Perhaps the first modern travelogues still to capture the imaginations of armchair explorers, the mid-19th-century bestselling books of American diplomat and writer JOHN LLOYD STEPHENS (1805-1852) read like the most…

Edgar Allan Poe called it perhaps the most interesting travel book ever published. Here, complete in one volume, is the classic real-life adventure–originally published across two volumes in 1841–that mesmerized…