Published in 1898, The Modern Traveller is not a travel book at all, but a brilliant satire (in verse) that attacks colonialism, explorer-journalists intent on fame and fortune, and British pretensions to moral superiority. Along with other travel accounts of the period, Belloc was undoubtedly parodying Henry Morton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa, 1890, which sold 150,000 copies within a few weeks of publication. (Stanley was the reporter who led a 7000 mile expedition through tropical jungle to find the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingston in 1871.) The entire poem takes the form of an interview that the narrator of the story, an unscrupulous adventurer, gives to a journalist from the Daily Menace (probably a poke at the British newspaper, the Daily Mail). The narrator explains to his wide-eyed visitor how he teamed up with Commander Henry Sin, a foreign mercenary, and Captain William Blood, a commercial buccaneer, and embarked on an enterprising and patriotic expedition to the dark continent. Belloc has the narrator describe the dangers and hardships endured by these scoundrels, along with the narrator’s claims to personal heroism, so as to make it clear that most, if not all, of the account has been fabricated. Conveniently, Commander Sin and Captain Blood, perhaps also fictitious, do not survive the expedition to provide independent testimony. Belloc’s satire ends with the narrator boasting about how much he is being paid for his upcoming book.
