Our titles on this subject
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 Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784)
In December 1776, bound for the North Pacific, James Cook anchors the Resolution and the Discovery in a bay of the Kerguelen lands, which he names Christmas Harbour. His men find there the message left by the French in 1774, proof of the taking of possession. Cook surveys the coast, describes the low vegetation, the seals and the penguins, and suggests a name that will stick: the Island of Desolation. His account, published after his death, confirms the Breton's discovery just as the latter, condemned by the court martial, writes his defence in the château of Saumur.
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Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (1843)
Nine years after Macbrair, Gérard de Nerval lands at Alexandria early in 1843 and settles in Cairo, where he rents a house, buys a Javanese slave girl and has the legend of the caliph Hakim told to him. He then travels on to Beirut and Mount Lebanon, at the heart of the rivalries between Druze and Maronites that Macbrair had already seen fermenting under Ibrahim Pasha. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1851, blends reportage, reverie and embedded tales. The contrast is complete: the poet seeks in the East a mystery to love, the missionary a people to save, yet both describe the same teeming city, its cafés, its markets and its alleys.
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James Clark Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions (1847)
On 12 May 1840, James Clark Ross's Erebus and Terror drop anchor at Christmas Harbour for a campaign of magnetic observations. The expedition stays about two and a half months, in almost continuous gales. The young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker gathers there the Kerguelen cabbage, Pringlea antiscorbutica, whose name tells its virtues against scurvy, the sickness that had broken the crews of 1774. Ross does not dwell on regrets: his volumes go on to tell of the push toward the great ice barrier that will bear his name. The southern stopover nonetheless fills precious pages on Kerguelen's land, its rocks, its plants and its storms.
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Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Orient (1849-1851)
In November 1849, Gustave Flaubert, aged twenty-seven, sails from Marseille with Maxime Du Camp, who has been entrusted with a photographic mission. They ascend the Nile in a cangia as far as the Second Cataract, stop at Philae, Thebes and Esna, then go on to Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baalbek. The notes and letters from this journey, published after the writer's death, are raw, funny, sensual, with a painter's precision. Fifteen years after Macbrair, Flaubert follows almost the same route, from Cairo to the ruins of Baalbek, but with the eye of an artist who wants to see everything and judge nothing: the reader can set two views side by side, one pious, the other profane, of the same riverbanks.
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Thomas Eyre Poole, Life, Scenery, and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia (1850)
Colonial and garrison chaplain at Freetown, the Reverend Thomas Eyre Poole published in London, in 1850, two volumes on Britain's West African colonies. From Sierra Leone he moves on to the Gambia, visits the settlements on the river and travels a long way up it. He depicts the life of the colonists, of the liberated Africans and of the riverside peoples, and dwells on the neglected churches, the cemeteries overrun by grass and the fevers that cut down Europeans, which he himself survives several times. The reader rediscovers the fragile colony, with its trading posts and missions, that Macbrair had known, seen this time by an Anglican clergyman rather than a Methodist.
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Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1862-1869)
Suffering from tuberculosis, Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt in 1862 in search of drier air and spent the last years of her life there. She settles in Luxor in the "French House" built on the roofs of the temple, learns Arabic, treats the peasants, receives notables and Copts, and writes to her family letters of rare freedom, published as early as 1865. In them she describes the corvée, the taxes and the levies of men that crush the fellahin, as Macbrair had done thirty years earlier under Muhammad Ali. But where the missionary saw souls to be won, she sees neighbours and friends, and reading her one measures all that European arrogance let slip.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)
A novelist and journalist, Amelia Edwards arrives in Egypt almost by chance, in November 1873, to escape the rain of Europe. She hires a dahabeah and sails up the Nile beyond Abu Simbel to the Second Cataract, sketching everything she sees. Her book, published in 1877, combines humour, erudition and indignation at monuments mutilated by treasure hunters and visitors. In 1882 she would found the Egypt Exploration Fund, to excavate and protect this heritage. Macbrair had seen the same temples at Thebes, Edfu and Philae; forty years later, Edwards shows what nascent tourism had made of this Nile of missionaries and pashas.
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Henry Nottidge Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger (1879)
A century after Kerguelen's second voyage, in January 1874, the British corvette Challenger puts in at the archipelago during the round-the-world cruise that founds modern oceanography. The naturalist Henry Nottidge Moseley walks its bays and observes the penguins, the elephant seals, the mosses and the famous cabbage, the fresh food Kerguelen's crews had so sorely lacked. His notes, written for a wide public, have the freshness of a field notebook. They show, up close and on foot, a land Kerguelen had only glimpsed in the fog, which in a hundred years had become a field of study for scientists and a hunting ground for sailors.
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Raymond Rallier du Baty, 15,000 Miles in a Ketch (1917)
In September 1907, two Breton brothers, Raymond and Henri Rallier du Baty, leave Boulogne aboard the J.-B. Charcot, a 48-ton fishing ketch, with four companions. Their aim: to map the Kerguelen Islands, which France has scarcely explored. To pay for the adventure, they hunt elephant seals and sell the oil. Their account, published in English before appearing in French as Aventures aux Kerguelen, has the humour and daring of expeditions without a budget. Raymond will return in 1913; his surveys will serve for the first complete map of the archipelago, published in 1922, a hundred and fifty years after his countryman's discovery.
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George Orwell, Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres (1933)
Zaydan compared Paris and London from the standpoint of the educated visitor, among museums, parliaments and schools. Orwell, twenty years later, goes down a floor, then several. In 1928 and 1929 he works as a dishwasher in the kitchens of a grand Parisian hotel near the Concorde, then in a Russian restaurant; back in England, he drifts from hostel to night shelter around London. Published in 1933, his first book describes the exact reverse of the facades the Levantine writer admired. He does not contradict Zaydan: he completes him, showing what European order costs at the bottom of the ladder.
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Tawfiq al-Hakim, Usfur min al-Sharq (Un moineau d'Orient) (1938)
The young Egyptian Tawfiq al-Hakim arrives in Paris in 1925 to prepare a doctorate in law; he spends his evenings mostly at the theater and the Opera, and returns to Cairo in 1928 without a degree but determined to transform the Arab stage. Ten years later he draws a novel from those years: Muhsin, his double, discovers the city, falls in love with a Parisian and runs up against the materialism of the industrial West. It is Zaydan's question taken up by the next generation, with less admiration and more unease: what should the East take from Europe, and what does it risk losing there?
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Stefan Zweig, Le Monde d'hier. Souvenirs d'un Européen (1942)
The world Zaydan visits in 1912, Zweig knew from the inside, and he saw it die. Written in exile and published in 1942, after the author's suicide, these memoirs return to his stays in Paris before 1914, to London, where he settled in the 1930s, and to Switzerland, refuge of pacifists during the Great War. Zweig paints the Europe of security, libraries and travel without passports, the same one the Levantine inventories, curious and trusting. Read after Journey to Europe, the book gives its tragic sequel: what Zaydan offered as a model to the East was to tear itself apart two years later.
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Ernest Hemingway, Paris est une fête (1964)
A decade after Zaydan, Paris has changed its face but not its pull. From 1921 to 1926, the young Hemingway lives there poorly with his wife Hadley, writes in the cafés of Montparnasse, borrows books from Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, and sees Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald. Written late in his life and published in 1964 after his death, these memories make the city a school of writing and discipline. Zaydan saw in Paris the capital of taste and advertising; the American finds in it the capital of fruitful hunger and the true sentence. Two foreigners, two lessons from the same city.
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Jean-Paul Kauffmann, L'Arche des Kerguelen (1993)
A few years after his release, the journalist and writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a hostage in Lebanon from 1985 to 1988, sets out for the Kerguelen Islands in the footsteps of Yves de Kerguelen, Rallier du Baty and the other discoverers. He shares the life of the scientists and soldiers at the base, sinks into the peat, gets lost, endures the wind that never stops. He dreams of sighting the rock arch that gives the book its title, and bad weather prevents him. The account of a goal missed, like that of 1774, his book turns southern isolation into literary material, never losing sight of the Breton navigator who revealed it.
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Bill Bryson, Nos voisins du dessous. Chroniques anglaises (1995)
An American settled in England for twenty years, Bill Bryson decides, before moving back to the United States, to tour his adopted country using only public transport. From Exeter to John o' Groats, by way of Yorkshire villages and Durham cathedral, he observes the quirks, the courtesy, the love of queues and the taste for compromise of the British, with a tender humor. Zaydan, in 1912, was already trying to grasp the English character, its morals, its education, its institutions. Eighty years later, another foreigner, more mocking but just as admiring, takes up the inquiry and finds that the essentials have not changed so much.