Pacific explorers and travel narratives of Oceania

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.

• Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (c. 1524)

  While the men of Dieppe descend toward the Cape, the memory of Magellan's circumnavigation is still fresh. Pigafetta, a gentleman of Vicenza who embarked out of curiosity, brought back the only complete account of it. He watched Magellan die in the Philippines, crossed the spice archipelago, and was one of the eighteen survivors of a fleet of five ships to return to Spain. His account, written at the same time as Crignon's journal, tells of the same seas of the East Indies, the same islands of pepper and clove, but by the other route, that of the west. Two logbooks thus answer each other from one end of the world to the other, written by two literate sailors whom the sea had made attentive.

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

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

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

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

• 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.

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

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

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

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

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• 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.

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

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

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• Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde (1771)

  A year before the Endeavour, a French frigate rounds Cape Horn and reaches Tahiti, which Bougainville names New Cythera. His account, published in 1771, offers the exact counterpoint to Cook's journal: the same atolls, the same happy island, the same astonishment before a society without iron or money, but the gaze of an Enlightenment philosopher where the Englishman remains a sailor and surveyor. Reading both is to watch two Europes lean over the same shore at the same moment, and come away with different Tahitis. Here one already glimpses the shadow of the noble savage that would haunt the whole century.

• Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage à la Nouvelle-Guinée (1771-1772)

  A naturalist and draughtsman, Sonnerat travels in 1771 and 1772 through the islands of the Indian Ocean and the coasts of New Guinea, gathering plants, sketching birds and customs, and mixing into his observations his own share of fables. An exact contemporary of Cook's Friendly Islands, he shows another Pacific, further west, where Europe is only just beginning to sort truth from marvel. Reading him, one measures what Anderson's sober, verified method brings that is new to the view of these seas.

• 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.

• John Hawkesworth, Relation des voyages entrepris pour faire des découvertes dans l'hémisphère méridional (1773)

  Two years before the Endeavour, another English ship, the Dolphin, had touched at Tahiti and brought back the news that decided Cook's call there. Hawkesworth's great compilation, published in 1773, gathers these expeditions of Byron, Wallis, and Carteret in the Pacific. In it one reads the discovery of Tahiti as the Royal Navy first knew it, that same Dolphin whose memory Cook's journal keeps everywhere. It is the opening act of the South Seas, just before the Endeavour made its round of them.

• Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773)

  Draughtsman on Cook's first voyage, who died at sea before the return, Parkinson left a journal published in 1773 by his family. In it we follow the Endeavour along the same New Zealand and Australian coasts that Cook had just revealed. The tone is that of a young man, wonderstruck and scrupulous, who notes down the words of the languages he encounters and sketches plants and faces. It is the first sustained European gaze upon these shores, the one that prepared the ground for the second voyage recounted here.

• 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.

• Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World (1777)

  Embarked at seventeen on the Resolution alongside his father, the young Forster lived through exactly the scenes that Cook recounts, but he gives a wholly different version of them: sensitive, colorful, attentive to people rather than to bearings. Published in 1777, the same year as the official account, his book is the intimate counter-shot to ours. In it we find again the Friendly Islands, the Maori cannibalism, Easter Island, but seen by a cultivated adolescent who would become one of the great German prose writers. The double gaze, that of the captain and that of the passenger, sheds light on the whole voyage.

• 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.

• 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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• 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.

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

  Just as Flinders follows the south coast, Nicolas Baudin's French expedition explores the same shores from the east. On 8 April 1802, the Géographe meets the Investigator in a bay that Flinders names Encounter Bay. The naturalist François Péron wrote the official account, whose first volume appeared in 1807 and which Louis de Freycinet completed after his death. The French charts name part of the coast that Flinders had just surveyed Terre Napoléon, fuelling a long dispute over priority. The Géographe in turn puts in at King George Sound in early 1803.

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

  This is the account from the other side: that of Nicolas Baudin's expedition, which Flinders meets on 8 April 1802 at Encounter Bay. The naturalist François Péron tells of the voyage of the Géographe and the Naturaliste along the same coasts, then of the stopover at Port Jackson where the two crews meet again. But the first volume, published in 1807, renames Flinders's discoveries: the south coast becomes Terre Napoléon, Kangaroo Island becomes Île Decrès. Flinders, then a prisoner on Mauritius, would protest in his own book. To read the Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes alongside his is to see the same coast through rival eyes.

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• 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.

• 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.

• Phillip Parker King, Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia (1818-1822)

  Sixteen years after Flinders, Lieutenant Phillip Parker King, son of a former governor of New South Wales, is charged with completing the survey of the coasts that the Investigator, too dilapidated, had had to leave unfinished. With the small cutter Mermaid and the botanist Allan Cunningham, he anchors at King George Sound in January 1818. There he searches in vain for the bottle Flinders had left with an account of his visit, not to take it away but to add a few lines, and finds, chart in hand, that his predecessor's surveys are accurate. His narrative, published in 1827, goes on to the tropical coasts of the north and west, but keeps Flinders as a constant model.

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• Phillip Parker King, Relation d'une reconnaissance des côtes intertropicales et occidentales de l'Australie (1818-1822)

  Son of Governor Philip Gidley King, the very man who fits out the relief ships for the castaways of the reef, Phillip Parker King takes up Flinders's work where captivity had interrupted it. Between 1817 and 1822, aboard the little cutter Mermaid and then the Bathurst, he surveys the northern and western coasts that the Investigator, too rotten, had been unable to finish, and passes through Torres Strait in his turn. His Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia, published in 1827, often cites his predecessor and corrects his charts with respect. The same reefs, the same treacherous tides and the same hydrographer's patience are all there.

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• 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.

• 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)

  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.

• Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage de la corvette l'Astrolabe (1826-1829)

  In October 1826, two days after sighting Cape Leeuwin, Jules Dumont d'Urville's Astrolabe drops anchor at King George Sound, which the French call Port du Roi-Georges. The stay lasts eighteen days. The sailors form friendly relations with the local people, whom the draughtsman Louis de Sainson depicts in several plates of the atlas. D'Urville judges the place suitable for a colony and is surprised that the British have not yet settled there; a few weeks later, a small garrison sent from Sydney founds the post that will become Albany. The official account, published from 1830, offers a French view of the shores described by Flinders.

• Charles Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (1828-1831)

  Flinders had followed the shore of Encounter Bay without seeing any great river come out there. Twenty-eight years later, Charles Sturt arrives at the same spot from the interior. Setting out from Sydney, he goes down the Murrumbidgee and then the Murray in a whaleboat as far as Lake Alexandrina, a short distance from the coast the Investigator had surveyed. The silted-up mouth lets no boat through: he must row all the way back up the river, exhausted and short of food. His narrative, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, published in 1833, opens the way to the founding of South Australia, on the very shores of Gulf St Vincent discovered by Flinders.

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• Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1831-1836)

  On 6 March 1836, Captain FitzRoy's Beagle enters King George Sound for a stay of eight days, the last in Australia. The young Charles Darwin sees only a sandy, monotonous countryside, but he accompanies FitzRoy to Bald Head, where earlier navigators had thought they recognized corals or petrified trees; there he identifies limestone concretions formed around roots buried in the sand. One evening, he attends a great dance bringing together the people of the Sound and a group from the interior. His journal, published in 1839, thus combines a learned dialogue with his predecessors and a gaze often harsh toward the peoples he met.

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• Thomas Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1831-1836)

  Surveyor General of New South Wales, Thomas Mitchell sets out from Sydney, where Flinders had refitted his ship, but heads inland. On his third expedition, in 1836, he crosses the plains of present-day Victoria, which he names Australia Felix, and reaches Portland Bay, on the coast that Flinders had followed between Cape Northumberland and Cape Otway. There he finds, to his astonishment, settlers already established. From the top of Mount Macedon he sees Port Phillip, the bay the Investigator had explored. His Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, published in 1838, hastened the colonisation of these lands.

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• Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zélée (1837-1840)

  After the Antarctic and the Pacific islands, Dumont d'Urville steers his two corvettes into Torres Strait in 1840, which Flinders had crossed in his schooner thirty-seven years earlier. On 1 June the Astrolabe and the Zélée run aground on the reefs and stay trapped for several days, beaten by the tide, before working free. The narrative, published from 1841, shows that the passage had lost none of its reputation. It also offers a peaceful revenge to the book's history: French sailors in the footsteps of an Englishman whom France had detained, citing his charts as a reference no one now disputes. Its title is Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie.

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• John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia (1837-1843)

  An officer of the Beagle, already aboard during Darwin's voyage, John Lort Stokes returned to Australia in the same ship to complete the chart of the coasts. In 1841 he reached the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, anchored in Investigator Road at Sweers Island and found there traces of Flinders's visit. He then ascended two rivers, which he named the Flinders and the Albert, and called the grassy plains he found the Plains of Promise, a hope of pasture for settlers. His illustrated Discoveries in Australia reads as a second visit to the shores that close this volume, forty years later, with the eye already of a colony in search of land.

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

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

• Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia and Overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound (1840-1841)

  In 1841, Edward John Eyre accomplishes on foot what Flinders had done by sea: linking Fowler's Bay to King George Sound along the cliffs of the Great Bight. Five months of walking, almost without water, with his overseer John Baxter and three Aboriginal companions, at the edge of a plain not yet called the Nullarbor. Baxter is killed on the way; Eyre and the young Wylie, a native of King George Sound, survive only through the unexpected meeting with a French whaler, the Mississippi, anchored near the Recherche Archipelago. The journal, published in 1845, offers the exact overland counterpart of this first volume.

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• 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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• 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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• Joseph Beete Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly (1842-1846)

  Naturalist and geologist of the Fly, Joseph Beete Jukes spent four years surveying the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, which Flinders had crossed feeling his way. In 1844, the expedition raised a stone beacon on Raine Island, at the outer edge of the reef, to show ships a safe opening. In his Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, Jukes describes at length the reefs seen from within and without, and takes up the question of how coral islands form, which Flinders had raised at Half-way Island. He also meets the strait islanders, notably at Darnley, and leaves vivid portraits of them, which extend this volume's pages on the Murray Islands.

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• Joseph Beete Jukes, Relation du voyage hydrographique du HMS Fly (1842-1846)

  A geologist aboard HMS Fly, Jukes spends four years with the team surveying the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, with a rigour that at last makes safe the route Flinders had opened at the price of so many anxious nights. He describes the growth of the reefs, the life of the strait's islanders, the canoes and the turtle markets, and the building of a beacon on Raine Island to guide ships to the passage. His Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, published in 1847, shows the Coral Sea turned into a trade route: the dangers Flinders reported are now charted, buoyed and almost tamed.

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• Ludwig Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia (1844-1845)

  In October 1844, the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt left the Darling Downs, west of Moreton Bay, to reach Port Essington, on the north coast, overland. He arrived more than fourteen months later, having lost the naturalist John Gilbert, killed in a night attack. His route skirts the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which Flinders had surveyed from the sea: where the Investigator saw only a low coast fringed with shoals, Leichhardt discovers rivers, plains and the peoples who live there. His Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia lets us read the end of this volume in reverse, from the interior toward the shore.

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• John MacGillivray, Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (1846-1850)

  Naturalist of the Rattlesnake, commanded by Owen Stanley, John MacGillivray followed from 1846 to 1850 the survey of the inner route of Queensland, of Torres Strait and of the south coast of New Guinea; the young Thomas Henry Huxley was aboard as assistant surgeon. At Cape York, in 1849, the crew took in Barbara Thompson, a young Scottish castaway who had lived nearly five years among the islanders of Prince of Wales Island. MacGillivray recorded her testimony in his Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, valuable on the languages and customs of the strait. Here we find again the islands and anchorages that Flinders had named, now visited by ships.

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

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

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• 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.

• Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1895-1896)

  Nearly a century after Flinders, Mark Twain lands in Sydney for a lecture tour. Port Jackson, where the Investigator took on convicts, has become a great city; Port Phillip, the bay barely explored in 1802, shelters Melbourne and its horse races; Adelaide spreads near Gulf St Vincent. Twain is amused by everything, from trains that change gauge to colonial borders and wildlife, but he also listens to the history of the Aboriginal people and judges it severely. His book Following the Equator, published in 1897, shows what the shores Flinders named one by one have become within a few decades.

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• Mark Twain, Le Tour du monde (Following the Equator) (1895-1896)

  Ruined, Mark Twain sets out in 1895 on a lecture tour around the world. He discovers Sydney, its quays and magnificent harbour, crosses Australia with astonishment mixed with irony, then reaches India and calls at Mauritius. At Port-Louis he pokes fun at the heat and at the islanders' devotion to Paul and Virginia, and reports with mischief that, to hear them tell it, Mauritius was made first and paradise copied from it. Published in 1897, Following the Equator turns into cruise destinations the places where Flinders had known hunger and prison, and reminds us that travel can also be told with laughter.

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• Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)

  In 1895, a fifty-one-year-old American captain sets out alone, on an old eleven-metre sloop, the Spray, to sail around the world. Joshua Slocum passes the Strait of Magellan in early 1896, struggles for weeks against gusts that throw him back, and scatters tacks on his deck to guard against nocturnal visitors from Tierra del Fuego. He then crosses the Pacific to Australia and returns in 1898. His account, full of humor, is the exact opposite of Van Noort's journal: one man without a crew where four ships had lost almost all of theirs.

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• Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines (1912-1935)

  In the early twentieth century, the Irishwoman Daisy Bates settles alone in a tent on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain: at Eucla in 1912, then near Yalata, not far from Fowler's Bay, and finally at Ooldea, where she spends sixteen years beside the transcontinental railway. There she gathers vocabularies, genealogies and stories of the peoples of the south coast, the descendants of those whom Flinders had only glimpsed from the sea. Published in 1938, her book is both a precious and a disturbing testimony: its very title expresses the conviction, now rejected, that these peoples were bound to disappear.

• 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.