First Europeans in Canada: early explorers in their own words

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.

• Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (c. 1230)

  A century after Adam, the Icelander Snorri recounts from within the kings the canon knew only by hearsay. Harald Bluetooth, the two Olafs, and Cnut the Great reappear here, but seen by the Norsemen themselves, with their sagas, their skalds, and their own memory. To read Snorri after Adam is to hear the other version of the same history, that of the conquered finally given voice.

• Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum (c. 1200)

  Around 1200, this Danish clerk composed in Latin the great chronicle of his people. He knew Adam's work and carried it forward, giving the Danish kings their national epic. Here one meets the heroes and legends that Bremen had barely glimpsed, in an ample language that seeks to rival the Ancients.

• Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555)

  In 1555, this Swedish prelate, exiled in Rome, published a vast description of Scandinavia, illustrated with famous engravings. Five centuries after Adam, he still describes the same ice, the same sea monsters, the same peoples of the far reaches, but with the eye of the Renaissance. Adam's wonder survives here, barely tempered by the new science.

• Marc Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609)

  A Parisian lawyer who embarked for Port-Royal in 1606, Lescarbot spent a year in Acadia and published, in 1609, the first great French book about the country. He describes the Souriquois, that is, the direct ancestors of those Maillard calls Mi'kmaq, a hundred and thirty years earlier, before the permanent missions and before eau-de-vie. This is the obligatory starting point: the same coast, the same people, a world still intact.

• Pierre Biard, Relation de la Nouvelle France (1616)

  Published in 1616, the account by Acadia's first Jesuit opens the long series of Relations that would make America's missions known to Europe. Biard tells of the difficult beginnings, the misunderstandings of language, the illnesses. In his account, everything Maillard would later live through still had to be invented: how to speak to the elders, the missionary's place in the assembly, the art of being heard without being obeyed.

• Gabriel Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons (1632)

  Paris, 1632. The Recollect friar produced the first long term ethnography of the Huron-Wendat nation, kin to Cartier's Iroquoians, in their homeland by Georgian Bay.

• Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France occidentale, dicte Canada (1632)

  Paris, 1632. Seventy years after Cartier, Champlain sailed up the same river, founded Quebec in 1608, and then explored the hinterland as far as the Great Lakes. It was with him that the French presence took lasting root.

• Thomas James, The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James (1633)

  In May 1631, Thomas James left Bristol aboard the Henrietta Maria to take up the quest where Hudson had left it. In the bay he met another seeker of the passage, Luke Foxe, who had sailed from London the same season, then headed south, into the bottom of the bay where Hudson had wintered and which today bears the name of James. He spent the winter on Charlton Island, deliberately sank his ship to save it from the ice, refloated it in the spring and returned to Bristol in October 1632. His Strange and Dangerous Voyage, published in 1633, tells of hunger, cold and prayer, and reaches the same conclusion as Hudson's journals: that way, no passage opens toward Asia.

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• Luke Foxe, North-West Fox, or Fox from the North-West Passage (1635)

  Twelve years after Munk, in 1631, Luke Foxe leaves London in the Charles, a small pinnace, passes by Orkney and enters Hudson Strait in June. He follows the west coast of the bay, finds at Port Nelson the traces of Thomas Button's wintering, meets his rival Thomas James by chance, then heads north into the basin that now bears his name. He returns in October having neither wintered nor lost a man. His book, published in 1635, mixes ship's journal with a history of earlier voyages: ideal reading for measuring what Munk had paid so dearly.

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• Abel Tasman, Journal de voyage (1643)

  In 1643, the Dutch navigator is the first to reach the islands he names Amsterdam and Middelburg, that is Tongatapu and Eua, a hundred and thirty-four years before Cook. His journal, brief and wary, notes the bartering, the canoes, the deceptive gentleness of the welcome. To read it again before this volume is to take the measure of what Cook finds unchanged and of what he comes to understand beyond it: where Tasman saw only a welcoming coast, Cook untangles a kingship, a taboo, an empire of islands.

• Nicolas Denys, Description géographique et historique des costes de l'Amérique septentrionale (1672)

  A merchant, fisherman, and grantee of Cape Breton, Denys published in 1672 the book of a man who had spent forty years on these coasts. In it one finds the harbors, the fisheries, the woods, the customs, and already the trade liquor. This is the concrete geography of Maillard's setting, described by someone who earned his living there rather than saving souls.

• Friedrich Martens, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise-Beschreibung (1675)

  In the spring of 1671, the Hamburg barber-surgeon Friedrich Martens shipped aboard a whaler, the Jonas im Walfisch, bound for Spitsbergen. Sixty years earlier, the whales reported by Hudson in 1607 had drawn English and Dutch fleets into these bays; Martens found an established industry there, with its boats, its harpoons and its try-works. While the crew hunted, he observed: the ice breaking away from the glaciers, the polar bear, the walrus, the seabirds, and the scurvy grass, the same plant the survivors of the mutiny gathered on the islands of the bay. His Reise-Beschreibung, printed in Hamburg in 1675, was translated into Italian, Dutch and English.

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• Jasper Danckaerts, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 (1679-1680)

  In 1679, two Dutch travellers belonging to the Labadist sect, Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, landed in New York in search of land on which to found their community. Seventy years after Hudson's passage, New Amsterdam had become English, but Dutch was still spoken there. Danckaerts travelled through Manhattan, Long Island and New Jersey, went up the river as far as Albany, and noted everything: the farms, the taverns, the Indians still living on the edges of the villages, the quarrels between the churches. Rediscovered in Amsterdam in the nineteenth century and published in 1867, his journal shows what had become, in two generations, of the country whose shores, encounters and skirmishes Juet had described.

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• Chrestien Le Clercq, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (1691)

  The indispensable book for understanding the chapter on hieroglyphics. The Recollet friar tells how, around 1677, he saw children mark signs in charcoal on birch bark to count the words of their prayers, and how he drew from this a system of writing that let them learn in a single day what weeks of recitation had failed to give them. The editors of 1863 quote this passage at length in a note to Maillard's text, and raise the question that remains open: which of the two invented it, and which perfected it?

• Nicolas Jérémie, Relation du détroit et de la baie d'Hudson (1694-1714)

  Born near Quebec, Nicolas Jérémie arrives at Hudson Bay in 1694 with Iberville as interpreter and clerk at Fort Bourbon, on the west coast. Taken prisoner by the English, he comes back, serves again, then commands the post from 1708 to 1714, before handing it over to the English after the Treaty of Utrecht. His Relation, published in Amsterdam in 1720, describes the rivers, animals and peoples of the bay. In it one reads the name "Danish River," given to the Churchill in memory of Munk's expedition: a century later, the Danish wintering was still written into the geography of the place.

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• Pierre-Esprit Radisson, Voyages (c. 1669)

  Written around 1669, published only in the nineteenth century. The coureur de bois traces the fur trade routes as far as Hudson Bay. A hybrid text, written in English by a Frenchman.

• Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal d'un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l'Amérique septentrionale (1744)

  Published in 1744, the great account by the Jesuit who crossed New France from the Saint Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. It fixed the French image of North America for a century. Curiously, it is also part of this book's own file: the London editor of 1758 appended to his abridged translation of Maillard an extract from a letter by Charlevoix, to complete what his volume did not provide.

• Henry Ellis, A Voyage to Hudson's-Bay, by the Dobbs Galley and California (1748)

  In 1746 and 1747, two ships fitted out on the initiative of Arthur Dobbs, the Dobbs Galley and the California, resume the quest for the Northwest Passage along the western coast of Hudson Bay. Henry Ellis, hired as a scientific observer, measures the tides, notes the winds and whales, explores Wager Bay and describes the Inuit, their fires and their seal-hunting gear. His book, which appeared in 1748, also retraces the history of earlier searches and concludes that no navigable passage opens from the bay. In a way it closes the chapter that Munk had opened for Denmark more than a century before.

• Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America (1749)

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

• Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America (1753-1761)

  A pupil of Linnaeus, the Swede Pehr Kalm set out for North America in 1748, charged with bringing back useful plants. On 10 June 1749, he left New York on one of the river's merchant sloops and sailed up the Hudson to Albany, arriving on the morning of the 13th. He describes the Highlands drowned in mist, the sturgeon leaping out of the water, the tide rising well beyond Albany, the red cedar boats loaded with timber, flour and furs, and wonders about this river that cuts straight through the mountains. His account, published in Stockholm from 1753 to 1761, retraces the ascent of 1609 as a naturalist, with a fresh eye on the same landscape.

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• Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage round the World (1768)

  In April 1768, the Boudeuse anchors off Tahiti, which Bougainville names New Cythera and leaves after nine days, leaving behind anchors and a legend. His account, written by a gentleman-philosopher, single-handedly invents the Polynesian myth that will occupy Europe for a century. To read it before this volume is to measure the distance between the dream and the inquiry: where Bougainville sees an island of gentleness, Cook and Anderson count ranks, wars, the skulls of the morai. The anchor bought back at Bora Bora is the thread linking the two books.

• Georg Forster, A Voyage round the World (1772-1775)

  Son of the naturalist embarked on the second voyage, Forster is seventeen when he discovers Tahiti and the Society Islands. His account, published in 1777, the very year this volume is set in, is the first great literary text to come out of Cook's voyages: sensitive prose, at times indignant, alert to what the arrival of Europeans destroys. He describes the same beaches, the same chiefs, the same war fleet, but through the eyes of an adolescent who refuses to be merely a witness.

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

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

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

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

• Jean-Baptiste Barthélemy de Lesseps, Travels in Kamtschatka, During the Years 1787 and 1788 (1787-1788)

  The sole survivor of the La Pérouse expedition was the one who was sent home. In September 1787, at twenty-two, Lesseps landed at St. Peter and St. Paul with his commander's journals and orders to carry them to Versailles overland. It took him a year to cross Kamchatka, Siberia and Russia, by dog sledge and then by reindeer, along exactly the routes King had just described. He passed through Bolcheretsk, stopped at Clerke's grave, and found the same jourts, the same toions, the same bears. No other book continues this one so closely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Fort Prince of Wales stood at the mouth of the Churchill River, where, a century and a half earlier, Munk had watched his crew die. From there Samuel Hearne, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, sets out on foot between 1769 and 1772, guided by the Dene chief Matonabbee, to the mouth of the Coppermine River and the Arctic Ocean. He finds that the continent offers no passage by land, and lives to the rhythm of the northern peoples, their hunts and their famines. Published in 1795, his account shows what Munk could not have learned: how to survive the winter of the bay.

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• Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Ecrits sur le Canada (c. 1758)

  Written around 1758. The future navigator spent three years alongside Montcalm in New France before setting off to sail around the world. The gaze of an Enlightenment philosopher on the colony on the eve of its fall.

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

  The Baudin expedition spends the summer of 1802 in Van Diemen's Land and spends long hours with the inhabitants of the south-east coast, the very people who come out of the woods at Adventure Bay in this volume. Péron, a young scholar as curious as he is talkative, notes their names, their songs, their manners, and takes it upon himself to measure their physical strength, in tests that say more about him than about them. It is the last great testimony before everything changes.

• Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage Round the World in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 & 1806 (1803-1806)

  Twenty-five years later, Russia finally did what King had imagined for it. Krusenstern linked Kamchatka to Japan and Canton, carried an embassy to Nagasaki that waited six months only to be turned away, surveyed the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin, and sold the Russian-American Company's furs at Canton. Page after page, one reads the programme of Chapter 19 carried out by others, and the first serious answer to the question King left open: what would happen if Kamchatka traded directly with Japan?

• John Martin, Récit de William Mariner aux îles Tonga (1806-1810)

  In 1806, an English ship's boy named William Mariner survives the massacre of his ship's crew and lives for four years among the Tongans, adopted by a chief, learning the language and the wars of the archipelago. Dictated to Dr Martin, his testimony is the most intimate account we have of that society from within. It illuminates, better than any other, what Cook could only glimpse from the outside: the meaning of the taboo, the place of the sacred king, the logic of the festivities that this volume describes with wonder.

• Archibald Campbell, A Voyage Round the World (1809-1810)

  Thirty years after the tragedy, a shipwrecked Scottish sailor, both feet amputated, washes up at Hawaii and spends thirteen months there, from 1809 to 1810, under the protection of King Kamehameha, the Maiha-Maiha of this volume. He lives in Honolulu, weaves sailcloth for the sovereign, and observes a court where iron, ships and muskets have changed everything, yet where the old order of the chiefs still holds. No other book shows so well what became, in a single generation, of the world described in the last chapters of this volume.

• Otto von Kotzebue, Entdeckungsreise in die Süd-See und nach der Berings-Straße (1815-1818)

  In 1815, a Russian officer sets out again to find, in the very strait where Cook had stopped, the passage he had not been able to force. Aboard the brig Rurik, with the poet and naturalist Chamisso on board, Kotzebue discovers north of the strait a vast bay that today bears his name, and uncovers cliffs of fossil ice mixed with earth. He prowls along the pack ice, questions the Chukchi, and meets the same refusal as his predecessor. Forty years on, the Arctic has given up nothing.

• Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits (1815-1818)

  In 1816, a Russian captain set out again to find the passage where Cook and Clerke had failed. He discovered the great sound that now bears his name on the American coast, found cliffs of fossil ice full of mammoth bones, measured the currents of the strait and ran into the same pack ice, in the same place, at the same season. The naturalist aboard, Chamisso, the very man who had written Peter Schlemihl, kept for his part the liveliest journal of the expedition. Two generations, one single barrier.

• Jacques Arago, A Narrative of a Voyage Round the World (1819)

  Draughtsman of the Freycinet expedition, Arago lands at Hawaii in August 1819, a few weeks after the death of Kamehameha and a few months before his son publicly overturns the law of the taboo. He thus witnesses the last summer of the order whose rules King had, forty years earlier, patiently taken apart. His pen is lively, talkative, often unfair, and prodigiously alive; one sees chiefs in European dress, abandoned morais, and prohibitions no one troubles to observe any longer. The end of a world seen by a man who does not know he is watching it.

• Ferdinand von Wrangel, Narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea (1820-1824)

  Chapter 7 of this volume argues that the coast between Cape Shelagskoy and North Cape must curve westward, and that almost nothing remains unknown. Wrangel went to find out. From 1820 to 1824, he set out from the Kolyma, Deshnev's own river, and pushed out onto the sea ice by dog sledge four times, searching for the land the Chukchi said they could see to the north. He never found it, came close more than once to being lost on a drifting ice floe, but finally surveyed the coast King had guessed at. The island he never reached now bears his name.

• William Ellis, Polynesian Researches (1822-1825)

  A missionary at Huahine and then in Hawaii in the 1820s, Ellis saw both archipelagos of this volume at the hinge of their upheaval. He speaks the languages, gathers genealogies and myths, describes the temples before their demolition and the rites at the moment they are abandoned. His testimony confirms, corrects, and completes almost everything Cook noted in haste, and lets us understand afterward what the sacrifice of Attahooroo meant.

• John Williams, Récit d'entreprises missionnaires dans les mers du Sud (1823)

  The missionary who lands at Rarotonga in 1823 and travels through the Cook Islands and the Friendly Islands opens the century that will transform these societies from top to bottom. His book, a bestseller in Victorian England, tells with fervour what Cook had left untouched and what the mission sets out to remake. Between the two accounts lies everything that shifts: the gods abandoned, the bark cloth replaced, the taboo abolished. Williams pays with his life, at Erromango, for the work he believes he is bringing.

• Frederick William Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait (1825-1828)

  In 1826, the Blossom pushes farther than Cook had been able to go. Beechey rounds Icy Cape, reaches Point Barrow, the northwesternmost point of America, and waits there for a Franklin coming overland who never arrives. He completes, mile by mile, the chart this volume left unfinished at the wall of pack ice, and describes the Esquimaux of the coast and their dealings with the Chukchi across the water. His account closes, half a century later, the line Cook had traced to the exact point where the ice had turned him back.

• Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie (1827-1840)

  The French navigator crosses New Zealand twice, in 1827 and again in 1840, and anchors in Queen Charlotte's Sound on the eve of the Treaty of Waitangi. He knows his Cook by heart and quotes him at every cove. Sixty years lie between the two accounts: the muskets, the missions, the wars that empty the bays, and chiefs who now know very well what a ship's arrival means.

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• Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1840)

  What Cook's expedition had missed, America accomplished in 1840. Wilkes led two hundred men and tons of instruments to the summit of Mauna Loa, camped there for weeks in the snow, and measured gravity with a pendulum. The account of that ascent, with its Hawaiian porters, its frozen tents and its smoking crater, answers directly to the aborted climb of chapter 8, when three officers turned back before a field of scorched stone. Sixty years separate the two attempts, and the same volcano measures them both.

• George Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia (1865-1867)

  In 1865, an American company set out to link New York to Moscow by telegraph, routed through Alaska, the Bering Strait and Siberia. Kennan, twenty years old, was tasked with surveying the line from Kamchatka to the Anadyr. He lived for two years among the nomadic Koryaks and the Chukchi, described their reindeer herds, their jourts and their shamans, and found himself one day a thousand versts from anywhere, learning that the transatlantic cable had just been laid and that his telegraph line no longer had any purpose. The country of Chapters 11 to 14, a century later, almost unchanged.

• Mark Twain, Letters from the Sandwich Islands (1866)

  In 1866 a young journalist lands at Honolulu for a Sacramento newspaper and stays four months. Twain visits the plantations, descends into the crater of Kilauea, tries surfing and drinks the cup, then has himself taken to Kealakekua, before the monument to Cook, where he writes a few cold pages on what the captain did or did not deserve. The comedy poorly covers a real melancholy: the kingdom he crosses is that of this volume, but depopulated, converted, indebted, and already turning toward California.

• Isabella Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands (1873)

  In 1873, a forty-year-old Englishwoman, sickly and fearless, travels across Hawaii on horseback, sidesaddle then astride, sleeps in huts, descends to the rim of the Kilauea crater, and rides up the valleys of Kauai. A century after Cook, she finds a Christian kingdom, a constitutional monarchy, sugar plantations, and beneath all of it the same volcanic land and the same names. The contrast with the beach at Waimea in January 1778 fits into a single book.

• Pierre Loti, An Iceland Fisherman (1886)

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the French novelist follows Breton sailors on their campaigns across the icy fishing banks of Iceland. Adam's Thule, a land where the ice burns, has become a place of toil and mourning. The novel gives flesh, eight centuries on, to the dread the canon felt before these seas at the edge of the world.

• Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1888-1890)

  Ill and seeking a climate, the Scottish writer sails from 1888 to 1890 from the Marquesas to the Gilberts, listens, questions, and refuses the postcard view. He describes societies that still remember the tabou and the morai, and a depopulation he attributes plainly to European contact. On the Society Islands, and on what Cook left there without meaning to, his pages are worth more than many treatises.

• Basil Thomson, Les Distractions d'un premier ministre (1890-1891)

  At the end of the nineteenth century, a young British official becomes, almost by chance, prime minister of the kingdom of Tonga, the only Polynesian state never to have been colonised. His book, witty and perceptive, describes a monarchy heir to the old order of Poulaho's Tu'i Tonga, with its rites, its ranks and its taboos still very much alive. Beneath the Christian veneer, one recognises the archipelago that Cook had believed he understood, and the sacred kingship he had sensed behind the pomp of Feenou.

• Fridtjof Nansen, Vers le pôle (1893-1896)

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the Norwegian explorer Nansen lets his ship, the Fram, become locked in Arctic ice so as to drift toward the pole. A distant heir to the sailors of this book, he faces the same pack ice, the same white silence, the same sea that decides in place of men. Nansen, who also studied the history of Norse voyages, knew what he owed these ancestors. His account extends, in the age of science, the adventure begun a thousand years earlier by Vikings releasing ravens to find land.

• Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Le Pays de l'aventure (1906-1918)

  At the start of the twentieth century, this explorer of Icelandic descent, born in Canada, travels the Arctic and lives for years among the Inuit. A descendant of the settlers whose epic this book tells, he closes the circle in a sense: the distant sons of the Norsemen return to the New World, no longer to name it, but to learn to live there alongside those their forebears called Skraelings. His testimony offers the counterpoint the sagas lack: that of a genuine encounter with the peoples of the Arctic.

• Raymond Rallier du Baty, Aventures aux Kerguelen (1907-1909)

  In 1907, a young Breton buys an old dundee, names her the J.-B. Charcot, and sets off with five men to spend more than a year on the land Cook called the Island of Desolation. He hunts sea-elephants, draws charts, winters in the fjords, and describes the same blue rock, the same kelp, the same penguins by the thousand. No other book better conveys what Cook only skirted for eight days.

• Georges Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future (1928)

  In 1928, Georges Duhamel crossed the Atlantic and spent a few weeks in the United States. He brought back Scenes from the Life of the Future, published in 1930, an indictment of a civilisation of machines, advertising and standardisation. The Chicago slaughterhouses, the cinema, the motor car, the hurried crowd: Duhamel often pauses before the same sights as the prince and sees in them the threat of a mechanical future for Europe. The comparison sheds light on both books: the Egyptian prince is irritated by the noise and the advertisements but admires the organisation, whereas the French writer, sixteen years later, sees in it little more than servitude.

• Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (1947)

  From January to May 1947, Simone de Beauvoir travelled the United States on a lecture tour: New York, Chicago, where she met Nelson Algren, the journey west, California, the deserts and Indian villages of the Southwest, then the South. America Day by Day, published in 1948, keeps the diary of those months with eager curiosity and a critical eye on money and segregation. Thirty-five years after the prince, she finds the same trains, outsized hotels and Broadway crowds, and in turn raises the question of the place given to Black people and Indians in American power, with a woman's freedom that the prince had observed in American women.

• Sayyid Qutb, The America I Have Seen (1948-1950)

  From late 1948 to 1950, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, then an official of the Ministry of Public Instruction, studied in the United States, notably in Greeley, Colorado, and then in California. He drew from it a series of articles, The America I Have Seen, published in Cairo in 1951. The text is severe: materialism, morals, brutal sport, racism. Read alongside the prince, it traces an Egyptian tradition of looking at America. Colorado is the same, and so are the questions, women's freedom, advertising, the place of non-whites, but the admiration of 1912 has given way to rejection, and Qutb would become one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood.

• John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1960)

  In the autumn of 1960, John Steinbeck fitted out a camper truck, took along his poodle Charley and toured the United States to rediscover the country he wrote about. Travels with Charley, published in 1962, follows a road that often crosses the prince's: Niagara Falls, where a problem with the dog's vaccination certificate makes him give up on Canada, Chicago, the Rockies, Seattle, Oregon and the California of his youth. He finds a country transformed by the automobile, waste and concrete, anxious about its own uniformity. Half a century after 1912, the progress the Egyptian traveller admired shows its other side.

• Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga (1964)

  The Welsh historian retraces, document in hand, the entire journey of this book: from the first drift voyages to Iceland to the camps of Vinland. Jones does not merely summarize the sagas; he tests them against geography, winds, and currents, and proposes cautious identifications for Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. His account, both scholarly and clear, makes an ideal companion for anyone who wants to follow the Norsemen on an actual map. It is the surest bridge between the memory of the sagas and the ground archaeologists walk today.

• John McPhee, Coming into the Country (1977)

  Coming into the Country, published in 1977, is John McPhee's great book on Alaska. In it he follows naturalists along Arctic rivers, investigates the plan to move the capital away from Juneau, then settles among the gold seekers and trappers of the upper Yukon, around Eagle. Sixty years after the prince passed through, Alaska is no longer a cruise of glaciers and totem poles but a state where nature conservation, native rights and a still lively dream of gold collide. As for the Treadwell mine, visited in detail in 1912, it collapsed beneath the sea in 1917.