BAREBACK RIDING AND PAPERBACK writing make an oddly successful mix. A horse is not a good place on which to read a book, but it is a very good place to write one. The horse seems to spur on the literary urge like no other animal, from the classic (Black Beauty, National Velvet) to the ridiculous (The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories and Bombproof Your Horse — these really do exist, I promise.)

Equestrian travel books have proved to be a particularly fertile literary pasture. Perhaps it is the elevated view from the saddle, the sense of gliding slightly above the land, that moves riders to write; perhaps it is the rhythmic clip of the hooves that encourages reflection and rumination; perhaps it is simply that horses always look as if they are thinking about something profound. Compare the horse’s intelligent gaze with the vacant look of a mule, or the malevolent, insolent stare of a camel, and you will see what I mean. Horses are the thinking man’s method of locomotion.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, writers were forever saddling up and riding away to discover new worlds and write about them. Most of these works are long out of print, but the Long Riders’ Guild, the international association of equestrian explorers, has now reissued more than 100 of the most important equestrian travel books in a single edition. What Virago once did for neglected books by women, the guild has done for long-forgotten writer-riders of both sexes who galloped into the sunset and, more often than not, fell off.

The project has rescued from undeserved obscurity a favourite author of mine, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936).

Equestrian, author, explorer, politician, rancher, fencing master, buffalo hunter, convict and founder member of the Scottish National Party, Cunninghame Graham was part-Scottish, part-Spanish and mostly bonkers. He did so much during his long life, with such wild energy, that he left everyone around him feeling exhausted. His friend Joseph Conrad wrote: “When I think of Cunninghame Graham, I feel as if I have lived all my life in a dark hole without seeing or knowing anything.” (Conrad reread his friend's books before writing Nostromo.)

Cunninghame Graham rode everywhere, but most notably in South America, where he was known as Don Roberto, “the Hidalgo Laird”. His most remarkable journey was in 1872, when he rode 600 miles following the Parana River to the Iguacu Falls: this resulted in one of his best books, A Vanished Arcadia, which was later adapted into the film The Mission. Throughout his life, he wrote at a breathless gallop: 30 volumes of travel books, biographies, histories, sketches and short stories, a tumbling scree of poetically mangled syntax and acute observation.

Cunninghame Graham’s woman counterpart was Isabella Bird Bishop, the frail daughter of an English clergyman who set off travelling on horseback to improve her health in 1871, and never reined in. First she cantered across Hawaii (On Horseback in Hawaii), then the Rocky Mountains (A Lady’s Ride in the Rockies), Japan (Unbeaten Tracks in Japan), from Baghdad to Tehran (Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan) and finally through Tibet ( Among the Tibetans).

She started by riding sidesaddle; but then switched to the less ladylike, but more practical, astride position. In all other respects, however, she was the ultimate Victorian lady traveller, genteel, literate and, after half a century of hard riding, supremely leathery. The Times called her “the boldest of travellers”. When Isabella Bird Bishop trotted into view, the British Empire was seldom far behind. Above all, she didn’t make a fuss. At the age of 58, while riding in Ladakh, her horse tried to jump out of a rising river, missed its footing and rolled over her, cracking her ribs. “A struggle, a moment of suffocation,” she wrote, but “I made light of it.” The next day, she was back in the saddle.

Perhaps the greatest equestrian travel writer of the modern age was Aimé Tschiffely, whose 10,000-mile ride from Argentina to Washington DC in 1924 still stands as the most extraordinary literary horseback journey on record. Tschiffely was Swiss by birth, and rather Swiss by temperament: solid, sage and without a scintilla of irony. But as he hacks his way through the pampas, across the Andes, through Peruvian deserts and the pestilential Ecuadorian swamps, the reader comes to admire his unassuming toughness. Drunken banditos, gulping quicksands, hungry crocodiles, earthquakes, malaria, vampire bats and revolutionaries are all recorded with the same practical phlegm, and resolute lack of humour.

Tschiffely’s Ride was a huge bestseller in the 1930s, but it marked the last outing for a particular species of writing. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Tschiffely returned to Latin America. On the wild pampas he visited for the last time the Criollo horses, Mancha and Gato, who had once carried him to Washington, now in retirement. The resulting book, This Way Southward, revealed how far and fast the world had moved: this time Tschiffely rode a 30-horsepower Ford, and the principal peril came from German U-boats roaming the Atlantic.

The rider-writers of the past captured two very British obsessions: the mystique of the horse and needlessly dangerous travel.

Nothing, I think, better illustrates that romance than this episode from Cunninghame Graham’s past. In 1876, the Hidalgo Laird was riding through Paris when he accidentally knocked down a very beauti-ful Chilean girl named Gabrielle de le Balmondière. He married her. They went on a riding honeymoon to Texas. There, inevitably, they were attacked by Apaches.

www.thelongridersguild.com

www.horsetravelbooks.com

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