On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,000 men. Within a month he was back in the Tuileries, and by mid-July he had surrendered to the Royal Navy.
The route follows him stop by stop: his villa on Elba, the landing at Golfe-Juan, the meeting at Laffrey and the entry into Grenoble on the Route Napoléon, the Tuileries, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, then Malmaison and Île d'Aix, where his journey ended. The pins at Golfe-Juan and Grenoble mark the towns, not exact spots.
In March 1697 a great Russian embassy left Moscow for Europe, and the tsar went with it incognito as "Peter Mikhailov", though at 2.03 metres he was one of the tallest men around. He worked in shipyards, studied gunnery and tried to broaden the Holy League against the Ottoman Empire.
The route follows the journey stop by stop: Riga and Königsberg, the Dutch shipyards, London and Deptford, then Vienna and the meeting with Augustus II at Rava-Ruska. Dates follow each source: the Dutch article uses the Gregorian calendar, the English and Russian sources the Old Style, so the labels say which.
Before the white whale there is a cold December and a wrong turn at the docks. Ishmael arrives in New Bedford to find the Nantucket packet gone, rents half a bed at the Spouter-Inn, sits through a sermon on Jonah, crosses to Nantucket and signs aboard the Pequod, which leaves on Christmas Day.
New Bedford had overtaken Nantucket as the country's top whaling port by 1840, yet Ishmael is set on sailing from the island. The route follows his first chapters. The inn, the Try Pots and the Pequod are invented, so their pins mark real places that stand in for them; the chapel is real.
In May 1846 Ida Pfeiffer, a 48-year-old Viennese widow with grown-up sons and very little money, set off to go round the world — mostly alone, on cargo ships, on horseback and with caravans. She came home two and a half years later, in the middle of a revolution, and turned her diaries into a bestseller translated into seven languages. The Royal Geographical Society in London would not admit her, because it did not accept women.
The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.
