The Tao of Travel

Dr. Samuel Johnson: Tourette's-like disease, depression, sloth. In Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, the account of a trip on which James Boswell spent three uninterrupted months traveling with Johnson, Boswell wrote, "He had a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking." As for his physical ailments, "His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy: he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions, of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance." Johnson blamed his parents, telling Boswell that "we inherit dispositions from our parents. I inherited (said he) a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober."

Henry Morton Stanley: "I was not sent into the world to be happy," Stanley wrote, "I was sent for special work." He succeeded in his exploration, fueled by his inferiority complex, his deep feelings of rejection, his illegitimacy, his masochism and manic attacks. He was tormented by identity confusion, pretending to be American, the son of a wealthy man named Stanley from New Orleans, but in fact he was Welsh, named John Rowlands, a pauper raised in a workhouse in Denbigh. He denied this his whole life, leading him to abandon writing his autobiography.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard: Extreme myopia, clinical depression. Nevertheless, he endured the rigors of the Antarctic for two years, and after serving in battle in World War I wrote his masterpiece, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). Later, he was nagged by the thought that he might have saved the life of Captain Scott, and suffered self-reproach. "It was not till long afterwards that the thought of what he might have done—and the fantasy of what others were thinking and saying about him—became a little cloud on the margin of his mind that grew till it covered his whole sky" (George Seaver, Foreword, Worst Journey, 1965).

William Somerset Maugham: "Maugham was an unhappy child who evolved into a deeply melancholic man, 'violently pessimistic,' as he characterized himself and ... in later life suffered frequently from nightmares" (Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 2009).

Gertrude Bell: Depression, despair over her long epistolary dalliance with a married man, a soldier who remained with his wife and died heroically at Gallipoli in 1915. Bell, who had threatened suicide in letters to the soldier, died of an overdose of barbiturates, an apparent suicide, after a series of family tragedies. She was fifty-eight.

Henry James: An almost permanent state of constipation, which drove him from spa to spa in Europe in search of relief throughout his adult life.

Geoffrey Moorhouse: Fear of solitude, empty spaces, and the unknown. He also had agoraphobia, which he sought to conquer in a crossing of the Sahara from west to east, an ordeal he recounted in his book The Fearful Void (see Chapter 10, "Travel as an Ordeal").

Evelyn Waugh: Paranoia and persecution mania on a voyage to Ceylon, which resulted in his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, an account of a man's paranoia and persecution mania.

Joshua Slocum: Subject to what he himself described as "mental lapses," one of which, when he was sixty-two, was the sexual assault of a twelve-year-old girl in New Jersey in 1906, for which he was arrested. He pleaded "no contest." Rape was not proven; it was assumed he exposed himself to her. After forty-two days in jail, he was released (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").

Freya Stark: At the age of thirteen, in a small town in Italy, where she was living with her single mother, her hair was caught in the flywheel of a weaving machine and she was seriously injured—a torn scalp, part of an ear ripped off. "A trauma of this order, both invasive and disfiguring, at an exquisitely vulnerable moment of adolescence, forever shaped her perception of herself. She was never able to overcome a dread that she might not be attractive to the opposite sex," one of her biographers, Jane Fletcher Geniesse, wrote (Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark). "Her parents' estrangement, her insecure childhood, and the injury that nearly killed her left Freya with a passion to conquer the fears and anxieties that plagued her and drove her to find personal validation through notable achievement." But Jonathan Raban, who traveled with her to the Euphrates in the 1970s, told me, "She had the kind of facial ugliness that eventually ages into monumental grandeur. Her intense egotism was a wonder to behold."