Travel from Europe and the Middle East

Travel narratives allowed ancient and medieval audiences to escape through literary fantasy and compare their culture to different ones. But the wondrous living denizens of these narratives—people whose heads grew beneath their shoulders, people who lived on odors, tribes of Amazon women—would be proven nonexistent. In their place, exploration narratives would put the actual wonders of spices, gold, silver, canoes, and differing customs. Before the early modern period, the veracity of travel narratives was not a serious issue because travel was a rare event and large-scale cross-cultural contacts relatively few. The few medieval narratives that realistically recounted diplomatic missions to the invading Mongol hordes during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were not widely known.

Thus, though medieval travelers were not generally believed, veracity was trivial. The situation changed in the fifteenth century with the first seaborne expeditions around the African continent and to the Americas. Though the earliest sea voyagers carried medieval descriptions of the places for which they searched, it soon became apparent that these descriptions were untrustworthy. Columbus carried on his first American voyage a copy of the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville, one of the most popular pilgrimage and travel narratives of the time, hoping to use its description to find the scriptural earthly paradise. Richard Hakluyt reprinted a Latin version of Mandeville's Travels in the first edition of his collection The Principall Navigations (1589). He most probably dropped it from the second edition of the collection because of its falsehoods.

Travel as exploration demanded a different set of criteria; instead of wonder and the imaginative, the requirements of the new travel narratives involved reliability and exactness of detail. This demand for descriptive exactness contributed to an extension of the exploratory image in travel writing into the twentieth century. Though exploration as an image of travel connotes objectivity and exactness, it is clear that this image is affected by the historical concommitants of conquest and imperialism. Certainly the information the explorers recount is conditioned by their Eurocentric perspective.

As representatives of the ascendant European culture and its political hegemony spread out across the globe, the amount of travel writing greatly expanded. Women undertook journeys in support of spouses or independently and related their experiences exploring and encountering other cultures, often in epistolary form. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu traveled to Turkey with her husband, a diplomat, between 1716 and 1718. Her letters closely observe the cultures through which she passed. It is clear, as well, that she is familiar with the male tradition of travel writing, because she often provides a contrasting female perspective on her travel experiences, as do many female travel authors of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Mary Wollstonecraft's epistolary journal of her travels to Scandinavia in 1795, in the company of only her maid and infant daughter, was influenced (like Lady Wortley Montagu's) by the earlier letters of the French Madame de Sévigné. In general, the specifically female mode of travel writing has much in common with the parallel tradition of women's autobiography.

Men, meanwhile, continued the exploratory movement, this time under the aegis of scientific and sociological investigation. The narrative of David Livingstone in Africa in the mid-nineteenth century was constructed as an exploratory and imperialistic epic, while Mungo Park's narratives of Africa in the 1790s and Alexander von Humboldt's narratives of scientific discovery on the American continent from 1799 to 1804 combine both epic hardships and reports of important scientific investigations. Sir Richard Burton, one of the Victorian era's most intrepid travelers, hazarded his life in journeys through the Islamic world, including making a disguised pilgrimage to Mecca, bringing back the first eyewitness European description of that great journey (Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah; 1855–1856). Travel writing of the exploratory type thus takes on a more personal and literary character as time goes on.