which have furnished some of the greatest travelers of historic times. Pilgrims, led by the desire to visit the holy places of their faith, often undertake journeys of great length and difficulty. Singly or in companies they traverse their hundreds or thousands of miles, their eyes fixed always on the distant goal, and too absorbed in anticipation of the things to be to take notice of the things about them as they go. Treading the same paths which generations before them have trod, whose ups and downs, whose hardships and dangers have become a matter of tradition, they follow like sheep in each other's footsteps. So they have journeyed and still journey in their thousands, century after century; in early times from China and other parts of Asia to the sacred places of India; from the uttermost parts of Europe to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages; from every corner of the Mohammedan world to Mecca to-day. Each and all are seeking for salvation, for all the reward is of the spirit; we may not blame them, therefore, that they do not heed the world through which they pass.

In one sense pilgrim travel may be said to be centripetal, in that it draws the traveler by known roads to some great center of his faith; missionary travel on the other hand may be said to be centrifugal, in that it leads away from these centers, by untraveled paths into the unknown. Thus the missionary, far more than the pilgrim, has been an explorer; and whether it be the early Buddhist monks who brought their faith from India to much of eastern and southeastern Asia; or Christians who have preached their doctrines in every clime; or fierce followers of the Prophet, who with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other carried Islam alike to Spain and the Spice Islands of the East—all alike have journeyed far and faithfully, led always by the fire of their zeal. They had no foreknowledge of what they might expect, for them new vistas opened as they went; Mohammedans excepted, their lives were spent, their journeys were made, not for their own but for others' sake; and their interest or pity was aroused in no small degree in the strange peoples whose souls they went to save. It is not surprising, therefore, that they should show a keener interest in what they saw, or that they should have left far more of record than the pilgrim has.

THE COMMERCIAL MOTIVE

Great as has been the influence of conquest and religion upon travel, a greater impulse and one leading to even wider results has been that of trade and commerce. In earlier times in search of foreign commodities and products, in modern days of new markets to which to export the products of home manufacture, men have penetrated to the ends of the earth, and to this commercial impulse is attributable most of the great travels and explorations from the thirteenth century to the beginning of modern scientific exploration at the end of the eighteenth. To the merchant traveler, even more than to the missionary, observation of the country and its products, its peoples and their needs, is important. The easiest and safest roads by which his merchandise may be transported, new materials, new sources, new markets, are the basis of his success; and the character and customs of the people are of vital import in the prosecution of his work. A new and shorter road gives him an advantage over his competitors, and it was this search for new ways to reach the Indies which led to the greatest fifty years in the whole history of travel-a period in which the area of the world as known to civilized Europe was far more than doubled.'

THE SCIENTIFIC MOTIVE

Although purely scientific curiosity became an important element of travel only toward the end of the eighteenth century, there were in earlier times a few for whom this was a great incentive. To seek for knowledge for its own sake, to be fired with the desire to extend, if only by a little, the limits of the known, is not wholly a modern trait; but before this could be in large measure an important factor, the extraordinary widening and development of scientific interest characteristic of the last century and a half was necessary. Each has, however, contributed to the advance of the other, and the vast additions to knowledge gained by scientific exploration have in large degree provided the materials from which the present structure of

1 See Harvard Classics, xliii, 21, 28, 45; xxxiii, 129, 199, 229, 263, 311; and the lecture below on "The Elizabethan Adventurers."

science has been built. As once for religion, so now for science mes plunge into the unknown; now as then they strive, not for themselves, but for an ideal.

Travel is then, as we have seen, as old as the human race, and of travelers there are and have been many kinds, according to the motives which induced them to fare forth. The records of these many travelers form a body of literature whose interest is undying, for besides the facts which they have gathered, and the additions to our knowledge which they have made, they give us often a clear and vivid picture of the character of the travelers themselves, their courage in the face of danger, their patience in overcoming every kind of obstacle; and heroism and self-sacrifice of the truest and highest types have been exemplified again and again in their lives. Of all these many travelers but a part have left a record, and, as might be expected, the earlier have left far less than those of later times. From the historical point of view, the records fall into several fairly definite groups or periods, each differing from the other not only in time, but also to a considerable extent in the character of the motive which was dominant.

THE FIRST PERIOD OF RECORDED TRAVEL

The first or early period may be said to begin about the fifth century B. C. with Herodotus, who in his travels in Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia gives us our first accurate accounts of those countries, and seems to be one of the earliest of scientific travelers. He traveled widely, gathered information assiduously both as to the actual condition and the history of the countries he visited, and seems to have been an accurate and painstaking observer. The bold explorations of the Carthaginian Hanno, at about this same time, along the west coast of Africa possibly as far as the Gulf of Guinea, were designed to extend the growing commerce of this great mercantile people, and show how, even at this early date, trade was one of the most potent incentives to travel. It is perhaps of interest to note that on this expedition gorillas were seen apparently for the first time, being described as hairy men of great ferocity and strength. Several of them were captured, and Hanno attempted to carry them back to 2 H. C., xxxiii, 7ff; and lecture on "Herodotus on Egypt,” below.

Carthage alive, but was forced to kill them because of their violence, and so brought back only their skins. A century or so later, the expedition of Alexander, while primarily actuated by the desire for conquest, was also in part exploratory, and resulted not only in bringing back the earliest authentic accounts of India, but demonstrated the feasibility of reaching that country by sea. With the rise of the Roman Empire, this early period came to an end, and from then on until the fourth or fifth century is a time of relative quiescence, during which the attention of the Mediterranean world. was devoted to the intensive occupation of the world as already known, rather than to exploration beyond those limits.

THE SECOND PERIOD-PILGRIMS AND MISSIONARIES

With the fourth century, however, the second period begins and lasts for some seven or eight hundred years. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of travel during this time was the prominence of the religious motive, for the travelers were largely pilgrims and missionaries, or, toward the latter end, those who, making religion their war cry, journeyed as Crusaders to wrest Jerusalem from the Saracen. The pilgrim, as already pointed out, was, although a traveler, usually an unobservant one; his interest was centered in his goal and in the spiritual benefits which were to accrue from his long and perilous journey, so that for the incidents of the day he had little care. To a large extent, also, the pilgrims were humble folk, illiterate, unlearned, and so left as a rule no records of what they saw. There were, of course, exceptions, and many persons of high rank as well as some scholarly attainment were to be found among the throngs who from all parts of Europe made the journey to Palestine. Not all the pilgrims, it should be noted, were men, for both during the early as well as the later portions of the period many women performed the arduous trip.3 Such, for example, was Sylvia of Aquitaine, apparently a woman of rank, who about 380 not only visited Jerusalem and the usual sacred places, but went on into parts of Arabia and Mesopotamia, and has left brief but interesting accounts of her years of travel. She may thus be con3 Cf. The Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," H. C., xl, 24.

sidered one of the first great woman travelers. In the seventh and eighth centuries the volume of pilgrim travel seems to have increased, or at least we have more abundant records of it; and in the accounts left by Willibald, a man of rank apparently from Kent, we have one of the earliest stories of English travel. This pilgrim gives us an interesting incident of his return journey from Palestine. It seems that he wished to bring back with him to England a supply of a certain balsam, but feared that this would be taken from him by the customs officials whose duty it was to see that none of this precious substance left the country. Accordingly he devised an ingenious smuggling scheme. Taking a reed which was of a size such that it exactly fitted the mouth of the calabash in which the balsam was contained, he plugged up one end and filled the tube thus formed with petroleum. This he carefully inserted into the opening, cutting off the end flush with the mouth of the calabash and inserting a stopper. On arriving at Acre the customs officials searched his luggage, found the calabash and opened it, but seeing and smelling only the petroleum, suspected nothing and allowed him to pass. From this it is clear that travelers of old as well as modern times were more or less at the mercy of customs regulations, and that then as now they took such means as they could to evade the laws.

Although in Europe the records of pilgrim travel are not only meager but generally disappointing in their brevity and lack of detail, conditions were somewhat different in far-away China. There, although the number of pilgrims was much smaller, the records which they left were of much greater value. The names of two of the Chinese pilgrims stand out as of particular importance, those namely of Fa Hian and of Hiuen Thsang. Journeying to India from northern China to visit the places made holy by the life and death of Gautama, the Buddha, and to consult and copy some of the sacred writings, they have left us records which are not only of the greatest interest as stories of travel, but which are of quite inestimable value as giving practically the only information to be had in regard to the condition of India and the life of its people at this time. Both pilgrims journeyed to India by way of Turkestan and across the Pamirs, and the former returned, after nearly fifteen years