The first Europeans in what is now the United States: explorers, settlers and travellers

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.

• Hidalgo d'Elvas, Relation véridique des travaux du gouverneur Hernando de Soto (1539-1543)

  In the very year of Cabeza de Vaca's return, Hernando de Soto obtained Florida; he landed there in 1539, he too in the Tampa Bay area. His men wintered at Apalache, took in Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard who had come looking for Narváez and stayed more than ten years among the Indians, then wandered for four years through the Southeast. After Soto's death, the survivors built brigantines, went down the Mississippi and followed the coast to Pánuco, the port the boats of 1528 had never reached. An anonymous Portuguese knight published the account in Évora in 1557.

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• Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, Relation de l'expédition de Cíbola (1540-1542)

  The stories of the four survivors set Mexico City dreaming of rich cities to the North. In 1539 Estevanico guided the Franciscan Marcos de Niza towards the seven cities of Cíbola and was killed there; the following year Coronado set out with an army. A common soldier, Castañeda told twenty years later of the stone villages of the Zuni, the Grand Canyon, the plains covered with bison, the humpbacked cows Cabeza de Vaca had described, and the elusive Quivira. The mirage of Apalache repeats itself further west, with the same disappointment.

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• Jens Munk, Navigatio Septentrionalis (1624)

  In 1619, King Christian IV of Denmark sent Jens Munk in his turn to seek the passage through Hudson Strait. His two ships, the Unicorn and the Lamprey, entered the bay near Digges Island, where Hudson's mutineers had fallen into an ambush, then wintered at the mouth of the Churchill River. Scurvy carried off almost the whole crew: by the spring of 1620, out of more than sixty men, only Munk and two companions were still alive. The three of them brought the Lamprey back to Norway and reached Copenhagen at Christmas. His Navigatio Septentrionalis, published in 1624, ranks among the most terrible accounts of an Arctic wintering, and echoes the winter Hudson had imposed on his men.

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• Thomas James, The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James (1633)

  In May 1631, Thomas James left Bristol aboard the Henrietta Maria to take up the quest where Hudson had left it. In the bay he met another seeker of the passage, Luke Foxe, who had sailed from London the same season, then headed south, into the bottom of the bay where Hudson had wintered and which today bears the name of James. He spent the winter on Charlton Island, deliberately sank his ship to save it from the ice, refloated it in the spring and returned to Bristol in October 1632. His Strange and Dangerous Voyage, published in 1633, tells of hunger, cold and prayer, and reaches the same conclusion as Hudson's journals: that way, no passage opens toward Asia.

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• 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.

• Friedrich Martens, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise-Beschreibung (1675)

  In the spring of 1671, the Hamburg barber-surgeon Friedrich Martens shipped aboard a whaler, the Jonas im Walfisch, bound for Spitsbergen. Sixty years earlier, the whales reported by Hudson in 1607 had drawn English and Dutch fleets into these bays; Martens found an established industry there, with its boats, its harpoons and its try-works. While the crew hunted, he observed: the ice breaking away from the glaciers, the polar bear, the walrus, the seabirds, and the scurvy grass, the same plant the survivors of the mutiny gathered on the islands of the bay. His Reise-Beschreibung, printed in Hamburg in 1675, was translated into Italian, Dutch and English.

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• Alexandre-Olivier Exquemelin, Histoire des aventuriers flibustiers (1678)

  Taken on as a surgeon among the buccaneers of Tortuga and Jamaica, Exquemelin publishes in 1678 the book that fixed the image of Caribbean piracy for three centuries. In it are the same anchorages, the same ransomed Spanish towns, the same reckoning of shares, but a century later and without the veneer of service to the queen. What Drake did under an implicit mandate, Morgan does under a Jamaican commission that barely disguises private plunder. The shift from state raid to private buccaneering can be read from one book to the other.

• Henri Joutel, A Journal of the Last Voyage Perform'd by Monsr. de La Sale (1684-1687)

  In 1685 Cavelier de La Salle was looking for the mouth of the Mississippi, missed it as Narváez's boats had missed it, and landed on the coast of Texas, near Matagorda Bay. Fort Saint-Louis wasted away there through disease, shipwrecks and desertions, until La Salle was murdered by his own men in 1687. Joutel, one of the few survivors, made his way on foot to Arkansas and Illinois, then returned to France. His journal, published in 1713, describes these low coasts, their lagoons and their peoples, a century and a half after Cabeza de Vaca passed through.

• Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1694-1706)

  Father Labat, a Dominican friar, lives in the French Antilles from 1694 to 1706 and tells everything: the sugar, the rum he perfects, the enslaved people, the governors, the fighting against the English, the recipes and the lawsuits. His prose is cheerful, curious, and utterly without scruple. In it we see what became, a century after Drake, of the islands he only sailed past: a plantation system that replaced the abandoned mines of Hispaniola and upended the population of the whole region.

• William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697)

  Dampier roams the Antilles and the Pacific through the 1680s before publishing in 1697 an account that will make him the favorite author of naturalists and novelists alike. He describes the winds, the currents, the plants, and the men with a scholar's curiosity, all while taking part in expeditions little better than those of his predecessors. It is the same ground as Bigges's, Panama, Cartagena, the isthmus, seen by someone who takes the time to look at what he passes through.

• Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight (1704-1705)

  Twenty-five years after Danckaerts, a Boston schoolmistress retraces part of his route on horseback, alone. Her sharp, funny journal describes the same roads, the same inns, the same river ferries, but in an altogether different key. Reading the two together measures what has changed in a generation along the colonial coast, and what has not: the mud, the cold, the uneven hospitality of isolated farms.

• Pehr Kalm, Voyage en Amérique du Nord (1748-1751)

  Sent by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to bring back useful plants, the naturalist Pehr Kalm, a pupil of Linnaeus, landed at Philadelphia in 1748. He struck up friendships with Benjamin Franklin and the botanist John Bartram, served as pastor to the Swedes of Raccoon, in New Jersey, then pushed on to Niagara and Quebec. In September 1748 he passed through Germantown: a single street nearly two English miles long, stone houses, German craftsmen who made nearly everything. Sixty-five years after the first huts, Pastorius's village had become a prosperous little town, and the Swedes of whom Pastorius spoke on the Delaware were still there.

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• Gottlieb Mittelberger, Voyage en Pennsylvanie en l'an 1750 (1750-1754)

  An organist and schoolmaster born at Enzweihingen in Württemberg, Gottlieb Mittelberger sailed from Rotterdam in 1750 with some four hundred poor emigrants. The crossing was a nightmare: disease, filth, stagnant water, biscuits crawling with worms, the dead in great numbers. At Philadelphia, those who could not pay their passage were sold for years of service. Mittelberger taught music at New Providence, then returned home in 1754 and published his account at Stuttgart in 1756 to dissuade his countrymen from leaving. Pastorius advised attempting the crossing only by trusting in God and accepting the rough fare on board; two generations later, the passage had become a business.

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• Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America (1753-1761)

  A pupil of Linnaeus, the Swede Pehr Kalm set out for North America in 1748, charged with bringing back useful plants. On 10 June 1749, he left New York on one of the river's merchant sloops and sailed up the Hudson to Albany, arriving on the morning of the 13th. He describes the Highlands drowned in mist, the sturgeon leaping out of the water, the tide rising well beyond Albany, the red cedar boats loaded with timber, flour and furs, and wonders about this river that cuts straight through the mountains. His account, published in Stockholm from 1753 to 1761, retraces the ascent of 1609 as a naturalist, with a fresh eye on the same landscape.

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• 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.

• 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.

• William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1773-1777)

  Two and a half centuries after Narváez's march, the Philadelphia naturalist travelled the Floridas on horseback and by canoe, from the St. Johns River to the Alachua savanna, then reached the Gulf coast towards Mobile and the Mississippi. He drew the plants, the alligators, the cranes, and described the towns of the Creeks and Seminoles with respect. Where the men of 1528 saw only lagoons, fallen trees and archers lying in ambush, Bartram saw a garden. Published in 1791, his Travels fed the imagination of Coleridge and Wordsworth.

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• William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1773-1777)

  Between 1773 and 1777, the American naturalist William Bartram travels alone, on horseback and by canoe, through Florida and the Carolinas, that is, exactly the coast Drake's fleet sails past between St Augustine and Roanoke. He describes the alligators, the springs, the pine forests, the Creek and Seminole villages. His book, published in 1791, fed the English Romantic poets. It brings to life a shore that the 1586 account shows only as a log fort and a wooden town.

• 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.

• Johann David Schöpf, Voyage à travers les États du centre et du sud de l'Amérique du Nord (1783-1784)

  A surgeon with the Ansbach troops sent to fight for George III, Johann David Schöpf stayed in America after the peace to study it as a naturalist. On 6 August 1783 he left Philadelphia for Bethlehem and passed through Germantown, still marked by the ruins of war: stone houses spread over two or three miles, an almost entirely German population, a Lutheran church, a Reformed church, a Quaker meeting house, weavers and woollen stockings. He attributes the founding of the town to Franz Daniel Pastorius, "of Weinsheim", in 1685: the very date that the 1700 book prints, in error. His account appeared at Erlangen in 1788.

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• 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.

• Martin Sauer, An Account of a Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the Northern Parts of Russia (1785-1794)

  Secretary of Joseph Billings's expedition, commissioned by Catherine II to survey the coasts between Asia and America, the Englishman Martin Sauer spends nearly ten years in eastern Siberia. He winters in Kamchatka, sails from Petropavlovsk in 1790 and visits the Aleutian Islands, Unalaska and Kodiak. His account, published in London in 1802, dwells on the Aleuts, their kayaks, their parkas, their villages, and plainly denounces the brutality of the Russian fur hunters toward them. Half a century after the meeting at the Shumagin Islands told by Steller, Sauer describes the price these islanders paid for the sea otter that Bering's expedition had made known.

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• Jean-Baptiste Barthélemy de Lesseps, Journal historique du voyage de M. de Lesseps (1787-1788)

  In September 1787, La Pérouse calls at Avacha Bay and lands his young interpreter, Jean-Baptiste Barthélemy de Lesseps, charged with carrying the expedition's journals to France. A year-long crossing begins: by dog sled across Kamchatka, through Bolsheretsk, then among the Koryaks, along the Sea of Okhotsk and across the whole of Siberia, to Saint Petersburg and Paris, where he arrives in October 1788. His Journal historique, published in 1790, describes the Kamchadals, the Koryaks, the Cossack outposts and the rigors of winter. Steller's reader finds Avacha and Bolsheretsk again half a century later, on the very road of his return on foot.

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• 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.

• 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.

• Moreau de Saint-Méry, Voyage aux États-Unis de l'Amérique, 1793-1798 (1793-1798)

  A lawyer born in Martinique and a deputy during the Revolution, Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry fled the Terror in 1794 and settled in Philadelphia, then the federal capital. There, at the corner of Front Street and Walnut Street, he opened a bookshop selling books, maps, prints and music in several languages, which became the meeting place of French exiles. His journal notes everything: the streets laid out with a line, the markets, the brick houses, the customs of the Quakers. In 1798, threatened by the laws on aliens, he returned to France; his notes were not published until 1913. A century after Pastorius, William Penn's city in its turn welcomed refugees from Europe.

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• Peter Kalm, Travels into North America (c. 1750)

  The Swedish naturalist, a disciple of Linnaeus, travels around 1750 through the Hudson valley, the Delaware, and the country around Albany that Danckaerts had seen seventy years before. Where the Labadist noted souls, Kalm records plants, soils, and customs. Set end to end, their accounts trace the slow transformation of a colonial frontier into settled farmland.

• Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1799-1804)

  Humboldt lands at Cumaná in 1799 and spends five years measuring, botanizing, and coming to understand Spanish America. He stays in Cartagena in 1801 before making his way up the Magdalena River toward Bogotá. He describes a drowsy port town, its outsized fortifications, its heat, its fevers, and the dying empire around it. Two centuries after the English soldiers' night march along the shore, the walls built in response to that kind of attack are still standing, and serve no purpose anymore.

• 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?

• Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803 bis 1807 (1803-1807)

  A German physician and naturalist, Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff sails on Krusenstern's Nadezhda for the first Russian circumnavigation. In 1804 he stays in Kamchatka; in 1805 he follows the chamberlain Rezanov to the trading posts of the Russian-American Company, at Unalaska, at Kodiak, then at Sitka where famine rages, before pushing on to California. Returning across Siberia, he publishes his Bemerkungen in 1812. Langsdorff is a direct heir of Steller: the same trade of physician and naturalist, the same curiosity for plants, sea animals and island peoples, and the same critical eye on the otter hunters, sixty years after the shipwreck on Bering Island.

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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.

• Washington Irving, A History of New York (1809)

  Behind the mask of the droll Diedrich Knickerbocker, Irving revives in 1809 the Dutch New York that Danckaerts had known from within. The satire is gentle, the setting exact: here again are the ferries, the taverns, the street names, and the spirit of old Nieuw Amsterdam that the journal shows us, for its part, without nostalgia or legend.

• 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.

• Adelbert von Chamisso, Reise um die Welt mit der Romanzoffischen Entdeckungs-Expedition (1815-1818)

  A poet already known for Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow, Adelbert von Chamisso sails as naturalist on Otto von Kotzebue's Rurik, fitted out by Count Rumyantsev to seek a passage north of America. In 1816 and 1817 the brig calls at Petropavlovsk, cruises in the Bering Strait and puts in at Unalaska, whose Aleuts Chamisso observes with a sympathy rare among the travelers of his time. His account, published in 1836, mixes a voyage journal with learned remarks. Chamisso sails in Bering's wake, and his naturalist's gaze, attentive to plants as much as to people, extends Steller's on the same shores.

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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.

• 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.

• Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie (1827-1840)

  The French navigator crosses New Zealand twice, in 1827 and again in 1840, and anchors in Queen Charlotte's Sound on the eve of the Treaty of Waitangi. He knows his Cook by heart and quotes him at every cove. Sixty years lie between the two accounts: the muskets, the missions, the wars that empty the bays, and chiefs who now know very well what a ship's arrival means.

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• Gottfried Duden, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America (1829)

  A few years after Ernst, another German settled on the far side of the Mississippi and in turn wrote for would-be emigrants. Gottfried Duden lived from 1824 to 1827 on a farm near the Missouri River, west of St. Louis, and in 1829 published an enthusiastic report that persuaded thousands of German families to leave. Both books answer the question asked in one of Ernst's chapters: what should the European do? Ernst calculates, Duden makes people dream. Many of his readers, once they arrived, would reproach him for painting Missouri in colours that were far too bright.

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• Alexis de Tocqueville, Quinze jours dans le désert (1831)

  In 1831, the young Tocqueville pushes toward the Great Lakes and crosses paths with the last Indians of the eastern seaboard. His brief, melancholy text extends, a century and a half later, Danckaerts's wonder at the Lenapes. The French traveler already mourns a world on the verge of vanishing, where the Dutchman had caught it still alive.

• Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

  Landing in New Orleans at the end of 1827, Frances Trollope travelled up the Mississippi by steamboat and settled in Cincinnati, where she opened a grand bazaar that ruined her. Back in England in 1831, she published a scathing portrait of the Americans: tobacco chewing, meals bolted in silence, the fervour of open-air camp meetings, slavery. She followed Ernst's route in reverse, from the delta to the Ohio, and found, eight years on, the towns he had seen being born. Her book caused a scandal in the United States; it remains one of the liveliest accounts of the West in the 1820s.

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• Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, Travels in the Interior of North America (1839-1841)

  A Rhineland naturalist already known for his journey to Brazil, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied came to America in 1832 with the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer. They spent the winter of 1832 to 1833 at New Harmony, the former Harmonist town that Rapp had since sold to Robert Owen, then travelled up the Missouri from St. Louis to the country of the Mandan and the Blackfeet. The book, illustrated with Bodmer's watercolours, extends Ernst's route beyond the Mississippi. Where Ernst had admired a Harmony of hard-working believers in 1819, Maximilian found a town of scientists and reformers, a sign of how quickly the West was changing.

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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.

• Charles Dickens, Notes américaines (1842)

  In 1842, Charles Dickens, already famous, travelled through the United States for six months and stopped at Philadelphia. He found the city beautiful but of a regularity enough to drive one mad: after an hour or two of walking, he confesses, he would have given the whole world for a crooked street. This is the grid that William Penn described in 1683, with its straight streets and its great central square. Dickens also visited the Eastern State Penitentiary, where prisoners were held in solitary confinement in the hope of reforming them, and he came away shaken. The Quaker utopia of the beginnings, seen a hundred and sixty years later by an unindulgent novelist.

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• James Clark Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions (1847)

  On 12 May 1840, James Clark Ross's Erebus and Terror drop anchor at Christmas Harbour for a campaign of magnetic observations. The expedition stays about two and a half months, in almost continuous gales. The young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker gathers there the Kerguelen cabbage, Pringlea antiscorbutica, whose name tells its virtues against scurvy, the sickness that had broken the crews of 1774. Ross does not dwell on regrets: his volumes go on to tell of the push toward the great ice barrier that will bear his name. The southern stopover nonetheless fills precious pages on Kerguelen's land, its rocks, its plants and its storms.

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• John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua (1850-1853)

  Appointed American commissioner to survey the new border after the war with Mexico, Bartlett spent three years between Texas, New Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora. He followed the Rio Grande, crossed the dry sierras, visited the towns and missions of Sonora, and drew the landscapes and the peoples. Published in 1854, his narrative covers almost exactly the last stretch of the four survivors' route, from the villages of the Rio Grande to the shore of the South Sea, at the moment this land was being divided between two states.

• Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas (1853-1854)

  Before designing Central Park, Olmsted crossed Texas on horseback with his brother in the winter of 1853-1854. He describes the coastal plain, the German settlers of New Braunfels, San Antonio, the ranches, and pushes on to the Rio Grande and beyond, into Mexico. His book, published in 1857, is also an indictment of the slavery spreading through the new state. Where Cabeza de Vaca had walked naked from nation to nation, Olmsted finds a land filling up with farms, and observes what colonisation does to people.

• Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1858)

  In 1858, the English novelist, then a post office official, is sent to reorganize the Caribbean mail routes. From it he draws a brisk, funny, and often unfair travel account, in which he visits Jamaica, Cuba, Colombia, Panama, and Guiana. He sees the ports the galleons once sailed from, the isthmus Drake never crossed, and the Panama Railroad, along the corridor the canal will later follow. The book shows what three centuries had made of the treasure route that was the true stake of the 1585 voyage.

• 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.

• Henry Nottidge Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger (1879)

  A century after Kerguelen's second voyage, in January 1874, the British corvette Challenger puts in at the archipelago during the round-the-world cruise that founds modern oceanography. The naturalist Henry Nottidge Moseley walks its bays and observes the penguins, the elephant seals, the mosses and the famous cabbage, the fresh food Kerguelen's crews had so sorely lacked. His notes, written for a wide public, have the freshness of a field notebook. They show, up close and on foot, a land Kerguelen had only glimpsed in the fog, which in a hundred years had become a field of study for scientists and a hunting ground for sailors.

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• Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

  Before the Civil War, Mark Twain had been a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. In 1882 he went back down the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, weaving into the trip memories of his apprenticeship, pilots' legends, shifting sandbars and the submerged snags that ripped open hulls. This is the river Ernst descended by small boat in 1819, from St. Louis to Natchez, narrowly escaping shipwreck. Sixty years later the towns had grown and the railways were competing with the steamboats, but the river remained the same capricious master.

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• Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1888-1890)

  Ill and seeking a climate, the Scottish writer sails from 1888 to 1890 from the Marquesas to the Gilberts, listens, questions, and refuses the postcard view. He describes societies that still remember the tabou and the morai, and a depopulation he attributes plainly to European contact. On the Society Islands, and on what Cook left there without meaning to, his pages are worth more than many treatises.

• 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.

• 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.

• Raymond Rallier du Baty, 15,000 Miles in a Ketch (1917)

  In September 1907, two Breton brothers, Raymond and Henri Rallier du Baty, leave Boulogne aboard the J.-B. Charcot, a 48-ton fishing ketch, with four companions. Their aim: to map the Kerguelen Islands, which France has scarcely explored. To pay for the adventure, they hunt elephant seals and sell the oil. Their account, published in English before appearing in French as Aventures aux Kerguelen, has the humour and daring of expeditions without a budget. Raymond will return in 1913; his surveys will serve for the first complete map of the archipelago, published in 1922, a hundred and fifty years after his countryman's discovery.

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• Georges Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future (1928)

  In 1928, Georges Duhamel crossed the Atlantic and spent a few weeks in the United States. He brought back Scenes from the Life of the Future, published in 1930, an indictment of a civilisation of machines, advertising and standardisation. The Chicago slaughterhouses, the cinema, the motor car, the hurried crowd: Duhamel often pauses before the same sights as the prince and sees in them the threat of a mechanical future for Europe. The comparison sheds light on both books: the Egyptian prince is irritated by the noise and the advertisements but admires the organisation, whereas the French writer, sixteen years later, sees in it little more than servitude.

• Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (1947)

  From January to May 1947, Simone de Beauvoir travelled the United States on a lecture tour: New York, Chicago, where she met Nelson Algren, the journey west, California, the deserts and Indian villages of the Southwest, then the South. America Day by Day, published in 1948, keeps the diary of those months with eager curiosity and a critical eye on money and segregation. Thirty-five years after the prince, she finds the same trains, outsized hotels and Broadway crowds, and in turn raises the question of the place given to Black people and Indians in American power, with a woman's freedom that the prince had observed in American women.

• Sayyid Qutb, The America I Have Seen (1948-1950)

  From late 1948 to 1950, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, then an official of the Ministry of Public Instruction, studied in the United States, notably in Greeley, Colorado, and then in California. He drew from it a series of articles, The America I Have Seen, published in Cairo in 1951. The text is severe: materialism, morals, brutal sport, racism. Read alongside the prince, it traces an Egyptian tradition of looking at America. Colorado is the same, and so are the questions, women's freedom, advertising, the place of non-whites, but the admiration of 1912 has given way to rejection, and Qutb would become one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood.

• John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1960)

  In the autumn of 1960, John Steinbeck fitted out a camper truck, took along his poodle Charley and toured the United States to rediscover the country he wrote about. Travels with Charley, published in 1962, follows a road that often crosses the prince's: Niagara Falls, where a problem with the dog's vaccination certificate makes him give up on Canada, Chicago, the Rockies, Seattle, Oregon and the California of his youth. He finds a country transformed by the automobile, waste and concrete, anxious about its own uniformity. Half a century after 1912, the progress the Egyptian traveller admired shows its other side.

• John McPhee, Coming into the Country (1977)

  Coming into the Country, published in 1977, is John McPhee's great book on Alaska. In it he follows naturalists along Arctic rivers, investigates the plan to move the capital away from Juneau, then settles among the gold seekers and trappers of the upper Yukon, around Eagle. Sixty years after the prince passed through, Alaska is no longer a cruise of glaciers and totem poles but a state where nature conservation, native rights and a still lively dream of gold collide. As for the Treadwell mine, visited in detail in 1912, it collapsed beneath the sea in 1917.

• Jonathan Raban, Old Glory (1981)

  In 1979 the English writer Jonathan Raban travelled down the Mississippi from Minnesota in a small motorboat, fulfilling a childhood dream born of reading Huckleberry Finn. He stopped in the river towns, lingered in St. Louis and Memphis, listened to the people he met and described an America of small towns, bars and churches. Ernst's wild river, with its bears, pelicans and drifting logs, had become a waterway tamed by levees and travelled by long strings of barges. The book measures what a hundred and sixty years had done to the landscape, and what they had failed to change.

• Jean-Paul Kauffmann, L'Arche des Kerguelen (1993)

  A few years after his release, the journalist and writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a hostage in Lebanon from 1985 to 1988, sets out for the Kerguelen Islands in the footsteps of Yves de Kerguelen, Rallier du Baty and the other discoverers. He shares the life of the scientists and soldiers at the base, sinks into the peat, gets lost, endures the wind that never stops. He dreams of sighting the rock arch that gives the book its title, and bad weather prevents him. The account of a goal missed, like that of 1774, his book turns southern isolation into literary material, never losing sight of the Breton navigator who revealed it.