Why travel advice from a 19th-century polymath is still relevant today
Sir Francis Galton’ s The Art of Travel, perhaps the world’s first travel guide, is full of practical tips and advice, from how to start a fire to surviving on carrion and insects
Portraits of Briton Sir Francis Galton show a man with mutton-chop whiskers and the demeanour of a minor public school headmaster of the “spare the rod, spoil the child” persuasion. A Victorian-era polymath with a patchy education in medicine and mathematics, Galton (1822-1911) was knighted two years before his death for his services to science.
Freed by a substantial inheritance from the need to pursue a career, he flitted from meteorology to eugenics, passing through much else on the way. His classification system for fingerprinting is still in use today, and he was instrumental in persuading the British legal system to accept fingerprints as evidence. He published the first weather map, in The Times newspaper, in 1875 and coined the term “anti-cyclone”. He was also ahead of his time in running an experiment to test the efficacy of prayer. Scientific rigour required he publish a result controversial to Victorians – he had found no effect whatsoever.
Galton applied the scientific method to everything in his life, including his travels, which were extensive. A Grand Tour of Europe in 1840 that reached as far east as Constantinople and Smyrna (both in modern-day Turkey) was followed by a trip down the Nile to Sudan in 1844 and, five years later, a full-scale expedition, approved by the Royal Geographical Society, to what is now Botswana.
Galton’s spur to write was the same frustration felt by many an independent traveller at finding his guidebook lacking in accuracy or useful practical detail.
“The idea of the work occurred to me when exploring South-western Africa in 1850-51,” he explains in his introduction. “I felt acutely at that time the impossibility of obtaining sufficient information on the subjects of which it treats.”
