in French, and writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which deserves to remain in print. And on my travels in France, I’m noticing more small publishers beginning to rediscover other lost delights.
Don’t overlook e-books either: if you come across a title from before 1923, chances are it’s available online to download in a variety of formats from Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive (that includes many Hakluyt Society titles!).
Willem Barents was a skilled Dutch ship’s pilot and navigator who worked at the same time Shakespeare was writing his plays, and at the time when both English and Dutch sailors were seeking to outwit the more powerful Spanish and Portuguese traders by discovering a north-east passage around the north of Russia to China and other lands in the East. I first heard of his remarkable journeys many years ago; finally I’ve read the account of them.
I need to make a couple of things clear: firstly, Barents didn’t survive the third journey to the Arctic, and the accounts are actually by another member of the expedition who recognised the navigator’s part in their achievement, and secondly, this isn’t an easy read. It’s a reprint of a Hakluyt Society volume from the middle of the nineteenth century. That society has been at the forefront of editing and translating memoirs and accounts of travels and explorations for over a century an a half, and its volumes are seriously academic (and expensive!), and often present very dry and detailed accounts of voyages, as in this case; I didn’t read it for pleasure.
In this volume there is much very dull and scrupulous recording of distances and directions travelled as well as depth soundings, very useful information for those who went after. Places are named for the first time, and travellers are trying the best they can to ascertain where they actually are… The men encounter serious problems with aggressive polar bears (two men are killed and partly devoured) and they have never encountered such ice before. One needs to remember how terribly small a lot of ships were in those days – often much less than 100 tons, so the size of a couple of juggernaut lorries, maximum.
The real perils, and the most interesting part of the narrative, are encountered on the third journey, where they are trapped by ice near the north-east coast of Novaya Zemlya. They realise they will have to over-winter, and build themselves a wooden hut, partly by pillaging their ship, which is raised high out of the water by the ice, and which they constantly fear will be crushed to pieces. They really cannot believe how cold it is – they have no way of measuring the temperature, of course, as we are in the days before the thermometer – and fear for their lives; when they try burning coal from the ship to keep warm they nearly kill themselves by carbon monoxide poisoning.
They live largely by trapping and eating arctic foxes, avoiding the perils of polar bears as best they can, for their guns are not really up to killing such creatures easily. Gradually they weaken physically and are overcome by scurvy. They spend the best part of ten months overwintering, finally managing to leave in June 1597, not in their ship which is forever trapped in the ice but in a pair of open boats in which they sail over 1500 miles back to civilisation. Long sick Willem Barents dies quite suddenly as the boats sail round the northern coast of Novaya Zemlya on the homeward journey.