First Europeans in Argentina: the discovery of the River Plate and Patagonia

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.

• Crónica del Perú, Pedro de Cieza de León, 1553 (1553)

  The soldier-chronicler traveled the same roads as Lizárraga, a generation earlier. He saw Cajamarca after Atahualpa, Cuzco after Pizarro, Potosí in its earliest days. His prose, simple and precise, is the great source for descriptions of Peru during the conquest. Lizárraga knows it and sometimes cites it without saying so. To read Cieza after Lizárraga is to go back a generation, to find the cities under their first coats of plaster, the Indians still close to the shock of conquest.

• Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's Voyage (c. 1524) (c. 1524)

  In the same bay of San Julián, in 1520, Magellan wintered for five months and faced a mutiny. The Vicentine knight Pigafetta recorded there the meeting with the Patagonian “giants”, matrix of all later fables. Two centuries later, Cardiel and Quiroga walk on foot through the same mud, open the same grave, measure the same bones and conclude: ordinary size. To read Pigafetta and then Lozano is to witness the birth and death of a myth.

• Willem Schouten et Jacob Le Maire, Journal ou description du merveilleux voyage de Guillaume Schouten (1618)

  To escape the monopoly of the Company, which alone may use the Strait of Magellan, merchants of Hoorn seek another passage. In 1616, Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten discover the strait that bears the former's name, then round a cape they christen Hoorn. They then cross the Pacific by islands that Van Noort never saw, the Tuamotus, Tonga, New Ireland, before arriving at Java, where the Company confiscates their ship. Read after the journal of 1598, this account shows how quickly Holland learns the Pacific: within twenty years, the sea that had nearly swallowed Van Noort becomes a known road.

• Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum Orientalis Occidentalisque Indiae Navigationum (1619)

  Fifteen years after Van Noort, Joris van Spilbergen takes up his route on behalf of the East India Company. Setting out in 1614 with six ships, he passes through the Strait of Magellan, follows the coast of Chile, crushes a Spanish squadron off Peru in 1615, ransoms Paita, negotiates at Acapulco, then crosses the Pacific to the Philippines and the Moluccas. His account, published in 1619 with that of Le Maire and Schouten, reads like a successful version of the first: same itinerary, same enemies, same ports, but a better-armed state fleet, which makes the South Sea a regular theater of the Dutch war against Spain.

• William Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland (1703)

  Seventy years before Cook, a former buccaneer turned explorer had been the first Englishman to describe New Holland, touching its west coast in 1699. Dampier saw there only an arid land and people he judged wretched, and left again without suspecting the immensity of the continent. Reading his account alongside Cook's is to measure the distance covered in three generations: one man happens upon a forbidding shore, the other methodically charts an entire coastline and gives it a name. The same country, seen through two ages of navigation.

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

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

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

  A century and a half later, an English squadron retraces Van Noort's course with the same ambition: to plunder the Spanish coast of the Pacific and intercept the gold of Manila. The official account of George Anson's expedition tells of Cape Horn in the storm, scurvy killing hundreds of men, the stopover at Juan Fernandez, the sack of Paita, the crossing to Guam, then the capture of the Manila galleon off the Philippines in 1743. A single ship returns, laden with silver. The resemblances to the journal of 1598 are striking: same sea, same enemies, same slaughter, but this time plunder equal to the losses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Thomas Falkner, A Description of Patagonia (1774)

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

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

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

• William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea (1787-1789)

  Bligh learned his craft as a navigator under Cook, serving as his sailing master on the third voyage. In 1788 he returns to Matavai to collect breadfruit trees and spends five months there. What Cook had only glimpsed, the slow corrosion of a crew by the softness of the islands, erupts here into mutiny. The same anchorage, the same chief Otoo grown more powerful, the same seamanship, and a human catastrophe that Cook had feared but never lived through.

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

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

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

  Vancouver was aboard the Resolution, a boy of fifteen, when she crossed the Antarctic Circle. Twenty years later he commands his own expedition and returns to Dusky Bay in 1791 to finish the survey his former captain had left incomplete in a corner of his chart. There he finds the stumps of trees felled by Cook's carpenters, the site of the forge, the traces of the anchorage. Reading this passage after this volume is dizzying: it is the first return to the scene of a book.

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

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

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

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

• Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814)

  A generation after Cook, a young English officer set out to circumnavigate New Holland in full and to prove that it formed a single continent. Flinders completed the survey the Endeavour had begun on the east coast, and proposed for this land the name Australia, which prevailed. His account, published in 1814, extends Cook's endeavour from one end of the coastline to the other, with the same hydrographer's rigour and the same endurance in the face of reefs and contrary winds.

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• Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, Alexander von Humboldt, 1814–1825 (1814-1825)

  The Prussian scholar retraces the Andean journey with the instruments of the Age of Enlightenment. Quito, Lima, Cajamarca, Chimborazo, the mercury of Huancavelica: the same places, seen through the eyes of the naturalist. Humboldt seldom cites Lizárraga, but he walks in his shadow, and the two books placed end to end offer a panorama spanning three centuries: colonial Peru still brand new in one, colonial Peru in its final stretch in the other.

• James Weddell, A Voyage Towards the South Pole (1822-1824)

  The title is the same as Cook's, and that is no accident. In 1823, a Scottish sealer sails down to 74° 15' south, farther than the Resolution, across a sea free of ice that he cannot explain. Cook had declared the question closed; Weddell reopens it for good. A spare, harsh narrative, with no scholarly pretension, written by a man whose trade was killing seals and who discovered a sea instead.

• 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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• Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1839)

  Between 1832 and 1835 the Beagle follows almost the whole South American route of Van Noort. Darwin calls at Port Desire, the Port Desire where Captain Huydecoper was buried, goes up the Strait of Magellan, observes the Fuegians, then follows the coast of Chile from Chiloe to Valparaiso, feels the earthquake of 1835 at Valdivia and then discovers Concepcion in ruins. Where the Dutch journal saw only watering places, enemies and provisions to be taken, the naturalist reads marine terraces, fossils and birds. The same places, two centuries later, become the laboratory of an idea that will change biology.

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• Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches (1839)

  Aboard the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Darwin in his turn skirts Brazil, touches the Falklands, rounds Cape Horn, stays in Chile and Peru, then spends five weeks in the Galápagos in September 1835, before returning by the Cape. Where Rogers sought fresh water and tortoises to feed his crews, the young naturalist notes the differences from island to island among the finches and the giant tortoises. His journal, published in 1839, changes the way these archipelagos are seen, which the Bristol privateers took for dry and useless rocks. See Journal of Researches.

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• Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) (1839)

  The young English naturalist anchored in 1834 off Puerto Deseado and San Julián. He found a country almost unchanged since Cardiel: the same cliffs, the same guanacos, the same solitude. But Darwin adds the question of deep time, that of the fossils buried in the barrancas. His Patagonian chapter, written a century after the San Antonio, gives the Jesuits' inhospitable landscape a geological and evolutionary dimension they could not have suspected.

• 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.

• Souvenirs d'un voyage au Chili, Gabriel Lafond de Lurcy, 1843 (1843)

  The French sailor frequented the ports of the southern Pacific coast in the years following independence. His pages on Valparaíso, on Callao, on the ruins of Arica take the measure of time passed: the same bays, the same winds, but the Spanish banners have vanished, and the Creole republics seek a new order amid the setting Lizárraga once inventoried.

• 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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• Herman Melville, Les Encantadas ou îles enchantées (1854)

  In 1841 the whaler Acushnet sails past Albemarle Island, in the Galápagos, with a young sailor named Herman Melville aboard. Thirteen years later, under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor, he publishes in Putnam's Monthly ten sketches of these islands of ash and lava, peopled by tortoises, hermits and former buccaneer lairs. He cites the old buccaneer accounts, such as Cowley's, by sailors who, before and after Rogers, came there for tortoises. The text, reprinted in 1856 in The Piazza Tales, turns into a moral landscape the archipelago that Rogers's journal describes as a hurried seaman. The sketches are The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.

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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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• Francisco Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia austral (1879)

  The young Argentine scholar explored southern Patagonia to assert national sovereignty against the Chilean claim. He rediscovered the bay of San Julián, the salt lagoons, the Indian trails. His accounts would serve to fix the modern border. A century and a half after Cardiel, the same coast became a political stake again, but this time between republics.

• Lady Florence Dixie, Across Patagonia (1880)

  A Scottish aristocrat sets out to hunt in the south with her brother, her dogs and a cook, and brings back the first Patagonian narrative written by a woman. The tone is that of a pleasure party, and that is precisely what is striking: where Viedma counted his sick and his weevil-ridden flour, here people picnic and take photographs. A century was enough to turn a deadly end of the world into a sporting ground.

• Pierre Loti, Le Mariage de Loti (1880)

  A century after Cook, the French naval officer Julien Viaud, under the name Loti, landed at Tahiti and drew from it a melancholy novel published in 1880. The island of the kings Otoo had become a protectorate, the monarchy was dying out, the population had dwindled. Loti mourns an already lost paradise. To read this book after Cook's is to measure, across a century, the collapse of a world the navigator had still seen sovereign and populous, and to feel the weight of what the encounter carried away.

• 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.

• 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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• William Henry Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (1893)

  A naturalist born on the pampa, Hudson spends months motionless on the banks of the Río Negro, one arm in a sling, watching the birds and the wind. His book invents a way of speaking of the Patagonian emptiness as an inner experience. After Viedma's latitudes, this reading gives the sensation that the journal lacks: what it does to a man to live in a landscape where nothing happens for weeks.

• Ramón Lista, Viaje al país de los tehuelches (1894)

  Explorer and governor of the territory of Santa Cruz, Lista goes up the river that Viedma had not been able to ascend and reaches by land the lakes of the Cordillera. He finds, drained of strength, the groups whose population the 1783 journal estimated at four thousand souls. The two texts, a hundred and eleven years apart, read like a before and an after from which one does not emerge unscathed.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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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• Aux pays de l'argent, Jules Huret, 1911 (1911)

  The reporter for Le Figaro crosses South America on the eve of the First World War. Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Potosí, La Paz, Lima: he visits the same places as Lizárraga, but with a train, a camera, a journalist's notebook. The Inca cities have become tourist attractions, the Potosí mine is nearly exhausted, and the colonial legacy shows through everywhere like bones beneath the sand.

• 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)

  One hundred and forty years after Cook turned back before the pack ice, an Irishman sails his ship into the same ice and is crushed by it. What Cook guessed from the masthead without ever seeing it, Shackleton lives from the inside, on foot, on the drifting ice. No book gives a better physical sense of what the Resolution came close to, nor a better understanding of the wisdom of the captain who, at 71° south latitude, said no.

• Alain Gerbault, À la poursuite du soleil (1929)

  A solitary navigator of the 1920s, Gerbault sailed across the Pacific and stayed for a long time in the Society Islands, whose inhabitants he loved to the point of wanting to defend them. His account, published in 1929, revisits Tahiti, Huaheine, and Ulietea two centuries after Cook. The contrast is striking: the same lagoons, the same names, but a world upended by colonization and disease. Gerbault, a disappointed lover of Polynesia, offers the sensitive, engaged counterpart to the captain's clinical gaze.

• 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.

• Thor Heyerdahl, Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (1957)

  In 1955, the Norwegian explorer Heyerdahl set up an archaeological expedition at Rapa Nui and made the statues that Cook had only glimpsed speak. Excavations, the raising of a giant, accounts from the island's last inhabitants about its spirits: the book, a worldwide bestseller, carries forward as inquiry what Cook had left as an enigma. His theories have been disputed, but his account retains the force of a man who wanted to understand how these colossi had been carved, moved, and raised.

• 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.

• Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (1977) (1977)

  The English traveller crosses Patagonia in the footsteps of a piece of mylodon skin brought back by a forebear. A fragmentary, poetic account, obsessed with earlier narratives, it meets Cardiel, Darwin and Magellan everywhere, without always naming them. The best contemporary guide for finding, in the silences of the pampa, the echo of the Jesuit voyages.

• 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.

• Sylvain Tesson, La Panthère des neiges and Patagonian notebooks

  In several recent French travellers, the Patagonian coast appears in filigree: in Le Clézio, in Kessel, in Tesson. The austral desert has become a topos there, almost a commonplace; one must return to the Jesuits of 1746 to find this coast when it was still a blank on the map, a coast of the Patagons that people doubted was inhabited at all.