Only occasionally do writers describe their exotic encounters overseas. Although famously interested in prostitutes, writers like Leigh-Fermor (Greece), Leonard Woolf (Ceylon) and Burton (everywhere) never went into the detail. Nor did the great homesexual writers like Thesiger (Arabia) and Chatwin (West Africa).
Only occasionally do writers describe their exotic encounters overseas. Although famously interested in prostitutes, writers like Leigh-Fermor (Greece), Leonard Woolf (Ceylon) and Burton (everywhere) never went into the detail. Nor did the great homesexual writers like Thesiger (Arabia) and Chatwin (West Africa).
Georgian travellers were more inclined to spill the beans, either because they were bedding every woman they could, like Stedman (Suriname, 1773), or because no one would have them, like George Cartwright (Labrador c 1760).
More recently, there have been rather over-embellished tales of sexual conquest, like Charriere’s account of his time among the Amerindians (Colombia). But, for comic value, there is Matthew Young’s account of a housemaid who climbed through his window one night in Guyana (see picture; from Port Kaituma), or Lawrence Millman’s amusing story of an Inuit who lent him his wife (Greenland). But the steamiest description of all is that of Laurie Lee, recalling an encounter during the Spanish Civil War (in ‘As I walked out one Midsummer Morning’).
Phew …! And me? I have no tales to tell … except that I was one propositioned by a heavily-armed lady-soldier in Eritrea. What she really wanted was a passport. ‘We could get married,’ she suggested, ‘and then go and live in Saskatchewan.’
