18th-Century Travel Narratives

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

• Collective work, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères (1702-1776)

  It is the great collection to which Maillard's letter should have belonged. For three quarters of a century, French Jesuits sent to Paris accounts arriving from China, the Levant, Paraguay, India, and Louisiana, and booksellers published them in volumes that all of Europe snapped up. Here we find the same situation as in our text: a man alone, months by sea from his superior, writing in the evening what he had seen by day, whose testimony is valuable precisely for the details that no hurried traveler would have noted. The difference is that Maillard was never printed in this collection.

• John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (1709)

  On 28 December 1700, John Lawson leaves Charles Town with five Englishmen and three Indian guides for a fifty-seven-day march through the backcountry of the two Carolinas, some 550 miles in a great horseshoe. He passes among the Santee, the Congaree and the Waxhaw, noting their villages, their hunting and their diseases, then settles near the future New Bern. His book appears in London in 1709, the year the Duke and the Dutchess cruise along Peru. Two years later the Tuscarora capture him and put him to death. Where Rogers follows coastlines, Lawson walks inland.

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• Cornelis de Bruijn, Voyages par la Moscovie, en Perse et aux Indes (1711)

  A Dutch painter who set out to draw the Orient, de Bruijn crosses the Russia of Peter the Great, descends into Safavid Persia and pushes on to the ruins of Persepolis, which he records with a scholar's care. An exact contemporary of Hamilton, he sees from inland the Asia the captain knows only from its coasts. His pencil fixes the palaces, the costumes and the monuments where the Scottish merchant counts his cargoes; together, they draw the two faces of a single continent, that of the caravan routes and that of the monsoon routes.

• Cornelis de Bruijn, Voyages par la Moscovie, en Perse et aux Indes orientales (1711)

  Leaving The Hague in July 1701, the Dutch painter Cornelis de Bruijn makes his way to Arkhangelsk, then Moscow, where he paints the portraits of Peter the Great's nieces. He goes down the Volga with Armenian merchants, reaches Isfahan at the end of 1703 and spends weeks drawing the ruins of Persepolis, before pushing on to Java. He returns in October 1708, less than three months after Rogers sails, and publishes his account in Amsterdam in 1711, loaded with hundreds of engravings. Two travellers of the same decade: one looks at monuments, the other at prizes and ransoms. The work is Voyages par la Moscovie, en Perse et aux Indes orientales.

• Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, Genealogy of the South-Indian Gods (1713)

  In 1706, the young Pietist Ziegenbalg lands at Tranquebar, a Danish trading post on the Coromandel Coast, sent by King Frederick IV. It is the same king, and soon the same Mission College founded in 1714, that will support Egede's venture in Greenland. Ziegenbalg learns Tamil, translates the New Testament and writes in 1713, from local informants and texts, a genealogy of the gods of South India. His superiors in Halle refuse to print it: a missionary must fight paganism, not describe it. The book does not appear until 1867. The two Danish missions, in the tropics and in the ice, echo each other from start to finish.

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• Amédée-François Frézier, Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou (1716)

  Three years after Rogers, the military engineer Frézier sets out for the South Sea disguised as a merchant captain. From 1712 to 1714, from Concepción to Valparaíso, from Callao to Arica, he secretly draws up plans of the ports, counts the Spanish guns and garrisons, and observes the mines and the crops. He brings back to France the Chilean strawberry plant, which will give us our garden strawberries. His account appears in Paris in 1716 and an English translation follows as early as 1717. It covers the coast that Rogers sails up, seen this time by an officer's eye, attentive to defences more than to booty. The book is Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou.

• Jean de La Roque, Voyage de l'Arabie Heureuse (1716)

  Between 1708 and 1710, while Rogers is cruising the South Sea, French merchant ships sail for the Red Sea to buy coffee at its source. Jean de La Roque publishes their account, presented as the first voyage of the French in those waters, with the story of an ascent from the port of Mocha to the court of the King of Yemen. The book adds a memoir on the coffee tree and a history of coffee in Asia and Europe. The same mainspring as with the Bristol shipowners: a distant expedition financed for a commodity, here a seed rather than the silver of the galleons. His book is Voyage de l'Arabie Heureuse.

• Ippolito Desideri, Relation de voyage au Tibet (1716-1721)

  An Italian Jesuit, Desideri crosses the Himalayas in the years when Hamilton is finishing his voyages, reaches Lhasa and there becomes, alone of his kind, the patient pupil of Buddhist scholars. Where the captain judges the cults of Asia from a distance, in the manner of a merchant in a hurry, the missionary learns the language, reads the sacred books and strives to understand from within a religion he opposes. His account, long buried, offers the learned counterpoint to Hamilton's gaze: the same Orient, seen by a man who took the time to stop and look.

• Ippolito Desideri, Notizie istoriche del Thibet (1716-1721)

  Setting out from Rome in 1712, the Tuscan Jesuit Ippolito Desideri reaches Lhasa in March 1716, after crossing the Himalayas by way of Ladakh. He stays five years, studies at Sera monastery, learns classical Tibetan and composes in that language treatises that dispute, point by point, the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth. Recalled in 1721 when Rome entrusts Tibet to the Capuchins, he writes an account that will lie in manuscript for nearly two centuries. Like Egede before Torngarsuk and the angekuts, Desideri wants to refute a religion and must first understand it, so that his narrative ranks among the best European testimonies on the Tibet of his time.

• Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant (1717)

  Botanist to the King of France, Tournefort travels in the early eighteenth century through the islands of Greece, the coasts of Anatolia and the borders of Armenia, gathering plants and noting the customs of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. His Orient of solid ground and old Christian communities is the western threshold of the world Hamilton finishes exploring at the other end of Asia. The same curious, meticulous prose runs through both, turned toward plants, cults and markets, and one comes to see that the vast eastern arc, from the Aegean Sea to the seas of Japan, formed for Europeans of that age a single field of discovery.

• Peter Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1719)

  Sent to the Cape in 1705 to make astronomical observations, the German Peter Kolb stays there until 1713 and soon forsakes the stars for people. His Caput Bonae Spei hodiernum, published in Nuremberg in 1719 and then abridged in French in 1741, describes the Dutch colony, the wildlife and above all the Khoikhoi: their click language, their herds, their rites and their remedies. At the other end of the Atlantic, Kolb does in the south what Egede does in the north: a complete inventory, from the soil to the beliefs, of a people Europe knew mostly through caricatures, with the same mixture of genuine curiosity and the judgements of the age.

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• Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage to North America (1720-1722)

  In the spring of 1721, as Egede is preparing to sail from Bergen, the Jesuit Charlevoix leaves Quebec on a discreet mission for the Regent: to find the route to the Western Sea. He travels up the St. Lawrence, skirts the Great Lakes, passes through the Illinois country and goes down the Mississippi to New Orleans, lodging at missions and trading posts. His letters, published in 1744, portray the Native American nations, their councils and their beliefs, and the missionaries who live among them. Egede's reader will find the same question there, asked under another sky: how does a European priest speak of God to a people who already have their own spirits?

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• Thomas Shaw, Travels, or Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant (1720-1732)

  From 1720 to 1732, almost exactly the years in which Egede prepares and then runs his mission, the Englishman Thomas Shaw is chaplain to the British factory in Algiers. He takes the opportunity to travel through the Regency of Algiers and Tunisia, then goes on to Egypt and the Levant, recording positions, Roman ruins, plants and the customs of the inhabitants. His Travels appear in Oxford in 1738, the very year of the Danish edition of the Account, and are translated into French as early as 1743. Two Protestant clergymen sent to serve Europeans far from home, two books born of long years abroad: one measures the deserts of the Maghreb, the other the fjords and the ice.

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• Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, Relation de l'ambassade de Méhémet-Effendi à la cour de France en 1721 (1721)

  In the very months when Izmailov submits to Kangxi's ceremonial, another ambassador discovers a foreign court: Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, sent by Sultan Ahmed III to the young Louis XV. After a quarantine near Toulon, he travels up to Paris by way of Bordeaux and enters the capital in March 1721. His report to the sultan describes the audiences, Versailles, the Opera, the Observatory, the gardens and the curiosity of the Parisians crowding to see him. Read alongside Unverzagt, it shows the other face of diplomacy in that age: ceremonial observed, measured and recounted by the one the crowd is watching, as the crowd of Peking watched the Russians.

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• Carl Friedrich Behrens, Reise durch die Süd-Länder und um die Welt (1721-1722)

  In the very year Egede settles in Greenland, three Dutch ships under the command of Jacob Roggeveen set out in search of the southern continent. On board is a soldier from Rostock, Carl Friedrich Behrens. On Easter Day 1722, the expedition reaches an unknown island that it names after the feast: Easter Island. Behrens describes the inhabitants, their canoes and the great stone statues, then the crossing of the Pacific to Batavia, where the Dutch East India Company seizes the ships. His account appears in 1737. While Egede discovers the life of a people at the edge of the ice, Behrens glimpses, for only a few hours, that of another in the middle of the ocean.

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• Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux îles de l'Amérique (1722)

  A Dominican missionary in the Antilles at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Father Labat plants cane, distills rum, arms ships against privateers and recounts it all with the relish of a bon vivant. His book is the tropical counterpart to Hamilton's: the same curiosity for plants, customs and trade, the same blend of piety and practical sense, but set down in the sugar world of the Caribbean. To read the two together is to measure how much the trade of the islands and that of the spices rested on the same enterprising merchants, the same rivalries among nations, and, too often, the same forms of bondage.

• Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1722)

  The Dominican Labat spent twelve years in the West Indies and brought back from them, in 1722, one of the liveliest books of the century: sugar, buccaneering, slavery, cooking, lawsuits and storms, all recounted by a friar with a hearty appetite for life. It is from these islands that guildive comes, a raw cane spirit, the very drink Maillard sees his flock grow drunk on. Reading Labat and Maillard together is to follow cane alcohol from one end of its journey to the other, from the tropical sugar works to the winter camps of Île Royale.

• Joseph-François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times (1724)

  From 1712 to 1717, the Jesuit Lafitau lives at the mission of Sault-Saint-Louis, near Montreal, among the Iroquois. He learns their language, observes their councils, their mourning rites and their dances, and even discovers ginseng in the Canadian forests. Back in France, he publishes in 1724 a vast comparison between Amerindian customs and those of the peoples of Antiquity. The parallel with Egede is striking: two missionaries settled for years among a people they want to convert, who end up becoming its ethnographers. One looks among the Iroquois for traces of the earliest times, the other questions the language and myths of the Greenlanders.

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• Lorenz Lange, Journal de la résidence du sieur Lange, agent de Sa Majesté impériale de la Grande Russie à la cour de la Chine, dans les années 1721 et 1722 (1726)

  When the embassy leaves in March 1721, Unverzagt stays in Peking with the resident Lorenz Lange, and it is the continuation of that stay that Lange's journal recounts, published in French at Leiden in 1726, then translated into English as an appendix to John Bell's account. The tsar's only representative at court, Lange records his visits to ministers, the evasive replies, the trade soon suspended and the affair of the Mongol defectors that blocks everything. Here is Unverzagt's city again, but seen from the files: the patient, often bitter reverse side of the banquets and the New Year fireworks.

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• Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1730-1735)

  In 1730, the Royal African Company hires a young clerk from Worcester, Francis Moore, and sends him to the Gambia River. For five years he travels upriver from trading post to trading post, over hundreds of miles, describing the riverside kingdoms, their markets, their languages and their religions, and witnessing the slave trade. He also tells the story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a learned Fula man sold into slavery in America, then freed and returned to his country. The book appears in London in 1738. As with Egede, life at an isolated post depends on ships from Europe, on a company's trade and on the goodwill of neighbouring peoples, but here commerce carries a very different weight.

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• Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731-1743)

  The English naturalist Mark Catesby travelled through Carolina from 1722 to 1725, then the Bahamas, gathering plants, hunting birds and drawing everything he saw. Back in London, he taught himself engraving in order to publish his Natural History, whose first volume is dated 1731, the year before Linné's departure. Birds, snakes, fish and trees are painted on the plant each prefers, with a text in English and French. Linné would draw on these plates to name many North American species: the two men were inventorying, each on his own continent, a nature that Europe did not yet know how to classify.

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• Johann Georg Gmelin, Reise durch Sibirien (1733-1743)

  Maria's captivity matches almost exactly the dates of this journey: from 1733 to 1743, the German naturalist Johann Georg Gmelin crosses Siberia for the St. Petersburg Academy, as part of the Great Northern Expedition. He goes up the Ob and the Yenisei, reaches Yakutsk, and describes the plants, minerals, cold and peoples of Siberia, whose shamans he observes with curiosity. He too spends ten years far from home, in the service of a distant sovereign. His four-volume account, published from 1751, offers a northern counterpart to Maria's Moroccan years.

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• Johann Georg Gmelin, Reise durch Sibirien, von dem Jahr 1733 bis 1743 (1733-1743)

  Professor of chemistry and natural history at the Academy of Saint Petersburg, Johann Georg Gmelin sets out in 1733 with the great Northern Expedition, the very one that will take Bering to America. For ten years he travels up the rivers of Siberia, from Tobolsk to Yakutsk, collects plants, notes the customs of the Tungus and the Yakuts, and endures the cold and a fire that destroys his baggage. He leaves to others the road to Kamchatka, which Steller, his young compatriot met in Siberia, will take in his place. Back in 1743, Gmelin publishes four volumes of his journal at Göttingen, in 1751 and 1752: one of the two German scholars tells of the continent, the other of the sea and the island where he nearly died.

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• Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description de la Chine (1735)

  Published in Paris in 1735, the very year Maillard landed at Louisbourg, this enormous work compiles the reports of the Jesuit missionaries of Peking to give Europe its first encyclopedia of China. The comparison is instructive: here is what a missionary produces when he writes about a civilization of writing and archives, with time and means at his disposal. Maillard, by contrast, worked without a library, in a language few Europeans had studied, about a people Europe believed it already knew.

• Stepan Krasheninnikov, The History of Kamtschatka (1737-1741)

  The first great book on the peninsula where Asia ends, drawn from the scholarly expedition that accompanied Bering's voyages. In the 1730s and 1740s, Krasheninnikov describes the volcanoes, the bears, the Kamchadals and their sled dogs, the language and beliefs of a people Europe did not yet know. Cook had this book aboard and cites it to identify the birds and animals he meets in the north. To read it is to enter, through the Russian door, the same world of ice and fur that the English expedition approaches through the door of the Pacific.

• George Anson et Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1740, 1741, 1742, 1743, 1744 (1740-1744)

  In September 1740, Commodore George Anson leaves England with a squadron sent to harass the Spaniards in the Pacific. Cape Horn scatters his ships, and scurvy does the rest: of nearly two thousand men who embarked, more than thirteen hundred die, the vast majority of disease. The Centurion recovers at Juan Fernández, then at Tinian, captures the Manila galleon in 1743 and returns alone in 1744. The narrative, published in 1748 under the name of the chaplain Richard Walter, is a huge success. At the same moment, on the other side of the same ocean, Steller watches the crew of the St. Peter dwindle from the same affliction, and gathers herbs that the officers disdain.

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• Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World (1740-1744)

  In 1740, while Maria ter Meetelen survives the palace revolutions of Meknes, Commodore George Anson leaves England with six ships to harass Spain's possessions in the Pacific. Scurvy ravages the crews, Cape Horn scatters the squadron, and only the Centurion completes the circumnavigation in 1744, laden with the treasure of a Manila galleon captured off the Philippines. The narrative, published in 1748 under the name of the chaplain Richard Walter, appeared the same year as Maria's account. Two books of 1748, two faces of war at sea: privateering seen from the deck of the victors, and from the hold of the captives.

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• Vitus Bering, journals of the second Kamchatka expedition (1741-1742) (1741-1742)

  At the very moment when the Patagonian expedition was being prepared in Buenos Aires, the Dane Bering, in Russian service, died on a desert island off the coast of Alaska that he had just reconnoitred. At the two ends of the Pacific, two European monarchies sent small crews onto uncharted seas; Bering's journals, long confiscated by the chancellery of Saint Petersburg, are the boreal counterpart of the Patagonian account: the same storms, the same fogs, the same solitude.

• Richard Pococke, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries (1743-1745)

  The English clergyman Richard Pococke begins in 1737 a three-year tour of the East, the very year Maupertuis returns from Lapland. He sets out from Egypt, passes through Judea, Cyprus, Crete and the Aegean islands, travels across Asia Minor from Ephesus to Ancyra, then reaches Constantinople, Thessaly and Athens. His A Description of the East, published in London from 1743 to 1745, lines up plans, inscriptions and views of monuments with an antiquarian's care. The contrast is striking: the French measure a land without ruins, covered with forests and ice, while Pococke surveys the remains of the oldest civilizations. Yet both books share the same faith in direct observation.

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• Réginald Outhier, Journal d'un voyage au Nord, en 1736 et 1737 (1744)

  The same journey, seen through other eyes. Abbé Réginald Outhier, a priest of the diocese of Besançon and correspondent of the Academy, in charge of the expedition's signals and maps, keeps his journal day by day during the two years spent in the North. Published in 1744, it shows what Maupertuis's Discours leaves in shadow: life in the hamlets along the river, the customs and beliefs of the Lapps, the view of a Catholic priest on a Lutheran country. Outhier draws the plates himself, including plans of Tornio and Stockholm and a view of Falun. To read the two texts side by side is to hear both the leader of the expedition and the man who carried the signals up the summits.

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• Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d'un voyage fait dans l'intérieur de l'Amérique méridionale (1745)

  In 1735, three years after Linné's departure, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent Charles-Marie de La Condamine to the equator, to the province of Quito, to measure a degree of the meridian; a second team, led by Maupertuis, would leave the following year for the Torne valley, in the very footsteps of our traveller. His measurements complete, La Condamine chose in 1743 to return to Europe by way of the Amazon, which he descended by dugout canoe to the ocean. His Relation abrégée describes the river, its banks, its peoples and the Indians' hunting poisons. At the same moment, at opposite ends of the world, the science of the Enlightenment was sending its scholars out to survey the land.

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• George Anson, A Voyage Round the World (1748)

  The account of the harshest of the century's English voyages: setting out in 1740 to harry Spain in the Pacific, Anson lost half his men to scurvy, rounded Cape Horn through hell, and returned in 1744 with the Manila galleon as his prize. The book, an enormous success in France as in England, shows the other face of the power that was, at the very same time, laying siege to Louisbourg. The warriors of Lorembec and Anson's sailors were fighting the same war, at opposite ends of the world.

• George Anson, A Voyage Round the World (1748)

  Five years before the Strobl-Cardiel-Quiroga expedition, the English commodore Anson set out to sail around the world at the head of a squadron ravaged by scurvy. It is precisely his printed charts that gave rise to the fables of giant rivers and outsized oysters at San Julián which the voyage of 1746 would dismantle. The English account is a masterpiece of naval propaganda: wild Patagonia, the Manila galleon captured, a triumphant return. To read Anson beside Lozano is to see the same coast through two enemy pens, one that magnifies everything, the other that counts fathoms.

• Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (1748)

  Thirty years later, Commodore Anson's squadron almost retraces the route of the Duke. Setting out in 1740 and decimated by scurvy off Cape Horn, it recovers at Juan Fernández, where the sailors find goats with slit ears that they link to Selkirk. It plunders Paita, watches in vain for the galleon off Mexico, then in 1743 seizes the Covadonga near the Philippines. The narrative, published in 1748 under the name of the chaplain Richard Walter, becomes a great publishing success. It shows what naval war made of Rogers's privateering model. See A Voyage Round the World by George Anson.

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• Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740-1744, by George Anson (1748)

  Three years after Maupertuis's return, in 1740, Commodore George Anson leaves England with a squadron charged with harassing Spanish possessions in the Pacific. The circumnavigation that follows, until 1744, turns into a human disaster: Cape Horn storms, scurvy decimating the crews, ships lost. Anson nonetheless comes home with the Manila galleon, captured off the Philippines. The account, published in 1748 under the name of the chaplain Richard Walter, becomes one of the great successes of the century. It sheds light on another side of The Figure of the Earth, whose preface already recalled what was at stake: to know the exact shape of the globe is, first of all, to navigate better.

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• Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America (1749)

  The Swedish naturalist, a student of Linnaeus, traveled through Canada in 1749, between the two sieges of Louisbourg. He notes the plants, the prices, the fortifications, the state of mind of the colonists, and the way the French and English regarded each other. His journal gives the exact climate of the years when Maillard was writing, seen by a foreigner with no stake in either camp.

• Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du Roi à l'équateur (1751)

  While Cardiel sets out barefoot toward the west, La Condamine descends the Amazon after ten years spent measuring the meridian of Peru. It is the account of another America, tropical, green, populated, but of the same generation of learned travellers, with the same instruments and the same wish to be done with the fables of armchair geographers.

• Frederik Ludvig Norden, Voyage d'Égypte et de Nubie (1755)

  In 1737, as Maupertuis completes his checks at Tornio, the Danish naval officer Frederik Ludvig Norden lands at Alexandria on the orders of King Christian VI. After four months in Cairo, he goes up the Nile southward, toward Nubia, charged with forging trade links with Ethiopia, then returns to Denmark in 1738. A remarkable draughtsman, he records temples, colossi and riverbanks with the same obsession with accuracy as the geometers of the polar circle. Dead of tuberculosis in Paris in 1742, he never sees his book: Voyage d'Égypte et de Nubie appears in Copenhagen in 1755, illustrated with engravings made from his drawings.

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• Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche, A Journey into Siberia (1761)

  Eighteen years before King climbed into a sledge bound for Bolcheretsk, a French astronomer-abbé crossed Russia in the depths of winter to observe the transit of Venus across the sun at Tobolsk. He noted everything: the cold that split his instruments, the post relays, the peasants' poverty, the power of the priests, and returned home to publish a book so severe that Catherine II herself took up the pen to answer it. It is the exact reverse of this volume. Chappe sees an empire and judges it; King sees one man, Major Behm, and cannot get over him. Both are right, and that is what makes the comparison instructive.

• David Cranz, The History of Greenland (1761-1762)

  In 1733, in Egede's lifetime, Moravian Brethren from Herrnhut settle next to his colony and found New Herrnhut; relations between Lutherans and Moravians are not always peaceful. Thirty years later, David Cranz is sent by his Church to write the history of this mission. He stays in Greenland in 1761 and 1762, then publishes in 1765 a comprehensive work on the country, its inhabitants and the work of the Brethren, translated into English as early as 1767. Cranz draws heavily on Egede, completes him, debates him, and adds what thirty years of presence have taught. Reading the two books one after the other means seeing the same coast described by two rival missions.

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• Carsten Niebuhr, Description de l'Arabie (1761-1767)

  A Danish expedition sets out in 1761 for Arabia Felix with six scholars. Five die along the way. Niebuhr returns alone in 1767, bringing back the surveys, measurements, and copied inscriptions of all his dead companions. It is the same century as Cook, the same faith in measurement, the same refusal of the marvelous, but without a ship's deck to shelter the instruments. It shows what plain accuracy cost, in those days.

• Guillaume Le Gentil de la Galaisiere, A Voyage in the Indian Seas (1761-1769)

  Setting out to observe the transit of Venus of 1761, the French astronomer misses it at sea, decides to wait for the next one, eight years later, settles at Pondicherry, and watches the sky cloud over on the decisive morning of 1769. He returns to France to learn he has been declared dead and his estate divided. His book is the most melancholy of the century's scientific adventures, and the perfect counterpoint to the methodical readings King and Bayly take under the coconut palms of Matavai: the same quest for the sky, one crowned, the other stolen by a cloud.

• John Bell, Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia (1763)

  Unverzagt's best reading companion walked at his side: the Scottish physician John Bell belonged to the same Izmailov embassy. He published his account in Glasgow in 1763, more than forty years after the journey, with the hindsight of a man who had already followed the Russian mission to Persia. In it we find Tobolsk, Lake Baikal, the Mongolian steppe, the entry into Peking and Kangxi's audiences, told by an adult attentive to plants, peoples and the negotiators' arguments. To read the two books together is to see the same procession through two pairs of eyes: the dazzled young man's and the observant practitioner's.

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• Jonathan Carver, Travels through the Interior Parts of North America (1766-1768)

  In the spring of 1766, while Niebuhr prepares his small caravan for Antioch, the former provincial officer Jonathan Carver leaves Boston for the Great Lakes, then goes up from Michilimackinac toward the upper Mississippi and the Sioux country. He winters among them, ascends the Minnesota River, follows the shore of Lake Superior and returns in 1768. His book, published in London in 1778, mixes field observation, ethnography of the peoples of the Great Lakes and borrowings from other authors, for which critics would reproach him. The contrast is instructive: where Niebuhr weighs every testimony and confesses his doubts about the inscriptions, Carver writes for a public hungry for American marvels.

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• Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde (1766-1769)

  At the end of 1766, a few months after Niebuhr left Aleppo for Cyprus, Bougainville sails from Brest with La Boudeuse, soon joined by the storeship L'Étoile. It is the first official French navy voyage around the world: the Strait of Magellan, the Tuamotus, then Tahiti, which he describes as a new Cythera and which will set the salons of Paris ablaze. The two men share a method, measuring, noting, comparing, but not a horizon. Where Niebuhr dismantles the illusions of armchair scholars about the stones of Larnaca, Bougainville, in spite of himself, fashions a myth, that of the noble savage of the South Seas.

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• James Cook, Journal of the First Voyage (1768-1771) (1768-1771)

  Twenty-two years after the return of the San Antonio, the English lieutenant Cook sailed up the east coast of Australia and charted New Zealand with a precision that would make every portolan obsolete. The same demands as Quiroga: soundings, latitudes, tides, landmarks. The same sobriety as Lozano in the telling. The two voyages, twenty-two years apart, say the same thing: the great age of discovery is over, and that of the exact survey begins.

• James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1768-1773)

  The towering Scotsman lands at Massawa in September 1769 and reaches Gondar, the capital of Ethiopia, in February 1770. There he lives amid court wars, treats the sick, hunts, commands a troop of horsemen, then in November 1770 reaches the sources of the Blue Nile at Gish Abay, convinced that he has solved the riddle of the ancients. His return across the Nubian desert brings him back to Europe in 1773, the very year the Voyage à l'Île-de-France appears. His five volumes of 1790 sell well, yet many travellers judged them implausible. While Bernardin describes a coastal Africa, captured and sold, Bruce tells of a sovereign, Christian and violent African kingdom.

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• Peter Simon Pallas, Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs (1768-1774)

  Summoned to Saint Petersburg by Catherine II, the Berlin naturalist set out in 1768 at the head of an expedition of the Academy of Sciences. For six years he travelled the Volga, the shores of the Caspian, the Urals, western Siberia, the Altai and Transbaikalia as far as Lake Baikal, noting rocks, plants, animals and peoples. His volumes, published from 1771, are a methodical inventory of an immense empire. Bernardin, at the same moment, apologizes for not being a naturalist and yet draws up, letter after letter, the catalogue of the trees, birds and fish of a tiny island. Two ways, one learned and one sensitive, of taking stock of the world.

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• Peter Simon Pallas, Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire (1768-1774)

  From 1768 to 1774, the German naturalist crosses Russia from the Volga to the Chinese frontier on behalf of Catherine II. He describes the steppes, the mines of the Urals, the Kalmyks and the Buryats, with an exactness that is still authoritative. His volumes appear at the very moment the Resolution leaves Plymouth. Cook's Pacific and Pallas's Siberia meet, moreover, sooner than one might think: it is toward the Bering Strait, between these two worlds, that the expedition heads at the end of this volume.

• Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche, Voyage en Californie (1769)

  In 1769, the French astronomer crosses Mexico as far as Baja California to observe the transit of Venus, the same quest that had brought Cook to Tahiti that same year. He completes his measurements in the midst of an epidemic that carries him off, along with almost his entire party. His journal, published after his death, tells of the century's scientific fervour and its price in lives. One finds there, under other skies, the same open-air astronomy that occupies King and Cook at Tongatapu, the eclipse watched for between the clouds.

• Jean de Surville, Journal du voyage du Saint-Jean-Baptiste (1769-1770)

  In December 1769, a French merchant ship was likewise searching for land in the Pacific and sailing along the north coast of New Zealand. Cook and de Surville passed within a few dozen leagues of one another, in the same storm, without ever sighting each other. The Frenchman's journal, long forgotten, tells the other face of that moment: a crew ravaged by scurvy, a tense landfall among the Maori, a hostage taken by force. To read these pages alongside Cook's journal is to grasp how much discovery depended on the chance of routes and winds.

• Samuel Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean (1769-1772)

  While Cook heads south toward the polar ice, a clerk of the Hudson's Bay Company walks north toward ice of another kind. From 1769 to 1772, Hearne travels on foot, guided by Dene companions, across thousands of kilometers of tundra to reach the mouth of the Coppermine River. He never finds the copper mines he was sent to look for, and he watches, powerless, as his own companions massacre an Inuit camp. The contrast with Cook is striking: the same decade, the same cold, the same pursuit of something that does not exist, but no ship, no instruments, no chronometer. Only moccasins and the knowledge of the people of the land.

• Samuel Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean (1770-1772)

  While Cook searches for the Northwest Passage by sea, a clerk of the Hudson's Bay Company searches for it by land. From 1770 to 1772, Hearne walks north from Churchill, guided by the chief Matonabbee and his band, living on whatever they can kill, until he reaches the mouth of the Coppermine River, on the Arctic Ocean. There he witnesses, powerless, the massacre of an Esquimaux camp by his own companions. His conclusion matches Cook's, reached from the other side of the continent: at this latitude, no navigable passage exists. Two men, two opposite routes, the same wall at the end.

• Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1771)

  Setting out in 1766 to hand the French settlement on the Falklands over to the Spanish, Bougainville passes through the Strait of Magellan, crosses the Pacific by way of Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides and the Solomons, then reaches the Moluccas and Batavia before returning across the Indian Ocean. It is the first official French naval voyage round the world. His account, published in 1771, feeds the philosophers' debate on the noble savage. The comparison with Rogers is telling: the same seas, the same Dutch ports of call, but a voyage of state, of scholars and observation, where Rogers led an enterprise of prizes. The book is Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile.

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• Maurice-Auguste de Benyowski, Memoirs and Travels of Mauritius Augustus Count de Benyowsky (1771)

  The figure who haunts the second chapter of this volume without ever appearing in it wrote his own memoirs. A Polish officer deported to Kamchatka, he raised Bolcheretsk in revolt in 1771, killed the commander, seized a galiot and reached Macao by way of Japan and Formosa, before ending his days as governor of Madagascar. His book is shameless invention from cover to cover, and historians have been taking its pages apart for two centuries; but it is the only voice from the other side of the affair, and it explains better than any other why an entire garrison, eight years later, mistook two English sloops for French pirates.

• Peter Simon Pallas, Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reiches (1771-1776)

  Published between 1771 and 1776, the immense journey of the German naturalist Pallas across the Russian Empire, from the Volga to the Altai and eastern Siberia, unfolded in the years just before and after Phipps's voyage. Pallas described the steppes, the mammoths, the Turkic and Mongol peoples. Readers curious about the Far North will find here, on the Russian side, the continental counterpart to what Phipps sought at sea.

• Jean Chappe d'Auteroche, Voyage en Californie pour l'observation du passage de Vénus (1772)

  On 3 June 1769, while Cook watched for Venus from Tahiti, the French astronomer Chappe d'Auteroche watched for it from a mission in Baja California. He succeeded in his observation, then died there of a fever only days later. His posthumous account, published in 1772, tells the other side of the same scientific adventure: the planetary race of astronomers dispatched to the four corners of the globe to measure, all at once, the distance from the Earth to the sun. The reader thus grasps how much the Endeavour's voyage belonged to a worldwide enterprise, coordinated from one hemisphere to the other.

• Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, Relation du voyage (1772)

  Two years after Cook, another French navigator dropped anchor in the Bay of Islands, those very shores the Endeavour had just sailed past. The stop, cordial at first, ended in blood: Marion du Fresne and some of his men were killed by the Maori they believed to be their friends. The account of this voyage casts a harsh light on what Cook's journal only lets the reader glimpse: the fragility of first contact, where a single misunderstanding was enough to turn hospitality into war.

• Anders Sparrman, Voyage au cap de Bonne-Espérance (1772-1776)

  The Swedish naturalist who had sailed on the Resolution during the second voyage had returned to the Cape and was still roaming the countryside when Cook anchored there in October 1776. His book tells what Anderson only glimpsed in three days on muleback: the farms of the hinterland, the hunts, the frontier peoples, the immense country that begins where the Company's garden ends. One finds there the same vineyards, the same Dutch hosts, the same tower-shaped rock, and what a man sees of a country when he stays there for months instead of calling at it between two tides.

• Constantine John Phipps, A Voyage Towards the North Pole (1773)

  In 1773, two English ships were sent due north past Spitsbergen to see whether the polar sea was open. They were stopped by pack ice at eighty degrees, spent a fortnight locked in the floes and came home with their answer: it was not. It is from this voyage that King draws, in Chapter 6, Lord Mulgrave's measurements of the polar bear, which he compares to his own. And it is the contrast between those eighty degrees reached off Greenland and the seventy-one that are never exceeded north of the Bering Strait that fuels his entire discussion of how ice forms.

• James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1773)

  In the autumn of 1773, while Cook is searching for a southern continent, two Londoners ride on horseback through the Highlands and the western isles of Scotland, thirty years after the crushing of the clans. Boswell notes everything: the windowless inns, the Gaelic he cannot understand, the ruined chiefs who still receive guests like lords. One finds there, four days from London, a world of ranks, taboos, and coded hospitality that resembles Otoo's and Towha's more than one might imagine.

• John Byron, relation du voyage du Dolphin (1773)

  Twelve years before Viedma, the English admiral enters San Julián Bay and swears he saw men nine feet tall. His account revives in Europe the old fable of the Patagonian giants and sets the engravings circulating. To read Byron and then Viedma is to pass from a tale to a measuring rod: the second measures his hosts in varas, notes that they are tall but by no means outsized, and calmly explains that it was their garment from neck to feet that deceived hasty visitors.

• John Hawkesworth, Relation des voyages entrepris pour faire des découvertes dans l'hémisphère méridional (1773)

  Two years before the Endeavour, another English ship, the Dolphin, had touched at Tahiti and brought back the news that decided Cook's call there. Hawkesworth's great compilation, published in 1773, gathers these expeditions of Byron, Wallis, and Carteret in the Pacific. In it one reads the discovery of Tahiti as the Royal Navy first knew it, that same Dolphin whose memory Cook's journal keeps everywhere. It is the opening act of the South Seas, just before the Endeavour made its round of them.

• Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta (1773)

  In 1770 the Scot Patrick Brydone toured Sicily and went on to Malta with the young men he was escorting on their Grand Tour. He climbed Etna, observed, measured and joked, and published his letters in London in 1773, the very year Plechtcheïev's journal was printed in St Petersburg. Malta, island of the Knights, and the corsair-haunted Mediterranean were also the horizon of the Russian sailors of the Archipelago. The two books show the same sea in two lights: that of the cultivated traveller strolling among ancient ruins, and that of the officer on campaign crossing it in wartime.

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• Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773)

  Draughtsman on Cook's first voyage, who died at sea before the return, Parkinson left a journal published in 1773 by his family. In it we follow the Endeavour along the same New Zealand and Australian coasts that Cook had just revealed. The tone is that of a young man, wonderstruck and scrupulous, who notes down the words of the languages he encounters and sketches plants and faces. It is the first sustained European gaze upon these shores, the one that prepared the ground for the second voyage recounted here.

• William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida (1773-1777)

  While the Resolution skirts a coast of volcanoes, a Quaker from Philadelphia walks alone, from 1773 to 1777, through the forests of the American South. Bartram gathers plants, draws alligators, sleeps among the Creeks and the Cherokees, and speaks of them in a tone his century rarely uses: that of the grateful guest. Where King observes a people he will never see again, Bartram lives for months on end in the villages he describes, and his book fed the imagination of the English Romantics as much as the maps of botanists. Two opposite ways of looking, at the same hour, upon a world Europe is preparing to undo.

• Thomas Falkner, A Description of Patagonia (1774)

  An English physician turned Jesuit spends forty years in the missions of the Río de la Plata and comes home with the first reasoned description of the Patagonian interior, its peoples and its rivers. The book appears six years before the departure from Montevideo, and its shadow hangs over the whole enterprise: it is partly because Falkner showed the English the strategic value of the coast that Madrid decides in haste to plant towns there.

• Carsten Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East (1774-1778)

  While Kim Jong-jeong was waiting in Shenyang, the surveyor Carsten Niebuhr was in India, having already crossed Yemen. He was the sole survivor of the scientific expedition sent to Arabia by the King of Denmark in 1761, and would not return until 1767, by way of Persia, Mesopotamia and Syria. His account, published from 1774, describes towns, customs posts and local authorities with a surveyor's precision. Like the Korean magistrate, Niebuhr is a king's envoy, attentive to hierarchies and procedures, who records what he sees as a man charged with a report rather than a traveller in search of the picturesque.

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• Carsten Niebuhr, Voyage en Arabie (1774-1778)

  While the Endeavour was being fitted out, a German surveyor was returning alone from Arabia, the sole survivor of a Danish expedition decimated by disease. His account, published in the 1770s, describes a Yemen then still almost unknown to Europeans, with the same surveyor's patience that Cook brought to charting a coast. It is another face of the age of great reconnaissance: no longer the South Seas, but the deserts and ports of the Red Sea. The precision of the line, the concern for measuring and naming everything, bring together these two travelers whom everything else set apart.

• Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia (1775-1776)

  A pupil of Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist spends the year 1775 and part of 1776 on the islet of Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor, the only point of Japan open to Europeans. He botanizes through the trellises of his confinement, buys plants from servants, and finally travels up to Edo in the annual procession of the Dutch embassy. His method is exactly Anderson's at Tahiti: name, classify, note remedies, listen to the language. Two pupils of the same master, at opposite ends of Asia, draw from a polite confinement and a stay of a few weeks a body of knowledge no one had managed to gather before them.

• Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels in Japan (1775-1776)

  The Japan that the ships skirt without ever touching it, a Swedish botanist actually lived in, for fifteen months in 1775 and 1776, as physician to the Dutch trading post at Dejima. A pupil of Linnaeus, he searched the horses' fodder for specimens when he could not go outside, finally obtained leave to travel to Edo with the annual embassy, and brought back the first flora of the country. Where King gives up in the face of currents and storms, citing Kaempfer's warning, Thunberg shows what it cost, and what could still be learned, if one agreed to enter the cage.

• Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage à la Nouvelle-Guinée (1776)

  On 29 June 1771, while Kerguelen is making for the Isle de France, a small expedition fitted out by the intendant Pierre Poivre leaves Port-Louis for the Philippines and the Moluccas. On board, the young Pierre Sonnerat, a relative and protégé of Poivre, draws birds, plants and inhabitants. He returns to the island in June 1772, when people there are discussing the southern land Kerguelen has just reported to France. His book, adorned with more than a hundred engravings, has a misleading title: he never came near New Guinea beyond the island of Gebe. It shows the other face of the Isle de France, a scholarly base turned toward Asia as much as toward the South.

• John Ledyard, A Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage (1776-1780)

  An American corporal of marines was at Kealakekua that morning. Once home, Ledyard published in Hartford, in 1783, an account of the voyage that came out more than a year ahead of the official edition and told of Cook's death without going through the Admiralty. The tone is free, at times borrowed from others, and the judgment on the officers' conduct severe. It is the first counterpoint to the text just read: two men, the same beach, the same quarter hour, and two versions whose comparison has occupied historians ever since.

• Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World (1777)

  Embarked at seventeen on the Resolution alongside his father, the young Forster lived through exactly the scenes that Cook recounts, but he gives a wholly different version of them: sensitive, colorful, attentive to people rather than to bearings. Published in 1777, the same year as the official account, his book is the intimate counter-shot to ours. In it we find again the Friendly Islands, the Maori cannibalism, Easter Island, but seen by a cultivated adolescent who would become one of the great German prose writers. The double gaze, that of the captain and that of the passenger, sheds light on the whole voyage.

• Georg Forster, A Voyage round the World (1777)

  A German naturalist who sailed on the Resolution with Cook, Forster published in London in 1777 an account of the same voyage as his commander, but seen through the eyes of the scientist. He described the Polynesians, the Antarctic ice, the albatrosses and the penguins in a prose more literary than that of the seamen. Forster is best read after Phipps, to see how a naturalist aboard ship observes, records, and classifies, in that same decade, under different skies.

• James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777)

  In July 1772, a few weeks before Plechtcheïev left Paros, James Cook sailed from Plymouth with Resolution and Adventure to look for the great southern continent that geographers placed at the bottom of the world. In January 1773 he became the first navigator known to cross the Antarctic Circle, then spent three years criss-crossing the southern seas, from New Zealand to Tahiti and Easter Island. Two European navies were sending their officers to opposite ends of the map: the Russian one to wage war in the eastern Mediterranean, the British one for science and mastery of the oceans.

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• Jonathan Carver, Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768 (1778)

  In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the colonial officer Jonathan Carver travelled up the upper Mississippi in 1766 and wintered among the Dakota, looking for a route to the west. His account, published in London in 1778, was a great success. Like Kim Jong-jeong's journal, it is set on a frontier between empires: the treaty of 1763 had just redistributed North America, as the Manchu conquest had redrawn Manchuria and its margins. In both cases a traveller from the centre describes peoples, outposts and crossings that treaties only half control.

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• Guillaume Le Gentil, Voyage dans les mers de l'Inde (1779-1781)

  No one was unluckier than this French astronomer, who set out to observe the transit of Venus of 1761 and was detained so long in the Indian Ocean that he missed the one of 1769 as well, a cloud stealing the decisive instant from him. Having returned after eleven years, he found himself declared dead and stripped of his belongings. His book, published in 1779, is the tragic and comic reverse of Cook's triumph: the same celestial quest, but pursued under an unlucky star. Here one breathes the full scholarly fever of the century and the fragility of distant expeditions.

• Pak Chi-won, The Jehol Diary (1780)

  Sixteen years after Kim Jong-jeong, the scholar Pak Chi-won passed through Shenyang in his turn with the Korean embassy of 1780, on the way to Beijing and Jehol. His Yeorha ilgi, translated into English as The Jehol Diary, devotes famous pages to the city: shops, signboards, night-time conversations with Chinese merchants. The contrast with Kim is striking. Where the investigator of 1764, humiliated and suspicious, sees in the Manchu capital nothing but barbarism and corruption, Pak Chi-won finds a prosperity and a technical skill from which, he argues, Korea should learn. The same city, two moods, and the beginning of a debate that would run through Korean scholarship.

• William Coxe, Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America (1780)

  Published in London in 1780, just as the Resolution returns to port, this book recounts everything Cook did not know when he put in at Unalaska: half a century of obscure voyages by Russian hunters, setting out from Kamchatka from island to island in pursuit of the sea otter. Coxe compiles the reports, charts and journals of these promyshlenniki that no official account had yet brought together. Here one finds again the world Cook glimpsed at Ismyloff's: huts, furs, baidars, and that silent Europe already settled at the far edge of Asia long before the English dropped anchor there.

• François-Jean de Chastellux, Travels in North America (1780-1782)

  The war the expedition left behind in 1776 is still being played out while it dies at Hawaii. Chastellux, a major general in Rochambeau's army, crosses it on horseback from 1780 to 1782, from Newport to Virginia, and tells what he sees: the taverns, the farms, Washington at home, the young universities, the slaves. This is the world that governed the thinking of London while Clerke, in Kealakekua Bay, was negotiating the return of Cook's bones. The contrast is the best commentary there is on the strange indifference of the two histories to one another.

• François Le Vaillant, Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique par le cap de Bonne-Espérance (1781-1784)

  Ten years after Bernardin's visit, a young ornithologist born in Dutch Guiana lands at the Cape, sent by a treasurer of the Dutch East India Company. Le Vaillant does not stop at Table Mountain: he sets off by wagon east of the Cape, then crosses the Orange River toward the land of the Namaquas, and returns in 1784 with more than two thousand bird skins and a giraffe skin. His account of 1790 was an immense success and was immediately translated everywhere, despite the errors and inventions that naturalists would charge him with. In it we find again the Khoikhoi and the Dutch colonists whom Bernardin had observed from the town.

• François Le Vaillant, Travels into the Interior of Africa (1781-1784)

  A few years after Cook, a Frenchman born in Guiana pushes north from the Cape with his wagons, his guns and his tame monkey. Le Vaillant hunts, collects birds, befriends the Namaquas, and writes it all in a novelistic style that made his book's success and the scholars' suspicion. He is exactly what King's manner refuses: the traveler who puts himself on stage. Reading the two side by side shows how much the tone of an account decides what posterity will believe.

• Julien Crozet, Nouveau voyage à la mer du Sud (1783)

  Shortly after Cook, the French navigator Marion du Fresne touched at New Zealand, where he was killed along with some of his men by the Maori in 1772. His second-in-command, Crozet, recounted the expedition in an account published in 1783. In it, as a tragic mirror of the cannibalism Cook observed, we read of the violence born of misunderstanding between Europeans and Maori. The two texts, almost contemporary with each other, together sketch the first century of contact, made up of exchange, fascination, and blood, upon these shores at the end of the world.

• Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1783-1785)

  Less than twenty years after Niebuhr, the young Volney travels through Egypt and Syria and publishes, in 1787, the very year of the Remarks on Aleppo, a picture that would become authoritative. His pashalik of Aleppo overlaps Niebuhr's line for line: villages abandoned at the edge of the desert, the road to Alexandretta infested with thieves, fallen Antioch, the fevered air of Alexandretta and the refuge of Beilan in the mountains. He adds the carrier pigeons and the famous Aleppo button. But Volney generalizes and judges Ottoman despotism as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, whereas Niebuhr, more modest, tells what he has seen and lets the reader conclude.

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• Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1783-1785)

  Constantin-François Chassebœuf, known as Volney, spent nearly three years in Egypt and Syria, including several months in a monastery in Lebanon to learn Arabic. His book appeared in 1787, the year Lesseps landed in Kamchatka with the La Pérouse expedition. It is the other face of Enlightenment travel: no dispatches and no sledge, but a methodical observer who describes the climate, the populations and the government of the Ottomans and Mamluks with an almost statistical coolness. The contrast sheds light on Lesseps, younger and less systematic, who nonetheless also records with care the tribute, the justice and the languages of the peoples he crosses.

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• Jean-François de La Pérouse, Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde (1785-1788)

  This is the other half of the story. While Lesseps sinks into the snows of Kamchatka, the Boussole and the Astrolabe head south again, call at Samoa, where Langle is killed, then anchor at Botany Bay in early 1788. After that, nothing: both frigates vanish with all hands. Published in 1797 by Milet-Mureau from the journals sent home along the way, including those Lesseps carried across Siberia, this account shows the expedition as the young interpreter left it. It takes in California, Alaska, the coasts of Tartary and Avacha Bay seen from the deck, and it makes clear the value of the dispatches sewn into his baggage.

• Jean-François de La Pérouse, Voyage autour du monde (1785-1788)

  Ten years after Cook, La Pérouse crosses the same waters, calls at the neighbouring Navigator Islands, and loses his second-in-command there in an ambush that answers, like a sinister echo, all the lavish friendships of this volume. His account, saved from the final wreck by copies sent home in time, shows the other side of the Polynesian coin: the same sea, the same magnificent chiefs, and the violence that Cook brushed against without always seeing it coming.

• Martin Sauer, An Account of a Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the Northern Parts of Russia (1785-1794)

  Secretary of Joseph Billings's expedition, commissioned by Catherine II to survey the coasts between Asia and America, the Englishman Martin Sauer spends nearly ten years in eastern Siberia. He winters in Kamchatka, sails from Petropavlovsk in 1790 and visits the Aleutian Islands, Unalaska and Kodiak. His account, published in London in 1802, dwells on the Aleuts, their kayaks, their parkas, their villages, and plainly denounces the brutality of the Russian fur hunters toward them. Half a century after the meeting at the Shumagin Islands told by Steller, Sauer describes the price these islanders paid for the sea otter that Bering's expedition had made known.

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• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise (Voyage en Italie) (1786-1788)

  As Lesseps speeds by sledge over the ice of the Gulf of Penzhina, Goethe is living in Rome, drawing, reading Vitruvius and restoring his spirit under a mild sky. Having left Carlsbad incognito in September 1786, he travels down to Naples and Sicily and returns to Weimar only in June 1788. The two travellers keep almost the same calendar and have nothing else in common: on one side the pursuit of beauty in a Europe saturated with memory, on the other survival in an Asia without roads. To read these letters and this journal, published much later, is to measure the gap between two ways of travelling at the end of the Enlightenment.

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• Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787)

  Four years after the signing of the Patagonian description, a young Frenchman travels through the Ottoman East with the plan of writing down not its marvels but its real state: population, resources, government, climate. The second half of Viedma's volume, where the journal gives way to a reasoned survey of a coast and a people, proceeds from the same gesture and the same period. It is the moment when travel stops being an adventure story and becomes a report.

• Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1787-1788)

  In January 1788, while Lesseps winters in Bolsheretsk, an English naval officer lands at the other end of the Pacific with the first fleet of convicts sent to Australia. Watkin Tench tells of the arrival at Botany Bay, the settlement at Port Jackson, the first contacts with the Aboriginal people, and the hunger that threatens the infant colony. He also notes two French frigates appearing in the bay: they are La Pérouse's, on their last known call. Published as early as 1789, his account is lively and curious, and offers one of the last glimpses of the companions Lesseps had just left.

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• Paul Egede, Efterretninger om Grønland, uddragne af en Journal holden fra 1721 til 1788 (1788)

  Paul Egede is twelve when he lands with his parents in 1721, and the Account follows him from journey to journey until he returns, ordained, in 1734, to help found Christianshåb on Disko Bay. He stays in Greenland until 1740, then becomes the author of the first Greenlandic dictionary and grammar, translates the New Testament and ends his life as Bishop of Greenland. Shortly before his death, he publishes in Copenhagen extracts from his own journal, kept from 1721 to 1788. The son takes up where the father leaves off: the same fjords, the same families, but with the language at last mastered and the hindsight of a whole lifetime.

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• John Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (1788-1789)

  Cook had scarcely left Nootka before the price of sea otter skins in Canton was already setting merchants in motion. In 1788, Meares settles in the very same bay, builds a small ship there, trades with the chief Maquinna, and his disputed settlement sets off the Nootka crisis that comes close to throwing England and Spain into war. His account, less scrupulous than Cook's, shows the reverse side of discovery: within ten years, the otter cove has become a trading post, and the captain's iron bartering, the first act of a great commerce.

• John Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (1788-1789)

  Here is the project of Chapter 19, carried out eight years later by a former naval officer turned merchant. Meares fitted out at Macao, sailed up to Nootka, built a house and a ship there, bought sea otter pelts on the same terms King had calculated, sailed back down to sell them at Canton, and triggered along the way the diplomatic crisis that nearly brought England and Spain to war. His book is boastful and often dishonest, which does not stop it from being the first document of the maritime fur trade, the very trade this volume invented without knowing it.

• William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea (1788-1789)

  The Master of the Resolution, the man who sounds the bays of Kerguelen's Land in this volume, returns to Adventure Bay twelve years later aboard the Bounty, plants apple trees on the very same spot, then sets a course for Otaheite, where the mutiny awaits him. To read his account of Van Diemen's Land alongside Cook's is to measure what a pupil retains from a master: the same method, the same gestures, and a temperament that will make all the difference.

• Peter Simon Pallas, Voyages en différentes provinces de l'Empire de Russie, et dans l'Asie septentrionale (1788-1793)

  During Kerguelen's two voyages, the Berlin-born naturalist Peter Simon Pallas travels the immense Russian Empire for the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, from the Volga to the Urals, from the Altai to the borders of Lake Baikal. Six years on the road, from 1768 to 1774, to inventory minerals, plants, animals and peoples in the service of Catherine II. Where the Breton seeks a new land for his king, Pallas measures the one his empress already holds. His volumes, translated into French on the eve of the Revolution, give the idea of a patient, well-provided scientific expedition, the opposite of the poorly armed ships Kerguelen complains about.

• Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal through the Continent of North America (1789)

  A year after Lesseps's return, a Scottish fur-trade clerk leaves Fort Chipewyan in a birchbark canoe and follows an immense river, now called the Mackenzie, down to the Arctic Ocean. In 1793 he will reach the Pacific overland. His two journeys, published in 1801, describe the same economy as that of Okhotsk and Irkutsk: fur, tribute, the indigenous guides on whom everything depends, hunger and rapids. Kamchatka and the Canadian North-West face each other across the North Pacific, two frontiers of the fur empire seen a few years apart.

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• William Lempriere, A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogodore, Santa Cruz, Tarudant (1789-1790)

  Half a century after Maria, in 1789, the surgeon of the English garrison at Gibraltar is called to the bedside of a son of Sultan Sidi Mohammed, at Taroudant. William Lempriere crosses Tangier and Salé, follows the coast to Mogador, crosses the Atlas and reaches Marrakech, where he is allowed into the royal harem, which he describes in detail. He finds there what Maria had known in Meknes: the favor of the palace women, the sovereign's unpredictable moods, promises of departure endlessly put off. His book, published in 1791, is the testimony of a free man about a world of which Maria had been the prisoner.

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• James Morrison, The Journal of James Morrison, Boatswain's Mate of the Bounty, and Memorandum on Tahiti (1789-1792)

  The boatswain's mate of the Bounty, left at Tahiti after the mutiny of 1789, lives there nearly two years before being captured, sentenced, then pardoned. His memoir, written in prison, is the most detailed description we have of Tahitian society before its conversion: the arioi, the morai, the royal maro, the district wars, everything Cook only glimpsed as a visitor. It lights up from the inside the chapters Anderson wrote, twelve years earlier, on the same islands.

• Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans (1789-1793)

  While Bligh delivers his breadfruit plants to the West Indies, a Scottish fur trader goes up the Peace River, crosses the Rockies and descends toward the ocean in a bark canoe, guided from nation to nation. In July 1793 Mackenzie reaches the Pacific near Bella Coola and paints his name and the date on a rock: he is the first European to cross North America north of Mexico. His two journeys, published in 1801, are written like a travel journal. The same ocean, approached from the east on foot and from the west under sail.

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• Alessandro Malaspina, Journaux de l'expédition politique et scientifique (1789-1794)

  Six years after Viedma's return, Spain launches its greatest scientific expedition, two corvettes around the world, with orders to measure, map and inventory the whole empire. Malaspina passes off the same southern coasts. His journals, left unpublished for a century because of political disgrace, tell of the end of the Spanish adventure in South America; the San Julián journal tells, in a low voice, of the beginning of the renunciation.

• James Bruce, Voyage aux sources du Nil (1790)

  While the Endeavour was seeking New Holland, a giant of a Scotsman was making his way up the Blue Nile. On 4 November 1770, in the very months when Cook was tracing the Australian coast, Bruce reached the springs he believed to be those of the great river. His account, published in 1790, met with the incredulity of learned Europe, so improbable did his adventures seem. It is the other face of the age of discovery: no longer the South Seas, but the high plateaus of Abyssinia. Here too is the same obstinacy in seeing with one's own eyes what no European had yet described, and the same solitude of the explorer at the edge of the known world.

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• William Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty (1790)

  Eighteen years after the Endeavour, driven from his ship by mutiny, Lieutenant Bligh accomplished, in a mere open boat, one of the most extraordinary voyages in the history of the sea. His route crosses almost exactly that of Cook: the strait separating New Holland from New Guinea, then Timor, where he too arrived exhausted and starving. A former pupil of Cook, whose master he had been on the last voyage, Bligh applied his master's lessons to survive. Two accounts of the same reef-strewn sea, a few years apart.

• William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791)

  In 1773, as Kerguelen sets out again toward the South, the Philadelphia naturalist William Bartram plunges into the southeast of British America: Georgia, Florida, Cherokee country, the lands of the Creeks. Four years of walking and paddling along the St. Johns River, among alligators, magnolias and Native American villages, which he describes with a sympathy rare for his time. His Travels, published in 1791, will feed the imagination of Coleridge and Wordsworth. They show from within those colonies on the verge of revolt, which Kerguelen, from his prison at Saumur, judges poor and in debt in his memoir on America.

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• George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World (1791-1795)

  Vancouver left England in April 1791, four months before Bligh, with the Discovery and the Chatham. His mission: to survey the northwest coast of America inch by inch, from Oregon to Alaska, and put an end to the dream of a passage to the Atlantic. On the way he anchored at Matavai from late December 1791 to 24 January 1792, only weeks before the Providence arrived, and the memory of the Bounty mutiny governed discipline aboard his ships. The two captains, veterans of Cook's last voyage, served the same learned navy: one drew charts, the other carried plants.

• George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean (1791-1795)

  Vancouver was a midshipman on the Discovery during this voyage. Fifteen years later he commands his own expedition, calls at Dusky Bay and then at Queen Charlotte's Sound, and finds the stumps of the trees felled by Cook's carpenters. The reader sees what becomes, within a generation, of a familiar anchorage and the people who once camped there.

• George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1792-1794)

  In September 1792, as the Providence crosses the Indian Ocean with her cargo of plants, Lord Macartney leaves England for China with an embassy laden with scientific gifts. Staunton, his secretary, tells of the voyage, the journey up to Peking, the audience with the Qianlong emperor at Jehol and the polite refusal of every British request. Both expeditions spring from the same ambition: to make science, botany and navigation serve the commerce of the empire. Breadfruit was to feed the slaves of the West Indies; the China mission wanted to open the tea ports. One succeeded, the other failed.

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• William George Browne, Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798 (1792-1798)

  Browne leaves Egypt in 1793 with a caravan following the Forty Days Road to Darfur, a sultanate then almost unknown to Europeans. Held for nearly three years by the sultan, suspected, ill, he observes the slave markets, the court and the routes of the Saharan trade before he can return to Cairo. His book, published in 1799, has nothing of the regularity of a ship's log: it is the account of a lone man, without escort or flag. The contrast with Bligh, master of two ships and a company of marines, shows the two faces of travel at the end of the century.

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• Peter Simon Pallas, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise in die südlichen Statthalterschaften des Russischen Reichs in den Jahren 1793 und 1794 (1793-1794)

  In February 1793, as the Providence makes for Jamaica, the naturalist Pallas leaves Saint Petersburg with his family and a military escort. He goes down the Volga, follows the Caspian, pushes on to the Caucasus and settles in the Crimea, just annexed by the Russian Empire. Plants, rocks, Tatar and Cossack peoples: he describes everything with the same care as a naval officer noting winds and soundings. The book appeared in Leipzig in 1799-1801, then in English in 1802. At the other end of the world, the same century of inventories turns a journey into a catalogue of nature.

• Samuel Hearne, Voyage à l'océan glacial (1795)

  In those same years, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company was making his way on foot into the Canadian Far North, guided by Dene hunters, to reach the mouth of the Coppermine River. His account, published in 1795, is the frozen, overland counterpart to Cook's voyage: the same immense distances, the same dependence on Indigenous guides, the same patience in surveying a virgin geography. Where Cook sounded tropical bays, Hearne crossed the tundra; yet both men wrote of Europe's encounter with worlds it had never suspected.

• Samuel Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort to the Northern Ocean (1795)

  While Viedma sounds empty harbours, a Hudson's Bay Company employee walks for three years towards the Arctic Ocean, guided by Chipewyan hunters on whom he depends entirely for food, direction and survival. Like the Patagonian journal, this account draws its strength from the accumulation of days and a refusal of emphasis, and it asks the same question without ever voicing it: what becomes of an office man when his life depends on people whose language he does not speak? Hearne's answer is as raw as Viedma's is discreet.

• Paolino da San Bartolomeo, A Voyage to the East Indies (1796)

  Arriving on the Malabar Coast in the mid-1770s, when the echoes of Duprat's venture have not yet died away, this Austrian Carmelite stays there until 1789. A missionary, he learns Malayalam and Sanskrit, publishing the first printed grammar of the latter in Europe. His account, published in Rome in 1796 and translated into French in 1808, describes the Nairs, the Brahmins, the fishing castes, the court of Travancore and the advance of the armies of Mysore. Here, seen by a man who knew them over many years, are the peoples and kingdoms that Duprat passes at the double.

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• James Wilson, A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, Performed in the Years 1796, 1797, 1798, in the Ship Duff (1796-1798)

  Five years after the Providence, the Duff, chartered by the London Missionary Society and commanded by James Wilson, drops anchor at Matavai on 5 March 1797. She lands the first Protestant missionaries in Tahiti, welcomed by the very family Bligh had known: Tynah, now Pomare, and his son Otoo. The account, published in 1799, describes the marae, the ceremonies and the life of Matavai through the eyes of pastors. The places and people of Bligh's journal reappear, on the threshold of an upheaval he could not foresee: the conversion of the island.

• Jean-François de Lapérouse, Voyage autour du monde (1797)

  Fifteen years after Cook, France in turn sends two ships to survey the Pacific. Lapérouse follows part of the Endeavour's routes, everywhere paying tribute to the memory of the great English seaman, then vanishes without a trace at Vanikoro. His journal, salvaged and published in 1797, closes the heroic age of Oceanic discovery just as Cook's journal had opened it. The reader finds here the same islands, already changed by the passage of Europeans, and that Enlightenment obsession with mapping everything before dying.

• George Vancouver, Voyage de découvertes dans l'océan Pacifique Nord (1798)

  Vancouver had served as a midshipman under Cook. Having become a commander, he returned to the Pacific in the 1790s to chart its coasts with a thoroughness inherited from his master. His account extends the Endeavour's undertaking by a generation: the same Polynesian ports of call, the same patience in surveying, but an island world already transformed by trade and epidemics. Here one sees what Cook's work made possible, and the price the peoples of the Pacific were beginning to pay for it.

• Giuseppe Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, to the North Cape (1802)

  The young Italian Giuseppe Acerbi left Stockholm in 1798 on a journey that would take him to the North Cape. In the depths of winter he crossed the ice-bound Sea of Åland by sledge, reached Finland and followed the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia up to Oulu and Torneå, in the opposite direction to Linné's return. When summer 1799 came, he went up the Torne and the Muonio by boat, from rapid to rapid, to the Lapp encampments and the Arctic Ocean. His Travels, published in London in 1802 with many engravings, offer a lively picture of the Finns, the Lapps and their reindeer, two generations after the journal of 1732.

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• Giuseppe Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, to the North Cape, in the Years 1798 and 1799 (1802)

  More than sixty years after Maupertuis, the young Italian Giuseppe Acerbi takes the road to Tornio again with a new ambition: to reach the North Cape by land. In spring 1799, his small party passes through Oulu and Kemi, reaches Tornio, goes up the Torne by boat and then the Muonio with its rapids, crosses the marshes of Enontekiö on foot to Kautokeino, and reaches the North Cape by sea on 19 July, under the midnight sun. Published in London in 1802, his two volumes describe the nature, inhabitants and customs of Finland and Lapland. The academicians' river becomes the gateway to a great adventure journey.

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• Jacob Roggeveen, Dagverhaal der ontdekkings-reis van Mr. Jacob Roggeveen (1838)

  In August 1721, while Unverzagt waits in Peking for the emperor's tapestries to be finished, Jacob Roggeveen leaves Holland with three ships to search for the southern continent. On Easter Sunday 1722 he comes upon an island missing from his charts and names it after the feast: Easter Island, with its giant statues. He then crosses the Pacific, passes Samoa and ends at Batavia, where the Dutch East India Company seizes his ships for infringing its monopoly. His journal, published only in 1838, tells, like Unverzagt's, of a route where trade and its privileges decide everything.

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