Jules Verne · 1883 · overland

Verne's comic novel about an Ottoman merchant who will not pay a ten-para tax to cross the Bosphorus - so he drives the entire way round the Black Sea instead, through Bulgaria, Russia, the Caucasus and the whole Anatolian coast, to reach a suburb he could see from where he started.

1. 1
   Constantinople

   An Ottoman tobacco merchant is told the Sultan has imposed a ten-para tax on crossing the Bosphorus by caique - so rather than pay it he announces he will drive round the Black Sea instead, and does, which is the entire novel.

2. 2
   Varna

   North-west into Bulgaria and up the western shore, and the first of the ways this proves more expensive than a ten-para toll - Verne's joke being that the whole six-hundred-league detour is cheaper than admitting a mistake.

3. 3
   Odessa

   The Russian Black Sea port, and the Dutchman Van Mitten trailing along behind - the patient European foil to a man who will not be argued with, which is how Verne gets a comic novel out of a geography lesson.

4. 4
   Kherson

   The Dnieper mouth and the steppe roads north of the Crimea - and a nephew in Odessa who is supposed to be getting married, with a deadline that gets tighter every league Keraban insists on driving.

5. 5
   Kerch

   The eastern tip of the Crimea, where a narrow strait divides the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov - and where a man on principle against short crossings is faced with another one.

6. 6
   Poti

   The Caucasus coast in Georgia, at the far eastern corner of the sea - halfway round, and the point at which the carriage has gone as far east as the route allows before turning back west.

7. 7
   Tiflis

   Inland to Tbilisi, and the Caucasus proper - the section Verne fills with the ethnography and natural history his readers expected, which is what the Voyages Extraordinaires were sold on.

8. 8
   Trebizond

   Trabzon on the Anatolian coast, and the long western run home - Ottoman territory again, and hundreds of miles of coast road with the sea always on the right.

9. 9
   Sinope

   The headland where Mithridates was born and where the Russians destroyed an Ottoman fleet in 1853 - and the last stretch of a journey now well behind schedule for a wedding.

10. 10
    Scutari

    Uskudar, on the Asian shore, and the destination - visible from where he started, about a kilometre across the water, reached after six hundred leagues and several months rather than one caique fare.