The Tao of Travel

Complete Essays

(1991)

Lady Hester Stanhope: Merely restless, melancholic, and frustrated before she left England in 1810. But in the Middle East, where she spent the rest of her life, she became a megalomaniac—"I am the Queen of them all"—power hungry, imperious, and with a violent temper. Her boast was that no one could slap a servant's face harder than she.

Francis Parkman: Parkman was a physical wreck, from his earliest expedition, for The Oregon Trail (1849), and increasingly thereafter, in his travels and his writing, suffering nervous ailments, lameness, partial blindness, and severe headaches. This might have contributed to the detachment and pessimism in his historical works.

Richard Henry Dana: His eyesight was so poor that he was unable to attend Harvard and instead went on the voyage that resulted in Two Years Before the Mast (1840).

David Livingstone: A manic depressive obsessed with his bowels. He believed that constipation was the cause of most maladies in tropical Africa—headaches, muscular weakness, distraction, and much else. His advice to a prospective traveler in Africa: "With the change of climate there is often a peculiar condition of the bowels which makes the individual imagine all manner of things in others. Now I earnestly and most respectfully recommend you to try a little aperient medicine occasionally" (quoted in Timothy Holmes, Journey to Livingstone, 1993).

Sir Richard Burton: His explosive temper and pugnacity earned him the nicknames "Ruffian Dick" and "Dirty Dick." He had a morbid aversion to darkness, so his wife, Isabel, said: "He hated darkness so much that he would never have the blind down lest he might lose a glimpse of light from twilight to dawn."

Burton was also seriously lacking in social skills. "The fact was that though undeniably brilliant," his biographer Mary S. Lovell wrote in A Rage to Live, "Richard Burton had a blind spot in his social skills ... He either lacked the patience, or he could not be bothered to pretend to like, or work with, people he did not like or respect, no matter what their station or influence. And to these individuals he gave deep offence without hesitation, frequently intentionally."

Captain George Vancouver: Fits of temper and depression, which may have been caused by tuberculosis or a thyroid condition. Prone to a paranoid melancholy, he was ashamed of his humble origins and had to suffer the contempt of snobbish senior officers. In Driving Home, Jonathan Raban convincingly argues that Vancouver "wrote his changing moods into the permanent nomenclature" of the Pacific Northwest coast. After a cheerful period in which he named Discovery Bay and Protection Island, Vancouver fell into "what now appears to have been clinical depression" in the spring of 1792, and saw the landscape as "dreary" and "dismal," and he applied names that reflected his low spirits—for example, the anchorage he named Desolation Sound.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott: Depressive, hypersensitive, lachrymose. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, on the Antarctic expedition, writes in The Worst Journey in the World: "[Scott] was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree which might be considered a fault, and it will be clear that leadership to such a man may be almost a martyrdom ... Temperamentally he was a weak man, and might easily have been an irritable autocrat. As it was he had moods and depressions which might last for weeks ... He cried more easily than any man I have known."

Fridtjof Nansen: A great skier, Arctic explorer (he made the first crossing of Greenland, led the Fram expedition to the Arctic), oceanographer, zoologist (neuron theory), and diplomat, Nansen was a relentless womanizer and suffered from suicidal melancholia.

Jack London: Alcoholism from an early age (described in his "alcoholic memoir," John Barleycorn), as well as serious physical ailments, kidney disease, gastrointestinal problems, double fistula surgery. London was in pain during much of his travels for Cruise of the Snark and The People of the Abyss, and had frostbite while reporting the Russo-Japanese War. He took morphine and died from a morphine overdose at the age of forty.

William Burroughs: Drug addiction for the whole of his adult life did not stop him from traveling throughout the United States and Mexico, to Europe, Morocco, and elsewhere, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, where he searched for the ultimate hallucinogen, ayahuasca, a trip recounted in The Yage Letters.

Graham Greene: Manic depression, a horror of spiders, and an irrational fear of birds.