Every age witnesses the birth of some great soul. Sometimes events bring these people to the attention of the world. More often than not, they alter the lives around them, then pass on quietly. Such a soul belonged to the author of this cherished book. There was nothing in Louisa Jebb’s comfortable Victorian youth to indicate she would one day take to the saddle and pen one of the most eloquent equestrian travel books ever written. Yet in the early years of the 20^th century, Jebb set out with a female companion to cross the Turkish Empire on horseback. To say they were unprepared to become Long Riders would be an understatement. Neither of them could speak the local language. Furthermore, both wore cumbersome full-length skirts and rode side-saddles. They were, in a word, enthusiastic amateurs who believed courage and common sense would see them through. Remarkably, it did. Having hired a picturesque guide and reliable horses, they set out to explore the secret corners of the Sultan’s empire. What they discovered were guarded harems and regal Pashas, fabled rivers and a desert world of intense beauty. If Jebb rode into Turkey expecting to find adventure, she found it. Yet she discovered something else – nomadic freedom. It is her personal observations about this subject that set By Desert Ways to Baghdad and Damascus apart from other equestrian travel books. “In the untravelled parts of the East you reign supreme, there is no need to go about securely chained to a gold watch. Ignore Time, and he is your servant,” she observed wisely. Sadly, revolution and death soon swept across this fabled land, wiping away the kingdom of the Turkish Caliphs and laying the foundations for the grief which enshrouds this unhappy part of the world today.

At first glance he didn’t look like a biological pioneer or an extraordinary Long Rider but that’s what Carl Linnaeus was. Of course part of the reason no one recognized his importance back in 1732 was because young Carl was still thought of as being merely the eldest son of a small-town curate in Sweden.
All that changed on the day before his twenty-fifth birthday. That’s when he saddled his horse, and armed with a plant press and a crazy notion, Linnaeus rode away from his family’s home in Uppsala, Sweden and into scientific history. His mission was to journey north into “Lapland,” an area inhabited by the ethnic Sami tribes people who lived on the frozen tundra with their reindeer.
Linnaeus was convinced that this glacier-carved Arctic region had plants which were of scientific importance. Yet when he began to discover, and wished to classify these rare and useful plants, Linnaeus realized that the current system of studying and naming plants and animals was a linguistic shambles, with various complex names being given to the same species based on a wide body of multiple criteria. Linnaeus the Long Rider changed all that. During his equestrian journey Linnaeus devised a system of classifying living things based on a single specific epithet unique to that item. For example, the human species is uniquely identified by the binomial Homo sapiens. No other species of animal can have this binomial. Prior to the system now known as Linnaean taxonomy, animals were classified according to their mode of movement.
During his productive and pleasant stay with the Sami, Linnaeus adopted the local clothes and lifestyle of his resourceful hosts. Though he was learning to relish meals of reindeer meat, the fledgling scientist was also busy discovering more than 100 new plant species. In fact Linnaeus is credited with having classified and named more than 4,000 animals and nearly 8,000 plants during his career. Thus it is often said that Lapland was for Linnaeus what the Galapagos Islands were for Charles Darwin, the other famous Long Rider scientist who was to follow. Yet while the scientific discoveries of both men are now well-known, few recall that they shared a common love of equestrian travel.