Seeking the perfect travel companion: Must like adventure, dodgy neighborhoods, good gin joints, handsome and interesting men (a spy or a poet, if you please), gibbons (which are NOT monkeys), and opium. Not in that particular order.

Meet Emily “Mickey” Hahn, a writer, an adventurer, and a professional rule-breaker whose wanderlust took her from the American Midwest to Europe and Africa, and finally to China, all before she turned 30.

By the time she got to China, she had already established herself as an up-and-coming literary voice and one of the New Yorker’s earliest star writers. In her career, she published 54 books and over 200 articles, but her most famous book is China to Me, a memoir of the years that we’re going to talk about in this episode.

She partied with poets (and her pet gibbon) at Shanghai soirees. Wrote biographies while dodging bombs in wartime Chongqing, and did her best to keep herself and her family alive in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. Along the way, she became famous (some might add “notorious”) for her affairs, including with Chinese writer Sinmay Zau (Shao Xunmei 邵洵美) and the head of British intelligence in Hong Kong, Charles Boxer.

Mickey lived through some of China’s most tumultuous moments. While many foreigners experienced these events, Mickey gave her readers an unvarnished look at what was happening, with a style all her own.

We’ll explore Mickey’s life, travels, and adventures, and we’ll also discuss how to follow in her footsteps today through the modern cities of Chongqing, Hong Kong, and especially Shanghai.

In diplomatic history, some missions don’t always go off with a bang, but with a cringe. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the US Navy attacked Guam and waited for return fire that never came. Turns out the Spanish-run island had no idea they were enemies and sent an army officer and port commander out in a rowboat to go say a cheerful hello instead. In 1715, Louis XIV donned his finest diamond encrusted outfit to welcome a Persian “ambassador” in his spectacular Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles only to be told his translator was no good; and in 1870, Chinese diplomat Chonghou went all the way to France to say sorry for the murder of some nuns during the Tianjin Massacre, only to wait around for a year to find someone to apologize to.

In this episode, Jeremiah and Sarah take turns to tell the stories of three of history’s most embarrassing diplomatic incidents and attempt to put themselves in the shoes of those who were there. Jeremiah balks at Sarah’s lack of Beatles song recognition, and Sarah reveals her favourite modern diplomatic fail: when Emmanuel Macron surprised Donald Trump with a Daft Punk medley performed by the Garde Républicaine.

Captured by a Spanish pirate? A gift to Pope Leo X? Europe’s expert on Africa for nearly three centuries? Leo Africanus lived many lives. Born al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan around 1488 in Granada, Spain, he was trained in the madrasas of Fez to be a diplomat. He travelled across the Sahara Desert and North Africa, sailed the Red Sea, and called on courts from Tunis to Timbuktu, Cairo to Constantinople. Then he became a prisoner of Rome, a convert (possibly) to Christianity, and one of the most celebrated scholars of his era, writing the Cosmography and Geography of Africa in 1526 (published in 1550). Then he disappeared.

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we tell the story of how a roving ambassador from Fez ended up a prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the dungeons and luxury apartments rolled into a single fortress on the Tiber. We follow his capture at sea in 1518, his fifteen months in the papal cells, his baptism by the Medici pope who gave him his own names, and the nine years he spent in Rome as a convert, a scholar, and a curiosity. We also follow him out, because when the city was sacked by mutinous Imperial troops in May 1527, Leo Africanus used the chaos to disappear, most likely back to Tunis, where he becomes untraceable in the historical record.

Become a member of the By Their Own Compass Club on Substack for research notes on Leo Africanus, extended travel tips for Fez and Rome, a full episode transcript, and an original parody song we’re not entirely sorry about. The gratitude is real.

Along the way, we talk about what it meant to be a Muslim diplomat captured in Renaissance Europe, the family history that starts with the fall of Granada in 1492, and the Venetian editor Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who published Leo’s manuscript and, in the process, smoothed over the Islam and sharpened the Christianity for his European readers. We also ask the same question we asked of Marco Polo. How much of Leo’s Africa did he actually see, and how much did he hear about in the markets of Fez and write down as if he’d been there? Our guide through the tangle is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, whose Trickster Travels is the most thorough reconstruction of who this man was. An updated edition of Cosmography and Geography of Africa is out from Penguin Classics, the first new English translation of the book in over four hundred years.

Sarah and Jeremiah take you through the Rome and Fez of Leo’s life too, from the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Passetto di Borgo (the corridor the Pope fled down in 1527) through the May 6 swearing-in ceremony of the Swiss Guard, and across the Mediterranean to the medina of Fez and the Chouara tanneries, where the smell still hits you on the terrace.

Share this episode with a friend who thinks Kashmir is part of Morocco simply because Robert Plant used to buy the really good drugs there back in 1973.

Cobblestones. Cafes. The smell of baguettes hits you as you walk into a warm boulangerie on a rainy morning. An open notebook on a chequered tablecloth, an old-style pen, and a café au lait at the ready. Paris in April. They even wrote a song about it. Paris is probably the most pre-imagined city on earth, and the so-called Lost Generation, the writers and artists who flooded here after the First World War, wrote a version of the city that most of us still carry with us.

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was the book that launched a thousand tote bags. But that version of 1920s Paris with its champagne, café feuds, and glamorised poverty (trust funds and inheritances conveniently hidden) is only one man’s memories, written down and romanticised decades after the fact.

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we take a look at three writers who were all in Paris at the same time, but writing about three different cities. Jean Rhys was a writer from Dominica. Later, she would become famous for her 1966 classic, Wide Sargasso Sea, but in 1920s Paris, she was a struggling writer with little money and a husband in a French prison. George Orwell was there, too. Washing dishes at a fancy hotel and scraping by in a rundown hotel just 500 metres from where Hemingway lived.

We trace their haunts from the Place de la Contrescarpe to Montparnasse, from Jean Rhys’ beautifully evocative Left Bank and Other Stories to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, whose stories of crowded, profane kitchens would be among the inspirations for Anthony Bourdain and his famous book Kitchen Confidential. And we offer a Paris travel guide for those on their way to France or just dreaming of a trip. Sarah and Jeremiah walk you from the Latin Quarter to the Luxembourg Gardens.

Our Marco Polo episode was the most downloaded show in the history of By Their Own Compass. This week, we go deeper into the world of Marco and the Mongols as we sit down with Nicola Di Cosmo, Professor of East Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and co-author of Venice and the Mongols, out this month from Princeton University Press, to talk about how the Mongol discovery of Europe (rather than the other way around) made Marco's journey possible in the first place.

We also ask Professor Di Cosmo why Marco, one of the world's most famous travellers, came home from China and chose to skip out on an entire era of growing economic and political ties between Venice and the Mongols, preferring instead to promote his book and invest in canal-adjacent real estate.

Finally, we find out how a slap to the face of a Venetian merchant in a Black Sea trading post might have been responsible for the Black Death reaching Europe.

It’s a question that’s puzzled historians for centuries: did Marco Polo really go to China – or is history’s most famous traveller also its greatest liar?

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, Jeremiah Jenne and Sarah Keenlyside attempt to uncover the true story of Marco Polo – the Venetian merchant who left home at 17, spent 17 years at the court of Kublai Khan, and came back with a tale so extraordinary that people still argue about whether it’s true.

Moreover, what was China like during the Yuan dynasty? We examine what Marco Polo actually saw – the cities he visited, the jobs he claimed to hold, the things he noticed, and, intriguingly, the things he didn’t, and ask whether those omissions work for or against him as a reliable narrator. He may not have mentioned the Great Wall, or tea, or chopsticks, but he sure went into detail about the Khan’s legions of concubines and the empire’s impressive postal system, which stretched all the way to Persia.

We also look at the famous book that came out of it – The Travels of Marco Polo – dictated to his cellmate Rustichello of Pisa in a Genoese prison, and ask how much of it is memoir, how much is merchant’s log, and how much is a romance writer adding colour for a medieval audience.

And, as always, we follow the Marco Polo trail in China today – from Beihai Park and the hutongs of Beijing, both built on the bones of Kublai Khan’s capital Khanbaliq, to the West Lake at Hangzhou, the city Marco called the greatest in the world. We also talk about why the bridge outside Beijing that bears his name is known to Chinese people for a very different reason.

From Fanny Trollope's war on American manners to Alice Roosevelt's pet snake to the Empress Dowager Cixi's private theme park: a travel history of women who refused to behave.

Every traveller knows one. You might be one. The person who sends the steak back twice, requests a different hotel room because the view isn't quite right, and has opinions about thread count that they're not afraid to share with the concierge at volume.

But is it always a fair label? Are Divas difficult? Demanding? Or are they a woman who refuses to travel on somebody else's terms? We discuss.

Fanny Trollope: The Woman Who Hated America (And wrote a bestseller all about it) In 1827, Frances "Fanny" Trollope was nearly broke, pushing 50, and raising five children plus a husband going mad on his own mercury cures. So naturally she decided to sail to America to join a utopian commune in Tennessee. By 1831, she was over the American experience and moved back to England to write a caustic book of her travels which earned her the name "Old Madam Vinegar." It was a smash hit.

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Woman Who Built Her Own Theme Park The de facto ruler of China from 1861 to 1908 spent a dynasty's fortune rebuilding the world in her back yard. Landscapes. Temples. Famous vistas. Unfortunately, events would force this reluctant traveller to leave her theme park world behind.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth: The Woman Who Simply Did Not Care WHAT You Think Teddy Roosevelt put his eldest daughter on a diplomatic ship to Asia in 1905, probably because he needed a break. She jumped fully clothed into the swimming pool, learned the hula in Hawaii, carried a pet snake named Emily Spinach in her handbag, and slid down a banister at the Korean royal court.

We also share some of our own encounters with diva behaviour from years of leading trips and running a luxury travel company.

To sign up for regular updates or to become a member of the By Their Own Compass Club and get bonus content, transcripts, research notes, and reading lists for each episode, visit bytheirowncompass.com

It’s rare that one of history’s most iconic travellers has a living relative we can speak to – but that’s exactly the case with Annie Londonderry, whose great-grandnephew Peter Zheutlin has a remarkable story of his own.

In 1894, Annie Londonderry, real name Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, became a global sensation when she claimed to be the first woman to cycle around the world. A fearless Victorian adventurer and brilliant self-promoter, she filled newspaper columns from Paris to Singapore before vanishing without a trace for nearly a century. Even her own descendants knew nothing about her.

Until Peter Zheutlin got a phone call.

In this bonus episode of By Their Own Compass, the US-based author and journalist recounts piecing Annie’s life together from scratch, clue by clue, until he had enough to write her definitive biography. What followed was a full-scale revival: West End musicals, documentaries, children’s books, and more.

Spin: A Novel Based on a (Mostly) True Story can be found at your local independent bookseller, and an audio version of Peter’s first book, Around the World on Two Wheels, is available on Libro.fm.

Want even more of the juicy details? Paid subscribers to our Substack newsletter and members of the By Their Own Compass Club get Zheutlin’s full story. Sign up at bytheirowncompass.substack.com.

On June 25, 1894, five hundred people gathered on the steps of the Massachusetts State House to watch a young woman named Annie Londonderry climb onto a Columbia bicycle and ride off to circle the globe. She carried a pearl-handled revolver, a placard advertising spring water from New Hampshire, and a wager (allegedly worth thousands) that no woman could complete such a journey in fifteen months.

There were a few things the crowd didn’t know. Her name wasn’t really Annie Londonderry. She’d never ridden a bicycle until a few days earlier. She had a husband and three small children at home. And the wager was almost certainly something she made up.

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we follow Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, advertising saleswoman, Latvian immigrant, mother, and one of history’s most audacious self-promoters — as she talks, pedals, and occasionally steamships her way around the world. From Boston to Chicago (where she ditches her skirts for bloomers and never looks back), across the Atlantic to Marseilles (where she tells reporters she’s a Harvard medical student), through a hopscotch tour of Asia (mostly from the deck of a ship), and back across the American West (where she crashes into a drove of pigs in Iowa), Annie’s journey is a story about the bicycle as a tool of women’s liberation, the birth of influencer marketing, and the thin line between adventurer and con artist.

We explore how Annie invented her own sponsorship model, turning her body into a walking billboard decades before the concept existed, why Susan B. Anthony said the bicycle did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world, and how Annie was forgotten for over a century until a letter from a stranger led her great-grandnephew to uncover her story in dusty newspaper archives.

Plus: how to follow Annie’s wheel tracks today, from the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House to the cycling routes of southern New England, and why the Boston neighbourhood she grew up in no longer exists.

This episode owes a tremendous debt to Peter Zheutlin's Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry's Extraordinary Ride, the definitive account of Annie's journey. Zheutlin, Annie's great-grandnephew, spent years piecing her story together from newspaper archives, microfilm, and the few surviving artifacts held by her granddaughter. Without his research, Annie would still be forgotten. If this episode sparks your interest, that book and his novelization of Annie’s journey, Spin, are the essential next steps.

If you’ve ever Googled “how to avoid scams in [destination],” you already know the genre: YouTube videos breathlessly (and ominously) exposing the 15 tricks that will ruin your trip to Florence, Bangkok, or Marrakech. Full disclosure: We watch them too. But the historically minded traveler will be quick to note that almost none of these scams are new.

Structurally, the “hey, did you lose your wallet” scam is identical to cons recorded in Chinese travel literature over 400 years ago. The “helpful stranger” who leads you to his friend’s shop? A porter scam from 1617. Fake antiquities? Egyptian villagers were running that play on European collectors since the days of Napoleon.

In this episode, we trace the world’s most common travel scams back to their historical origins across three centuries and three continents, and then embarrass ourselves by sharing the ones we’ve fallen for personally or that have happened to people on our trips we’re supposed to be protecting.

Medieval Europe: Holy Bones, Unholy Business

The medieval relic trade was a continent-wide fraud economy hiding in plain sight. Churches needed relics to attract pilgrims, pilgrims brought money, and money built cathedrals. The problem? There are only so many saints, and they only have so many bones. Enter the relic hunters: professional grave robbers descending into the Roman catacombs to fill orders from churches across Northern Europe, and (in the greatest heist/relic rescue of the era) two Venetian merchants who smuggled the body of St. Mark out of Alexandria (hidden under a shipment of pork). We also meet Chaucer’s Pardoner, literature’s most shameless con artist, and hear John Calvin’s withering data-driven observations about the improbable number of supposed holy relics held in churches across Europe.

Ming Dynasty China: The Original Lonely Planet Warning

In 1617, a Chinese writer named Zhang Yingyu published The Book of Swindles — essentially a traveler’s field guide to every way you could get cheated on the road. The bag-drop switcheroo. The porter who disappears into the crowd with your luggage. The commentary is remarkably familiar: a traveler on the road doesn’t seek ill-gotten gains, and to keep his own property safely hidden, it’s the only way to prevent loss. Four centuries later, it still is.

19th-Century Egypt: When the Scammed Deserved It

After Napoleon kicked off a European craze for Egyptian antiquities, colonial collectors stripped temples and bought relics by the crate. We find it difficult to feel sorry for them when it turns out local workshops were producing fake scarabs and amulets by the thousand. The crowning achievement: an entire village near Luxor that built a convincing fake royal tomb, furnished it with forged antiquities, and conned a dealer out of 600 gold pounds.

And Then There’s Us

We also share some of our own less glorious moments — including the tea house and KTV bar double-hit (one student, one day, both scams), a game of bat and ball at the Temple of Heaven that turned out to have a cover charge, and a Berber market in Marrakech that supposedly only happens once every two months but whose bracelet broke in two days.

The through-line? The scam works because the wanting is universal. We want to believe. We want our trip to be magical. And sometimes that plays right into the magician's hands.

Have a scam story of your own? Send it in — we might feature it in a future newsletter.