Published in this country last year, the letters sent to Ireland from 1766 onwards by the second Duke of Leinster while on his grand tour show little evidence of sexual misdemeanour on the writer's part. This may be because their recipient was the Duke's formidable mother or because the correspondent was a pleasant but rather unimaginative young man - while at a ball in Turin, he trod on the toes of his dancing partner and this, seemingly, became a talking point for the entire city's population - but it might also be due to a certain reticence, shared by many travellers over the centuries, to articulate the real motivation for his peregrinations. On the other hand, around the same time as the Duke, James Boswell was also spending time in Europe with, as his journals reveal, the expressed intention of gaining as much sexual experience as possible.
He is, in Ian Littlewood's fascinating book, the archetypal tourist who uses the opportunity of travel to behave in a manner not possible at home. Even a brief perusal of television series dedicated to today's holiday-makers in resorts such as Ibiza and Ayia Napa will show that their desires differ little from those of Boswell. Such tourists, and their predecessors, scarcely figure in Sultry Climates which is dominated by writers simply because they are the most likely to have left behind relevant material. As Rupert Croft-Cooke remarked: "No doubt stockbrokers and lawyers attended the sessions at St John's Wood which attracted Swinburne but nobody knows of it now." The respectable traveller used to derive comfort from the notion that bad behaviour was the preserve of the artist, but the activities of many contemporary tourists show that this was probably never the case and that "stockbrokers and lawyers" acted in exactly the same way as Boswell once they had left their native country.
Traversing some two and a half centuries, Littlewood divides his travellers into three categories - the connoisseur, the pilgrim and the rebel - although he cheerfully admits that such titles "are of course a kind of fiction. The realities of tourist motivation and experience mingle them inextricably." But the divisions have been introduced primarily for chronological purposes: the 18th century was the age of the connoisseur; "pilgrims" in search of a sexual grail flourished in the 19th; and the last century was the great era of the rebel.
However described, Littlewood believes that the people whose travels he has investigated seek a common goal - escape from existences they believe to be unnecessarily or unfairly constrained. He also argues convincingly that the escape needs to be temporary, that in order for the dream of sexual freedom to remain inviolate it must be only occasionally experienced. Those who chose to live the dream only succeeded in proving its falsity; Littlewood offers the example, simultaneously poignant and repulsive, of the ageing Gauguin in Tahiti, covered in running sores from syphilis and forced to pay ever higher amounts to local families before they would part with their young daughters. The legend of Gauguin as social rebel is shown to be false and the painter now looks little different from the elderly male tourists who continue to travel to south east Asia in search of sex.
Tahiti is just one of the destinations explored by Littlewood but what all these places have in common is that they involve travel south towards heat. The connection between warm weather and sensuality was made a long time ago. In the 18th century, an English traveller with the unfortunate name of Philip Thicknesse, observed: "It is certainly true that the nearer we approach to the sun, the more we become familiar with vice of very kind." And as one of Littlewood's heroes, Lord Byron, wrote in 'Don Juan', "What men call gallantry, and gods adultery/ Is much more common where the climate's sultry."
No matter what the temperature, there have always been travellers who sought to legitimise their behaviour through acts of philanthropy. In the spring of 1881, the cultural historian John Addington Symonds was staying on Venice's Lido where he spotted a gondolier called Angelo Fusato and immediately fell in love. Scruples led him to decline the sexual favours Fusato was prepared to offer - gondoliers were notorious for lax morals, a reputation not, it would seem, shared by their contemporary equivalent, the vaporetto driver - but instead Symonds insisted on buying a boat for his inamorato, encouraging him to marry and providing regular financial assistance.
Here is evidence of a frequent trait of the sex tourist: his (and, just sometimes, her) inclination towards lordly condescension. The traveller will usually be wealthier than the natives and whether Joe Orton in Tangier, Christopher Isherwood in Berlin or E.M. Forster in Alexandria, will use this affluence to ensure gratification of physical desires. Sometimes, Symonds's grandiose claim will be made that "You do not feel the beauty of a nation till you have slept with one of them" but more often, there is a tacit understanding between the respective parties that a commercial transaction is taking place. Littlewood correctly opts not to moralise about the behaviour of the people he discusses. By the time this book concludes, the wise reader will feel inclined to follow the same course.
Robert O'Byrne is an author and an Irish Times journalist