Travel narratives of the Americas, from the St. Lawrence to the Amazon

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.

• Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus (1503)

  A year after Cabral's passage, a Portuguese fleet returned to explore the new land, and the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was on board. He followed the Brazilian coast southward for hundreds of leagues, and the letter printed in 1503 under the title Mundus Novus spread across Europe the idea that this was a new world, neither an island nor a piece of Asia. His descriptions of the coastal peoples, cruder and more fanciful than Caminha's, made the text's fortune, and his first name ended up baptising the continent. Where Caminha describes for his king, Vespucci already makes of this land a story for all of Europe.

• Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, Relation authentique du voyage du capitaine de Gonneville ès nouvelles terres des Indes (1505)

  Setting out from Honfleur in 1503 for the Indies, the Norman ship L'Espoir was driven by the winds toward a coast of southern Brazil, where the crew stayed several months among Indians who welcomed them. On the return, in 1505, the captain made his declaration before the Admiralty: it is one of the very first French testimonies on Brazil. He brought back to Normandy Essomericq, a chief's son, who would never see his country again and would marry a relative of Gonneville. This short account extends Caminha's: a few years later, on another shore of the same land, the same mutual curiosity between sailors from Europe and men who knew nothing of them.

• Décadas de Orbe Novo, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, 1530 (1530)

  The Italian cleric employed at the court of Castile spent thirty years gathering the first accounts of the navigators: Columbus, Cortés, the conquests of Cuba, Mexico, and Darién. His elegant Latin carried the New World into European humanist culture. Lizárraga writes a generation later: the astonishment of the early years has given way to methodical inventory, but the echo of the pioneering decades still runs through his account, in the pages on the origin of the Indians and on the earliest settlements.

• Jacques Cartier, Bref récit et succincte narration de la navigation faite en 1535 et 1536 (1535-1536)

  While the four survivors walked from people to people towards Sinaloa, at the other end of the continent Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence to Hochelaga, then wintered at Stadaconé. Scurvy killed twenty-five of his men; the Iroquoians taught them the remedy of annedda, a decoction of conifer bark. In the same years, 1535 and 1536, two Europeans discovered North America through its inhabitants: one healed by them, the other become their healer. The Bref récit, published in 1545, also appears in the collection.

• 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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• Crónica del Perú, Pedro de Cieza de León, 1553 (1553)

  The soldier-chronicler traveled the same roads as Lizárraga, a generation earlier. He saw Cajamarca after Atahualpa, Cuzco after Pizarro, Potosí in its earliest days. His prose, simple and precise, is the great source for descriptions of Peru during the conquest. Lizárraga knows it and sometimes cites it without saying so. To read Cieza after Lizárraga is to go back a generation, to find the cities under their first coats of plaster, the Indians still close to the shock of conquest.

• Hans Staden, Véritable histoire et description d'un pays habité par des hommes sauvages, nus, féroces et anthropophages (1557)

  Half a century after Caminha, the Hessian gunner Hans Staden, who had come to serve the Portuguese in Brazil, fell around 1554 into the hands of the Tupinamba, their enemies, close in language and customs to the inhabitants of Porto Seguro. For months he awaited being eaten, witnessed feasts, wars and rites, and owed his survival only to his cunning and to a French ship. His account, printed at Marburg in 1557 with striking engravings, became a European success. The comparison with the letter of 1500 is dizzying: peoples of the same family, the same coast, but the laughing trust of the first days has given way to war.

• True History of His Captivity, Hans Staden, 1557 (1557)

  The German arquebusier survived nine months among the Tupinambá, a prisoner marked to be devoured. His account, translated into several languages, caused a sensation across Europe. The description of cannibal customs, rituals, and Tupinambá chiefs is firsthand, raw, without scholarly filter. It reads well alongside the pages Lizárraga devotes to the Chiriguanos: the same report on cannibalism, but one speaks from bodily experience, the other relays what survivors of the Charcas expeditions told him at the convent.

• Andre Thevet, Les Singularites de la France antarctique and Cosmographie universelle (1557-1575)

  Paris, 1557 and 1575. The royal cosmographer, who knew Cartier in Saint-Malo late in his life, gathered several anecdotes from him and gives an encyclopedic vision of Brazil and Canada typical of his century.

• Pero de Magalhães de Gândavo, História da Província Santa Cruz (1576)

  A Portuguese humanist whose book opens with verses by Camões, Pero de Magalhães de Gândavo published in Lisbon in 1576 what is often held to be the first printed history of Brazil. Its title keeps the name of Santa Cruz, heir to the Vera Cruz that Caminha had recorded. Gândavo describes the captaincies, the sugar mills, the plants and animals, the peoples of the coast, and invites his compatriots to settle in a land he calls fertile and healthy. Three quarters of a century after the letter of 1500, wonder has become a settlement programme: the same land, now seen by those who want to live there.

• Francis Fletcher, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1577-1580)

  Published in 1628 from the notes of the ship's chaplain Francis Fletcher, this account tells of the circumnavigation of 1577-1580, the voyage that made Drake a legend before the West Indian expedition. It follows Patagonia, the Strait of Magellan, the execution of Thomas Doughty, the run up the coast of Peru, and the capture of the galleon Cacafuego. Reading the two texts one after the other is watching a captain move from a distant raiding cruise to a large-scale military operation, with two thousand three hundred men and shareholders behind him.

• Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578)

  A young Calvinist cobbler, Jean de Léry joined Villegagnon's French colony in Guanabara Bay in 1557. Having fallen out with the head of Antarctic France, he spent several months among the Tupinamba, sharing their meals, listening to their songs, learning words of their language. Published twenty years later, in 1578, his Histoire is one of the masterpieces of French travel writing, which Claude Lévi-Strauss called the ethnologist's breviary. One finds there, matured by hindsight and by the Wars of Religion, the same attention as in Caminha to painted bodies, feathers, dances and a nakedness without shame.

• Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588)

  Harriot was at Roanoke with Ralph Lane in the very year Drake was sailing toward the Antilles. A mathematician, he measured, catalogued, learned a few words of Algonquian, and in 1588 published a report meant to convince English investors that Virginia was worth returning to. In it are the maize, the tobacco, the bark houses, and a careful silence about what had gone wrong. It is the exact reverse of Bigges's final page: what the hundred and three colonists taken back aboard in June 1586 had seen and believed.

• Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589)

  Published in 1589, the same year as Bigges's account, this monumental work gathers everything England could claim upon the seas: Cabot, Frobisher, Gilbert, Hawkins, Drake, the merchants of Muscovy and those of the Levant. Hakluyt writes to prove that a nation left out of the great carve-up now has its place. The volume allows the West Indian expedition to be set within the series it belongs to, and shows just how much this kind of raid then served in place of foreign policy.

• Garcilaso de la Vega, known as El Inca, Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609)

  Lisbon, 1609. The mestizo of Cuzco, son of a conquistador and an Inca princess, wrote in Cordoba the great inward account of the destroyed empire. To be read as a counterpoint to the European accounts.

• Comentarios reales de los Incas, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 1609 (1609)

  The mestizo from Cuzco wrote in Córdoba, Spain, the history of the Inca empire seen from within. His mother was an Inca princess, his father a Spanish captain. The book, published four years after the completion of Lizárraga's manuscript, brings Cuzco back to life, its rituals, its languages, its sovereigns, with a nostalgia the Dominican does not share. The two texts, nearly contemporary, are two faces of the same landscape: one by a mestizo who claims the Incas as his own, the other by a religious who judges them.

• Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Histoire veridique de la conquete de la Nouvelle-Espagne (c. 1568)

  Written around 1568. Cortes's old soldier recounts, sixty years after the events, the march on Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the meeting with Montezuma, the siege and fall of the Aztec capital. The memoir of a direct witness, written in a rough hewn language, that resonates with the Malouin's notebook through its visual precision.

• Marc Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609)

  A Parisian lawyer who embarked for Port-Royal in 1606, Lescarbot spent a year in Acadia and published, in 1609, the first great French book about the country. He describes the Souriquois, that is, the direct ancestors of those Maillard calls Mi'kmaq, a hundred and thirty years earlier, before the permanent missions and before eau-de-vie. This is the obligatory starting point: the same coast, the same people, a world still intact.

• Pierre Biard, Relation de la Nouvelle France (1616)

  Published in 1616, the account by Acadia's first Jesuit opens the long series of Relations that would make America's missions known to Europe. Biard tells of the difficult beginnings, the misunderstandings of language, the illnesses. In his account, everything Maillard would later live through still had to be invented: how to speak to the elders, the missionary's place in the assembly, the art of being heard without being obeyed.

• Gabriel Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons (1632)

  Paris, 1632. The Recollect friar produced the first long term ethnography of the Huron-Wendat nation, kin to Cartier's Iroquoians, in their homeland by Georgian Bay.

• Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France occidentale, dicte Canada (1632)

  Paris, 1632. Seventy years after Cartier, Champlain sailed up the same river, founded Quebec in 1608, and then explored the hinterland as far as the Great Lakes. It was with him that the French presence took lasting root.

• Nicolas Denys, Description géographique et historique des costes de l'Amérique septentrionale (1672)

  A merchant, fisherman, and grantee of Cape Breton, Denys published in 1672 the book of a man who had spent forty years on these coasts. In it one finds the harbors, the fisheries, the woods, the customs, and already the trade liquor. This is the concrete geography of Maillard's setting, described by someone who earned his living there rather than saving souls.

• 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.

• Louis Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane (1683)

  At the very moment our Labadists are working their way up the Hudson, a Flemish Recollect is descending the Mississippi and discovering the Falls of Saint Anthony. Hennepin shares with Danckaerts a Dutch homeland, religious fervor, and a taste for the cataract: both men stop, awestruck, before a wild waterfall. But where the Dutchman stays sober, the friar swells his tale. Read side by side, the two sketch the rival Americas of the late seventeenth century, French and English, already dividing the continent between them.

• 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.

• Chrestien Le Clercq, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (1691)

  The indispensable book for understanding the chapter on hieroglyphics. The Recollet friar tells how, around 1677, he saw children mark signs in charcoal on birch bark to count the words of their prayers, and how he drew from this a system of writing that let them learn in a single day what weeks of recitation had failed to give them. The editors of 1863 quote this passage at length in a note to Maillard's text, and raise the question that remains open: which of the two invented it, and which perfected it?

• 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.

• Pierre-Esprit Radisson, Voyages (c. 1669)

  Written around 1669, published only in the nineteenth century. The coureur de bois traces the fur trade routes as far as Hudson Bay. A hybrid text, written in English by a Frenchman.

• 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.

• Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1722)

  The Dominican Labat spent twelve years in the West Indies and brought back from them, in 1722, one of the liveliest books of the century: sugar, buccaneering, slavery, cooking, lawsuits and storms, all recounted by a friar with a hearty appetite for life. It is from these islands that guildive comes, a raw cane spirit, the very drink Maillard sees his flock grow drunk on. Reading Labat and Maillard together is to follow cane alcohol from one end of its journey to the other, from the tropical sugar works to the winter camps of Île Royale.

• Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal d'un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l'Amérique septentrionale (1744)

  Published in 1744, the great account by the Jesuit who crossed New France from the Saint Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. It fixed the French image of North America for a century. Curiously, it is also part of this book's own file: the London editor of 1758 appended to his abridged translation of Maillard an extract from a letter by Charlevoix, to complete what his volume did not provide.

• Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d'un voyage fait dans l'intérieur de l'Amérique méridionale (1745)

  In 1743, the academician descended the Amazon from Peru to the Atlantic and reported on his journey to the Academy of Sciences. Same continent, same decade, an entirely different gaze: La Condamine measures, calculates, and samples, while Maillard listens and reports words spoken to him. Each text tells, in its own way, what Enlightenment Europe had come to America to find, and what it failed to see there.

• 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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• 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.

• 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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• 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.

• Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Ecrits sur le Canada (c. 1758)

  Written around 1758. The future navigator spent three years alongside Montcalm in New France before setting off to sail around the world. The gaze of an Enlightenment philosopher on the colony on the eve of its fall.

• 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.

• 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.

• Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, Voyage au Brésil dans les années 1815, 1816 et 1817 (1820-1821)

  A naturalist trained at Göttingen, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied travelled up the eastern coast of Brazil between 1815 and 1817, from Rio de Janeiro to Bahia, through forests the colony had not yet cleared. He passed through Porto Seguro, very near the bay where Caminha had seen the cross planted three centuries earlier, and an engraved view of the town illustrates his book. He observed the Botocudo and the Pataxó at length, bringing back vocabularies, objects and portraits. Published in German in 1820 and 1821, then translated into French as early as 1822, his account offers a striking return to the very place of the discovery.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• Souvenirs d'un voyage au Chili, Gabriel Lafond de Lurcy, 1843 (1843)

  The French sailor frequented the ports of the southern Pacific coast in the years following independence. His pages on Valparaíso, on Callao, on the ruins of Arica take the measure of time passed: the same bays, the same winds, but the Spanish banners have vanished, and the Creole republics seek a new order amid the setting Lizárraga once inventoried.

• 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.

• 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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• 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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• Aux pays de l'argent, Jules Huret, 1911 (1911)

  The reporter for Le Figaro crosses South America on the eve of the First World War. Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Potosí, La Paz, Lima: he visits the same places as Lizárraga, but with a train, a camera, a journalist's notebook. The Inca cities have become tourist attractions, the Potosí mine is nearly exhausted, and the colonial legacy shows through everywhere like bones beneath the sand.

• 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.

• 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.