Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies (1659-1679)
Burckhardt knows the King of Kandy only through the Puqvoy embassy. The English sailor Robert Knox, for his part, lived nineteen years in his kingdom. Captured in 1659 with part of his crew by the troops of Raja Sinha II, he survives by knitting caps and lending grain, until his escape to the Dutch fort of Arippu, which sends him on to Batavia. Back in London in September 1680, he publishes his account in 1681, with the support of the Royal Society. Translated into German as early as 1689, it offers the exact reverse of Burckhardt's: Sinhalese Ceylon from the inside, seen by a captive, against the Ceylon of the Dutch coastal forts.
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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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Peter Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1705-1713)
Thirty years after Burckhardt's stop, the Franconian Peter Kolb lands at the Cape in 1705, sent by a Prussian councillor, Baron von Krosigk, to make astronomical observations there. He stays several years, until his eyesight fails, and takes a particular interest in the Dutch colony and the Khoikhoi, those Burckhardt calls the Hottentots. His great book appears in Nuremberg in 1719, followed by a French translation in 1741. Kolb breaks with the clichés of his predecessors, compares the beliefs of the Khoikhoi with those of Europeans and reports the armed raids of the settlers. To be reread alongside the chapter on the Cape, written by a passing soldier in a hurry to leave.
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Johann Wolfgang Heydt, Allerneuester Geographisch- und Topographischer Schau-Platz von Africa und Ost-Indien (1733-1740)
Half a century later, Johann Wolfgang Heydt follows in Burckhardt's footsteps: a German who entered the Company's service in 1733, he first spends two years in Ceylon before reaching Batavia, where in 1737 he becomes the Company's architect and draughtsman. Back in Europe in 1740 for reasons of health, he publishes in Nuremberg in 1744 a large album of more than a hundred plates engraved after his drawings, with a long text: the Cape, Colombo and its fortifications, Batavia, Malacca, the Moluccas, Dejima. There one sees, drawn, the places Burckhardt describes in words: the citadels, the streets, the gardens and the life of the European employees of the Indies.
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Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du Roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1766-1769)
The first official circumnavigation by the French navy followed, forty-five years later, a route strikingly close to Behrens's: the Tuamotu, which Bougainville named the Dangerous Archipelago, Tahiti, the Samoan islands he called the Navigators' Islands, then the waters of New Ireland, the Moluccas and finally Batavia, where his ships put in, worn by scurvy. Published in 1771, his book fixed for Europe the image of a happy Polynesia. The sergeant from Rostock, for his part, had known skirmishes, hunger and death in the same archipelagos, and the contrast between the two accounts sheds light on each.
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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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Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia (1770-1779)
A pupil of Linnaeus, the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg signs on in 1771 as a surgeon of the Dutch Company in order to collect plants in the Indies. He spends three years at the Cape, reaches Batavia in May 1775, stays at the Dejima trading post and in 1776 accompanies the Dutch embassy to Edo, then lives in Ceylon from July 1777 to February 1778, before returning by way of the Cape. His account appears in Uppsala from 1788. A hundred years later, he almost retraces the route of Burckhardt's memorial, from the Cape to closed Japan by way of Ceylon, but with a naturalist's eye: where the clerk reports marvels, Thunberg names, classifies and describes the plants.
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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.
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James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (1772-1775)
Fifty-two years after Roggeveen, in March 1774, James Cook's Resolution anchored off Easter Island at the end of a long cruise through the southern ice. Cook too was looking for the southern continent, and it was he who proved its absence in the temperate latitudes, closing the dream the Dutch squadron had pursued. His narrative devotes two chapters to the island, its inhabitants and its gigantic statues, some of which he found toppled. Readers of Behrens will find the same shores seen by a navigator with better instruments, and can measure what had already changed on the island in half a century.
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Jean-François de La Pérouse, Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde (1785-1788)
In April 1786 the Boussole and the Astrolabe called at Easter Island. La Pérouse's officers drew a map of the island, measured the statues, and observed the inhabitants and their crops; animals and seeds were left in the hope of enriching a land judged poor. The expedition's journals, saved because they had been sent to France before the wreck at Vanikoro, appeared in 1797 under the direction of Milet-Mureau. They offer the Enlightenment's view of the island that Behrens had described sixty-four years earlier in the more naive and more anxious words of a soldier on board.
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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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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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Pierre Loti, L'Île de Pâques, journal d'un aspirant de La Flore (1872)
In 1872 the young Julien Viaud, not yet signing himself Pierre Loti, was a midshipman on the frigate La Flore, sent to bring one of the island's great statues back to France. He drew from it a journal, published in 1899, in which the island becomes, in his words, a half-fantastic country. The island he discovered had meanwhile been devastated by slave raids and epidemics. To read this journal after Behrens is to measure a century and a half: the first witness saw a numerous population and standing statues; the novelist finds survivors and ruins, and puts into his pages all the melancholy of what has vanished.
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Ernst Haeckel, A Visit to Ceylon (1881-1882)
Two centuries after Burckhardt, another German discovers Ceylon with wonder. The zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a professor at Jena and a great champion of Darwin, lands in Colombo on 21 November 1881, after a voyage by way of Bombay, and stays on the island until March 1882. He sets up a laboratory at Belligemma, today's Weligama, on the south coast not far from Matara, where Burckhardt had capsized, visits Kandy and the Peradeniya garden and climbs the island's highest peak. His letters, collected under the title Indische Reisebriefe, celebrate the jungle, the sea and the wildlife, with the racial prejudices of their time.
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Katherine Routledge, The Mystery of Easter Island (1914-1915)
Katherine Routledge and her husband had a schooner, the Mana, built to reach Easter Island and carry out the first real field survey there. The expedition spent seventeen months on the island, from 1914 to 1915: recording platforms, the quarries of Rano Raraku and the statues, and interviewing the last inhabitants who remembered the old rites. The book, published in 1919, mixes adventure narrative with scholarly work, in a remarkably free tone. Two centuries later, it takes up the questions Behrens already asked before the great stone figures: who raised them, how, and to what end.
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Thor Heyerdahl, Aku-Aku (1955-1956)
Eight years after the Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl landed on Easter Island with five Norwegian, Chilean and American archaeologists. At the foot of the Rano Raraku volcano, the team cleared statues thought to be mere heads and uncovered their colossal buried torsos; island families opened their secret caves and small ancient carvings to him. The narrative, published in Norwegian in 1957 and then translated into many languages, made the island a popular mystery. His theories of a settlement from America have since been largely rejected, but the book remains a living testimony to the island as Behrens was among the first to describe it.