Discovery of Tahiti and French Polynesia: the first travelers

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• James Wilson, A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, Performed in the Years 1796, 1797, 1798, in the Ship Duff (1796-1798)

  Five years after the Providence, the Duff, chartered by the London Missionary Society and commanded by James Wilson, drops anchor at Matavai on 5 March 1797. She lands the first Protestant missionaries in Tahiti, welcomed by the very family Bligh had known: Tynah, now Pomare, and his son Otoo. The account, published in 1799, describes the marae, the ceremonies and the life of Matavai through the eyes of pastors. The places and people of Bligh's journal reappear, on the threshold of an upheaval he could not foresee: the conversion of the island.

• 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.

• 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.

• Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis (1801-1803)

  The young Flinders was a midshipman aboard the Providence: he lived through the stop at Adventure Bay, the stay in Tahiti and the attack of the canoes in Torres Strait. Ten years later, commanding the Investigator, he sails around the continent he proposes to call Australia and passes through the strait again in October 1802, on the road opened by his old captain. A prisoner of the French on Mauritius for six years, he saw his book appear only as he lay dying, in July 1814. It is the direct continuation of Bligh's school of navigation.

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• 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.

• William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, during a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands (1817-1822)

  A missionary who reached the Society Islands in 1817, Ellis stayed there several years before leaving for Hawaii. His Polynesian Researches, published in 1829, are a summa on the beliefs, arts, genealogies and warfare of the Tahitians, gathered just as the old order was vanishing under the conversion of the Pomare. The reader of Bligh finds there the marae, the maro ura, the ranks of the chiefs and the funerals he described in 1792, now explained from within by a man who speaks the language, but already in the past tense.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

  Beechey's Blossom sailed in 1825 for Bering Strait, but her crossing of the South Pacific took her first to Pitcairn, where he met John Adams, last survivor of the Bounty mutineers, and took down his account of the mutiny and the years of violence on the island. She then called at Tahiti in 1826. The book, published in 1831, gives the sequel to a story that Bligh, in 1792, heard only in scraps from the Tahitians: what became of Christian and his companions after their last departure from Matavai.

• 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)

  Aboard the Beagle, in the 1830s, a young naturalist rounds Cape Horn, stays in Tierra del Fuego among the Fuegians, and crosses the Pacific. His pages on the southern seas speak closely with Cook's journal: the same storms, the same icy shores, the same inhabitants the Englishman had met sixty years before. But Darwin is already searching there for something else, the history of living things and of the land itself. One thus passes from the eye of the sailor to that of the scientist, along coasts that Cook had been the first to describe.

• 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.

• James Clark Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, during the Years 1839-43 (1842-1843)

  Five years after the French corvettes, James Clark Ross set out from the Falklands with the Erebus and the Terror and, at the end of 1842, came before the lands that Dumont d'Urville had named: Louis-Philippe Land and Joinville Land. He entered the gulf to which he gave the name of his two ships, then struck southeast along Weddell's route. The pack ice stopped him in turn: in March 1843 he reached 71° 30' south, farther than the French but far from Weddell's 74° 15'. His narrative appeared in 1847. It vindicates, at least in part, the commander of the Astrolabe: the open sea of 1823 was not to be found every year.

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• Joseph Beete Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly in Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Other Islands of the Eastern Archipelago (1842-1846)

  Naturalist of the Fly, Jukes spent four years surveying the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, the passage where Bligh had to fight off the canoes in 1792. His narrative, published in 1847, describes the same shoals, the same islets and the islanders of the strait, with whom exchanges remained a matter of barter, mistrust and skirmishes. He also pushes on to the coast of New Guinea and Java. Fifty years after the Providence, the strait is as dangerous as ever, but it is now charted for regular navigation to Asia.

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• Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1844)

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

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• Ludwig Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington (1844-1845)

  Six years after the French visit, the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt sets out from the Moreton Bay region in October 1844 to reach Port Essington overland. More than four thousand kilometers of bush, rivers and escarpments, dwindling provisions, a companion killed in a night attack: the expedition is given up for lost when it finally reaches Victoria, the small colony where Dumont d'Urville had dined with Commodore Bremer. His journal, prefaced in 1846, describes the same isolated post, seen this time from the interior of the continent, as the end of a crossing that the colony had been founded to make possible.

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• John Elphinstone Erskine, Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific (1849)

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

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• Edmond Reuel Smith, The Araucanians, or Notes of a Tour among the Indian Tribes of Southern Chili (1853)

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

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• Ida Pfeiffer, Meine zweite Weltreise (1856)

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

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• Albert S. Bickmore, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago (1865)

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

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• 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.

• 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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• 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.

• 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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• 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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• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa (1891-1893)

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

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• Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1895-1898)

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

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• Frederick William Christian, The Caroline Islands (1899)

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

• 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 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 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.

• 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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• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.