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The discovery of Britain: the history of the British Isles told by foreign travellers

The first known witness to the island was a Greek from Marseille. Around 325 BC Pytheas sailed round Britain, which he called Prettanike, and brought back word of Cornish tin and of the brief northern nights. Julius Caesar landed in 55 and again in 54 BC and described Britons dyed with woad who fought from chariots. In AD 98 Tacitus told, in his life of Agricola, how Rome pushed north as far as the Caledonians of present-day Scotland.

Britain soon began to tell its own story: in 731 the monk Bede finished at Jarrow his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, England joined the world of continental chroniclers, and in 1154 the geographer al-Idrisi described it for Roger II of Sicily. In 1435 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, crossed a poor Scotland where people burned black stones for heat. Around 1500 a Venetian envoy portrayed a wealthy kingdom whose people thought there was no other world but theirs.

Under the Tudors visitors came for London, the Tower, the court and the playhouses. The German lawyer Paul Hentzner described Elizabeth I in 1598; Thomas Platter of Basel saw a Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599. In 1663 the Frenchman Samuel Sorbière called on the newly founded Royal Society.

In the eighteenth century England became a model that Europe came to study: its liberty, its Parliament, its sects and its trade. Montesquieu stayed from 1729 to 1731, Voltaire published his Letters on the English in 1733 and 1734, and the Prussian Karl Philipp Moritz walked across the country in 1782. Scotland drew the curious too: Thomas Pennant toured it in 1769, and Samuel Johnson and James Boswell reached the Hebrides in 1773.

In the nineteenth century people came to see the first industrial nation. Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau moved through parks and drawing rooms from 1826 to 1828; Alexis de Tocqueville discovered Manchester in 1835; Flora Tristan published her London walks in 1840, and Friedrich Engels described working-class misery in 1845. Observers also came from much farther away: the Persian Mirza Abu Taleb Khan lived in London from 1799 to 1802, and the Japanese Iwakura mission arrived in 1872, the year Hippolyte Taine published his Notes on England.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early accounts of the United Kingdom.

Our titles on this subject

The Description of the Northern Islands

Adam of Bremen, c. 1075-1080

Around 1075, a canon of Bremen drafts the first written portrait of Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and the mysterious Vinland, without ever leaving his cell.

Around 1075, Latin Europe knew the Scandinavian North only by hearsay. Adam, a canon of the Church of Hamburg-Bremen, which was charged with converting those lands, gathered what missionaries, merchants and above all the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson could tell him. The result is the first reasoned geography of the Baltic and the North Atlantic islands, written as the northern kingdoms turned Christian, and the only mention of Vinland older than the Icelandic sagas.

My First Sea Voyage

Quirijn Maurits Rudolph Ver Huell, 1807-1810

On his first voyage, young Ver Huell reaches Brazil just as the Portuguese court flees there.

The testimony of a young Dutch officer on Brazil from 1807 to 1810, this account shows Salvador da Bahia at the moment the fleeing Portuguese court lands there, in January 1808. Held for nearly three years after the seizure of his brig, Ver Huell describes from the inside a colonial slave-holding city: processions, the Bonfim festivals, whale hunting, the sugar mills of the Recôncavo, a provincial prison. Published in 1842, it was translated into Portuguese in 2007.

Journey to Europe

Jurji Zaydan, 1861-1914

Two years before he died, al-Hilal's founder tours 1912 Europe and measures it against the Arab world.

In the summer of 1912, Jurji Zaydan, a Lebanese writer based in Cairo and founder of the journal al-Hilal, observes France, England and Switzerland. His book reverses the usual gaze of the travel narrative: it is the East that examines Europe, its governments, schools, theaters, women and museums, to decide what is worth taking from it. A rare testimony on the Belle Époque Europe of the eve of 1914, seen by a leading figure of the Nahda.

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.

Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (c. 1230)

A century after Adam, the Icelander Snorri recounts from within the kings the canon knew only by hearsay. Harald Bluetooth, the two Olafs, and Cnut the Great reappear here, but seen by the Norsemen themselves, with their sagas, their skalds, and their own memory. To read Snorri after Adam is to hear the other version of the same history, that of the conquered finally given voice.
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum (c. 1200)

Around 1200, this Danish clerk composed in Latin the great chronicle of his people. He knew Adam's work and carried it forward, giving the Danish kings their national epic. Here one meets the heroes and legends that Bremen had barely glimpsed, in an ample language that seeks to rival the Ancients.
Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555)

In 1555, this Swedish prelate, exiled in Rome, published a vast description of Scandinavia, illustrated with famous engravings. Five centuries after Adam, he still describes the same ice, the same sea monsters, the same peoples of the far reaches, but with the eye of the Renaissance. Adam's wonder survives here, barely tempered by the new science.
Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, Voyage au Brésil dans les années 1815, 1816 et 1817 (1820-1821)

From 1815 to 1817, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied travels up the coast of Brazil from Rio to Bahia, through the forests of the Rio Doce and the Mucuri, among the Botocudos, whom he observes with a new attentiveness. Near the bay, at Nazaré, he is arrested at the time of the Pernambuco insurrection and held for three days, until the governor of Bahia orders his release. He then follows Itaparica, its whaleries and its fences of whale bone, and leaves Salvador in May 1817 aboard a ship the government had requisitioned. Ten years after Ver Huell, the same suspicion of the foreigner, and the same bay.
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Johann Baptist von Spix et Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831)

Sent by the King of Bavaria in the wake of Archduchess Leopoldina, the future empress of Brazil, the zoologist Spix and the botanist Martius travel the country from 1817 to 1820. After Minas Gerais and its diamond mines, they reach the coast at Salvador, then set off again across the caatinga, where thirst and fever nearly kill them, study the Bendegó meteorite and finally ascend the Amazon. Their account, published from 1823 to 1831, is the great scholarly inventory of a country that the opening of the ports, decreed at Bahia in 1808, had just made accessible to foreigners. What Ver Huell looked at as a curious observer, they classify as naturalists.
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Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)

At the end of 1821, Maria Graham arrives at Bahia aboard the frigate Doris, commanded by her husband, as Brazil prepares to break with Lisbon. Her journal, published in 1824, describes the lower town, its markets, its churches, the sedan chairs and the slave market, which she says she cannot look at without shame and indignation; she also visits the island of Itaparica and its cane fields. English, educated, soon a widow, she sees the city with different eyes from the young Dutch officer, but the same sloping streets, the same cadeiras and the same violence of slavery run through both books, fourteen years apart.
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Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1839)

On 29 February 1832, the Beagle anchors off Salvador. Charles Darwin, twenty-three, enters a tropical forest for the first time and notes that the word delight is too weak to express what a naturalist feels. At Bahia he observes luminous insects, spiders, a puffer fish that swells with water; later in his book he will voice his anger against Brazilian slavery. This account, published in 1839, is also a book of youth: almost the same age as Ver Huell, the same first great departure, the same wonder of a draughtsman and collector before the nature of the Bay of All Saints, a quarter of a century apart.
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James Wetherell, Brazil. Stray Notes from Bahia (1860)

British vice-consul at Bahia for some fifteen years, James Wetherell died in 1858 without having published his notes; William Hadfield edited them in 1860. They are lively, precise fragments: the cadeiras carried on the shoulder by slaves, the ganhadores singing under their loads, whale meat sold at the market, the festivals, the dead child carried about in a chair decked with ribbons before being buried. Almost everything Ver Huell had discovered in 1808 is still there, barely changed, under the gaze of another foreigner settled in the city. The book shows how little Bahian society had moved in half a century.
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Pierre Loti, An Iceland Fisherman (1886)

At the end of the nineteenth century, the French novelist follows Breton sailors on their campaigns across the icy fishing banks of Iceland. Adam's Thule, a land where the ice burns, has become a place of toil and mourning. The novel gives flesh, eight centuries on, to the dread the canon felt before these seas at the edge of the world.
George Orwell, Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres (1933)

Zaydan compared Paris and London from the standpoint of the educated visitor, among museums, parliaments and schools. Orwell, twenty years later, goes down a floor, then several. In 1928 and 1929 he works as a dishwasher in the kitchens of a grand Parisian hotel near the Concorde, then in a Russian restaurant; back in England, he drifts from hostel to night shelter around London. Published in 1933, his first book describes the exact reverse of the facades the Levantine writer admired. He does not contradict Zaydan: he completes him, showing what European order costs at the bottom of the ladder.
Tawfiq al-Hakim, Usfur min al-Sharq (Un moineau d'Orient) (1938)

The young Egyptian Tawfiq al-Hakim arrives in Paris in 1925 to prepare a doctorate in law; he spends his evenings mostly at the theater and the Opera, and returns to Cairo in 1928 without a degree but determined to transform the Arab stage. Ten years later he draws a novel from those years: Muhsin, his double, discovers the city, falls in love with a Parisian and runs up against the materialism of the industrial West. It is Zaydan's question taken up by the next generation, with less admiration and more unease: what should the East take from Europe, and what does it risk losing there?
Stefan Zweig, Le Monde d'hier. Souvenirs d'un Européen (1942)

The world Zaydan visits in 1912, Zweig knew from the inside, and he saw it die. Written in exile and published in 1942, after the author's suicide, these memoirs return to his stays in Paris before 1914, to London, where he settled in the 1930s, and to Switzerland, refuge of pacifists during the Great War. Zweig paints the Europe of security, libraries and travel without passports, the same one the Levantine inventories, curious and trusting. Read after Journey to Europe, the book gives its tragic sequel: what Zaydan offered as a model to the East was to tear itself apart two years later.
Ernest Hemingway, Paris est une fête (1964)

A decade after Zaydan, Paris has changed its face but not its pull. From 1921 to 1926, the young Hemingway lives there poorly with his wife Hadley, writes in the cafés of Montparnasse, borrows books from Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, and sees Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald. Written late in his life and published in 1964 after his death, these memories make the city a school of writing and discipline. Zaydan saw in Paris the capital of taste and advertising; the American finds in it the capital of fruitful hunger and the true sentence. Two foreigners, two lessons from the same city.
Bill Bryson, Nos voisins du dessous. Chroniques anglaises (1995)

An American settled in England for twenty years, Bill Bryson decides, before moving back to the United States, to tour his adopted country using only public transport. From Exeter to John o' Groats, by way of Yorkshire villages and Durham cathedral, he observes the quirks, the courtesy, the love of queues and the taste for compromise of the British, with a tender humor. Zaydan, in 1912, was already trying to grasp the English character, its morals, its education, its institutions. Eighty years later, another foreigner, more mocking but just as admiring, takes up the inquiry and finds that the essentials have not changed so much.

The discovery of Britain: the history of the British Isles told by foreign travellers