And while in western Europe, demands for regional autonomy have, for the most part, led nowhere, despite, on occasion, intense bombing campaigns, further east, the former Soviet Union and its satellite nations are still dividing into a series of ever-smaller sovereign territories, each demanding recognition as an independent nation.

With the arrival of the European Union and the Schengen Agreement, with most of Europe’s borders standing wide open, one might have supposed that crossing from one territory to another would become the easiest thing in the world, yet in the wake of 9/11 and the advent of the Global War on Terror, some borders have become ever more tightly controlled, governed by security operations that come perilously close to farce. Closer to home, closer in time, John Le Carré’s stories exemplify Cold War efforts to unobtrusively move information and people in and out of eastern Europe, across tightly monitored borders. Such activities reached their literary apotheosis in Kipling’s Kim, which also popularised the term, ‘The Great Game’. Explorers were almost by default spies as well: Richard Burton, the translator of A Thousand and One Nights, disguised himself in order to visit Mecca, while a number of Europeans disguised themselves in order to explore the Himalayan region, and the British government sent trained Indian surveyors into the region disguised as pandits in order to map the area. The desire to explore the forbidden or the unknown, coupled with a need to pass through territory unobserved, permeates travelogues and spy stories. Above all, they were beholden to no one but themselves, careless of borders, able to travel swiftly, and mostly unremarked, thanks to their skills as woodsmen. They were explorers and adventurers, intensely romantic figures, often treated as outlaws, and some of them were probably crooks, though on occasion they could also be of use to the authorities. Early on there was some official encouragement of this as the French, who claimed the territory, needed men who could negotiate with the indigenous peoples but as the authorities became more interested in matters of regulation and ownership, the coureurs des bois, unlicensed as they mostly were, pushed even deeper into the interior in an effort to circumvent the authorities’ attempts to curb their operations.

The original coureurs des bois (the runners of the woods) were French-Canadian woodsmen who ventured into the North American interior, trading goods with the native peoples in return for furs, learning their languages and cultural practices, sometimes taking native wives.

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson