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.
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James Weddell, A Voyage towards the South Pole, Performed in the Years 1822-24 (1825)
Three years after Bellingshausen, the Scottish sealer James Weddell takes the road to the ice again with two small vessels, the Jane and the Beaufoy. He visits the Orkneys and the South Shetlands, where hunting has already nearly emptied the beaches, then, in February 1823, takes advantage of an exceptionally mild season to go down to 74° 15' south latitude, farther south than any of his predecessors, in the sea that now bears his name. His account shows the other face of the Southern Ocean: no longer the state expedition with learned instructions, but the commercial enterprise that follows closely on discoveries and profits from them.
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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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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.
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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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Ludwig Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington (1844-1845)
Six years after the French visit, the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt sets out from the Moreton Bay region in October 1844 to reach Port Essington overland. More than four thousand kilometers of bush, rivers and escarpments, dwindling provisions, a companion killed in a night attack: the expedition is given up for lost when it finally reaches Victoria, the small colony where Dumont d'Urville had dined with Commodore Bremer. His journal, prefaced in 1846, describes the same isolated post, seen this time from the interior of the continent, as the end of a crossing that the colony had been founded to make possible.
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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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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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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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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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Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869)
Twenty years after the corvettes passed, the English naturalist Wallace travels the Malay Archipelago from 1854 to 1862. He lodges at Ternate, from where in 1858 he sends Darwin his letter on natural selection, and stays at Ambon, whose gardens and transparent sea he describes. In him we find again the Dutch, the sultans, the Chinese and the clove trees that Dubouzet described in 1839, but seen by a man who stays for months and collects birds and insects. The reader of this volume sees the same shores explored in depth, with a patience the navy did not have.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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Adrien de Gerlache, Quinze mois dans l'Antarctique (1902)
In 1897, the Belgica leaves Antwerp with an international crew that includes the young Roald Amundsen and the physician Frederick Cook. Caught in the ice in February 1898 near Peter I Island, the very one Bellingshausen had discovered, she drifts all winter in the sea that now bears the Russian navigator's name. It is the first overwintering of an expedition in Antarctic ice: the polar night, the madness lying in wait, scurvy fought with seal meat. Gerlache tells of these fifteen months with restraint. At the end of the century, his book lets us hear what it cost to linger where Bellingshausen had only passed through.
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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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Otto Nordenskjöld, Antarctica, or Two Years Amongst the Ice of the South Pole (1901-1903)
In 1902, the Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjöld settled to winter on Snow Hill Island, on the edge of the Weddell Sea, in the waters Ross had surveyed in January 1843. The plan went wrong: his ship, the Antarctic, was crushed by the ice, and the crew made their way by boat to Paulet Island, the very island Ross had named, where they spent the winter in a stone hut, living on penguins. The scattered parties finally found one another, and the Argentine gunboat Uruguay came to collect the survivors at the end of 1903. The account, translated into English in 1905, makes these islands a setting of survival and restores to Ross's cartography its due place.
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Otto Nordenskjöld et Johan Gunnar Andersson, Antarctica, or Two Years amongst the Ice of the South Pole (1901-1903)
Sixty years after Dumont d'Urville, the waters around Louis-Philippe Land became the setting of a polar Robinsonade. In February 1902 the ship Antarctic, commanded by Carl Anton Larsen, landed the Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjöld and five companions on Snow Hill Island for a winter stay. Sent to bring them back, the ship was caught in the ice and sank on 12 February 1903; the crew wintered in a stone hut on Paulet Island, while three men spent the winter at Hope Bay in a makeshift shelter. The three groups met again in November 1903 and were picked up by the Argentine corvette Uruguay. The narrative, published in Swedish and then in English in 1905, tells of these two years among the ice.
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Robert Falcon Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery (1901-1904)
Sixty years after Ross, Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery wintered in 1902 at the head of McMurdo Sound, named for the lieutenant of the Terror. Scott follows along the great Barrier that Ross had traced without being able to land on it, even rises above it in a captive balloon, then pushes south with Wilson and Shackleton beyond 82 degrees, on foot and behind poorly used dogs. The narrative, published in 1905, names on every page the capes and volcanoes of Ross, the Erebus and the Terror first among them. What in 1842 was only a wall of ice seen from the deck becomes a territory one crosses, at the price of scurvy and exhaustion.
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Robert Neal Rudmose Brown, Robert Cockburn Mossman et James Hunter Harvey Pirie, The Voyage of the Scotia (1902-1904)
On 25 March 1903, the Scotia of William Speirs Bruce's Scottish expedition dropped anchor in a bay of Laurie Island, in the South Orkneys, which the French corvettes had skirted in February 1838. Held by the ice until 23 November, the team built a stone house, Omond House, and ran a meteorological observatory there. On 22 February 1904, Bruce handed the station over to the Argentine government: this is the Orcadas base, in uninterrupted service ever since. The Scotia then pushed into the Weddell Sea, discovered Coats Land and stayed caught in the pack ice at 74° 01' south. The narrative, written by three members of the expedition and published in 1906, keeps the verve of ships' journals.
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Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Le Français au pôle Sud (1903-1905)
Jean-Baptiste Charcot sailed in 1903 aboard the Français, a three-master built at Saint-Malo, at first to relieve Nordenskjöld's Swedish expedition, which the Argentines had already found. He then turned to the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the other side of those lands Ross had glimpsed from the east under the names of Joinville and Louis-Philippe. Wintering in a bay of Booth Island, hydrographic surveys, magnetic and meteorological observations: the doctor turned seaman takes up, sixty years later, Ross's scientific program. The Français, struck on a rock, came home damaged and was sold to Argentina. The narrative, published in 1906 as Le Français au pôle Sud, keeps the verve of a ship's log.
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Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark (1907-1909)
On 6 December 1907, after sixty days at sea from Hawaii, Jack London's little ketch Snark rounds Point Martin, as the Astrolabe did on 26 August 1838, and enters the bay of Taiohae by night. A reader of Melville since childhood, the writer sets off on horseback for Typee. There he finds a jungle where the house platforms are lost beneath the trees, and a dozen survivors eaten away by leprosy, elephantiasis and tuberculosis. The chapter "Typee" in The Cruise of the Snark, published in 1911, speaks plainly of the depopulation of the Marquesas. It also recalls Porter's expedition against the Taipi, that Porter whose name a hillock in the bay still bears.
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Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Le Pourquoi-Pas ? dans l'Antarctique (1908-1910)
In August 1908, Jean-Baptiste Charcot left Le Havre on the Pourquoi-Pas?, a polar three-master built for him at Saint-Malo, and reached Antarctica in December. Like Dumont d'Urville seventy years earlier, he passed through the South Shetlands: at Deception Island, off which the Astrolabe had known calm weather and its commander's gout, whalers were already established, and the expedition gave their anchorage the name Whalers Bay. Charcot wintered in 1909 on Petermann Island, surveyed the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula and in 1910 discovered the land he named after his father. His journal, published in 1910, extends in French the narrative of the sailors of the Astrolabe.
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Roald Amundsen, Sydpolen (Le Pôle Sud) (1910-1912)
In January 1911, Roald Amundsen set up his base, Framheim, in the Bay of Whales, an indentation in the great Barrier that Ross had followed in 1841 and seen again in 1842, without being able to set foot on it. The Norwegian made the wager of living on the floating ice itself. From there, with four companions and dog sledges, he reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, more than a month ahead of Scott. His narrative, published as early as 1912, is that of a method: marked depots, furs, dogs sacrificed along the way. It closes the story opened by Ross: the Barrier, an impassable wall seen from the ships, becomes the great road to the pole. The Norwegian original is Sydpolen, in English The South Pole.
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Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1910-1913)
In the dead of the southern winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers left Cape Evans for Cape Crozier, which Ross had named for the commander of the Terror. Five weeks in the polar night, in cold that fell below minus 40 degrees, to bring back emperor penguin eggs that the science of the day believed decisive. The three men returned barely alive. A year later, Cherry-Garrard was part of the party that found the tent of Scott, Wilson and Bowers on the Barrier. His book, published in 1922, is probably the finest account of the Antarctic: where Ross measured the ice, he tells what it does to men.
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Ernest Shackleton, South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition, 1914-1917 (1914-1917)
In January 1915, Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, the one Dumont d'Urville had tried to force in February 1838. The ship drifted ten months with the ice before being crushed; it sank on 21 November 1915. The twenty-eight men camped on the floes, then in April 1916 reached Elephant Island by boat, the steep land the corvettes had skirted after the Orkneys. Shackleton set out again with five companions in the James Caird to South Georgia and came back for the others on 30 August 1916 aboard the Chilean Yelcho. South, published in 1919, tells to the end what the commander of the Astrolabe feared during his five days of blockade.
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Ernest Shackleton, South (1919)
The Endurance was meant to cross the Antarctic continent; she is crushed by the ice of the Weddell Sea in 1915. Shackleton tells of the drift on the pack, the arrival at Elephant Island, then the crossing of eight hundred nautical miles in a boat to South Georgia, and the march across the island's interior mountains to the whaling station at Stromness. All his men are saved. The reader of Bellingshausen recognizes the southern coast of South Georgia that the Vostok had charted in 1819, with its glaciers, its mists and its storms, which a century later became the setting of one of the most famous survivals in polar history.
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Robert Lee Eskridge, Manga Reva, the Forgotten Islands (1931)
In 1927, the American painter Robert Lee Eskridge is in Tahiti when Queen Marau tells him of Mangareva, its pearls and its isolation. He sails there and spends eight months in the Gambier Islands, among the last Mangarevans and a handful of Europeans. He paints, listens to stories of tupapau, the spirits of the dead, and devotes a chapter to the island's missionary past, of which the great cathedral of Rikitea remains the monument. In August 1838, Dumont d'Urville already saw, in the old temple of Riki-Tea, the blocks of coral cut for the church to come, and regretted so much labour. Published in 1931, the book shows what the islands of King Mapu-teoa had become a century later.
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Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (1974-1975)
At the end of 1974 Bruce Chatwin set off for Patagonia on the trail of a piece of mylodon skin, the prehistoric animal that Charley Milward, a cousin of his grandmother and a sailor settled in Punta Arenas, had sent to England. From Buenos Aires to Tierra del Fuego he gathered the stories of Welsh settlers, North American outlaws, anarchists and exiles, and went back as far as Pigafetta's Patagonian giants and the origin of their name. Published in 1977, his book of short chapters renewed travel writing. In it we meet again the strait, the Patagonians and the memory of the predecessors whom Dumont d'Urville reviewed before entering Port Famine.
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Tim Severin, The Spice Islands Voyage (1997)
In the 1990s, the adventurer Tim Severin retraces Wallace's route in the Moluccas aboard a prau built for the occasion, named Alfred Wallace. From island to island, from Ambon to Banda and the Aru Islands, he looks for what remains of the birds, forests and villages the naturalist described in the nineteenth century. His book closes a long chain of gazes on these spice islands: after the Dutch, Dumont d'Urville and Wallace, a traveller of the late twentieth century measures what time has done to the garden of Ambon.