Travel: A Literary History by Peter Whitfield: review Meanwhile, Francis Drake, described by Whitfield as Elizabeth I's "unofficial terrorist," was busy being the scourge of Catholic Spain and its colonies. Drake was crowned in California "by the adoring indigenous people." A few years later, Sir Walter Raleigh was the first to see the amorphous race of savages as individuals in their own right. He declared of the wife of one Indian chief, "I have seen a Lady in England so like her, as but for the difference of colour I would have sworn might have been the same." By the age of the Enlightenment, science and reason replaced plunder and rape in global exploration. With the opening up of the Pacific, a new ocean was suddenly subject to western influence. In the wake of Cook's voyages - which to some young officers offered merely an expanded Grand Tour ("Any blockhead can go to Italy," as Cook's patron Joseph Banks declared) - came whalers and missionaries, importing faith and disease to newly discovered Polynesia. It was now that travel literature became sexy, as the French explorer Bougainville described a Polynesian beauty on board his ship: "The girl carelessly dropt a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian shepherd." Two generations later, Herman Melville's sensational Typee was full of such naked maidens - but was also a sharp critique of the way the west had sullied the islanders" innocence with a sense of Christian guilt. From the sweltering Equator to the freezing Poles, Whitfield takes us to the icy sites of Scott and Shackleton's doomed expeditions, and a new neurosis in 20th-century travel writing. Lawrence Durrell, Paul Bowles and Bruce Chatwin were wanderers with personal agendas and varying degrees of reliability. Secretly, Whitfield sympathises with Pascal, the French philosopher who declared that man's misfortunes stemmed from the fact that "he does not know how to sit still in a room." All the same, as Whitfield's subtly written, wide ranging and beautifully produced book proves, sometimes you have to leave the library or turn off the computer and step out into the real world. Travel: A Literary History Peter Whitfield Bodleian Library, £19.99, 336pp