Rambles by Land and Water or, Notes of Travel in Cuba and Mexico

Norman, Benjamin Moore, 1809-1860Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
332K words
Chapters
34

Tags

English Originals Travel Human GeographySocial ObservationNature ObservationExotic CultureCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Rambles by Land and Water; or, Notes of Travel in Cuba and Mexico by NormanAuthor: Norman, Benjamin Moore, 1809-1860,Language: English, Class: F1201: North America local history: Mexico, Release Date: Jul 28, 2011

Editor's review

This is a travelogue by the nineteenth-century American travel writer Benjamin Moore Norman, recording his journeys by land and water in Cuba and Mexico. As a public-domain work of travel literature, its appeal lies in the observer's gaze: the author describes towns, modes of transport, local customs, and the small incidents of travel from the perspective of a traveler of his time, preserving a wealth of period detail that offers readers studying nineteenth-century Caribbean and Central American society a vivid sense of primary material. The prose has the unhurried tone of Victorian travel writing, with an essayistic, unhurried narrative suited to leisurely reading. It should be noted that the book's views and phrasing bear the mark of their era; today's readers should understand them in historical context, taking the record while discerning the bias. Overall, it is not a practical guide but a period travel text that can be cross-referenced with other historical sources.

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Reading tips

  1. Read chapter by chapter according to geographic sections, and consult a map to trace the route after finishing each place.
  2. Keep a notebook of observations on scenery and customs for later cross-referencing with other historical sources.
  3. When encountering expressions reflecting period bias, mark them first and then understand them in light of the historical background.
  4. You may start with the table of contents and choose sections of interest rather than reading from beginning to end.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34

FAQ

Is this book suitable as a travel guide? No. It records nineteenth-century observations and impressions and contains no practical information such as transport, accommodation, or costs, so it cannot guide travel today. It may serve as reference for understanding the historical character of a destination, but for actual travel please use a contemporary guide.
What should I keep in mind while reading? The book's phrasing and ideas bear the mark of the nineteenth century, and some expressions may not meet today's standards. Read it in historical context and treat it as a period text, valuing its documentary record while remaining alert to its biases.
How difficult is the original English? It is a nineteenth-century essayistic travelogue with long sentences and somewhat classical vocabulary, but the narrative is plain and accessible to readers with intermediate English. Unfamiliar place names can be skipped at first and looked up after finishing a section without affecting overall comprehension.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Norman, Benjamin Moore, 1809-1860 Author

Benjamin Moore Norman (1809–1860) was a nineteenth-century author known chiefly for his travel writing; details of his life are limited in publicly available sources, though his birth and death years are established as 1809 and 1860. Three of his works are held in this collection, most of them based on his own journeys and combining geographical description with travel notes. His representative works include Rambles in Yucatan or, Notes of Travel Through the Peninsula, which records travels in the Yucatan Peninsula; Norman's New Orleans and Environs, focusing on New Orleans and its surrounding area; and Rambles by Land and Water or, Notes of Travel in Cuba and Mexico, covering land and water routes through Cuba and Mexico. These works consist mainly of regional observation and accounts of places and customs along the way, offering useful travel documents for the study of the Americas and the Caribbean of that period.