Ambrose Rathborne was an Australian mining engineer who moved first to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) as a coffee planter, and then in the 1880s to the Malay States, where he worked as a planter and entrepreneur. Camping and Tramping in Malaya: Fifteen Years in the Native States of the Malay Peninsula was first published in 1898, and is a lively and entertaining account of the authors travels, with fascinating insights into the colonial personalities and working conditions of the day.
An urge to find his own nirvana in the hills for planting Arabica coffee evidently drove Rathbornes initial years in Malaya, and his chief legacy is his role in surveying for the alignments of the first long-distance roads in Malaysia. As Malaysia develops and matures as a nation state, interest will surely grow in its early formative years.
Rathbornes Camping and Tramping is an excellent place to start, and as easy to read as a good novel. Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language, with authors hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. Every title has been reset in a contemporary typeface to create a series that every lover of fine travel literature will want to collect and keep.
