The Mediterranean: Seaports and sea routes including Madeira, the Canary Islands, the coast of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; Handbook for Travellers

About this book

The Handbook to the Mediterranean is a comprehensive travel guide that maps out the principal sea routes and coastal highlights from the Portuguese shoreline through Madeira, the Canary Islands, the North‑African coasts of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and onward to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Its opening pages explain the editor’s ambition to condense a vast region into a single volume, acknowledging the inevitable omissions and the reliance on contributions from friends, consular officials, and the late geographer Theobald Fischer. The work is organized into six detachable sections, each devoted to a specific area or route, and is accompanied by an extensive suite of maps and city plans, all carefully revised for accuracy. The introductory notes also detail the author’s commitment to recommending only respectable hotels and to excluding commercial advertising, underscoring the guide’s practical, detail‑oriented purpose.

Written in the measured, authoritative tone of early‑20th‑century guidebooks, the text reflects the scholarly rigor of its German predecessor and the editorial care of Professor John Kirkpatrick, who translated the original 1909 edition. Its style is dense with factual data, abbreviations, and precise measurements, appealing to readers who enjoy meticulous planning, historical geography, and the romance of a bygone era of travel. Scholars of maritime history, vintage cartography enthusiasts, and modern adventurers seeking a structured, reference‑rich overview of Mediterranean ports will find this handbook both informative and evocative.

Opening lines

The present Handbook to the Mediterranean describes the chief routes along the Mediterranean coasts. In his endeavour to unite within a single volume the chief points of interest in so vast a region the Editor has naturally been confronted by peculiar difficulties. These points are so numerous that little space could be afforded for more subordinate matters, so that many details have necessarily been omitted. Again as regards the selection of routes, and of places to be described, opinions frequently differ. The Editor ventures, however, to hope that on the whole he has satisfied the requirements of most of his readers. As many of the regions which are here grouped historically and geographically[1] have already been treated of in several of his other Handbooks, the Editor would respectfully refer the traveller to these for fuller details[2]. …

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