
Richard Hakluyt and Early English Travel - Thevet
http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/10/26/richard-hakluyt-and-early-english-travel/
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pmoriarty
I'd recommend the travel writing of Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, spy,
scholar, and all-around erudite Victorian badass.[1]

Burton was famous for being the first non-muslim to see Mecca and Medina
(which he did in disguise), when the penalty for non-mulsims entering the holy
cities was death. He did the same in other dangerous places as well, taking
similar risks. Burton also wrote a famous translation of the _Thousand and One
Nights_ (aka _Arabian Nights_ )[2], translated the _Kama Sutra_ and other
works.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton)

[2] - Burton's is by far my favorite translation of the _Thousand and One
Nights_. You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg.[3]

[3] -
[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3435](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3435)

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lmm
From a few hundred years later, I would recommend Frederick Gustavus Burnaby's
_A Ride to Khiva_. It's striking how much is the same about travel writing
even a century and a half ago - and at the same time this makes the
differences all the clearer.

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lb1lf
Richard Hakluyt; arguably the world's first tourist.

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gwern
It's a cool-sounding book but let's not go overboard here. Marco Polo? The
Grand Tour? Ibn Battuta? Alexander the Great? All the Roman nobility who would
take tours of the famous sites in Greece (so much so that Pausanias wrote a
length - and now historically invaluable - guidebook)? Hakluyt wasn't even
much of a traveler himself:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hakluyt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hakluyt)

