Travellers' Checks | Sherlock Holmes author’s extensive yet unsung adventures to feature in new travelogue

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was an unusually well-travelled man. His lifelong thirst for adventure and discovery (both worldly and spiritual) took him from the Arctic to the southern Pacific Ocean, across North America, around Africa, and throughout Europe. In Asia, he visited only Bombay (“not an interesting place for the casual visitor”) and Ceylon (“I could imagine no greater pleasure than to have a clear month to wander over its beauties”) while sailing to and from a five-month speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand in the early 1920s.

Although a most prolific author, his travel writing was relatively sparse for one who ventured so far afield over more than half a century. The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), Our American Adventure (1923) and Our Winter in Africa (1929) are among the few books to cover his trips, along with his autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924). Conan Doyle designed and ordered an ingenious portable writing desk from Parisian trunk maker Goyard in 1925, which might have encouraged further output were his travels not nearing their end at that time. (This, incidentally, was also the year that the screen adapta­tion of his 1912 novel The Lost World became the first feature film to be shown on an aeroplane, during an Imperial Airways flight from London to Paris).

A new book featuring selections of Conan Doyle’s travel writing, compiled and annotated by biographer Andrew Lycett (Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, 2007) is published this month. As noted in the introduction to Conan Doyle’s Wide World: Sherlock Holmes and Beyond, this is the first time the author’s travelogues (“full of insight, humour and exceptional evocations of place”) have been gathered together.

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