No wonder, then, that in spite of my unfortunate journey into the desert the preceding spring, I was again drawn irresistibly toward the mysterious country under the eternal sand! The inhabitants of the oasis of Khotan, which extends round the town of the same name, told me of buried towns; and two men offered to guide me to one of those cities for a liberal remuneration.
Sven Anders Hedin was a Swedish writer, geographer, topographer, and all-around adventurer who, starting in his twenties, set out to see and chart hitherto unmapped parts of Asia. In his incredibly risky travels, Hedin managed to write a phenomenal book that will make you want to jump off your couch and go plant your flag in the last miles of territory still left to explore on Earth. In My Life as an Explorer, we find Hedin setting off on his way first to Azerbaijan as a private tutor to a Swedish diplomatic family and we follow him into Persia climbing mountains for the sheer thrill of it.
After returning to Sweden and publishing his first travel log to much commercial success, Hedin managed to secure funding from Alfred Nobel (of Nobel Prize fame), King Oscar II of Sweden, and Czar Nicholas of Russia to map the outer reaches of Russia’s Turkestan all the way to its border with Britain’s colonies in Afghanistan and into Tibet. My Life as an Explorer narrates his multiple journeys, including ones where he not only mapped the Transhimalayan mountain range, discovered the source of several rivers including the Indus, bust also found the long-forgotten remains of several Chinese cities abandoned for over a millennium.
Having witnessed the triumphant return of the Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, an ethnic Swede from Finland, Hedin was inspired to follow in his footsteps and also become an explorer. He studied under the famed German geographer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen (who first coined the term “Silk Road”), who suggested that Hedin should first carry on with his studies before setting off exploring. Hedin ignored this advice, which meant his work would always be analyzed by other scientists, as he simply did not possess the methodological training to do so himself. The other result of his education would be a deep fondness of Germany. This would see him at first supporting Germany in WWI and later, during WWII, hoping an alliance with Germany would protect Sweden and the other Scandinavian nations from the USSR. Although Hedin successfully pleaded for the release of several prisoners who faced execution in Nazi Germany along with aiding several Norwegian resistance fighters, his contacts with Germany would see him cancelled in his native Sweden for quite some time.
Hedin’s love of mountains and exploration in general led him into forming large caravans throughout the Altai mountains and deserts, and later into Tibet, a land he seemed positively obsessed with seeing and mapping. These caravans would encounter tremendous hardship in the form of avalanches, periods of absolute hunger and thirst, sandstorms, packs of wild wolves, and other dangers. Many of these caravans saw the death of not only animals (sheep, horses, mules, yaks, and even guard dogs) but also of several human guides and porters. In describing not only the habitations but also the prayer and funeral rituals of the different peoples who composed these caravans, Hedin managed to create not just a thorough document of geography in My Life as an Explorer, but also an in-depth anthropological exposé of the different Islamic, Buddhist, and animist cultures he came across.
Related Book Recommendations
If “memoirs of an European dude who treks over the Middle East and/or Russia into Asia and encounters hardship and has adventures along the way” was a literary genre, then it would definitely be one of my favorites. Maybe it is because I read The Travels of Marco Polo as a young man and fell in love with his descriptions of faraway lands and exotic customs, in what may in fact be the first book in this genre. Over the past couple of years, I have been lucky enough to come across some more books in this vein; here are some of my favorites:
Gustav Krist's WWI POW memoirs, Prisoner in the Forbidden Land, and the exhilarating sequel Alone Through the Forbidden Land are both excellent books. The first book details his experience as an Austrian WWI soldier in prisoner of war camps in Belarus, Russia, and what was then called "Russian Turkestan." Describing the dehumanizing conditions of his imprisonment and his daring escapes into Persia and Afghanistan, and the violent developments within the changing political landscape of WWI Europe and Central Asia, the book is full of adventure and exotic landscapes. The sequel finds Krist returning after the war to visit beautiful places like Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan and witnessing the last days of nomadic cultures that would soon be erased by the encroachment of centralized Soviet authority. Krist would translate his experiences of both learning the local languages and making contacts all over the Middle East and Central Asia into a successful and very lucrative career as Austria’s foremost importer and dealer of Oriental rugs.
Much like Prisoner in the Forbidden Land, A.H. Brun’s Troublous Times is set at the end of WWI. This book recounts the narrator's experience as the Danish Legation's representative charged with the care of the Austro- Hungarian prisoners of war in Russia. Captain A. H. Brun travels to prison camps in the Central Asian regions of Russia and witnesses firsthand the absolute chaos of the Russian revolution and the communist takeover of the different nations forcibly absorbed into the USSR. Brun works tirelessly and courageously to secure the better treatment and release of the prisoners, often risking his life heroically in the face of an uncaring and invariably brutally vicious communist state apparatus.
For fictionalized Marco Polo-inspired journey logs, I recommend both Umberto Eco’s Baudolino as well as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Italy’s foremost masters of magical realism surely made their forefathers proud with these masterpieces. Eco’s book finds Baudolino, the book’s eponymous main character describing his adventures while on a search for the elusive and mysterious Kingdom of Prester John, a legendary Eastern Christian kingdom rumored to have tremendous riches. And Invisible Cities is Calvino’s retelling of Marco Polo’s adventures through dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo describing a total of fifty-five cities he encounters in his journey.
