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Title: Eccentric Travellers: Excursions With Seven Extraordinary Figures from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries by John Keay ISBN: 0-87477-276-1 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $12.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Mad Dogs And Englishmen...
Comment: If you enjoy "armchair adventure" travel books I think you will find "Eccentric Travellers" well worth your time. You get the stories of 7 different people, with the added bonus that they were all engagingly eccentric individuals. Each chapter runs to about 30 pages, and Mr. Keay writes well. He has a deft touch, a good sense of humor, and obvious sympathy for the brave and quirky oddballs he has elected to include. As there is no synopsis on the webpage, here are the folks who are included: Captain Philip Thicknesse- who travelled through Europe with his wife and daughters, his cocker spaniel, pet parakeet, and Jocko the monkey. Jocko wore a red jacket, jack-boots, a hard hat, and he led the way by riding on top of the horse that pulled the coach. Oh yes, Jocko also carried a riding crop; Thomas Manning- a brilliant scholar and China enthusiast who, when he was denied permission to travel to Peking, tried to sneak in through the "back door" by going through Tibet. He never made it, but he was the first European who gained entry to the forbidden fortress of Lhasa, and had an audience with the seven-year-old Dalai Lama; James Holman- who, though blind, travelled further than anyone else in the book. On one trip he journeyed with a deaf companion, and in Moscow he met a Captain John Cochrane, a man who had planned to walk around the world but got sidetracked in Siberia- after walking all the way across Russia he fell in love with a 15 year old Kamchatkan girl, married her, and backtracked to Moscow; Charles Waterton- a traveller who engaged in the hobby of taxidermy. While slogging his way through South America he wrestled with both a boa constrictor and a cayman (similar to an alligator). He was also a firm believer in bloodletting to ward off fever and illness. He would perform the procedure on himself- draining up to a pint at a time. He called the operation "tapping the claret."; Joseph Wolff- a convert to Christianity, he reckoned himself to be the first Jew since Jesus to preach Christianity in Jerusalem. He once met Pope Pius VII and, patting the Pope on the shoulder, said to him "I love Your Holiness. Give me your blessing." Wolff was quite an ambitious fellow. He hoped to be Pope himself one day. In fact, he even had his own papal name picked out- Hildebrandus I. Part of his procedure for trying to get Muslims to convert to Christianity was to hand out copies of "Robinson Crusoe"- translated into Arabic; William Palgrave- starting off as a wunderkind and scholar (at eighteen months he had learned half the alphabet; at three he was a good speller; at six he was studying botany and the Chinese alphabet; by age seven he had learnt the first book of the "Aenid" by heart), he later became a Jesuit. He was a master of disguise and snuck into Riyadh in what is now Saudi Arabia. (His Arabic was flawless.) If he had been found out it would have been fatal. Central Arabia was under the thumb of the Wahabi Mohammedans, a fundamentalist sect so strict that they believed orthodox Sunni Mohammedans had strayed from the true path; Gottlieb Leitner- born in Budapest of German parents, but he wound up in Woking, England. He built the "Oriental University Institute, Woking" which boasted the first mosque in England. He spoke 15 languages by the time he left school and, supposedly, "added one each year thereafter." Engaged in linguistic research, he travelled to Kashmir, Tibet and Afghanistan. One time he brought back some natives of Dardistan to his (then) home in India: "One of them, otherwise a nice fellow, I stopped in the attempt of cutting off the head of his mother. The good son merely wished to prevent her from dying of grief in consequence of his departure." Obviously, at only 30 pages per subject, the author can't go into great biographical depth. But this was a very enjoyable, exciting and funny book. Just make sure to have some mosquito netting and quinine nearby.