By period

19th-Century Travel Narratives

In the nineteenth century, travel changed faster than in any century before. At its start, people crossed the Atlantic under sail and reached Jerusalem on muleback; by its end, steamships ran regular lines, the Suez Canal had been open since 1869, the first transcontinental railroad had linked the two coasts of the United States that same year, and the world could be circled in a matter of weeks. In 1889-1890 the American journalist Nellie Bly did it in seventy-two days, to beat the hero of Jules Verne.

The century opened with a model: Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland traveled through Spanish America from 1799 to 1804, and the publication of their journey took thirty years. Geographical societies, in Paris in 1821, in London in 1830 and then in every capital, funded, rewarded and published explorers. Charles Darwin brought back from his voyage on the Beagle the observations from which his theory would emerge. The African interior became the great riddle: Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke searched for the sources of the Nile in 1857-1858, David Livingstone crossed the continent, and Henry Morton Stanley found him in 1871 on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Then the poles drew attention: John Franklin's expedition was lost in the Arctic after 1845, and Fridtjof Nansen let the Fram drift with the ice from 1893 to 1896.

Travel also went hand in hand with colonial expansion. Explorers often prepared conquest or served it: the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 laid down rules for the partition of Africa on maps that travelers had only just drawn. In Central Asia, Russia and Britain played the Great Game, and Nikolai Przhevalsky explored Mongolia and northern Tibet for the Russian general staff. Missionaries, consuls, officers and engineers wrote in their turn, and travel narrative blended with official report.

At the same time, tourism was born. Printed guidebooks, those of John Murray from 1836 and then those of Karl Baedeker, listed hotels, monuments and routes; agencies organized group tours to Egypt and the Holy Land, and the romantic Orient drew writers and painters. Women traveled alone and published: the Austrian Ida Pfeiffer went around the world twice, and the Englishwoman Isabella Bird rode through the Rockies, Japan and Persia. The gaze ran the other way as well: Japan's Iwakura Mission toured the United States and Europe in 1871-1873, and Naser al-Din Shah of Persia published the diaries of his European journeys.

The illustrated press widened the audience: the magazine Le Tour du monde, founded in 1860, published travel accounts with engravings every week, and from the 1850s photography offered a new kind of proof. Truth now claimed to be documentary, statistical, ethnographic; yet the picturesque, prejudice and exoticism weighed heavily, and many of these accounts tell us as much about European eyes as about the lands they describe. They remain first-rate records of societies that modernity was about to transform.

This collection brings together our editions of nineteenth-century narratives and a directory of related texts, so that each can be read in the century when travel became science, conquest and leisure all at once.

Our titles on this subject

19th century

A Voyage to Terra Australis

Matthew Flinders, 1801-1810

Flinders fits out the Investigator, rounds the Cape, and follows the still unknown south coast of New Holland.

First volume of Matthew Flinders's voyage: the fitting out of the Investigator in 1801, the passage by Madeira and the Cape, then the arrival on the south coast of New Holland. From King George Sound to the Nuyts Archipelago, Flinders checks the surveys of Vancouver and D'Entrecasteaux as far as Fowler's Bay, the limit of the known coast, beyond which only the Dutch chart of 1627 remained. There he records, with restraint, his meetings with the people of King George Sound.

Volumes 1 2 3 4 5 6

My First Sea Voyage

Quirijn Maurits Rudolph Ver Huell, 1807-1810

On his first voyage, young Ver Huell reaches Brazil just as the Portuguese court flees there.

The testimony of a young Dutch officer on Brazil from 1807 to 1810, this account shows Salvador da Bahia at the moment the fleeing Portuguese court lands there, in January 1808. Held for nearly three years after the seizure of his brig, Ver Huell describes from the inside a colonial slave-holding city: processions, the Bonfim festivals, whale hunting, the sugar mills of the Recôncavo, a provincial prison. Published in 1842, it was translated into Portuguese in 2007.

Tribulations of a Swiss Man on His Journey to Jerusalem and Lebanon

Johann Heinrich Mayr, 1812-1814

To revive his business, a Swiss man sets out for Constantinople, Egypt, Jerusalem and Lebanon.

Between 1812 and 1814, while Europe fought Napoleon, Johann Heinrich Mayr, a Thurgau textile maker cut off from his markets by the Continental System, crossed the Balkans, Constantinople, Muhammad Ali's Egypt, Jerusalem and Emir Bashir's Mount Lebanon. Alone, sharing no language with his hosts, he lived through plague, quarantines and caravans. His book, published in 1815, offers the rare view of a Protestant merchant, practical and plain-spoken, on the Ottoman East before the great Romantic travellers.

A German in Illinois

Ferdinand Ernst, 1819

Dreaming of a German colony in Illinois, a nobleman roams the Sangamon country, still home to Native Americans.

In 1819, a few months after Illinois joined the Union, the Hanoverian agronomist Ferdinand Ernst travelled through the American West to prepare a settlement for his countrymen. His account, published in Hildesheim in 1820, is written for future emigrants: it puts figures on soils, prices and risks, and describes Rapp's Harmonists, Birkbeck's English colony and the voyage down the Mississippi. The following year Ernst returned to found a colony of about a hundred Germans at Vandalia.

Beyond the Second Cataract

George Waddington and Barnard Hanbury, 1820-1821

Two Cambridge antiquaries follow an invading army up the Nile as far as Meroë.

In 1820 Ismail Pasha, son of Muhammad Ali, launched the Egyptian army on the conquest of Nubia and the Sudan. Two young Englishmen, George Waddington and Barnard Hanbury, followed it beyond the Second Cataract as far as the camp at Jebel Barkal. Their journal, published in London in 1822, bears witness to this war, to the defeated Shaigiya and the Nubian kings, and describes the temples and pyramids of ancient Napata, which they were among the first Europeans to measure.

Forty Pilgrims in the Holy Land

Louis Énault, 1824-1900

A Paris journalist follows forty pilgrims all the way to Jerusalem.

In 1853, on the eve of the Crimean War, the question of the Holy Places set Catholic France against Orthodox Russia. That year Louis Énault, a Paris journalist, accompanied some forty French pilgrims from Marseille to Jerusalem, then on to the Jordan, Nazareth and Mount Carmel. His account, published in 1854, captures pilgrimage at the moment steam made it accessible, and a holy city divided between Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and a Turkish garrison.

Journey through Arabia Petraea

Léon de Laborde, 1828

Crossing Sinai, Laborde and Linant de Bellefonds reach Petra and capture it in sixty-nine lithographs.

In the spring of 1828, Léon de Laborde and the engineer Linant de Bellefonds cross Sinai, reach the fortress of Aqaba and spend eight days at Petra, bringing back plans and drawings. Published in Paris from 1830, their *Voyage de l'Arabie Pétrée* made the Nabataean city known through images, while also describing the Bedouin tribes, the Egypt of Muhammad Ali, the monastery of St Catherine and the inscriptions of the valleys of Sinai.

Journey to the Holy Land

Anton Prokesch von Osten, 1829

Future Austrian diplomat Prokesch von Osten sizes up the Holy Land in 1829, just before the Egyptian crisis.

In the spring of 1829, the Austrian major Anton Prokesch lands at the foot of Mount Carmel to obtain from Abdallah, pasha of Acre, redress for the insults offered to the Austrian consul. Between negotiations, he travels the coast from Caesarea, spends Easter in Jerusalem, and reaches Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mount Tabor and the Jordan. His account, published in Vienna in 1831, captures Ottoman Palestine in the last days of the pashalik of Acre, on the eve of the Egyptian conquest of 1831-1832.

Sketches of a Missionary's Travels in Egypt, Syria, Western Africa

Robert Maxwell Macbrair, 1833-1836

A missionary travels up the Nile and confronts fever, marabouts and tolerated slavery.

Published in London in 1839, Robert Maxwell Macbrair's *Sketches* bring two worlds together in a single narrative: on one side the Egypt of Muhammad Ali and the Syria conquered by Ibrahim Pasha, on the other the British colony of the Gambia. A Wesleyan missionary and grammarian of Mandinka, the author bears witness to the plague in Alexandria in 1835, to the pasha's levies of men and monopolies, and then to the life of the Mandinka and the Fula around MacCarthy Island, where slavery persisted.

Voyage to the South Pole and Oceania

Jules Dumont d'Urville, 1837-1839

September 1837: a gout-ridden commander, doubted by his own sailors, sails from Toulon for the South Pole

This first volume follows the Astrolabe and the Zélée from Toulon to the exit of the Strait of Magellan, from September 1837 to January 1838. Dumont d'Urville recounts the campaign wrested from the ministry, the quarantine and the Peak of Tenerife, the call at Rio de Janeiro, then twenty-seven days in the strait: Port Famine and its post office, the graves of Philippeville, the Patagonians of Peckett Harbour. A South American prologue to a campaign aiming at the southern pole in the wake of Weddell.

Volumes I II III IV V VI VII

A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions

James Clark Ross, 1839-1843

Amid the southern ice, James Clark Ross presses on with his Antarctic voyage and magnetic surveys.

This second volume of James Clark Ross's narrative covers the Antarctic campaigns of 1842 and 1843: the great Ice Barrier seen again at 78 degrees south, the collision of the Erebus and the Terror, and the survey of Joinville Land and Paulet Island. Ross gave names that Scott, Nordenskjöld and Charcot would take up, and he describes, as a scientific seaman, the New Zealand of the early colonial years, the winter in the Falklands and the Fuegians of Cape Horn.

Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt, and Italy

Ida Pfeiffer, 1842

Alone, a Viennese woman reaches Constantinople, Jerusalem, Damascus and the Nile, and becomes a travel icon.

In 1842, Ida Pfeiffer, a forty-four-year-old Viennese woman, set off alone for Jerusalem by way of the Danube and Constantinople, travelled through Palestine, Damascus, Lebanon and the Egypt of Muhammad Ali, then returned by Malta, Sicily, Naples and Rome. Published anonymously in 1844, this journal, kept day by day, shows the Ottoman Levant of quarantines and pilgrims, seen by a woman who would become the great traveller of her century.

Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1844

Thackeray boards a steamer for the East and skewers the first tourists all the way to Cairo.

In the summer of 1844, Thackeray accepted a berth offered by the Peninsular and Oriental and toured the Levant in two months: Malta, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beirut, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Cairo. Published in 1846, his account is one of the first to describe the East discovered on a steam cruise. His satire of made-to-order enthusiasm and his grave look at a declining Ottoman Empire make him a singular witness of the journey to the East.

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.

Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar (1800-1801)

In the spring of 1800, less than a year after the fall of Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam (May 1799), Governor General Wellesley commissions the Scottish physician Francis Buchanan to travel through Mysore, Canara and Malabar. For more than a year, Buchanan notes everything: crops, grain prices, weavers, castes, temples, roads and the yield of the land. Where Flinders charts a coast without towns or roads, Buchanan inventories a dense country that the East India Company has just conquered and intends to administer. The two men work at the same moment for the same empire, one on land, the other at sea, and their books, published in 1807 and 1814, are first of all meticulous inventories of what they saw.
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François Péron, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (1800-1804)

Just as Flinders follows the south coast, Nicolas Baudin's French expedition explores the same shores from the east. On 8 April 1802, the Géographe meets the Investigator in a bay that Flinders names Encounter Bay. The naturalist François Péron wrote the official account, whose first volume appeared in 1807 and which Louis de Freycinet completed after his death. The French charts name part of the coast that Flinders had just surveyed Terre Napoléon, fuelling a long dispute over priority. The Géographe in turn puts in at King George Sound in early 1803.
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François Péron et Louis de Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (1800-1804)

This is the account from the other side: that of Nicolas Baudin's expedition, which Flinders meets on 8 April 1802 at Encounter Bay. The naturalist François Péron tells of the voyage of the Géographe and the Naturaliste along the same coasts, then of the stopover at Port Jackson where the two crews meet again. But the first volume, published in 1807, renames Flinders's discoveries: the south coast becomes Terre Napoléon, Kangaroo Island becomes Île Decrès. Flinders, then a prisoner on Mauritius, would protest in his own book. To read the Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes alongside his is to see the same coast through rival eyes.
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George Annesley, vicomte Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt (1802-1806)

In 1802, the very year Flinders searches the Gulf of Carpentaria, a young Irish lord sails for India with a secretary and draughtsman, Henry Salt. For four years Valentia travels the coasts of Ceylon and India, then explores the Red Sea aboard an East India Company ship, as far as the shores of Abyssinia and Egypt. His three volumes, published in 1809, mix coastal surveys, the courts of Indian princes and accounts of uncertain anchorages. They share Flinders's obsession: reliable charts for the routes to India, in seas that European sailors still knew poorly.
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Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803, 1804, 1805 und 1806 (1803-1806)

Two years after the Investigator's departure, Russia launches its own first circumnavigation. Adam Johann von Krusenstern, a Baltic officer who served several years in the British navy, commands the Nadezhda, accompanied by the Neva. He takes the ambassador Nikolai Rezanov to Nagasaki, where the Japanese authorities keep him waiting six months before sending him away without a treaty, then surveys the coasts of Sakhalin and Kamchatka. Like Flinders, he carries chronometers to fix longitudes and embarks naturalists and an astronomer. His narrative, published in Russian and German in Saint Petersburg, was soon translated throughout Europe, at the very time when Flinders, a captive on Isle de France, could not publish his own.
Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde dans les années 1803, 1804, 1805 et 1806 (1803-1806)

A year after Flinders, Russia launches its own first voyage around the world. Krusenstern, a Baltic officer who had served in the British navy, commands the Nadezhda, accompanied by the Neva. He calls at the Marquesas, then takes the ambassador Nikolai Rezanov to Japan, who waits six months at Nagasaki only to be refused all trade. Krusenstern then surveys the coasts of Sakhalin and Kamchatka, seas as poorly charted as the south coast of New Holland. His trade is the same as Flinders's: a hydrographer correcting the charts of his predecessors, under the eye of an empire that wants its share of the Pacific. The narrative is Voyage Round the World in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806.
Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde (1803-1806)

In August 1803, a year after the Investigator sailed north, two Russian ships, the Nadezhda and the Neva, left Kronstadt under Adam Johann von Krusenstern for the Imperial Navy's first circumnavigation. By Cape Horn, the Marquesas and Hawaii, they reached Kamchatka and then Nagasaki, where the ambassador Rezanov waited for months for an audience that closed Japan finally refused. Krusenstern then surveyed the coasts of Sakhalin. Like Flinders, he was an officer who had served in the Royal Navy, attentive to the charts of his predecessors, correcting with the chronometer the blanks on the map of a still poorly known ocean. His Voyage Round the World tells the story.
Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde, fait dans les années 1803, 1804, 1805 et 1806 (1803-1806)

A few weeks after Flinders returns to Port Jackson, two Russian ships, the Nadezhda and the Neva, leave Kronstadt on the Imperial Navy's first circumnavigation. Krusenstern takes the ambassador Rezanov to Japan, where he waits months at Nagasaki only to be turned away, then surveys the coasts of Sakhalin and Kamchatka. Like Flinders, he leads a scientific expedition, with naturalists and astronomers, and must make do with worn ships and exhausted crews. Both accounts tell of the same age, when Europe's navies contested the last poorly known shores of the globe, each at an opposite end of the Pacific.
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Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde sur la Nadejda et la Neva (1803-1806)

In August 1803, a few days before the wreck of the Porpoise, the Nadezhda and the Neva leave Kronstadt on the first Russian circumnavigation. Krusenstern, who served in the Royal Navy, rounds Cape Horn, calls at the Marquesas and Hawaii, then takes the ambassador Rezanov to Nagasaki, where the shogunate keeps him waiting for months before sending him away without a treaty. He then surveys the coasts of Sakhalin and Kamchatka. Like Flinders, he travels for an empire that wants charts and routes; like him, he runs up against a power wary of foreigners. Closed Japan answers, in its way, to Decaen's Île de France.
Ali Bey el Abbassi (Domingo Badía), Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie (1803-1807)

Just as Flinders completes his circuit of New Holland, a Spaniard, Domingo Badía, lands in Morocco under the identity of a Muslim prince, Ali Bey. For four years he travels through Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus and Egypt, then performs the pilgrimage to Mecca before going on to Syria and Constantinople. He observes, measures latitudes and describes cities with the care of an Enlightenment scholar, while playing a murky political role. His Travels of Ali Bey el Abbassi in Africa and Asia appeared in Paris in 1814. It is another way of exploring: not a coast empty of maps, but a world closed to Europeans.
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Meriwether Lewis et William Clark, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1804-1806)

Two years after Flinders's voyage, another expedition sets out to explore the interior of a continent on behalf of its nation. Lewis and Clark ascend the Missouri, cross the Rockies and descend the Columbia to the Pacific, keeping their journals day by day. They meet dozens of Native American peoples, as Flinders meets the Aboriginal people of Port Phillip, and depend on guides and interpreters, such as Sacagawea, as he does on Bongaree. The official account of the expedition, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, appears in 1814, the very year of A Voyage to Terra Australis: two young nations, one born, the other yet to be, are taking shape at the same moment.
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Meriwether Lewis et William Clark, Histoire de l'expédition sous le commandement des capitaines Lewis et Clark (1804-1806)

In May 1804, while Flinders wears himself out writing letters of protest at Port-Louis, the Corps of Discovery leaves Saint Louis to ascend the Missouri, cross the Rockies and reach the Pacific. Two and a half years of rivers, portages, winters among the Mandans and meetings with the nations of the Plains, undertaken in the name of a young country eager to know the territory it has just bought from France. The narrative, shaped by Nicholas Biddle, appears in 1814, like Flinders's. Two continents to map, two commanders who keep their journals like a treasure: the same ambition, under opposite fortunes.
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Meriwether Lewis et William Clark, Journaux de l'expédition Lewis et Clark (1804-1806)

In the spring of 1804, as Flinders discovers the walls of the Garden prison, Lewis and Clark head up the Missouri to cross the continent to the Pacific. Their journals, kept day by day, tell of portages, the winter among the Mandans, the Rockies barely crossed, and encounters with peoples no American had yet described. Everything sets the two accounts apart: one advances ceaselessly into the unknown, the other goes round in circles on an island a few dozen kilometres across. Yet they are two men of the same generation, commissioned to map, and who know their maps are worth more than they are.
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Mungo Park, The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, in the Year 1805 (1805)

In April 1805, the Scotsman Mungo Park set out again from the Gambia with some forty Europeans to descend the Niger, which he had reached on his first journey. The rainy season decimated the party: when he arrived at the river, only a handful of men remained. At Sansanding, he assembled a makeshift vessel from two canoes and set off downstream; he vanished the following year at the Bussa rapids. His journal, brought back by a guide, appeared in 1815 as The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, in the Year 1805. Like Flinders at Sweers Island, Park chose to go on with a failing instrument: there a rotten ship, here an expedition almost wiped out.
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Mungo Park, Journal d'une mission à l'intérieur de l'Afrique (1805)

In 1805, the Scottish explorer Mungo Park set out again for the Niger with a party of British soldiers, determined to follow the river to its mouth. Fever decimates the column, the dead are counted every week, and the journal stops at Sansanding, from where Park sends his last letters before vanishing in the rapids at Bussa. The text, published in 1815, appeared a year after Flinders's book. The two men share the same fate as explorers of the Crown caught up in the war against France, and the same dread of seeing their work lost before it reaches London.
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Mungo Park, Journal d'une mission à l'intérieur de l'Afrique en 1805 (1805-1806)

While Flinders charts the coasts of Australia, West Africa remains a blank page for Europe. In 1805, the Scottish surgeon Mungo Park sets out again from the Gambia to follow the Niger down to its mouth, whose position no one knows. The rainy season and fevers decimate his party; he presses on regardless, in a makeshift boat, and disappears at the Bussa rapids in 1806. His journal, brought back by his guide, appeared in 1815 as The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in the Year 1805. Like the loss of the cutter at Cape Catastrophe, it records the human price paid for filling in the blanks on the map.
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Mungo Park, Journal d'une mission dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique en 1805 (1805-1806)

Returning famous from his first journey, the Scot Mungo Park sets out again in 1805 with some forty Europeans, mostly soldiers, to descend the Niger to its mouth. Fevers and the rainy season decimate the column before it even reaches the river. Park builds a boat at Sansanding, dispatches his last letters and his journal, then vanishes downstream, near Bussa, in 1806. The journal, saved by a messenger, appears in 1815. Same year, same stubbornness: a British explorer knows he risks losing everything and strives to get his observations to England, as Flinders copies out his charts in his prison.
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Leopold von Buch, Voyage en Norvège et en Laponie (1810)

From 1806 to 1808, the Prussian geologist Leopold von Buch travels through Norway, then Danish, and then Lapland as far as the North Cape, barometer in hand to measure the height of the mountains. His book, published in German in 1810, follows the Finnmark coast by Alten, Hammerfest and Tromsø, then returns through Lapland and Sweden as winter approaches. In it he puts forward the idea, destined for a long future, that the land of Sweden is slowly rising above the sea. While the Vlieg grazes the rocks of the Shetlands in the storm, a few degrees farther north a stubborn scholar tries to read the history of a continent in its rocks.
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François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811)

Leaving Paris in July 1806, Chateaubriand makes his way to Venice, Greece, Constantinople and Jerusalem, then Egypt, Tunis and Spain, and returns to France in the spring of 1807, a few weeks before the Vlieg leaves Holland. The Itinerary, published in 1811, mingles ancient learning, piety and a taste for the picturesque; the writer looks in it for images for his epic Les Martyrs as much as for the road to the holy places. The contrast with the young Dutchman is telling: one travels in order to write and composes his book straight away, the other writes thirty-five years later what war made him live through, with no ambition other than to remember.
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Vassili Golovnine, Mémoires d'une captivité au Japon (1811-1813)

The closest cousin of Flinders's book. Commander of the Russian sloop Diana, Golovnin was first held for over a year by the British at Simon's Bay, at the Cape, from 1808, before escaping by night in May 1809. Two years later, landed in the Kurils, he is captured by the Japanese and shut away for more than two years at Hakodate and Matsumae. His account, translated into English as early as 1818, describes the cage, the failed escape attempt, then the long negotiations that free him. The same world war of empires, the same naval officer held by a power that suspects him of espionage.
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Vasily Golovnin, Narrative of My Captivity in Japan (1811-1813)

In July 1811 the Russian captain Vasily Golovnin, sent to chart the Kuril coasts, was captured by the Japanese on Kunashir together with several of his men. He remained a prisoner for more than two years, at Hakodate and then at Matsumae, and was released only in October 1813, just as Mayr was leaving Salonica to head back to Europe. His account, published in 1816, is one of the rare European testimonies on closed Japan. Like the Swiss merchant, Golovnin found himself alone among people whose language he did not know, dependent on their hospitality or mistrust, and survived by patient observation.
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Germaine de Staël, Ten Years' Exile (1812)

On 23 May 1812, two days after Mayr left Vienna, Germaine de Staël fled Coppet, where Napoleon kept her under surveillance. She crossed Austria, Galicia and Ukraine, reached Moscow shortly before the Grande Armée, then St Petersburg and finally Stockholm. Her memories of this flight, published after her death in 1821, show the same Europe the Arbon manufacturer was leaving: a continent locked down by the Empire, where trade and thought alike sought outlets to the east. Two travellers who set out from the shores of a Swiss lake, one to sell, the other to remain free.
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Ross Cox, Adventures on the Columbia River (1812-1817)

Hired by John Jacob Astor's fur company, the young Irishman Ross Cox reached Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia, in May 1812, just as Mayr was going down the Danube. He spent six years in the trading posts of the American Northwest, was lost alone in the forest for two weeks, traded with the river peoples and witnessed the handover of the post to the British during the War of 1812. His book appeared in 1831. Like the Swiss, Cox was a businessman travelling for trade who tells his misadventures frankly, far from any heroic tale.
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Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (1813)

Another Swiss was travelling the East in the same months. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, of a Basel family, travelled for a London learned society under the name of Sheikh Ibrahim. In 1812 he discovered Petra on his way to Cairo, where Mayr too spent that winter; in the spring of 1813 he went up the Nile through Nubia and glimpsed the great temple of Abu Simbel half buried in sand. His Nubian account appeared in 1819, after his death. The scholar living as a Muslim and the merchant from Arbon who spoke no local language offer two Swiss ways of facing the same East.
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Henry Salt, Voyage en Abyssinie (1814)

In 1809, Henry Salt sets out again for Abyssinia, charged by the British government with carrying the King of England's presents to the country's ruler. On the way, his ship follows the east coast of Africa, and his book, published in 1814, describes the Portuguese settlements of Mozambique, at the other end of the empire whose former American capital Ver Huell is discovering at the same moment. Next come Tigray, its churches, its princes, and vocabularies of the peoples of the coast. The comparison shows the Portuguese Empire on both its shores at once, at the very hour when its court leaves Lisbon to take refuge in America.
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Vassili Golovnine, Memoirs of a Captivity in Japan (1816)

In May 1808, Vasily Golovnin's Russian sloop Diana enters Simon's Bay, near the Cape, unaware that Russia is now at war with England. The British detain her for more than a year, until Golovnin seizes a favourable wind, in May 1809, to escape. The same man is captured in 1811 by the Japanese in the Kurils and remains a prisoner for more than two years at Hakodate and Matsumae; his account, published in 1816, shows Europe a closed Japan. A neutral ship turned prize of war, a crew kept in port by the policy of the great powers: the Diana at the Cape lives what the Vlieg lives at Bahia.
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Phillip Parker King, Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia (1818-1822)

Sixteen years after Flinders, Lieutenant Phillip Parker King, son of a former governor of New South Wales, is charged with completing the survey of the coasts that the Investigator, too dilapidated, had had to leave unfinished. With the small cutter Mermaid and the botanist Allan Cunningham, he anchors at King George Sound in January 1818. There he searches in vain for the bottle Flinders had left with an account of his visit, not to take it away but to add a few lines, and finds, chart in hand, that his predecessor's surveys are accurate. His narrative, published in 1827, goes on to the tropical coasts of the north and west, but keeps Flinders as a constant model.
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Phillip Parker King, Relation d'une reconnaissance des côtes intertropicales et occidentales de l'Australie (1818-1822)

Son of Governor Philip Gidley King, the very man who fits out the relief ships for the castaways of the reef, Phillip Parker King takes up Flinders's work where captivity had interrupted it. Between 1817 and 1822, aboard the little cutter Mermaid and then the Bathurst, he surveys the northern and western coasts that the Investigator, too rotten, had been unable to finish, and passes through Torres Strait in his turn. His Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia, published in 1827, often cites his predecessor and corrects his charts with respect. The same reefs, the same treacherous tides and the same hydrographer's patience are all there.
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Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries in Egypt and Nubia (1820)

A former fairground strongman turned antiquities hunter, Giovanni Battista Belzoni of Padua spent the years 1815 to 1819 in Egypt. He shipped the colossal bust of Ramesses II down the Nile for the British Museum, cleared the entrance of the great temple at Abu Simbel, discovered the tomb of Seti I at Thebes and made his way into the pyramid of Khafre. He left Egypt in 1819, the year Ernst was surveying Illinois, and published his narrative in London in 1820, when Ernst brought out his own in Hildesheim. Two practical men, two down-to-earth books: one digs up a buried past, the other sizes up a land where everything is still to be built.
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Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, Voyage au Brésil dans les années 1815, 1816 et 1817 (1820-1821)

From 1815 to 1817, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied travels up the coast of Brazil from Rio to Bahia, through the forests of the Rio Doce and the Mucuri, among the Botocudos, whom he observes with a new attentiveness. Near the bay, at Nazaré, he is arrested at the time of the Pernambuco insurrection and held for three days, until the governor of Bahia orders his release. He then follows Itaparica, its whaleries and its fences of whale bone, and leaves Salvador in May 1817 aboard a ship the government had requisitioned. Ten years after Ver Huell, the same suspicion of the foreigner, and the same bay.
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William Edward Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (1821)

In May 1819, while Ernst was still at sea bound for Baltimore, two Royal Navy ships, Hecla and Griper, left the Thames for the Arctic under William Edward Parry. They passed through Lancaster Sound and crossed the 110th meridian west, earning the reward Parliament had promised, then wintered at Melville Island, locked in the ice for ten months. Parry kept his men busy with a theatre and a little newspaper. The two books tell the story of the same year at the two ends of North America: here the prairie promised to settlers, there a frozen sea that men hoped to cross.
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George Bethune English, A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar (1822)

Behind the American renegade Waddington met in the camp, Mahommed Effendi, one recognizes George Bethune English. Born in Boston and a convert to Islam, he served as an artillery officer in Ismail Pasha's army, which he followed as far as Sennar. His narrative, published in London in 1822, tells of the same campaign seen from inside the ranks: the marches, the battles with the Shaigiya, the submission of the kings, the advance southward beyond Jebel Barkal. To read the two books together is to hear two versions of the same war, that of the convert soldier and that of the English visitor who held him in contempt.
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Jacques Arago, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World (1822)

As draughtsman to Louis de Freycinet's expedition, Jacques Arago sailed round the world from 1817 to 1820 aboard the corvette Uranie, on which the captain's wife, Rose, had come aboard disguised as a man. In a series of letters he describes Mauritius, Timor, the Marianas, Hawaii and Australia, and then the wreck of the Uranie in the Falklands early in 1820. Ernst also wrote in letters, for a Europe eager to know what lay beyond the seas. But where the agronomist counts acres and the price of wheat, Arago, painter and storyteller, looks for faces, dances and the anecdote that carries his reader away.
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Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (1823)

In 1819 Major Stephen Long's expedition left Pittsburgh aboard a steamboat to explore the American West as far as the Rocky Mountains. The botanist Edwin James, who wrote the narrative, made in July 1820 the first recorded ascent of the summit later named Pikes Peak. The expedition came back describing the Great Plains as a vast desert unfit for farming, a verdict that weighed on their reputation for a long time. In both books, travellers attached to an official column describe lands their contemporaries thought hostile, and blend scientific inventory with the hazards of the march.
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John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1823)

While Waddington was travelling up the Nile, John Franklin was wintering in the Canadian North. Having left England in 1819 to chart the Arctic coast of America, he went down the Coppermine River to the sea in 1821 and followed the shore by canoe. The return turned into disaster: hunger, cold, men dying along the way, suspicions of murder and cannibalism; the survivors were reduced to eating the leather of their boots. Like Waddington's journal, this account shows Europeans at the mercy of local guides and uncertain supplies, very far from any help.
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Johann Baptist von Spix et Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831)

Sent by the King of Bavaria in the wake of Archduchess Leopoldina, the future empress of Brazil, the zoologist Spix and the botanist Martius travel the country from 1817 to 1820. After Minas Gerais and its diamond mines, they reach the coast at Salvador, then set off again across the caatinga, where thirst and fever nearly kill them, study the Bendegó meteorite and finally ascend the Amazon. Their account, published from 1823 to 1831, is the great scholarly inventory of a country that the opening of the ports, decreed at Bahia in 1808, had just made accessible to foreigners. What Ver Huell looked at as a curious observer, they classify as naturalists.
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Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)

At the end of 1821, Maria Graham arrives at Bahia aboard the frigate Doris, commanded by her husband, as Brazil prepares to break with Lisbon. Her journal, published in 1824, describes the lower town, its markets, its churches, the sedan chairs and the slave market, which she says she cannot look at without shame and indignation; she also visits the island of Itaparica and its cane fields. English, educated, soon a widow, she sees the city with different eyes from the young Dutch officer, but the same sloping streets, the same cadeiras and the same violence of slavery run through both books, fourteen years apart.
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Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql (1826-1827)

The Frenchman Frédéric Cailliaud, whom Waddington passed on his way back, joined Ismail Pasha's army early in 1821 with his companion Letorzec. Luckier than the two Englishmen, he was allowed to follow it south: he reached the pyramids of Meroe, which he was one of the first Europeans to describe, then Sennar and Fazughli. His book, published in Paris in several volumes with an atlas, completes Waddington's. Where the English journal stops at Jebel Barkal, Cailliaud continues the road and shows that the city of Meroe lay much further south.
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Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage de la corvette l'Astrolabe (1826-1829)

In October 1826, two days after sighting Cape Leeuwin, Jules Dumont d'Urville's Astrolabe drops anchor at King George Sound, which the French call Port du Roi-Georges. The stay lasts eighteen days. The sailors form friendly relations with the local people, whom the draughtsman Louis de Sainson depicts in several plates of the atlas. D'Urville judges the place suitable for a colony and is surprised that the British have not yet settled there; a few weeks later, a small garrison sent from Sydney founds the post that will become Albany. The official account, published from 1830, offers a French view of the shores described by Flinders.
Egor Timkovski, Travels of the Russian Mission through Mongolia to China (1827)

In 1820 the Russian diplomat Egor Timkovski escorted to Peking the relief of the Orthodox mission that the tsars maintained in the Chinese capital. The caravan crossed Mongolia and the Gobi desert, stayed several months in Peking and returned to Kyakhta in 1821. The account, published in Russian and then translated into French and English in 1827, describes the Mongols, their Buddhist monasteries, the Qing court and the imperial city. Like Waddington, Timkovski travelled in the wake of an official power and had to reconcile a traveller's curiosity with the discretion his position as a tolerated guest required.
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John Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China (1828)

At the end of 1821 the English East India Company sent the physician and orientalist John Crawfurd to negotiate with the courts of Siam and Cochin China. He sailed up the river to Bangkok, spent months in talks with wary ministers, then went on to Hue, without obtaining the trade agreements he had hoped for. His journal, published in 1828, describes in detail the societies and economies he passed through. At the same moment Waddington was watching another expanding power, Muhammad Ali's Egypt, conquering the Sudan by force of arms: two faces of imperial ambition in the early 1820s.
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John Franklin, Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827 (1828)

In 1828, the year Laborde paces Petra, John Franklin publishes in London the account of his second expedition to the Polar Sea. From 1825 to 1827 he went down the Mackenzie to its delta, then followed the Arctic coast of America westward, while John Richardson surveyed the shore eastward as far as the mouth of the Coppermine. Taught by the disaster of the first journey, when the men had come close to starvation, they return this time without loss, with hundreds of kilometres of coastline added to the map. To the burning sands of Arabia Petraea answer the ice of another desert, and the same passion for the exact survey.
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Charles Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (1828-1831)

Flinders had followed the shore of Encounter Bay without seeing any great river come out there. Twenty-eight years later, Charles Sturt arrives at the same spot from the interior. Setting out from Sydney, he goes down the Murrumbidgee and then the Murray in a whaleboat as far as Lake Alexandrina, a short distance from the coast the Investigator had surveyed. The silted-up mouth lets no boat through: he must row all the way back up the river, exhausted and short of food. His narrative, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, published in 1833, opens the way to the founding of South Australia, on the very shores of Gulf St Vincent discovered by Flinders.
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Gottfried Duden, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America (1829)

A few years after Ernst, another German settled on the far side of the Mississippi and in turn wrote for would-be emigrants. Gottfried Duden lived from 1824 to 1827 on a farm near the Missouri River, west of St. Louis, and in 1829 published an enthusiastic report that persuaded thousands of German families to leave. Both books answer the question asked in one of Ernst's chapters: what should the European do? Ernst calculates, Duden makes people dream. Many of his readers, once they arrived, would reproach him for painting Missouri in colours that were far too bright.
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René Caillié, Journal d'un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné, dans l'Afrique centrale (1830)

On 20 April 1828, a few weeks after Laborde left Petra, René Caillié enters Timbuktu, passing himself off as an Egyptian Muslim trying to find his way home. Having set out a year earlier from the coast of Guinea, with neither escort nor money, he has crossed the Fouta Djallon, survived scurvy at Timé, then gone down the Niger to the city forbidden to Christians. He returns by way of the Sahara, Fez and Tangier, and receives the prize promised by the Société de géographie. His Journal appears in 1830, the year Laborde's publication begins: two young Frenchmen, two disguises, two legendary cities reached in the same spring.
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Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage de la corvette l'Astrolabe, exécuté par ordre du roi, pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829 (1830-1835)

While Laborde waits at Aqaba for the Alawin chiefs, Dumont d'Urville's Astrolabe lies at anchor off Vanikoro, in the Santa Cruz archipelago. Relying on information from Captain Peter Dillon, the crew searches for traces of La Pérouse, who had vanished forty years earlier, and recovers from the reef anchors, cannons and wreckage from his ships. Before sailing on, the fever-stricken sailors raise a monument to their predecessors. The account, published in several volumes from 1830, also records the surveys of New Zealand and New Guinea. Same year, same French ambition: to measure, draw and bring back what others had only glimpsed.
Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antarctic Seas, 1819-1821 (1831)

In July 1819 two Russian ships, Vostok and Mirny, left Kronstadt under Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen to explore the southern seas. In January 1820 they came close to the coast of Antarctica, and the expedition is often credited with the first sighting of the continent. Until 1821 they sailed round the pole, discovering Peter I Island and Alexander I Land. In those same months Waddington and Hanbury were following Ismail Pasha's army into the heart of Nubia: two expeditions at the edges of the world Europeans knew, one among the ice, the other in a burning desert.
Alexander Burnes, Travels into Bokhara (1831-1833)

Just as Macbrair is studying Arabic in Malta, London is fêting a young Scottish officer of the Indian army back from Central Asia. Dressed in Afghan clothes, Alexander Burnes left Lahore early in 1832, crossed the Hindu Kush by way of Kabul and reached Bukhara, the emirate where captives were sold at market, before returning through Persia. His book, published in 1834, makes him "Bokhara Burnes", the celebrity of the day. Both Scots, these two contemporaries observe Islam at close quarters, one to draw up its strategic inventory at the start of the Great Game, the other to refute it, and both describe the slave markets with the same astonishment.
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Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1831-1836)

On 6 March 1836, Captain FitzRoy's Beagle enters King George Sound for a stay of eight days, the last in Australia. The young Charles Darwin sees only a sandy, monotonous countryside, but he accompanies FitzRoy to Bald Head, where earlier navigators had thought they recognized corals or petrified trees; there he identifies limestone concretions formed around roots buried in the sand. One evening, he attends a great dance bringing together the people of the Sound and a group from the interior. His journal, published in 1839, thus combines a learned dialogue with his predecessors and a gaze often harsh toward the peoples he met.
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Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836)

While Macbrair sails up the Nile in a cangia, a young English naturalist is roaming Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and the Andes. Having embarked in December 1831 on Captain FitzRoy's Beagle, Charles Darwin spends nearly five years collecting fossils, birds and rocks, weathers the storms of Cape Horn, sees an earthquake devastate Concepción and reaches the Galápagos in 1835. His journal appears in 1839, the very year of the Sketches. The two men look at the world with opposite eyes, one in search of souls, the other in search of laws, yet they share the same frankness in the face of slavery, which Darwin denounces in Brazil with an anger Macbrair could have signed in the Gambia.
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Thomas Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1831-1836)

Surveyor General of New South Wales, Thomas Mitchell sets out from Sydney, where Flinders had refitted his ship, but heads inland. On his third expedition, in 1836, he crosses the plains of present-day Victoria, which he names Australia Felix, and reaches Portland Bay, on the coast that Flinders had followed between Cape Northumberland and Cape Otway. There he finds, to his astonishment, settlers already established. From the top of Mount Macedon he sees Port Phillip, the bay the Investigator had explored. His Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, published in 1838, hastened the colonisation of these lands.
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Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

Landing in New Orleans at the end of 1827, Frances Trollope travelled up the Mississippi by steamboat and settled in Cincinnati, where she opened a grand bazaar that ruined her. Back in England in 1831, she published a scathing portrait of the Americans: tobacco chewing, meals bolted in silence, the fervour of open-air camp meetings, slavery. She followed Ernst's route in reverse, from the delta to the Ohio, and found, eight years on, the towns he had seen being born. Her book caused a scandal in the United States; it remains one of the liveliest accounts of the West in the 1820s.
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Richard et John Lander, Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of the Niger (1832)

In March 1830, less than a year after the salute at Acre, the brothers Richard and John Lander land at Badagry, on the coast of present-day Nigeria, commissioned by the British government to solve the riddle of the Niger. They reach Bussa, where Mungo Park died, then go down the river by canoe. Captured and ransomed downstream, they are finally taken to the delta and prove that the Niger flows into the Gulf of Guinea. Their Journal, published in 1832, tells the adventure in a simple, direct tone. Like Prokesch, they must deal with local rulers, with gifts and long palavers, to win the mere right of passage.
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George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1832-1839)

In the spring of 1832, the painter George Catlin boards the Yellow Stone at St. Louis, the first steamboat to ascend the Missouri as far as Fort Union. Over several summers he paints and describes dozens of Plains peoples, above all the Mandans, whose ceremonies he observes. In 1837 smallpox almost wipes them out: his letters, published in 1841, become an irreplaceable record of a vanished world. Like Macbrair among the Mandinka and the Fula, Catlin sees himself as the friend of the peoples he visits and accuses the whites of destroying them; but where the missionary wants to convert, the painter wants only to preserve what is about to fade away.
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Victor Jacquemont, Correspondance de Victor Jacquemont avec sa famille et plusieurs de ses amis, pendant son voyage dans l'Inde (1828-1832) (1833)

At the end of the summer of 1828, when Laborde has returned to Cairo, the naturalist Victor Jacquemont sails from Brest aboard the Zélée, commissioned by the Muséum d'histoire naturelle to explore India. Arriving in Calcutta in May 1829, he travels up towards the Himalaya, pushes on as far as Ladakh, is received at Lahore by the Sikh maharaja Ranjit Singh, collects plants and takes measurements tirelessly, before dying in Bombay in December 1832, aged thirty-one. His letters, published in 1833 with the help of Mérimée, have the liveliness of conversation. Like Laborde, a young man of Parisian society who chooses the harshest terrain and sends his collections to the Jardin des Plantes.
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Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah (1833-1834)

In April 1833, six months before Macbrair lands at Calais, Flora Tristan leaves Bordeaux for Peru. Separated from a violent husband and without means, she has come to claim her father's inheritance from her uncle Pío de Tristán, in Arequipa. She will obtain only an allowance, but she witnesses the civil war, visits enclosed convents and a sugar plantation worked by slaves, then meets the Mariscala Francisca Gamarra in Lima just as she is going into exile. Published in 1838, her account is that of a woman who knows she is a stranger everywhere and looks without indulgence. Like Macbrair, she judges the clergy severely and says what others keep silent.
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George Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition (1833-1835)

In February 1833, George Back leaves England to search for John Ross, missing for four years in the Arctic ice. He winters at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake, learns in the spring of 1834 that Ross has returned safe and sound, and nevertheless presses on towards the polar sea, descending a furious river, broken by dozens of rapids, that now bears his name. His narrative, published in 1836, ranks among the classics of exploration in the Canadian Far North. While Macbrair suffers thirst on the plains of Damascus and fever on the Nile, Back endures the exact opposite: hunger, frost and the white immensity.
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Alexander Kinglake, Eothen (1834-1835)

In 1834 the young Englishman Alexander Kinglake left Belgrade and rode across the Ottoman Balkans to Constantinople, then on to Smyrna, Cyprus, Beirut, Nazareth, Jerusalem and, through the desert, to Cairo during the plague of 1835. It is almost Mayr's itinerary twenty years on, with the same quarantines and the same fear of contagion. Eothen, published in 1844, is written with a nonchalant humour that has made it a classic. The Swiss merchant and the English gentleman share a dislike of bombast and a taste for the lived anecdote.
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Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (1835)

In the autumn of 1832, three years after Prokesch, Alphonse de Lamartine lands at Beirut with his wife and his daughter Julia, then rides to Jerusalem, escorted like a prince. He looks there less for proof than for emotion: the Holy Sepulchre, the Valley of Jehoshaphat and the Mount of Olives become lyrical meditations under his pen. On the return, Julia dies in Beirut, and the journey turns into mourning. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1835, fixed the romantic image of the Holy Land for generations. The contrast with Prokesch is sharp: where the Austrian major records, measures and compares texts, the poet contemplates and remembers.
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George Alexander Hoskins, Travels in Ethiopia, above the Second Cataract of the Nile (1835)

In 1833, a dozen years after Waddington, the Englishman George Alexander Hoskins travelled up the Nile beyond the Second Cataract. Nubia was now an Egyptian province, and he moved with a freedom his predecessors had not enjoyed. He visited Jebel Barkal, went on to the pyramids of Meroe, which he describes with care, and devoted part of his book to the state of the country under Muhammad Ali's rule. It is the natural sequel to Waddington's journal: the same temples and the same villages, seen again once the war was over and the Egyptian administration in place.
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John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage (1835)

In May 1829, a few weeks after the storm off Psara, John Ross leaves England aboard the Victory, a small paddle steamer financed by the distiller Felix Booth, to search for the North-West Passage. Ice traps him along a land he names Boothia; the crew spends four winters there, helped by the Inuit, who teach them to live off the country. In June 1831, his nephew James Clark Ross reaches the North Magnetic Pole. With the ship abandoned, the survivors are picked up by a whaler in 1833. The account appears in 1835: another expedition that set out in 1829, lasting four years where Prokesch's takes six weeks.
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George Borrow, The Bible in Spain (1835-1840)

In the spring of 1838, while the corvettes refit in Chile, the Englishman George Borrow, an agent of the Bible Society, is arrested in the middle of the Calle de Alcalá in Madrid on the corregidor's orders and shut up in the Carcel de la Corte. Since 1835 he has been riding across a Spain torn by the Carlist war to sell the New Testament, and he has had the Gospel of Saint Luke printed in Caló, the language of the Gypsies. He spends three weeks in prison, until the British embassy obtains his release. His account, published in 1843, was a great success. A foreigner alone against the authorities and the rumour mill, a few weeks before the slanders of Valparaiso.
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Alcide d'Orbigny, Voyage dans l'Amérique méridionale (1835-1847)

While Laborde crosses Sinai, Alcide d'Orbigny has already spent two years travelling through South America for the Muséum d'histoire naturelle. His journey lasts from 1826 to 1833: Brazil, Uruguay, the Argentine provinces and Patagonia, then Chile, Peru and above all Bolivia, whose landscapes and peoples he describes. He brings back thousands of specimens and a monumental work, the Voyage dans l'Amérique méridionale, published from 1835 to 1847 in nine volumes. Naturalist, geographer and ethnographer all at once, he shares with Laborde a taste for the complete inventory, where every plant, every shell and every rock finds its place beside the narrative.
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Alexandre Pouchkine, Voyage à Arzroum pendant la campagne de 1829 (1836)

In the spring of 1829, Alexander Pushkin sets off without permission to join the Russian army in the Caucasus, at war with the Ottomans. Beyond Tiflis he meets a cart bringing home from Persia the body of the poet and diplomat Griboyedov, massacred in Tehran a few months earlier. He follows General Paskevich's troops to Erzurum, which opens its gates to the Russians, and leaves when plague breaks out there. His Journey to Arzrum, published in 1836, is a dry, ironic narrative, the opposite of the romantic Orient expected of him. It is the same war that weakens the Porte while Prokesch negotiates with the pasha of Acre: two travellers at opposite ends of the Ottoman Empire, in the same spring.
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Anna Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1836-1837)

At the end of 1836, Anna Jameson arrived in Toronto in the depths of winter, alone, to join a husband from whom she had long lived apart. The Irish woman of letters was bored in the small capital of Upper Canada, then set off west in the summer of 1837, as far as Lake Huron, Sault Ste. Marie and Manitoulin Island. She travelled by canoe with the Ojibwe, shot the rapids, and noted what Indigenous women confided to her about their lives. Her book appeared in London in 1838. A few months before Dumont d'Urville received the Patagonians aboard at Peckett Harbour, a woman traveller was also looking at peoples whom Europe described poorly.
George Back, Narrative of an Expedition in H.M.S. Terror (1836-1837)

On 21 September 1837, at the very moment the Astrolabe and the Zélée were passing the Strait of Gibraltar by night, another warship was ending its voyage in tatters. George Back was bringing the Terror home from a failed Arctic campaign: having left in 1836 for Repulse Bay, he had been caught by the ice near Southampton Island and drifted for ten months, the hull crushed, the crew wasting with scurvy. Freed in the summer of 1837, the Terror crossed the Atlantic taking on water and was deliberately run aground in Lough Swilly, in Ireland. Dumont d'Urville was heading for the southern ice; Back was returning from the northern, and his narrative tells what awaits the stubborn.
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Alexander Burnes, Cabool: A Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and Residence in that City, in the Years 1836, 7, and 8 (1836-1838)

In September 1837, while the French corvettes were leaving the Mediterranean, Alexander Burnes entered Kabul. This Scottish officer in the service of the East India Company had come to discuss trade with the emir Dost Mohammad, but the Persian siege of Herat gave his mission a political turn, and a Russian envoy, Ivan Vitkevich, arrived in the city in his turn. Burnes observed, frequented the bazaars and gardens, wrote a great deal, and left in 1838 without a treaty. He would be killed in Kabul in November 1841. Two official missions of the same season: one searching the empty southern seas, the other marching into the heart of the Great Game between two empires.
John Wood, A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus (1836-1838)

On 19 February 1838, a few days after Dumont d'Urville gave up on the pole before the pack ice, Lieutenant John Wood of the Indian Navy reached the Pamir plateau in the depths of winter. Detached from Alexander Burnes's mission to Kabul, he had gone up the Wakhan valley under snow, in cold so bitter that part of his escort deserted. At the end he found a frozen lake about fourteen miles long, at more than 4,700 metres, from which the Oxus, today's Amu Darya, flows according to him. His narrative was published in London in 1841. Two sailors facing ice in the same week: one in the heart of Asia, the other on the edge of the Weddell Sea.
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Thomas Simpson, Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America (1836-1839)

While the Astrolabe and the Zélée struggle against the southern pack ice, Thomas Simpson and Peter Warren Dease, of the Hudson's Bay Company, spend the winter of 1837-1838 at Fort Confidence, on Great Bear Lake, waiting for the thaw. Their mission: to survey the Arctic coast of America. In July 1838 the boats reach the mouth of the Coppermine, but the ice holds firm; stopped at Cape Flinders, Simpson continues on foot, follows a hundred miles of coast and names Victoria Land. The following summer the two men discover the strait that now bears their name. The narrative appeared in 1843, after Simpson's death. Same season, same ice barring the way, at opposite ends of the globe.
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John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837)

In 1836, the American John Lloyd Stephens follows Laborde's route almost step by step: Cairo, Sinai, the fortress of Aqaba, the Wadi Araba, Petra. He travels in the dress of a Cairo merchant and, at Aqaba, the garrison immediately demands baksheesh: they still remember the shower of gold scattered there ten years earlier by Laborde, and Linant is still known to everyone. In Cairo, Stephens had in fact called on Linant before setting out. His account, published in 1837, lively and ironic, is a great success and launches him towards the Maya cities. To read Stephens after Laborde is to see the same route made more expensive by the passage of the first.
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Paul-Émile Botta, Relation d'un voyage dans l'Yémen, entrepris en 1837 pour le Muséum d'histoire naturelle de Paris (1837)

A year before the call at Tahiti, another envoy of the Museum of Natural History in Paris plunges into a land few Europeans know. Paul-Emile Botta, son of the Piedmontese historian Carlo Botta and a former physician in the service of Muhammad Ali's Egypt, lands in Yemen in 1837 to collect plants and animals. He gathers specimens on the coast and in the mountains of the interior, describes the khat that Yemenis chew, and brings his collections back to the Jardin des Plantes. His account appears in Paris in 1841. A few years later, as consul at Mosul, he will unearth the Assyrian palace of Khorsabad. Like Hombron and Le Guillou on the Astrolabe, a naturalist in the service of state science, herbarium under his arm.
Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, with Remarks on its Institutions (1837-1838)

Landed in New York on 4 May 1837, Captain Frederick Marryat, a former Royal Navy officer turned sea novelist, spent two years in the United States and Canada to judge American democracy on the spot. He sees the bank panic of 1837, goes up the Hudson, stays in Canada during the rebellion, then heads west: on 13 June 1838 he is at Fort Snelling, on the upper Mississippi. His diary, published in 1839, is lively, mocking and often severe; part of the American public burned the book and the author in effigy. During those same months another naval officer, Dumont d'Urville, kept his own in the midst of the ice, with no audience but his crews.
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George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia (1837-1839)

On 5 July 1837, two months before the departure from Toulon, the young lieutenant George Grey left Plymouth aboard the Beagle, Darwin's very ship, to penetrate the interior of north-western Australia. He landed at Hanover Bay in December 1837, in the days when the Astrolabe was entering the Strait of Magellan. Early in 1838 he was speared in a clash with Aboriginal people and discovered great painted figures in sandstone shelters. In 1839 a second expedition towards Shark Bay ended in disaster: the whaleboats were wrecked and the party walked back to Perth, starving. Two southern ventures of the same season, one by sea, the other by land.
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Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (1837-1840)

On 13 April 1838, five days after the anchorage at Talcahuano, Emily Eden dates from Simla, in the Himalayan foothills, a new letter to her sister, who has stayed behind in England. Sister of the Governor-General of India, Lord Auckland, she left Calcutta in October 1837 with an immense retinue, went up the Ganges, and crossed Benares, Cawnpore and Delhi under canvas. She spends the summer in the hill station, then in November reaches Ferozepore and Amritsar for the meeting with Maharaja Ranjit Singh, just as the war in Afghanistan is being prepared. Her letters, funny, sharp and clear-sighted, appeared in 1866. Another travel journal kept day by day, behind the scenes of an empire advancing its pieces.
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Gustav Rose, Reise nach dem Ural, dem Altai und dem Kaspischen Meere (1837-1842)

In April 1829, as Prokesch anchors off Haifa, Alexander von Humboldt leaves Berlin for Russia with the mineralogist Gustav Rose and the naturalist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg. Invited by the tsar's government, they travel for months by post carriage, visit the mines of the Urals, reach the Altai and the Chinese frontier, then come back down through Orenburg and Astrakhan to the Caspian. It is Rose who writes the scientific account of the journey, published in two volumes in 1837 and 1842. Two German-speaking travellers in the same year, two surveyors' eyes: one on the veins of Siberia, the other on the ramparts of Jerusalem.
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John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia (1837-1843)

An officer of the Beagle, already aboard during Darwin's voyage, John Lort Stokes returned to Australia in the same ship to complete the chart of the coasts. In 1841 he reached the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, anchored in Investigator Road at Sweers Island and found there traces of Flinders's visit. He then ascended two rivers, which he named the Flinders and the Albert, and called the grassy plains he found the Plains of Promise, a hope of pasture for settlers. His illustrated Discoveries in Australia reads as a second visit to the shores that close this volume, forty years later, with the eye already of a colony in search of land.
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Charles Fellows, A Journal Written during an Excursion in Asia Minor (1838)

On 19 April 1838, while the Astrolabe is being repaired at Talcahuano, the English traveller Charles Fellows is camping among the tombs of a dead city on the banks of the Xanthus, in what is now south-western Turkey. Setting out from Smyrna, his base, he has gone up the valley from Patara and identifies Xanthos, the ancient capital of Lycia, then Tlos, before returning through Caria and Lydia. He draws the monuments, copies the inscriptions and publishes his journal in London in 1839. The book persuades the British Museum: in 1842 the Xanthian marbles go down the river in crates bound for England. Same spring, same European appetite for collections, from Araucanian skulls to Lycian tombs.
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Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (1838-1839)

While Dumont d'Urville leaves the Fiji Islands, a famous English actress prepares to spend the winter in the American South. Fanny Kemble has married Pierce Butler, heir to rice and cotton plantations on the islands off the Georgia coast. From December 1838 to the spring of 1839, she lives among hundreds of slaves, listens to the women, tends them, rages, and sets it all down in letters to a friend. The journal is published only in 1863, in London, in the midst of the Civil War, to weigh on English opinion. Two views of distant archipelagos: the Fiji Islands seen from the deck of a corvette, slaveholding Georgia seen from inside a master's house.
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Xavier Marmier, Lettres sur le Nord : Danemark, Suède, Norvège, Laponie et Spitzberg (1838-1839)

On 13 June 1838, two weeks after the departure from Valparaiso, another of the king's corvettes, the Recherche, leaves Le Havre for the North with the scientific commission led by Paul Gaimard. The writer Xavier Marmier, translator of Scandinavian literatures, joins the expedition by way of Trondheim, then follows by steamer the islands of Nordland and Finnmark as far as Hammerfest, where the corvette puts in during July. He describes the northernmost little town in Europe, its fishermen, its merchants and the Lapps, and will reach Spitsbergen the following year aboard the same corvette. His Lettres sur le Nord appeared in 1840. The same season, the French navy sends its scholars to the midnight sun as to the southern seas.
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Xavier Marmier, Lettres sur le Nord (1838-1840)

While Dumont d'Urville leaves the southern ice for warm seas, another French naval expedition, that of the corvette la Recherche led by the naturalist Paul Gaimard, ranges over the Far North between 1838 and 1840. Xavier Marmier, its historian, drew from it letters published in 1840: Scandinavia, Lapland, the shores of Spitsbergen, fjords and small fishing towns. The two undertakings are sisters, born of the same scientific impulse of the July Monarchy. One explores the cold, the other ends its campaign in the tropics, but both combine hydrography, natural history and curiosity about the peoples they meet.
Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition during the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 (1838-1842)

A year after the Astrolabe, Charles Wilkes's American squadron follows almost the same route. Leaving Norfolk in August 1838, the expedition calls at Tahiti in September 1839, surveys Samoa in the autumn, then spends three months in the Fiji Islands in 1840, anchored notably off Levuka, the commander's Lebouka. There Wilkes has the chief Veidovi arrested, held responsible for the massacre of the crew of the Charles Doggett in 1834, the very year the Aimable-Josephine was seized by the people of Piva. In July, two officers killed at Malolo bring about a punitive expedition. The five volumes of the narrative, published in 1845, extend Dumont d'Urville's inquiry, with the same hydrographic ambition and the same violence.
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Adulphe Delegorgue, Voyage dans l'Afrique australe, notamment dans le territoire de Natal, dans celui des Cafres Amazoulous et Makatisses (1838-1844)

In 1838, the year the Astrolabe skirts the reefs of Viti, a young Frenchman from the North lands at the Cape. Adulphe Delegorgue has read Le Vaillant and wants to see southern Africa with his own eyes. He travels up to Natal, into Zulu country, just as the emigrant Boers face King Dingane, and becomes a witness to that war. A tireless hunter, he shoots hippopotamuses, elephants, lions and buffalo, gathers collections for the museums of Paris and Douai, and observes the customs of the Amazulu. His two volumes appear in 1847, the second enlarged with a Zulu lexicon: the same passion for vocabularies as Desgraz's, noting down the languages of Tahiti, Samoa and Viti.
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Arnauld d'Abbadie, Douze ans de séjour dans la Haute-Éthiopie (1838-1848)

In February 1838, while the corvettes look for a passage through the ice of the South Orkneys, two brothers land at Massawa, on the Red Sea: Antoine and Arnauld d'Abbadie, born to a Basque father and an Irish mother. They would stay ten years in Ethiopia, at a time when the country was torn between rival princes, and push on into the then little-known regions of Ennarea and Kaffa. Antoine measures, observes, gathers manuscripts and dreams of the sources of the Nile; Arnauld lives among the lords, shares their rides and learns their customs. His narrative did not appear until 1868. Another French undertaking of the same season, turned not toward the ice but toward the highlands of Africa.
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Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839 (1839)

In the summer of 1839, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine arrived in Saint Petersburg intending to find arguments against representative government. He came back appalled. Received by Nicholas I, taken from the splendors of the court to the rutted roads leading to Moscow and the Nizhny Novgorod fair, he describes an empire of facades, surveillance and silence, where one sees only what one is allowed to see. His letters, published in 1843, were immediately banned in Russia and became a classic of the Western view of that country. Ross advances toward a continent without inhabitants; Custine explores a political continent. Two ways of surveying the unknown: the compass of one, the suspicion of the other. The book is La Russie en 1839.
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William Cornwallis Harris, The Wild Sports of Southern Africa (1839)

An Indian Army officer on leave, Harris leaves the Cape in 1836 and heads north, as far as the country of the chief Mzilikazi (Moselekatse) and the Tropic of Capricorn. He hunts, draws and describes a fauna still intact, just as the Boer settlers set out for the interior. Published in 1839, his account appears while the Astrolabe skirts the Solomons. The two books answer each other: the same naturalist passion, the same ambiguous relation with African or Oceanian rulers, welcoming and feared, and the same foreboding of a world about to change under European pressure.
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John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1839-1840)

In the autumn of 1839, while the Erebus and the Terror sailed down the Atlantic toward the southern seas, the New York lawyer John Lloyd Stephens landed in Central America on a diplomatic mission, with a precious companion: the English draughtsman Frederick Catherwood. The two men hacked their way through the Honduran forest with machetes, uncovered the stelae of Copán, reached Palenque across a country torn by civil war, then the palaces of Uxmal in Yucatán. The account, published in 1841 with Catherwood's engravings, revealed the grandeur of the Maya cities to the public. The same taste for inventory and measurement as in Ross, but here the unknown land is covered with ruins, not ice.
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Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, Travels in the Interior of North America (1839-1841)

A Rhineland naturalist already known for his journey to Brazil, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied came to America in 1832 with the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer. They spent the winter of 1832 to 1833 at New Harmony, the former Harmonist town that Rapp had since sold to Robert Owen, then travelled up the Missouri from St. Louis to the country of the Mandan and the Blackfeet. The book, illustrated with Bodmer's watercolours, extends Ernst's route beyond the Mississippi. Where Ernst had admired a Harmony of hard-working believers in 1819, Maximilian found a town of scientists and reformers, a sign of how quickly the West was changing.
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Hans Christian Andersen, A Poet's Bazaar (1840-1841)

In the spring of 1841 Hans Christian Andersen returned from Constantinople by the Black Sea and the Danube, on the steamers that now plied the river up to Vienna. He did quarantine at Orsova, the frontier town where Mayr had spent twenty-one days in the lazaretto in November 1813, and describes the Bulgarian, Serbian and Wallachian banks. The book, published in 1842, turns the journey into a poetic tableau. What had been for Mayr a dangerous crossing by caravan and boat had become, a generation later, a steamboat cruise; but the lazaretto had hardly changed.
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Edward Robinson et Eli Smith, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841)

In 1838, the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson travels through Palestine with the missionary Eli Smith, an accomplished Arabist. Bible in hand, compass and measuring tape in their saddlebags, they question villagers about the Arabic names of places and find beneath them a host of forgotten biblical sites. In Jerusalem, Robinson spots on the western wall the springing of an ancient arch that now bears his name. His Biblical Researches, published in 1841, lay the foundations of the historical geography of the Holy Land. Nine years earlier, Prokesch was already practising this surveyor-officer's method: bearings taken by compass, ramparts measured, ancient texts on the city walls debated.
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William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab (1841)

A veterinary surgeon in charge of the East India Company's stud, William Moorcroft left northern India in 1819, the year of Ernst's journey, to look for Central Asian horses fit to remount the British cavalry. With the young George Trebeck he stayed for long periods in Ladakh and Kashmir, passed through Kabul and reached Bukhara in 1825; both men died on the way back. Their journals, published in 1841, share Ernst's practical eye: soils, livestock, roads, prices, resources. But Moorcroft ventured into kingdoms closed to Europeans, while Ernst crossed a country open to every newcomer.
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William Allen et T. R. H. Thomson, A Narrative of the Expedition Sent by Her Majesty's Government to the River Niger in 1841 (1841-1842)

In August 1841, three Royal Navy steamers, the Albert, the Wilberforce and the Soudan, went up the Niger with an ambitious program: to sign treaties against the slave trade, to found a model farm at the confluence with the Benue, and to open the interior of West Africa to trade. Fever decided otherwise. Within weeks it struck down most of the Europeans and killed dozens, and the ships came back down the river with decimated crews. The account by Captain William Allen and the surgeon Thomson, published in 1848, is the meticulous chronicle of that failure. The same Admiralty, the same year as Ross in the pack ice, but here death comes from the climate, not from the ice.
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William Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia (1841-1843)

Two years after the corvettes' call at Makassar, the British officer William Cornwallis Harris leads an embassy to the kingdom of Shoa, on the highlands of Ethiopia. He crosses the desert from the coast, reaches the court of King Sahle Selassie and stays there a long time, noting ceremonies, markets, churches and slavery. His account, published in 1844, serves science as much as diplomacy: Great Britain was seeking allies and trade routes. In Dumont d'Urville one finds the same reading of local powers, from the regent of Goa to the orang-kaya of Warrou, and the same attention to the exchanges that bind native courts to the European powers.
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Alexander Burnes, Cabool (1842)

From 1836 to 1838, the Scottish officer Alexander Burnes stays in Kabul with the emir Dost Mohammad, sent by the East India Company on a commercial mission that soon turns political. He observes the city, its bazaars, its tribes and the play of influence between British and Russians. The account appears after his death, for he was killed in Kabul in 1841. Like this volume's pages on Ternate and Ambon, it shows a European power settling among local princes through treaties, garrisons and trade. From one end of Asia to the other, the same imperial grammar was being written in those years.
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Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842)

In the spring of 1842 Charles Dickens, already famous, travelled down the Ohio by steamboat to Cincinnati and Louisville, then reached St. Louis by the Mississippi. He went as far as an Illinois prairie, the Looking Glass Prairie, and came back disappointed: the vast plain struck him as monotonous. The meeting of the Ohio and the Mississippi at Cairo inspired a grim page on swamps and fevers. The novelist saw with a city dweller's eyes the landscapes Ernst had assessed as an agronomist, and the contrast is delightful: what enchanted the would-be settler bored the visitor in a hurry to get back to his readers.
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Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1842)

In July 1842, four years after the Astrolabe, the American whaler Acushnet anchors in the bay of Taiohae, a few weeks after Admiral Dupetit-Thouars took possession of Nuku Hiva in the name of Louis-Philippe. A twenty-two-year-old sailor, Herman Melville, deserts with a comrade, Toby, crosses the ridges and descends into the valley of the Taipi, the very bay the commander had skirted when rounding Point Martin without seeing the populous villages described by Porter. He stays a few weeks, which his book stretches to four months. Typee, published in 1846, mixes memories, reading and invention; it makes the valley a threatened paradise and launches the career of the future author of Moby-Dick.
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Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1842)

Four years after the weeping queen of Papeete, an American sailor lands at Tahiti in the wake of a mutiny. Herman Melville left Nuku Hiva, where he had lived among the Taipis of whom Hutchinson spoke to the commander, aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann. At Papeete, the rebellious crew is locked up by the Tahitian authorities; Melville then wanders through the islands with a fanciful companion, Doctor Long Ghost, reaches Eimeo and tries to approach Pomare's court. He arrives in 1842, just as France is imposing its protectorate. Omoo, published in 1847, recounts with irony the missionaries, the deserting sailors and the beach society that Dumont d'Urville had already described.
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Max Radiguet, Les Derniers Sauvages : souvenirs de l'occupation française aux îles Marquises, 1842-1859 (1842)

Aboard the Reine-Blanche, Admiral Dupetit-Thouars' frigate, Max Radiguet witnesses in 1842 the taking of the Marquesas: Tahuata on 1 May, Nuku Hiva in early June. He draws, observes, questions, and leaves a famous portrait of the king of Tahuata, that Hio-tete whom the Marquesan Moë described to the commander of the Astrolabe as a bad man: a bust of Louis XVIII dipped in indigo. His memoirs tell of life at Taiohae and Tahuata, the tattoos, the feasts, the chiefs, Hio-tete's revolt and the early days of the French occupation. The book takes up the story almost where this volume leaves off, at the anchorage of Taiohae, four years later.
Joseph Beete Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly (1842-1846)

Naturalist and geologist of the Fly, Joseph Beete Jukes spent four years surveying the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, which Flinders had crossed feeling his way. In 1844, the expedition raised a stone beacon on Raine Island, at the outer edge of the reef, to show ships a safe opening. In his Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, Jukes describes at length the reefs seen from within and without, and takes up the question of how coral islands form, which Flinders had raised at Half-way Island. He also meets the strait islanders, notably at Darnley, and leaves vivid portraits of them, which extend this volume's pages on the Murray Islands.
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Joseph Beete Jukes, Relation du voyage hydrographique du HMS Fly (1842-1846)

A geologist aboard HMS Fly, Jukes spends four years with the team surveying the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, with a rigour that at last makes safe the route Flinders had opened at the price of so many anxious nights. He describes the growth of the reefs, the life of the strait's islanders, the canoes and the turtle markets, and the building of a beacon on Raine Island to guide ships to the passage. His Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, published in 1847, shows the Coral Sea turned into a trade route: the dangers Flinders reported are now charted, buoyed and almost tamed.
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Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (1843)

Nine years after Macbrair, Gérard de Nerval lands at Alexandria early in 1843 and settles in Cairo, where he rents a house, buys a Javanese slave girl and has the legend of the caliph Hakim told to him. He then travels on to Beirut and Mount Lebanon, at the heart of the rivalries between Druze and Maronites that Macbrair had already seen fermenting under Ibrahim Pasha. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1851, blends reportage, reverie and embedded tales. The contrast is complete: the poet seeks in the East a mystery to love, the missionary a people to save, yet both describe the same teeming city, its cafés, its markets and its alleys.
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John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843)

As Ida Pfeiffer explores Constantinople, John Lloyd Stephens and the draughtsman Frederick Catherwood are finishing their second campaign in Yucatan, begun in the autumn of 1841. On muleback, in heat and fever, they record dozens of Maya cities overrun by forest: Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tulum. Stephens already knew the East, having crossed Egypt, Petra and the Holy Land a few years earlier. His view of the Yucatan ruins in Incidents of Travel in Yucatan answers Pfeiffer's before Baalbek or the pyramids: the same concrete curiosity, the same taste for the practical details of a hard journey, the same certainty of having an immense past before one's eyes.
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Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1844)

In February 1842, two and a half years after the French, Charles Wilkes's American expedition anchors off the town of Soung, on Jolo. There it finds Datu Molou, who had acted as go-between for Dumont d'Urville, and a sultan with eyes reddened by opium, surrounded by his sons and counselors. Wilkes, who has just put in at Caldera, a small Spanish fort near Zamboanga, is there to have a treaty of commerce and ship protection signed. His pages on Sulu in the Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, reprinted in a free online collection, form the exact reverse shot of this volume's chapters: same characters, same court, same mistrust, seen this time by an American officer.
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Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1844-1845)

In the summer of 1844, as Thackeray leaves for the East, his great rival Charles Dickens settles in Genoa with his family for a year in Italy. He travels through Parma, Bologna, Venice, Rome, where he watches the carnival and the Holy Week ceremonies, then Naples and Vesuvius, whose crater he climbs in the dead of night. The two books appear in the same year, 1846, and tell of the same discovery: the English tourist before the monuments he has been taught to admire. Dickens, like Thackeray, mocks guidebooks and made-to-order enthusiasm, and lingers more willingly on the crowd, misery and street life than on the masterpieces. See Pictures from Italy.
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Ludwig Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia (1844-1845)

In October 1844, the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt left the Darling Downs, west of Moreton Bay, to reach Port Essington, on the north coast, overland. He arrived more than fourteen months later, having lost the naturalist John Gilbert, killed in a night attack. His route skirts the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which Flinders had surveyed from the sea: where the Investigator saw only a low coast fringed with shoals, Leichhardt discovers rivers, plains and the peoples who live there. His Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia lets us read the end of this volume in reverse, from the interior toward the shore.
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Ludwig Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington (1844-1845)

On 1 October 1844, a few days before Thackeray rides from Jaffa towards Jerusalem, the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt leaves the Darling Downs in eastern Australia with a small party of settlers, two Aboriginal guides and pack bullocks. He wants to reach the outpost of Port Essington, on the north coast, overland. Fourteen months later, after losing the naturalist John Gilbert, killed in a night attack, the exhausted party reaches its goal in December 1845, when it had been given up for lost. His journal, published in London in 1847, is the exact opposite of Thackeray's cruise: no timetable, no hotel, only rivers to name and provisions to ration. See Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington.
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Évariste Huc, Souvenirs d'un voyage dans la Tartarie et le Thibet (1844-1846)

A few years after the expedition, two French Lazarists, Évariste Huc and Joseph Gabet, cross Mongolia and the steppes of Kokonor by camel, disguised as lamas, as far as Lhasa, which they reach in 1846 before being expelled to China. Huc's account, full of humor and detail about caravan life, was an immense success. At the other end of Asia, Dumont d'Urville describes trading societies open to the sea; Huc, inland worlds closed to foreigners. Both books bear witness to the same French generation taking hold of the edges of the Asian continent and its archipelagos.
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Évariste Huc, Souvenirs d'un voyage dans la Tartarie, le Thibet et la Chine (1844-1846)

In 1844, the very year Thackeray boards at Southampton, two French Lazarist priests, Évariste Huc and Joseph Gabet, leave their mission on the edge of the Great Wall to reach Tibet. Dressed as lamas, they follow the caravans across Mongolia, the Ordos desert and Koukou-Nor, endure a terrible winter on the high plateaus and enter Lhasa in January 1846, before being expelled to China. Where Thackeray travels in a cabin on a steamer, Huc advances at the pace of camels, far from any mail. But the two men share a talent: humour, an eye for the comic detail and curiosity about the prayers of other peoples. See Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China.
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Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound (1845)

In 1840 and 1841, across the Timor Sea, Edward John Eyre tries to cross South Australia westward along a coast with no fresh water. His companion John Baxter is killed one night by two of the Aboriginal guides; Eyre goes on with Wylie alone, drinking dew and eating his horses, as far as King George's Sound. His Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, published in 1845, are among the harshest survival narratives of the century. They throw Dumont d'Urville's world into relief: where the French corvettes find trading posts, governors and markets everywhere, Eyre walks through a country where the colony still clings only to the edges.
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Ida Pfeiffer, Reise nach dem skandinavischen Norden und der Insel Island im Jahre 1845 (1845)

Ida Pfeiffer, a Viennese housewife who waited until her sons were grown before setting out, had made the journey to Constantinople, the Holy Land and Egypt alone in 1842, two years before Thackeray. In 1845 she chose the cold: by way of Copenhagen she reaches Iceland, visits Reykjavik, the geysers, the lava fields and the turf farms, climbs Hekla, then returns through Norway and Sweden. Her book appears in 1846, the same year as Thackeray's. The contrast is delicious: where the English writer complains about his hotel, this traveller of modest means sleeps with the peasants, eats what she is offered and notes everything with unvarnished precision. See Reise nach dem skandinavischen Norden und der Insel Island im Jahre 1845.
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John Charles Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44 (1845)

In the summer of 1842, while Ida Pfeiffer rides along the roads of Lebanon, Lieutenant John Charles Fremont goes up the Platte valley toward the Rockies, guided by Kit Carson. He crosses South Pass, the key passage of the future Oregon Trail, and plants the American flag on a peak of the Wind River range that he believes the highest of the chain. His Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44, widely read, would serve as a guide for emigrants. Two journeys of 1842 alike in their taste for measurements, distances and halts, yet separated by everything: one opens a territory to conquest, the other follows pilgrim paths fifteen centuries old.
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Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (1846)

Two years after Thackeray's cruise, a young Harvard graduate, Francis Parkman, leaves St. Louis with his cousin Quincy Adams Shaw to follow the Oregon Trail among the emigrant wagons. Ill, he nevertheless spends several weeks with a band of Oglala Sioux, shares their buffalo hunts and observes their camps with a historian's curiosity. Published first as a serial, then in book form in 1849, his account shows another face of the years when Thackeray marvels at steam: elsewhere, travel is still done on horseback, at the pace of the seasons. The two men share a lucid, sometimes harsh gaze at the peoples they meet. See The Oregon Trail.
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John MacGillivray, Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (1846-1850)

Naturalist of the Rattlesnake, commanded by Owen Stanley, John MacGillivray followed from 1846 to 1850 the survey of the inner route of Queensland, of Torres Strait and of the south coast of New Guinea; the young Thomas Henry Huxley was aboard as assistant surgeon. At Cape York, in 1849, the crew took in Barbara Thompson, a young Scottish castaway who had lived nearly five years among the islanders of Prince of Wales Island. MacGillivray recorded her testimony in his Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, valuable on the languages and customs of the strait. Here we find again the islands and anchorages that Flinders had named, now visited by ships.
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Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848)

Four years after Ida Pfeiffer, the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau, already famous for her writings on political economy, set out in turn for the East at the end of 1846. She goes up the Nile into Nubia, crosses Sinai, visits Petra, then Jerusalem, Galilee and Damascus. Like the Viennese woman, she travels as a mature woman, not letting the fatigues of the saddle and the tent stop her. But where Pfeiffer prays, Martineau reasons: her Eastern Life, Present and Past turns Egyptian temples and holy places into stages in a history of religions, to the point of scandalising some of her readers. Two women before the same stones, two ways of believing.
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John Elphinstone Erskine, Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific (1849)

From June to October 1849, Captain John Elphinstone Erskine takes the British ship Havannah from Samoa to Tonga, then to Fiji, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia. In Viti, he anchors at Ovalau, describes the village of Levuka entrenched behind its ditch, receives on board the missionary Hazlewood and Christian chiefs in Bua Bay, and talks with Cakobau, son of old Tanoa, through the missionary Calvert. The account, published in London in 1853, shows how far the Wesleyan missions that Dumont d'Urville saw taking root had come in a decade. Lebouka, Boua, Bau: the names of this volume return under the pen of an English officer, with the same question of cannibalism.
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Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Orient (1849-1851)

In November 1849, Gustave Flaubert, aged twenty-seven, sails from Marseille with Maxime Du Camp, who has been entrusted with a photographic mission. They ascend the Nile in a cangia as far as the Second Cataract, stop at Philae, Thebes and Esna, then go on to Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baalbek. The notes and letters from this journey, published after the writer's death, are raw, funny, sensual, with a painter's precision. Fifteen years after Macbrair, Flaubert follows almost the same route, from Cairo to the ruins of Baalbek, but with the eye of an artist who wants to see everything and judge nothing: the reader can set two views side by side, one pious, the other profane, of the same riverbanks.
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Thomas Eyre Poole, Life, Scenery, and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia (1850)

Colonial and garrison chaplain at Freetown, the Reverend Thomas Eyre Poole published in London, in 1850, two volumes on Britain's West African colonies. From Sierra Leone he moves on to the Gambia, visits the settlements on the river and travels a long way up it. He depicts the life of the colonists, of the liberated Africans and of the riverside peoples, and dwells on the neglected churches, the cemeteries overrun by grass and the fevers that cut down Europeans, which he himself survives several times. The reader rediscovers the fragile colony, with its trading posts and missions, that Macbrair had known, seen this time by an Anglican clergyman rather than a Methodist.
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Richard Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Peninsula of Sinai (1852)

Sent by the King of Prussia at the head of a large scientific expedition, the Egyptologist Richard Lepsius travelled through Egypt and the Sudan from 1842 to 1845. He went up as far as Meroe and the Blue Nile, then stayed at Jebel Barkal, where he recorded the temples and pyramids with a new precision. His letters, published in 1852, tell of the journey day by day. Lepsius identified the ruins of Jebel Barkal as Napata, the ancient capital of the kings of Kush, a conclusion Waddington had already defended. The Cambridge antiquary had been right, with far more modest means and in the middle of a war.
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Edmond Reuel Smith, The Araucanians, or Notes of a Tour among the Indian Tribes of Southern Chili (1853)

On 4 January 1853, Edmond Reuel Smith leaves Concepción for the Biobío frontier. A young American attached to the astronomical expedition sent to Chile by the United States Navy, he has left the service to see at close quarters the Araucanians whom the whole country talks about. With an interpreter, he crosses the river, goes from cacique to cacique, attends the ceremonies of the machis, the dances and the funerals, then returns to Concepción before going down the bay of Talcahuano. His book appeared in 1855. Fifteen years after the Astrolabe, it extends the pages Dumont d'Urville devotes to the Araucanians on the basis of Vice-Consul Bardel and Padre Gil, and his visit to the old cacique Penoleo, the last hero of Ercilla.
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Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)

In the summer of 1853, as Énault was embarking at Marseille, the British officer Richard Burton, disguised as a Muslim doctor from Afghanistan, reached Medina and then Mecca with the pilgrim caravan. Two pilgrimages in the same summer, at the two poles of the Mediterranean world: one Christian, open, protected by consuls and steamships; the other forbidden to non-Muslims, carried out under a false name at the risk of his life. Burton's account, published in 1855 and 1856, describes the rites, crowds and roads of the Hejaz with an ethnographer's precision and a marked taste for danger.
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Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas (1853-1854)

At the end of 1853 the New York journalist Frederick Law Olmsted, future designer of Central Park, set off on horseback with his brother across Texas for the New York Daily Times. He describes the slave plantations, the German settlers of New Braunfels, the Mexicans of San Antonio and the Indian frontier. The book appeared in 1857. Like Énault, Olmsted writes as a journalist for a broad readership: in the same year, two observers from the press travelled through a contested land and drew from it a lively narrative, rich in encounters, anecdotes and forthright judgements.
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Matthew C. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1853-1854)

In July 1853, a few weeks before the pilgrims set out, Commodore Matthew Perry's black ships entered Edo Bay and forced Japan, closed for two centuries, to receive a letter from the President of the United States. Perry returned in 1854 and obtained the Treaty of Kanagawa. The official narrative, written by the clergyman Francis Hawks from the journals of Perry and his officers, appeared in 1856. The same year 1853 thus saw the West force open the gates of Japan while the European powers quarrelled over the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, a prelude to the Crimean War.
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Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations (1853-1855)

On 30 May 1853, three months before the pilgrims sailed from Marseille, the American naval surgeon Elisha Kent Kane left New York aboard the Advance to search for the Franklin expedition. The ship stayed locked in the ice of northern Greenland for two winters: scurvy, hunger, the defection of part of the crew, then a retreat of more than eighty days by boat and sledge to the Danish settlements. The account, published in 1856, was an immense success. It is the icy counterpoint to Énault's journey: the same year, the same taste for vivid narrative, but an ordeal at the very edge of survival.
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David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1853-1856)

In November 1853 the Scottish missionary David Livingstone left Linyanti, on the upper Zambezi, to reach Luanda and the Atlantic coast, which he gained in May 1854; he then set off eastward again, came upon the Victoria Falls in 1855 and completed the crossing of the continent in 1856. His book, published in 1857, made him the most famous traveller of his age. The missionary zeal that drove him across Africa answers Énault's Catholic fervour in the Holy Land: two ways, in the same months, of carrying Christianity beyond Europe and writing about it.
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Léonie d'Aunet, Voyage d'une femme au Spitzberg (1854)

In 1839, a nineteen-year-old Parisian woman obtains leave to follow the scientific commission of the North, that of the corvette La Recherche, headed by Paul Gaimard. Through Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, she reaches Spitsbergen, then returns across Lapland. Published fifteen years later in the form of letters, her account mixes curiosity, humour and cold. It offers the boreal counterpart of Dumont d'Urville's voyage: the same French navy, the same learned ambition, but a woman's eye on board, a rare thing, and the ice at the other end of the world.
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Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1854-1862)

For eight years the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace travels the islands of the Malay world in search of birds and insects. He stays at Macassar, the port from which Pobassoo's praus sailed, and passes through Timor, where Flinders had found a haven for his sick. During these travels he conceives, at the same time as Darwin, the theory of natural selection, and draws the boundary between the faunas of Asia and Australia. His book, published in 1869, lights up the whole Asian background of this volume: the merchants, the ports and the islands that already looked toward the Australian shores.
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Ida Pfeiffer, Meine zweite Weltreise (1856)

A Viennese woman traveling alone around the world, Ida Pfeiffer reaches Borneo at the end of 1851. From Kuching, home of the white rajah James Brooke, she crosses the Dayak country with a small escort, by dugout and on foot, sleeps in their longhouses and reaches Pontianak, on the west coast, in February 1852. She then passes through Java and pushes on to the Batak country of Sumatra. Her account, Meine zweite Weltreise, published in 1856 and quickly translated, covers at human height the coast that the Astrolabe's boats only brushed at the mouth of the Sambas, and gives flesh to the Dayaks of whom the Dutch manuscript quoted by Dumont d'Urville spoke only from afar.
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Ludwig August Frankl, The Jews in the East (1856)

Three years after Énault, the Viennese poet Ludwig August Frankl, secretary of the Jewish community of Vienna, went to Jerusalem in 1856 to found a modern school there, the Lämel foundation. His book, published in 1858, describes from within what Énault saw from outside: the life of the city's Jewish communities, their poverty, their disputes, their dealings with the consuls and the Ottoman authorities. The Catholic pilgrim stopped at the Western Wall; Frankl entered homes, synagogues and hospices, and gave the Jerusalem of those years a face that Christian accounts left in shadow.
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Herman Melville, Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant (1856-1857)

In the autumn of 1856, Herman Melville, worn out by the failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre, sets out alone for the Mediterranean. He discovers Constantinople, goes down to Egypt, where the Pyramids overwhelm him, then lands at Jaffa and spends several weeks in Palestine, from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, before Beirut, Greece and Italy. His journal, scribbled day by day and published only in the twentieth century, follows almost the route of Thackeray, but in another key: where the Englishman jokes before the Holy Sepulchre, the American finds a spiritual desert there. From this journey will come Clarel, a long poem on religious doubt published in 1876. See Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant.
Ida Pfeiffer, Voyage à Madagascar (1856-1858)

The Viennese traveller, who has already gone twice around the world, passes through Mauritius before reaching Madagascar in 1857. She describes Port Louis, the Creole and Indian servants, the grand dinners, the country houses, the cane plantations, the workers brought from India, the botanical garden and the waterfalls. Then Madagascar holds her in a conspiracy against Queen Ranavalona, from which she emerges expelled and ill. Back in Mauritius, she tends a fever of which she will die in Vienna. Half a century after Flinders, the same Creole hospitality, seen this time by a woman travelling alone.
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James Wetherell, Brazil. Stray Notes from Bahia (1860)

British vice-consul at Bahia for some fifteen years, James Wetherell died in 1858 without having published his notes; William Hadfield edited them in 1860. They are lively, precise fragments: the cadeiras carried on the shoulder by slaves, the ganhadores singing under their loads, whale meat sold at the market, the festivals, the dead child carried about in a chair decked with ribbons before being buried. Almost everything Ver Huell had discovered in 1808 is still there, barely changed, under the gaze of another foreigner settled in the city. The book shows how little Bahian society had moved in half a century.
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Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1862-1869)

Suffering from tuberculosis, Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt in 1862 in search of drier air and spent the last years of her life there. She settles in Luxor in the "French House" built on the roofs of the temple, learns Arabic, treats the peasants, receives notables and Copts, and writes to her family letters of rare freedom, published as early as 1865. In them she describes the corvée, the taxes and the levies of men that crush the fellahin, as Macbrair had done thirty years earlier under Muhammad Ali. But where the missionary saw souls to be won, she sees neighbours and friends, and reading her one measures all that European arrogance let slip.
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Albert S. Bickmore, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago (1865)

In 1865, the young American naturalist Albert Bickmore leaves Batavia for the Moluccas, following the shells described by Rumphius two centuries earlier. He passes through Makassar, stays at Ambon and the neighboring islands, calls at Ceram, climbs the slopes of Gounong-Api at Banda, then explores Buru before heading north to Ternate and northern Celebes. His book, published in 1868, is that of a man who would later found a great natural history museum in New York. The volcano, the nutmeg plantations and the Dutch administration appear in it a generation after Dumont d'Urville, seemingly little changed.
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Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1867)

In 1867 Mark Twain boarded the Quaker City in New York with some sixty passengers for one of the first organised cruises to Europe and the Holy Land. Like Énault, he travelled with a party of pilgrims, from Jaffa to Jerusalem, from the Jordan to Nazareth; but where the Parisian is moved, the American mocks the guides, the relics and his own companions. Published in 1869, The Innocents Abroad became its author's best-selling book in his lifetime. Read after Énault, it shows the same sacred road through a sceptical eye, fourteen years later.
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Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1867)

In 1867, Mark Twain sails from New York on the Quaker City for one of the first organised cruises: Gibraltar, Tangier, Italy, Athens, Constantinople, Smyrna, Beirut, the Holy Land and Egypt. It is, twenty-three years later, Thackeray's cruise in an American version, with its pious pilgrims, its travellers who break off souvenirs from the monuments and a narrator who refuses to gush on command. Twain slips onto the Acropolis at night, haggles in the bazaar, is irritated by the relics of Jerusalem and contemplates the Sphinx. Published in 1869, the book became one of the best-selling travel narratives of its day and extends, in a louder tone, the satire of the tourist. See The Innocents Abroad.
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Nicolas Pike, Sub-Tropical Rambles in the Land of the Aphanapteryx (1867-1873)

United States consul at Port Louis from 1867 to 1873, Nicolas Pike devotes his leisure to the natural history of Mauritius and the neighbouring islands. He paints fish, gathers specimens that will end up at Harvard and in the Mauritius herbarium, and travels the island's uplands on foot. His book, published in New York in 1873, carries in its title the name of an extinct bird, the red rail, companion of the dodo. The reader of Flinders finds there the rivers, forests and gorges that the prisoner explored around Vacoas, described by another foreigner settled on the island for a few years.
George Chaworth Musters, At Home with the Patagonians (1869-1870)

In April 1869 the English naval officer George Chaworth Musters left Punta Arenas, the Chilean colony founded in 1848 on the Strait of Magellan, with a small party heading north towards the Santa Cruz River. The route passed by Oazy Harbour, where Dumont d'Urville's officers had spotted a Patagonian camp. Musters then joined the Tehuelche of Casimiro and Orkeke, lived in their hide tents, hunted guanaco and rhea with them, and travelled the length of Patagonia to Carmen de Patagones, on the Río Negro. His book, published in London in 1871, gives names, faces and customs to the "giants" of Peckett Harbour.
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Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus (1871)

In 1869, the Cambridge orientalist Edward Henry Palmer takes part in the survey of Sinai carried out for the Palestine Exploration Fund; he then sets off again with the naturalist Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake to cross on foot, without escort, the desert of the Tih, the limestone plateau that Laborde saw bordering the Wadi Araba to the west. Ten months under a small tent, inscriptions copied in the valleys, nights among the Bedouin who call him Abdallah Effendi: The Desert of the Exodus, published in 1871, seeks, like Laborde's introduction, the traces of the Exodus in the landscape, but with the instruments of a new science. The desert Laborde skirted at last becomes a mapped country.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)

A novelist and journalist, Amelia Edwards arrives in Egypt almost by chance, in November 1873, to escape the rain of Europe. She hires a dahabeah and sails up the Nile beyond Abu Simbel to the Second Cataract, sketching everything she sees. Her book, published in 1877, combines humour, erudition and indignation at monuments mutilated by treasure hunters and visitors. In 1882 she would found the Egypt Exploration Fund, to excavate and protect this heritage. Macbrair had seen the same temples at Thebes, Edfu and Philae; forty years later, Edwards shows what nascent tourism had made of this Nile of missionaries and pashas.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)

Thackeray stops at Cairo and the Pyramids; the English novelist Amelia Edwards, who arrived in Egypt almost by chance in the winter of 1873, goes much further. On a dahabieh, with a friend and a Nubian crew, she sails up the Nile to Abu Simbel and the second cataract, draws the temples, has sand-buried paintings cleared and is outraged by the plundering. Her book, published in 1877, mixes life on board, landscapes and a scholarship that grows page by page. The journey decides her life: in 1882, she founds the Egypt Exploration Fund in London. See A Thousand Miles up the Nile.
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Constance Gordon-Cumming, At Home in Fiji (1875-1877)

In 1875, a year after Fiji was ceded to Great Britain, the Scotswoman Constance Gordon-Cumming accompanies the new governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, to Levuka, Dumont d'Urville's Lebouka, now the capital of a colony. She arrives just after a measles epidemic that decimated the islanders, and the government is not even installed. For two years, watercolour brush in hand, she meets chiefs, visits missions and villages, and observes ceremonies and daily life. At Home in Fiji appears in 1881. The land of vengeances and alliances of 1838 has become a province of the British Empire, and the traveller measures all that has changed within a single generation.
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Anna Brassey, A Voyage in the Sunbeam (1876-1877)

On 1 July 1876 the yacht Sunbeam left England on a voyage round the world, with Thomas and Anna Brassey aboard, together with their children, friends and a crew. The route resembled that of the Astrolabe: a call at Tenerife and a night ascent of the Peak, the crossing of the Line, Rio de Janeiro and its bay, then the south. The day after leaving Buenos Aires, the Sunbeam took off the crew of the Monkshaven, an English sailing ship whose cargo of coal was burning in mid-ocean. Then came Punta Arenas, the Strait of Magellan and the canoes of the Fuegians. Anna Brassey kept the journal of a family at sea, attentive to the ports of call that Dumont d'Urville had described forty years earlier.
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Florence Dixie, Across Patagonia (1878-1879)

Lady Florence Dixie landed at Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan, with her husband, two of her brothers and a few friends. Weary of London drawing rooms, she wanted to go where no one of her world had gone. The small party crossed the pampas of Patagonia on horseback towards the Andes, hunted guanaco and rhea, camped in the wind and met Tehuelche families, the Patagonians whom Dumont d'Urville had received aboard at Peckett Harbour in January 1838. The book, published in 1880, keeps the eye of a horsewoman rather than a scholar, with its fatigues, its meals of game and its immense landscapes. Forty years after the corvettes, the same coast seen from the land.
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Henry Ogg Forbes, A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago (1878-1883)

Between 1878 and 1883, the Scottish naturalist Henry Ogg Forbes travels through Java, Sumatra, then the east of the archipelago, Banda, Buru and the Timor-Laut islands, south of the Aru. A tireless collector of plants and birds, he travels partly with his wife, and his pages on the eastern islands extend those of Wallace, whom he admires. The account, published in 1885, shows the same archipelagos half a century after the French corvettes: the same small ports, the same dependence on the spice trade and on the monsoon winds. It is also a testimony on island societies that colonial administration barely reached.
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Laurence Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (1882-1885)

In 1882 the British writer and former diplomat Laurence Oliphant settled in Haifa, at the foot of Mount Carmel where Énault's journey ends, and spent his summers in a Druze village on the mountain. His letters to the New York Sun, collected in 1887, describe the German Templer colony, the first Jewish villages, the monasteries, the excavations, the Druze and the Bedouin. Where Énault saw a sacred land frozen in its biblical memories, Oliphant observes a changing country, cleared, settled and coveted. The pilgrims' Carmel becomes in his hands a vantage point on modern Palestine.
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Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883)

In 1879, on her way back from Japan, the Englishwoman Isabella Bird stops at Singapore. Invited by the colonial administration, she spends five weeks in the Malay states just placed under British protection: Malacca, Selangor, Perak, aboard small Chinese steamers and then on elephant back through the jungle mud. Her letters, published in 1883 as The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, describe a Singapore that has become a Chinese, Malay and Indian crowd, forty years after the one Dumont d'Urville already found prosperous. The book helps measure the road traveled by the free port the admiral saw growing, and how Britain turned into a protectorate the hinterland of which he saw only the coast.
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Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Before the Civil War, Mark Twain had been a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. In 1882 he went back down the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, weaving into the trip memories of his apprenticeship, pilots' legends, shifting sandbars and the submerged snags that ripped open hulls. This is the river Ernst descended by small boat in 1819, from St. Louis to Natchez, narrowly escaping shipwreck. Sixty years later the towns had grown and the railways were competing with the steamboats, but the river remained the same capricious master.
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Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1888-1889)

On 28 July 1888, before dawn, the yacht Casco approaches Nuku Hiva and enters the bay of Anaho: Robert Louis Stevenson, ill in the lungs, discovers the South Seas. He walks to Hatiheu counting the platforms of abandoned houses, anchors at Taiohae, stays on Hiva Oa with the chiefs of Atuona, then passes to the Tuamotus and the atoll of Fakarava. He listens to chiefs, missionaries and traders, questions old men about the tapu and the wars of former times, and dwells on the depopulation that is emptying the valleys. In the South Seas, gathered into a volume after his death, is the lucid witness of a world that Dumont d'Urville already saw declining as he searched in vain for Porter's villages.
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Charles Morris Woodford, A Naturalist among the Head-hunters (1890)

Between 1886 and 1888, the English naturalist Woodford makes three stays in the Solomon Islands: at Alu and Fauro, then at Aola on Guadalcanal, and finally at Roviana and Nggela. He gathers thousands of specimens and tells of village life, head-hunting expeditions and exchanges with traders. A few years later, he becomes the first resident commissioner of the British Solomon Islands protectorate. His book continues Dumont d'Urville's pages on Isabel and Guadalcanal: the same shores, half a century later, on the threshold of colonisation.
Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa (1891-1893)

In June 1891, Paul Gauguin lands at Papeete hoping to find in Tahiti the paradise that travel narratives had promised him. He discovers a small colonial town, soon leaves it for Mataiea on the south coast, takes a Tahitian companion, Tehura, and paints. Back in Paris in 1893, he writes Noa Noa with the poet Charles Morice to make his canvases understood by the public. The book, half journal and half poem, sings of a dreamed Polynesia and laments the one that missionaries and settlers have transformed. Half a century earlier, before the immense abandoned church of Papa-Oa, Dumont d'Urville was already meditating on the island's past glory: Sic transit gloria mundi.
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Matilde Serao, In the Country of Jesus (1893)

Forty years after Énault, the Neapolitan journalist Matilde Serao, co-founder of the daily Il Mattino, made her own journey to the Holy Land in 1893 and drew from it a series of articles, collected in a volume in 1898. The same profession, the same Catholic faith, the same road to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee. Serao writes with fervour and a keen sense of scene, crowds and colour that recalls her predecessor's. The two journalists, the Parisian of the Second Empire and the Neapolitan of the century's end, form a diptych of pilgrimage as seen by the press.
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Pierre Loti, Jérusalem (1894)

In the spring of 1894, after crossing the Sinai on camelback, Pierre Loti arrives in Jerusalem as a pilgrim without faith, come to seek a religious emotion he does not find. Fifty years after Thackeray, he describes the same Holy Sepulchre crowded with rival sects, the same throngs of pilgrims, a grey city under the rain, but in a tone of fervent melancholy that is the exact opposite of the Englishman's irony. Published in 1895, the book forms with Le Désert and La Galilée an Eastern triptych. To read Loti after Thackeray is to measure how the same place can arouse satire in one and nostalgic fervour in the other. See Jérusalem.
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Pierre Loti, Le Désert (1895)

On 22 February 1894, Pierre Loti leaves the Springs of Moses with a camel caravan, climbs to the monastery of Sinai and goes down towards the Gulf of Aqaba, determined to take the longest route, the one through the desert of Petra, precisely because the guides advise him to avoid it. At Aqaba, the Ottoman administrator bars his way: the tribes of Idumea are in revolt, and Loti must turn off towards Gaza across the desert. Le Désert, published in 1895, is a journal of light and silence, all in shades of sand and granite. It shows what the entry into Petra was worth, won by Laborde through patience and gifts.
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Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1895-1896)

Nearly a century after Flinders, Mark Twain lands in Sydney for a lecture tour. Port Jackson, where the Investigator took on convicts, has become a great city; Port Phillip, the bay barely explored in 1802, shelters Melbourne and its horse races; Adelaide spreads near Gulf St Vincent. Twain is amused by everything, from trains that change gauge to colonial borders and wildlife, but he also listens to the history of the Aboriginal people and judges it severely. His book Following the Equator, published in 1897, shows what the shores Flinders named one by one have become within a few decades.
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Mark Twain, Le Tour du monde (Following the Equator) (1895-1896)

Ruined, Mark Twain sets out in 1895 on a lecture tour around the world. He discovers Sydney, its quays and magnificent harbour, crosses Australia with astonishment mixed with irony, then reaches India and calls at Mauritius. At Port-Louis he pokes fun at the heat and at the islanders' devotion to Paul and Virginia, and reports with mischief that, to hear them tell it, Mauritius was made first and paradise copied from it. Published in 1897, Following the Equator turns into cruise destinations the places where Flinders had known hunger and prison, and reminds us that travel can also be told with laughter.
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Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1895-1898)

In February 1896 Joshua Slocum, alone aboard the Spray, a small sloop rebuilt with his own hands, entered the Strait of Magellan. He called at Punta Arenas, where he was warned about the Fuegians, then sailed along the waters of Port Famine. Canoes followed him; one evening, to sleep in peace, he scattered carpet tacks on his deck, and the night visitors fled howling. Driven towards Cape Horn by a storm at the mouth of the strait, he came back in through the Cockburn Channel before finally reaching the Pacific. The narrows, squalls and anchorages that Dumont d'Urville describes, seen this time by a man alone.
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Frederick William Christian, The Caroline Islands (1899)

In the late 1890s, the English traveller F. W. Christian crosses the then Spanish Carolines: Ponape and its ruins of Nan Madol, Kusaie, Yap, Palau and the lagoon of Truk, the old Hogoleu of this volume. A linguist as much as a traveller, he notes languages, legends and stone monuments. His account lets us see again, sixty years later, the islanders whose canoes had assailed the Astrolabe's boat at Rouk, and measure what missions, whalers and traders have changed in the meantime in these islands the French expedition had barely touched.
Winston Churchill, The River War (1899)

A young officer and war correspondent, Winston Churchill took part in 1898 in Kitchener's campaign against the Mahdist state and fought at Omdurman. His book traces the reconquest of the Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces, the advance up the Nile through Dongola and the railway driven across the desert from Wadi Halfa. Nearly eighty years after Ismail Pasha, another army from Egypt took the same road along the river, between the cataracts and deserts Waddington and Hanbury had crossed. The book also looks back at the conquest of 1820, the starting point of this whole story.
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Odoardo Beccari, Nelle foreste di Borneo (1902)

The Florentine botanist Odoardo Beccari arrives at Kuching in June 1865 and leaves Borneo only in January 1868. He lives in a hut in the heart of the Sarawak forest, collects palms, ferns and carnivorous plants, hunts orangutans and shares the life of the Dayaks, until fever forces him home. He published his account, Nelle foreste di Borneo, in 1902, translated into English two years later. Where this volume gives on Borneo the cold inventory of a Dutch resident, timber, gold, diamonds and tin, Beccari tells of the forest itself, its humidity, its noises and its inhabitants, and offers the reader the interior of the island that the French expedition only guessed at from the sea.
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19th-Century Travel Narratives

Our titles on this subject

19th century

A Voyage to Terra Australis

My First Sea Voyage

Tribulations of a Swiss Man on His Journey to Jerusalem and Lebanon

A German in Illinois

Beyond the Second Cataract

Forty Pilgrims in the Holy Land

Journey through Arabia Petraea

Journey to the Holy Land

Sketches of a Missionary's Travels in Egypt, Syria, Western Africa

Voyage to the South Pole and Oceania

A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions

Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt, and Italy

Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar (1800-1801)

François Péron, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (1800-1804)

François Péron et Louis de Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (1800-1804)

George Annesley, vicomte Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt (1802-1806)

Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803, 1804, 1805 und 1806 (1803-1806)

Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde dans les années 1803, 1804, 1805 et 1806 (1803-1806)

Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde (1803-1806)

Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde, fait dans les années 1803, 1804, 1805 et 1806 (1803-1806)

Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage autour du monde sur la Nadejda et la Neva (1803-1806)

Ali Bey el Abbassi (Domingo Badía), Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie (1803-1807)

Meriwether Lewis et William Clark, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1804-1806)

Meriwether Lewis et William Clark, Histoire de l'expédition sous le commandement des capitaines Lewis et Clark (1804-1806)

Meriwether Lewis et William Clark, Journaux de l'expédition Lewis et Clark (1804-1806)

Mungo Park, The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, in the Year 1805 (1805)

Mungo Park, Journal d'une mission à l'intérieur de l'Afrique (1805)

Mungo Park, Journal d'une mission à l'intérieur de l'Afrique en 1805 (1805-1806)

Mungo Park, Journal d'une mission dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique en 1805 (1805-1806)

Leopold von Buch, Voyage en Norvège et en Laponie (1810)

François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811)

Vassili Golovnine, Mémoires d'une captivité au Japon (1811-1813)

Vasily Golovnin, Narrative of My Captivity in Japan (1811-1813)

Germaine de Staël, Ten Years' Exile (1812)

Ross Cox, Adventures on the Columbia River (1812-1817)

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (1813)

Henry Salt, Voyage en Abyssinie (1814)

Vassili Golovnine, Memoirs of a Captivity in Japan (1816)

Phillip Parker King, Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia (1818-1822)

Phillip Parker King, Relation d'une reconnaissance des côtes intertropicales et occidentales de l'Australie (1818-1822)

Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries in Egypt and Nubia (1820)

Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, Voyage au Brésil dans les années 1815, 1816 et 1817 (1820-1821)

William Edward Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (1821)

George Bethune English, A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar (1822)

Jacques Arago, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World (1822)

Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (1823)

John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1823)

Johann Baptist von Spix et Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831)

Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)

Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql (1826-1827)

Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage de la corvette l'Astrolabe (1826-1829)

Egor Timkovski, Travels of the Russian Mission through Mongolia to China (1827)

John Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China (1828)

John Franklin, Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827 (1828)

Charles Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (1828-1831)

Gottfried Duden, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America (1829)

René Caillié, Journal d'un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné, dans l'Afrique centrale (1830)

Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage de la corvette l'Astrolabe, exécuté par ordre du roi, pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829 (1830-1835)

Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antarctic Seas, 1819-1821 (1831)

Alexander Burnes, Travels into Bokhara (1831-1833)

Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1831-1836)

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836)

Thomas Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1831-1836)

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

Richard et John Lander, Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of the Niger (1832)

George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1832-1839)

Victor Jacquemont, Correspondance de Victor Jacquemont avec sa famille et plusieurs de ses amis, pendant son voyage dans l'Inde (1828-1832) (1833)

Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah (1833-1834)

George Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition (1833-1835)

Alexander Kinglake, Eothen (1834-1835)

Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (1835)

George Alexander Hoskins, Travels in Ethiopia, above the Second Cataract of the Nile (1835)

John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage (1835)

George Borrow, The Bible in Spain (1835-1840)

Alcide d'Orbigny, Voyage dans l'Amérique méridionale (1835-1847)