Introduction

In June 1657, James Fraser set off on an adventure of a unique type for a Highlander in the early modern period. According to his own account, his travels between then and early 1660 took him, by horseback, boat and mostly foot, across swathes of southern, central and western Europe. Fraser's initial route would introduce him to London, carry him across the English Channel to Dieppe, and on to Marseille. Diverted by pirates to north-east Spain, he would venture east via Corsica and then Genoa, choosing to extend his stay in Italy by spending nearly a year in Rome, besides taking in many of the peninsula's other major cities. From Venice, Fraser would venture through Alpine passes, heading eastwards through Bavaria, Austria and north-western Hungary, then making an abrupt westward turn into Bohemia, Germany and the Low Countries, on to northern France, London and, eventually, back home to the Highlands of Scotland.

This maverick journey changed his life and is captured in fulsome detail in Fraser's own writing, most especially the ‘Triennial Travels’, the several hundred thousand-word, three-volume memoir he wrote up in the years that followed. Despite it being barely touched on in Mackay's 1905 volume, this rich source is now achieving recognition from modern scholars, within Highland, Scottish, British and European contexts. While exhaustive coverage of it as travel writing is a project which is beyond the aims of this book, there are recurring features in it which this chapter and the next will show to be vital in affording a reappraisal of aspects of pre-Culloden Highland society. The first section will consider the account against the background of the family, regional, national and transnational networks in which Fraser took part, revealing new angles on the Scottish, British and northern European, Protestant approach to tourism in the period. However, since his journey is uncorroborated in any other known contemporary records besides those he authored himself, it is vital to reflect on the possibility of conscious concealment of emotional experience, even fraudulence, within it, and to seek to shine a light on both his deeper motivations and intended audience.