Discovery of New Zealand: the accounts of 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 Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland (1699-1700)

  Fifty-six years after Tasman, the former buccaneer William Dampier commands a worm-eaten ship, the Roebuck, for the English Admiralty and takes up the coast of New Guinea again. Where Tasman thought he was following a single continuous shore, Dampier discovers a passage and names the land it separates Nova Britannia. He observes the volcanoes, the canoes, the villages, with a naturalist's curiosity that the Dutch commander's journal lacked. The two accounts answer each other: Tasman follows a coast he believes to be one, Dampier discovers that it is an archipelago, and the map of Melanesia begins to take its modern shape.

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• 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.

• James Cook, Journal du premier voyage autour du monde (1768-1771)

  In October 1769, Cook reaches New Zealand with Tasman's chart before his eyes: an unfinished coastline, a bloody bay, a Cape Maria van Diemen. In six months the Endeavour sails right round both islands and proves that they belong to no southern continent. Cook keeps the name Cape Maria van Diemen, passes within sight of the Three Kings, and enters the strait Tasman had taken for a bay. His journal is the sequel and the correction of this one: the same ocean, the same Maori, but a century and a quarter later, and this time a complete chart.

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

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

• Julien Crozet, Nouveau voyage à la mer du Sud (1771-1773)

  In March 1772, Marion Dufresne's ships anchor in a bay on the east coast of Van Diemen's Land, not far from the spot where Tasman's carpenter had planted his post. The French at last see the inhabitants Tasman had only heard, and the encounter goes badly. A few months later, in New Zealand, Marion and some of his men are killed by Maori. His second in command, Julien Crozet, brings the expedition home and entrusts his account to the Abbé Rochon, who publishes it in 1783. A single line of failed encounters thus runs from Murderers' Bay to the Bay of Islands.

• 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.

• 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.

• Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière, Voyage in Search of La Pérouse (1791-1794)

  Sent with Bruni d'Entrecasteaux in search of La Pérouse, the botanist Labillardière retraces part of Tasman's route almost step by step. He collects plants in Tasmania, where this time the French establish peaceful exchanges with the inhabitants, then stays at Tongatapu, the Amsterdam Island of the journal, and sails along New Ireland. Where Tasman noted pigs, coconuts and canoes, Labillardière describes plants, tools, dances, faces. His account, published in 1800, is one of the liveliest of the age of scientific expeditions, and shows what the same shores become under a naturalist's gaze.

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• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• William Mariner and John Martin, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands (1806-1810)

  In 1806, the English ship Port-au-Prince is seized by islanders in Ha'apai, between Tongatapu and Nomuka. Young William Mariner, spared, is adopted by the chief Finau and lives four years among the Tongans, learning their language, their wars and their ceremonies. Back in London, he dictates his memories to the physician John Martin, who publishes them in 1817. Tasman had seen Tonga only from his deck and his boats, for the time it took to barter; Mariner tells it from the inside. The two books frame a century and a half of contact between Tongans and Europeans.

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie (1841-1854)

  In the nineteenth century, Dumont d'Urville's corvette in turn sails through New Zealand, the Society Islands, and the southern seas. The French scholar draws up the first true ethnographic picture of Polynesia and Melanesia, where Cook had only been able to lay down markers. Reading his account is to measure the distance traveled in two generations, and to see the Maori shores of Poverty Bay enter, this time, into methodical observation. The encounter loses some of its astonishment and gains in depth.

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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.

• 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, 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.

• 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.

• Otto Nordenskjöld, Antarctica, or Two Years Amongst the Ice of the South Pole (1901-1903)

  In 1902, the Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjöld settled to winter on Snow Hill Island, on the edge of the Weddell Sea, in the waters Ross had surveyed in January 1843. The plan went wrong: his ship, the Antarctic, was crushed by the ice, and the crew made their way by boat to Paulet Island, the very island Ross had named, where they spent the winter in a stone hut, living on penguins. The scattered parties finally found one another, and the Argentine gunboat Uruguay came to collect the survivors at the end of 1903. The account, translated into English in 1905, makes these islands a setting of survival and restores to Ross's cartography its due place.

• Robert Falcon Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery (1901-1904)

  Sixty years after Ross, Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery wintered in 1902 at the head of McMurdo Sound, named for the lieutenant of the Terror. Scott follows along the great Barrier that Ross had traced without being able to land on it, even rises above it in a captive balloon, then pushes south with Wilson and Shackleton beyond 82 degrees, on foot and behind poorly used dogs. The narrative, published in 1905, names on every page the capes and volcanoes of Ross, the Erebus and the Terror first among them. What in 1842 was only a wall of ice seen from the deck becomes a territory one crosses, at the price of scurvy and exhaustion.

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• Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Le Français au pôle Sud (1903-1905)

  Jean-Baptiste Charcot sailed in 1903 aboard the Français, a three-master built at Saint-Malo, at first to relieve Nordenskjöld's Swedish expedition, which the Argentines had already found. He then turned to the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the other side of those lands Ross had glimpsed from the east under the names of Joinville and Louis-Philippe. Wintering in a bay of Booth Island, hydrographic surveys, magnetic and meteorological observations: the doctor turned seaman takes up, sixty years later, Ross's scientific program. The Français, struck on a rock, came home damaged and was sold to Argentina. The narrative, published in 1906 as Le Français au pôle Sud, keeps the verve of a ship's log.

• 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)

  At the start of the twentieth century, the French doctor and navigator wintered off the white continent that Cook had sensed without seeing it. His account, illustrated with photographs, describes the same ice islands, the same birds and the same storms that the Resolution faced near the Isle of Georgia. A century and a half of progress separates the two men, but the same hostile sea unites them. Charcot shows what Cook had only glimpsed from the deck of a wooden sailing ship.

• Roald Amundsen, Sydpolen (Le Pôle Sud) (1910-1912)

  In January 1911, Roald Amundsen set up his base, Framheim, in the Bay of Whales, an indentation in the great Barrier that Ross had followed in 1841 and seen again in 1842, without being able to set foot on it. The Norwegian made the wager of living on the floating ice itself. From there, with four companions and dog sledges, he reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, more than a month ahead of Scott. His narrative, published as early as 1912, is that of a method: marked depots, furs, dogs sacrificed along the way. It closes the story opened by Ross: the Barrier, an impassable wall seen from the ships, becomes the great road to the pole. The Norwegian original is Sydpolen, in English The South Pole.

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• Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1910-1913)

  In the dead of the southern winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers left Cape Evans for Cape Crozier, which Ross had named for the commander of the Terror. Five weeks in the polar night, in cold that fell below minus 40 degrees, to bring back emperor penguin eggs that the science of the day believed decisive. The three men returned barely alive. A year later, Cherry-Garrard was part of the party that found the tent of Scott, Wilson and Bowers on the Barrier. His book, published in 1922, is probably the finest account of the Antarctic: where Ross measured the ice, he tells what it does to men.

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• Ernest Shackleton, South (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.

• 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.