Travels with a Donkey; An Inland Voyage; The Silverado Squatters

In a sail-powered canoe, on foot with a pack-donkey, playing house in a derelict silver mine, Stevenson celebrates the romance of life as a voluntary inland castaway. From canalside Belgium and darkest rural France to the wild west, he gazeteers history, landscape and inhabitants with equal enthusiasm, despite being taken from a madman; in his youthful relish and supreme disregard for discomfort, this precursor of Kerouac and Chatwin joys in his life on the open road.