Journey Without Maps is a travel account

Travel literature

Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...

 by Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

, about a 350-mile, 4-week walk through the interior of Liberia

Liberia

Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...

 in 1935. It was Greene's first trip outside of Europe. He hoped to leave civilization and find the "heart of darkness" in Africa. The interior of Liberia was at the time unmapped (a US Government map had the interior as a large white space marked "cannibals"), and so he relied on local guides and porters.

Greene set off from the northern most point of the country bordering Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea to the north and east, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west and southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has an estimated population between 5.4 and 6.4...

 near the town of Kailahun

Kailahun

Kailahun is the capital of Kailahun District in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone. The town lies 300 miles east of Freetown and with a population of 25,210. The population of Kailahun is largely from the Mende ethnic group and the Mende language along with the Krio language are widely spoken...

 (near Pendembu

Pendembu

Pendembu is a town in Kailahun District in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone. The town population was 7,243 at the 2004 census. The majority of Pendembu's population are from the Mende ethnic group. The most widely spoken languages are Mende and Krio....

) and traveled in a south-eastern direction through the jungle highlands. He crossed through a section of French Guinea

French Guinea

French Guinea was a French colonial possession in West Africa. Its borders, while changed over time, were in 1958 those of the independent nation of Guinea....

, going between the Liberian towns of Zorzor

Zorzor

Zorzor is the second largest city in Lofa County, Liberia. Located near Liberia's capital of Monrovia, it is a local trade center for agricultural products such as rice, cassava, pineapples, palm oil, and palm kernels. Zorzor's major ethinc groups include the Kpelle and Loma peoples. The town...

 and Ganta

Ganta

Ganta, also known as Gompa City, is a town in Nimba County of northern Liberia, lying just south of the Guinean border. It is the second largest city in Liberia, with a population of 41,106....

, before turning south-west and arriving at the coast at Grand Bassa. He then traveled to Monrovia

Monrovia

Monrovia is the capital city of the West African nation of Liberia. Located on the Atlantic Coast at Cape Mesurado, it lies geographically within Montserrado County, but is administered separately...

.

Greene's account provides many insights into what Liberia was like in 1935. The country has not modernized much since, in particular away from the coast, so much of it remains unchanged to this day. Greene did encounter a number of whites along the way including American and English missionaries, a German adventurer, gold seekers and beachcomber

Beachcomber

Beachcomber may refer to:* Beachcomber * Beachcomber , a nom de plume used by several humor columnists* Beachcomber , the name of multiple characters in the Transformers universe...

s. Most of the primitive villages he passed through had encountered white people before, but it had been years, and so for many of the younger people it was a new experience. Greene documents the deplorable public health; there were only a handful of doctors in the whole country. A long list of diseases visibly ravaged the typical Liberian (venereal disease and malaria in particular were almost universal, with various weeping sores and wounds from insects and occasionally leprosy). Greene drank whiskey the entire trip going through cases of it. He became ill halfway through the journey, during their stay at Zigiter, and almost died while in Zigi's Town, near the end of the trip. During this experience he discovered that he had a "passionate interest in living" which "seemed that night an important discovery".

Greene traveled with his female cousin, Barbara Greene, who in 1938, produced her own memoir of the trip Too Late to Turn Back (originally entitled Land Benighted). How well the two accounts match up appears to be a matter of opinion. In Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux

Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar . He has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his...

's error-strewn introduction to the 1981 version of Barbara's book, he says "Few journeys have been so well recorded, and there are few discrepancies and no contradictions between the two accounts." However, in Michael Shapiro

Michael Shapiro

Michael Shapiro may refer to:*Michael Jeffrey Shapiro, composer and music director of the Chappaqua Orchestra*Michael Shapiro , voice actor of Barney and the G-Man in the Half-Life series of computer games...

's 2004 book A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration, he says Barbara's memoir "contradicts Greene's memoir on almost every point.. neither narrator agrees with the one other as to anything at all, where they were, who they saw, what they met, the condition of his illness, whatever. There is just no consonance between these two accounts."

In 2009 the journey was retraced by the English writer and journalist Tim Butcher

Tim Butcher

Tim Butcher is an English journalist, broadcaster and best-selling author.Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, he was educated at Rugby School, and Magdalen College, Oxford University....

, former Africa correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and author of the bestselling book on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart (2007). He was accompanied by fellow Englishman and Graham Greene aficionado David Poraj-Wilczynski. Butcher's account of their adventure was published as Chasing The Devil in 2010 by Random House. Butcher made numerous discoveries about Greene: establishing the identity, lost for decades, of the colonial officer libelled so seriously in the first edition of Journey Without Maps that the book was pulped, finding numerous factual errors in Greene's writing and showing that Greene exaggerated significantly the duration of his trip.