The Early Explorers (Ecology)

Introduction

Early explorers played a crucial role in both ecological transformations in the early modern era (c. 1400–1800) and in scholars’ ability to understand environmental change over time. Christopher Columbus, the most famous explorer in the history of the world, figured prominently in the growing European desire to lay claim to the western hemisphere and established a model of explorers who traveled far in the pursuit of gold, God, and glory. But he also solidified the role that explorers played in identifying species and in the initial transportation of biota, which produced a series of far-ranging impacts. Following in the wake of the pioneering work of the environmental historian Alfred Crosby, who developed the concept of the “Columbian exchange,” scholars have written about the environmental consequences of long-distance travel, primarily (though not exclusively) of Europeans in the period often called the Age of Discovery. As many of these studies have revealed, the development of trade networks that spanned the oceans spurred unprecedented ecological change, including localized species depletion and alterations in climates long before observers such as Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold called attention to detrimental human impact on the environment.

General Overviews

Crosby 2003 and Crosby 1986 are the starting points for any discussion of the interplay between explorers and ecologies. As the author recognized, explorers did not travel alone into new territories. They typically brought animals with them, and almost as typically they were the unwitting carriers of infectious disease, most notably smallpox, which devastated indigenous American communities. But explorers also tended to bring home new plants and animals, which led him to label the phenomenon the “Columbian Exchange.” In 1972 Alfred Crosby (see Crosby 2003) laid out how the system worked in the early modern Atlantic World. As he wrote, Europeans benefited from explorers’ descriptions of American fauna and flora, and their diet and cultures became more varied as a result of the importation of tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, and maize. Americans, by contrast, suffered from the arrival of pathogens for which they lacked the acquired immunities that Europeans possessed; hence smallpox, measles, and chicken pox became more lethal in the Americas than they had been previously. Crosby 1986 applied these lessons across the globe. Richards 2003 offered a systematic review of environmental change on a global scale, though explorers play a minor role in a work primarily intended to reveal how the pursuit of economic opportunity altered disparate environments. He focuses on population growth, which led to more intensive use of land; the movement of biota, a phenomenon tied directly to discoverers and those who followed them; depletion of certain species, all victims to increased economic activity; and human reshaping of lands in ways that transformed large carnivores (e.g., wolves) into pests and thus facilitated their elimination. Unlike environmental historians, others who write about early explorers often tend to emphasize biographical details and often dwell on issues relating to the politics of the era, typically setting expeditions into larger economic, religious, and cultural contexts. Buisseret 2007 is a comprehensive overview of explorers, many of whom traveled and wrote in the early modern era. There is much in particular on the explorations of the early modern era, a period stretching from the early-15th-century journeys of the Chinese admiral Zheng He (or Cheng Ho) to the early-19th-century explorers of the American West, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Konstam 2000 provides brief but extensively illustrated accounts of the major issues confronting explorers.

Buisseret, David. 2007. The Oxford companion to world exploration. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A collection of approximately 800 articles, with many illustrations from the Newberry Library in Chicago, this volume covers virtually every aspect of the exploration of earth from ancient times forward. Though the pieces are often not long, the astonishing range makes this a crucial supplement for serious research on the multiple ages of discovery.
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Crosby, Alfred W. 1986. Ecological imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Crosby expanded his vision beyond the explorers and other individuals who dominated the pages of the Columbian Exchange. His brilliant elucidation of 1,000 years of human activity ranges from the Norse explorations of the North Atlantic (c. 900–1400) to the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand. Crosby reveals the importance of long-distance exchange of biota, with excellent details about how ecological change happened in very localized ways.
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Crosby, Alfred W., Jr. 2003. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Praeger.
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First published in 1972 and now available in a 30th anniversary edition, Crosby’s book has become the ur-text for early modern environmental history. He used the accounts of explorers (among others) to explain the long-term consequences of the European conquest and colonization of America. Still relevant for its clarity of expression, this work is now more likely to be of use for those interested in the environmental consequences of European explorations.
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Konstam, Angus. 2000. Historical Atlas of Exploration, 1492–1600. New York: Checkmark/Facts on File.
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Provides a useful if somewhat elementary survey of the major explorers of the long 16th century. The volume is primarily organized biographically, but there is substantial material on issues such as wind patterns, developments in cartography, and encounters between explorers and indigenous peoples. The work is not centrally about ecological concerns.
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Richards, John F. 2003. The unending frontier: An environmental history of the early modern world. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Richards’s magisterial review of the early modern environment and how it changed pivots on four developments: demographic change, biological exchange, reduction of certain species, and fears of food shortages. Some of these changes were initiated by explorers whose extensive journeys encouraged major changes.
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Journals

There are no major scholarly journals devoted solely to the actions of explorers. Instead, serious scholars publish works relating to the history of cartography (in journals such as Imago Mundi), journals relating to particular places (e.g., William and Mary Quarterly), or specific phenomena. Most publishing about explorers tends to appear in books, particularly in introductions to edited volumes of primary sources, which often contain extensive materials relating to local environments and changing ecological conditions. Imago Mundi is not primarily about explorers, but since explorers were crucial for the production of knowledge, the study of maps is crucial. All articles in the journal are illustrated, and many—if not most—early maps contain information about local environments. Environmental History treats the modern era extensively but includes some early modern pieces. National Geographic has developed a strong interest in the environment and often includes articles that look for the origins of contemporary issues in the early modern era.

Environmental History.
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Published quarterly, Environmental History aims to explore all aspects of the intersection between humans and their environments. Most of the contents focus on the modern era and rarely on explorers, but its “Gallery” section focuses on interpretations of the kinds of visual evidence produced on journeys.
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Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography.
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Imago Mundi is published in English but contains abstracts in Spanish, French, and German as well. Established in 1935, it primarily focuses on early maps, though its contents often stretch into the 20th century.
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Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction.
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Itinerario is led by an international team of editors and linked to the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, which meets biennially. Presents new scholarly work focused not only on explorers but also on the consequences of early explorations.
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National Geographic.
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National Geographic, the glossy full color magazine of the National Geographic Society based in Washington, DC, typically focuses on modern events. But it regularly features stories, typically well illustrated, relating to explorations. Often homey in its appeal to a wide audience, the scholarship that lies behind the contributions is normally impeccable.
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William and Mary Quarterly.
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Published by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture located at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the William and Mary Quarterly, now in its third series, is one of the most frequently cited history journals in the United States and beyond. Though it does not frequently include articles on explorers, it is a leading journal for new directions in early modern environmental history.
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Societies

Explorers have long captured the imagination of readers, and so it is not surprising that there are societies devoted to their efforts. Most of these associations focus on the past, but there is sustained interest as well in modern-day travelers and the lessons they have to teach. The National Geographic Society, in Washington, DC, and the Explorers Club, based in New York City, have sponsored explorations. Others, such as the Hakluyt Society, have published the works of earlier explorers, many of whose testimonies contain abundant information needed to understand earlier environments. Scholars and interested amateurs often mix in these settings, where specialists in the history of cartography or rare books, for example, might reveal new insights into older sources. The Society for the History of Discovery brings together scholars interested in all aspects of human exploration; its conferences often feature new work on the early modern era.

Explorers Club.
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The Explorers Club, established in 1904 in New York City, focuses on all aspects of exploration—including exploration of air and space as well as lands and seas on earth. Its elected members have included some who made historic journeys, including to both of the poles and to the moon.
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Hakluyt Society.
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Established during the grand days of the British Empire, the Hakluyt Society has, since its founding, concentrated its efforts on the publication of travel narratives, including definitive editions of major works by promoters of exploration such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger (c. 1552–1616), for whom it is named. The society routinely publishes at least one volume per year, which quickly becomes a definitive edition. The society also publishes an Extra Series, at times for oversized volumes.
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National Geographic Society.
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Founded in 1888 and mostly known for its National Geographic magazine, the National Geographic Society supports advanced research relating to archaeology, geography, conservation, and science. Bound like a slender book, each issue features dazzling photography as well as analysis of exploration in its broadest context.
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Society for the History of Discovery.
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The Society for the History of Discovery, which was founded in 1960, holds annual meetings to promote new work in all aspects of exploration in any time period. The Society publishes Terrae Incognitae, which contains new scholarly research as well as book reviews.
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The Columbian Exchange

Crosby’s elucidation of the mechanism of transoceanic encounters and the mixing of biota became a foundational concept for scholars interested in the age of discovery—or the age of mutual discovery, as Axtell 1987 reformulated the concept, taking account of the fact that encounters necessarily involved acts of discovery on both parts. The idea of the Columbian Exchange became central to environmental historians’ interpretations of early North America, as can be seen in the works Cronon 1983, Silver 1990 (both cited under Environmental History), and Verano and Ubelaker 1992 (cited under Economics and Demography), and then more popularly in Diamond 1997, Mann 2005, and Mann 2011. More recently, it has come under some challenge. Jones 2003, who relies on developments in clinical understanding of infectious diseases, which helps explain why some people succumb while others survive, has challenged the idea that individuals with no prior exposure to a pathogen will likely experience worse consequences from a disease than those coming from areas where at least qualified or partial immunity prevailed. Specifically, Jones uses the advances in epidemiology produced by the modern HIV/AIDS crisis to look carefully at why some individuals succumb to infectious diseases while others do not, an interpretive strategy that suggests that Europeans’ unquenchable drive for American resources (notably land, for what it can produce and as a place for Old World livestock to browse) exacerbated the public health crisis produced by the transmission of pathogens. But the concept of the Columbian Exchange involves more than the transfer of diseases. As McNeill 2010 notes, the spread of disease-carrying insects was both a function of the ventures by the first European explorers of the western hemisphere and the development of the slave trade and the regular passage of ships from the west coast of Africa to the West Indies, two locales ideal for the breeding of yellow fever- or malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Axtell, James. 1987. Europeans, Indians, and the age of discovery in American history textbooks. American Historical Review 92:621–632.
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Axtell, a leading historian of encounters between English colonists and the native peoples of the North American Atlantic coast, here trains his formidable skills on textbooks, which he recognizes as crucial for the transmission of culture. In this case, he argues that historians and their students need to understand that acts of discovery, such as those described by European explorers, need to be set into a larger context.
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Cook, Noble David. 1998. Born to die: Disease and new world conquest, 1492–1650. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Cook provides a detailed assessment of the various diseases that struck the Americas, particularly modern Latin America and the West Indies, during the initial 150 years following Columbus’s voyage. The volume is especially strong on explaining both the ways that diseases acted and on European interpretations of epidemics devastating indigenous American communities.
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Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human society. New York: W. W. Norton.
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Diamond took Crosby’s concept of the Columbian Exchange and applied it on a global scale, mingling observations of small places with interpretations of large geographical areas, such as China and Africa. He emphasized geography, arguing that the “fates” of societies were determined in parts by whether they were organized along longitude, his interpretation for the Americas before contact with Europeans, or along latitude, which he argued helps explain the spread of certain ideas in the Old World’s “fertile crescent” and beyond.
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Jones, David S. 2003. Virgin soils revisited. William and Mary Quarterly 60:703–742.
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Jones, a medical historian, draws on modern clinical studies, particularly in epidemiology, to rethink how and why European diseases had the effects that they did in early America. His work aims to undermine some of the claims of Crosby and Diamond, particularly what Jones views as those scholars’ tendency to see the working out of large processes without assigning responsibility for their consequences to particular groups of people, primarily Europeans.
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Mann, Charles. 2005. 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Mann, a science writer, uses a combination of historical analysis and interviews to give an in-depth and well-documented popular account of the environment of the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish in 1492.
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Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the new world Columbus created. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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In this follow-up to his best-selling 1491, Mann here continues to employ the concept of the Columbian Exchange in a similar book. This time, in a vein more closely resembling Crosby’s, he investigates the consequences of European contact.
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McNeill, J. R. 2010. Mosquito empire: Ecology and war in the greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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In this stunning reassessment of the history of the greater Caribbean basin, McNeil reveals how pathogens moved across the ocean and then became embedded in the natural world of the West Indies. His is among the most subtle interpretations environmental historians have yet offered to explain one especially devastating consequence of European expansion in the Americas.
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Climate

Wherever they went, travelers paid attention to the weather. Explorers in particular wrote about climate and whether local conditions met their expectations. Early modern European scientists had argued that climates should be similar at similar latitudes, but their projections failed to take account of the ways that wind patterns, especially the favorable winds that circulated in the North Atlantic, brought warmer temperatures to northern climates than might otherwise be expected. Lacking any way of measuring longitude until the development of the chronometer in the 18th century, earlier explorers needed to figure out where they were during their expeditions. Those calculations helped them make their assessments about climates, and about the impact of particular localities on the nature of local cultures and even human bodies (Chaplin 2001). Europeans were especially interested in extremes of heat (Kupperman 1984) and cold (Mancall 2013).

Chaplin, Joyce E. 2001. Subject matter: Technology, the body, and science on the Anglo-American frontier, 1500–1676. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Chaplin’s study closely examines the reports of explorers, especially from England, who wrote in depth about Native Americans’ bodies and cultures, including indigenous understandings of natural history. This closely argued and richly detailed volume is an excellent example of how to use early writings to understand ideas about the environment.
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Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. 1984. Fear of hot climates in the Anglo-American colonial experience. William and Mary Quarterly 41:213–240.
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This pioneering study focuses on English travelers to the West Indies who suffered from a variety of ailments because of their inability to cope with the unfamiliar, year-round heat of the tropics.
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Mancall, Peter C. 2013. The raw and the cold: Five English sailors in sixteenth-century Nunavut. William and Mary Quarterly 70:3–40.
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This piece uses the experience of five English men who disappeared on an exploratory journey of 1576 to explore English and Inuit understandings of northern climates. It includes material drawn from indigenous oral history recorded in the 19th century along with documents left by contemporaries in the 16th century.
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Economics and Demography

The circulation of explorers’ reports often produced excitement among readers, many of whom soon supported additional journeys because they perceived the economic benefits of establishing connections to distant locales. Explorers, it could be argued, played a greater role in what might be seen as the more benevolent parts of the Columbian Exchange, such as the transfer of flora and their integration into diets and especially the eastward movement of American plants and their adoption by Europeans. This was not a minor part of transoceanic exchange. It is difficult to imagine modern Europe without two American plants—tobacco and the potato. Explorers often described these new plants in depth and participated in their initial transportation back to their homelands. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage led to a great outpouring of material about the “Admiral of the Ocean Seas” (his title) and the aftermath of his historic journey. Viola and Margolis 1991 brings together scholars from different academic disciplines to reveal how diets across the world changed as a result of the European exploration of the Americas and subsequent migrations. Steckel and Rose 2002 employs skeletal remains from the Americas to examine stresses on humans over the longest possible historical range and concludes, somewhat paradoxically, that pre-1492 indigenous Americans were often the healthiest peoples in the western hemisphere and also the least healthy. Thornton 1987 takes a long-term view of the demographic shifts in North America produced by the arrival of Europeans and their diseases. Verano and Ubelaker 1992 analyzes diseases that existed in the Americas before European explorers arrived and the subsequent demographic catastrophe produced by the Columbian Exchange.

Steckel, Richard H., and Jerome C. Rose, eds. 2002. The backbone of History: Health and nutrition in the western hemisphere. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This major collection of essays draws on the skills of a multidisciplinary crew of contributors—from economics, history, anthropology, demography, biology, and anatomy—who collectively produced the most systematic review of literature they define as part of macrobioarchaeology studies.
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Thornton, Russell. 1987. American Indian holocaust and survival: A population history since 1492. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
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Thornton here offers the most sustained treatment of the demography of North America in the aftermath of the age of European explorers and colonization. He traces widespread population loss through the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries but also notes demographic recovery, which began in the 19th century and continued from that point forward.
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Verano, John W., and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds. 1992. Disease and demography in the Americas. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
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This collection of essays, primarily by physical anthropologists, includes material on two related subjects. The first half focuses on the health of Americans before 1492, and the latter part treats the following period with a focus on the specific diseases that befell residents of the western hemisphere in the generations following Columbus’s voyages.
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Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, eds. 1991. Seeds of change: Five hundred years since Columbus. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
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This collection contains essays from leading scholars of the Columbian Exchange (including Crosby and Verano and Ubelaker), as well as contributions from historians, museum curators, botanists, and anthropologists. In a series of nicely illustrated essays, the authors here reveal that it is virtually impossible to identify every aspect of the vast aftermath of the European arrival in the Americas at the end of the 15th century.
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Environmental History

Although there are relatively few works that deal explicitly with the arrival of explorers and subsequent alterations of human and non-human natural communities, there has been no shortage of important works in environmental history, which is a field dominated by a focus on the American West in the 19th and 20th centuries. These works draw on the insights of Crosby 2003 and Crosby 1986, both cited under General Overviews but tend to focus on localized areas, such as a region, or on attitudes, as can be seen the magnificent Worster 1994 study of ecological ideas. Still, ecological change did not begin as a result of early modern exploration, as Bruce 2010 reveals. But for the early modern era, the leading work in the field is Cronon 1983. Cronon argues that native peoples in the region, like indigenous peoples across much of North America, did not see land as a commodity that could be owned by an individual but instead as corporate entity controlled by a community, which could be used to human advantage. The English, in contrast, looked at North America and immediately tried to commodify it, laying claim to land itself and then imposing themselves on their possession, most notably by erecting fences that impeded the movement of natives and animals, whose numbers diminished drastically as a result of the region’s booming fur trade. Cronon’s work continues to have a wide following—such that Mancall 2010 used it as a starting point for a review of new developments in the field. While early modern environmental history remains a stepchild to modern environmental history—which dominates the pages of the main journal in the field (Environmental History, cited under Journals)—there is abundant source material, especially accounts left by explorers, which can be utilized to understand ecological change over long time periods. Donahue 2004 reveals the benefits of an intensive focus on one place over an extended period. His innovative and interdisciplinary research takes readers into Concord’s soil, tracing the meaning of settlement by recreating the layers of human activity there while Silver provides a southern analogue to Cronon’s work. Melville 1997 examines the role of European livestock released by Spanish settlers in Mexico in the 16th century.

Bruce, Scott G. 2010. Ecologies and economies in medieval and early modern Europe: Studies in environmental history for Richard C. Hoffman. Boston: Brill.
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This collection of essays on various aspects of environmental history by leading scholars of pre-modern Europe brings together insights of social scientist and historians. Taken together, they reveal the scope of environmental change in the centuries before explorers brought news back to Europe of new possibilities to be exploited.
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Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.
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Cronon’s book, which has become a mainstay of early American environmental history, focuses less on the arrival of English explorers in New England than on the consequences of colonization there. The book is a sustained essay on the radical differences in attitudes toward land.
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Donahue, Brian. 2004. The great meadow: Farmers and the land in colonial Concord. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
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Donahue’s study of Concord, Massachusetts follows in the wake of Cronon’s study of New England, but rather than look at the region he instead narrows his perspective to the small town of Concord, a suburb of Boston. He, too, does not focus on explorers but instead on the world that English claims to the region produced.
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Mancall, Peter C. 2010. Pigs for historians: Changes in the land and beyond. William and Mary Quarterly 67:347–375.
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This essay used Cronon’s pathbreaking book (1983) as a starting point for a review of the environmental history of early North America. It brings together primary and secondary sources and calls attention to significant new interpretations of the early American environment, including those of Donahue 2004, Jones 2003 (cited under Columbian Exchange, and McNeill 2010 (cited under Columbian Exchange).
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Melville, Elinor. 1997. A plague of sheep: Environmental consequences of the conquest of Mexico. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Although other scholars have recognized the destructive impact that European livestock had when they arrived in the Americas, no one else has examined the devastations produced by sheep in such depth. The sheep that accompanied the Spanish in Mexico devastated fields planted by natives, which produced food shortages and made indigenous people more susceptible to the impact of European pathogens. Further, untended sheep overgrazed fields, producing long-lasting ecological damage.
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Silver, Timothy. 1990. A new face on the countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in South Atlantic forests, 1500–1800. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Silver followed the model laid out by Cronon 1983 in a study of the modern-day southeastern United States. Unlike Changes in the Land, this book uses illustrations to advance the argument, and it also pays attention to slavery, which was a system that existed but was of much less importance in early New England.
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Worster, Donald. 1994. Nature’s economy: A history of ecological Ideas. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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When explorers traveled into new areas, they had in mind a set of ideas about the natural world. In this work, which primarily focuses on the modern period, Worster offers a systematic assessment of European and later Euro-American understandings of how nature worked and how humans could capitalize on its potential for economic gain.
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Geography

Explorers traveled in order to gather information about new places. In the early modern era, they often had close relations with mapmakers, with whom they shared news of what they had seen. Some lacked such connections, so their information reached cartographers through intermediaries (such as Ramusio 1978–1988 and Hakluyt 1965, both cited under European Explorers), who knew how to find cartographers sympathetic to their larger political and economic goals. With the spread of the printing press, many cartographers found large audiences for their maps, which were typically printed on single sheets and only rarely gathered together into atlases such as Speed 1632. But in the 16th century, many of the most important geographic discoveries can best be understood by examining manuscript maps, including maps produced by fine artists for important political figures, including members of royal families, as was the case with Moliero 2010, which contains what some scholars believe is the earliest European depiction of the eastern coast of Australia. Such maps included Moliero 2003–2006 (the Atlas Miller), produced in 1517 by Portuguese cartographers, which includes vivid images of the western hemisphere, especially Canada and Brazil. This edition also contains maps of the Old World, though they tend to be less well illustrated. This edition includes an extraordinary book of commentary on the atlas and its original production. However inviting such maps can be, modern readers should be aware, as geographers such as Harley 2002 have argued, that every map represents a political point of view and so needs to be understood as the product of a particular place and time. This collection of essays presents his core argument that all maps reflected the political, economic, and social biases of their creators, many of whom produced maps to reflect the concerns of specific courts or rulers. Fossett 2003 has also examined indigenous American cartography, a genre in which information about a particular place circulated orally and not in two dimensions.

Fossett, Renée. 2003. Mapping Inuktitut: Inuit views of the real world. In Reading beyond words: Contexts for native history. 2d ed. Edited by Jennifer S. H. Brown and Elizabeth Verbert, 111–131. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
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Historical cartographers of Europe and the travelers of Europeans abroad focus their analyses on two-dimensional representations of the physical world. As Fossett argues here, Inuit also produced maps, but theirs differed in two fundamental ways: first, they were often maintained in the imagination of the person who possessed geographical information; second, they frequently contained details about time, as in the season when certain resources could be found.
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Harley, J. B. 2002. The new nature of maps: Essays in the history of cartography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
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J. B. Harley (b. 1932–d. 1991) was among the most influential historical cartographers of the 20th century. Harley played a crucial role in founding the History of Cartography project, which has produced numerous collections of essays on maps produced about and in different parts of the early modern and modern worlds.
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Moliero, Manuel, ed. 2003–2006. Atlas Miller. 4 vols. Barcelona: Moliero, S. A.
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This virtually perfect facsimile of the Atlas Miller, created in 1517 and now in the collection of the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, reproduces a two-sided map on a large scroll and a series of single pages produced by Portuguese geographers who studied the reports of some of the earliest explorers who went to the Americas.
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Moliero, Manuel, ed. 2010. Vallard Atlas. 2 vols. Barcelona: Moliero, S. A.
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This atlas, from the same producer of high-quality facsimiles as the Atlas Miller, includes a near-perfect copy of a 1547 atlas now in the collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Five of the atlas’s fifteen sheets include the western hemisphere, which are more thoroughly illustrated than the maps that focus on Europe and Asia.
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Speed, John. 1632. The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine. London.
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John Speed was the most important cartographer in Stuart England. This atlas presents his maps of Britain—England, Scotland, and Ireland. The work is especially useful for revealing the ways that a skilled mapmaker produced two-dimensional images of his own homeland.
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Migration

When European explorers traveled to the West they had in mind more than the accumulation of new information about places that Europeans had never heard about in Antiquity. Almost immediately upon hearing news about what could be found across the Atlantic Ocean, European rulers and others sought to promote the creation of colonies. The concept was not new; Romans had established colonia from the 1st century BCE until perhaps the 6th century. The colonies created in the early modern period differed substantially from those earlier outposts of Roman civilization. On the one hand, Europeans recognized that they could not colonize most of Asia or Africa, so the reports explorers generated about those places fed economic and religious dreams, as Wills 2002 and others have recognized. On the other hand, Europeans saw opportunities for the establishment of colonies across the Americas. In the past, historians have studied migrations across the early modern world, with a particular focus on European and African migrants to the western hemisphere. Europeans, by and large, traveled across the Atlantic voluntarily, as Bailyn 1986, Bailyn 2012, Games 1999, and Bailyn and Morgan 1991 have recognized. Africans, by contrast, often traveled against their will—as slaves sold into harsh conditions, initially by other Africans, in numbers that are dizzying and to locations that ranged from plantations to cities: this is a process well explained in Canizares-Esguerra, et al. 2013 and Eltis and Richardson 2010. Yet despite the tragedy of the slave trade, scholars such as Thornton 1998 have identified the ways in which Africans took control of their lives.

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986. Atlantic history: Concepts and contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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This short volume presents Bailyn’s understanding of the development of the Atlantic basin, primarily in the early modern era. One essay focuses on historiography in a broad sense and touches on the development of the concept of an “Atlantic” world, while the other suggests avenues for understanding the complex encounters that followed the time of the explorers but before the era of the American Revolution.
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Bailyn, Bernard. 2012. The barbarous years: The peopling of British North America: The conflict of civilizations, 1600–1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Inarguably one of the most influential historians of the past generation, Bailyn here turns his attention to the first seventy or so years of English settlement in eastern North America. Rather than emphasize either explorers who tracked this area earlier and fueled English desires, he instead examines the frequently brutal encounters that drove natives and newcomers against each other in one bloody conflict after another.
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Bailyn, Bernard, and Phillip D. Morgan. 1991. Strangers within the realm: Cultural margins of the first British Empire. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
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Bailyn and Morgan present a series of essays that treat disparate regions, primarily in eastern North America, and a variety of cultural encounters. Strong contributions by James Merrell on encounters between indigenous people and colonists, and Morgan, which focuses on African Americans and the development of slavery across much of British North America, can be found along with analyses of subgroups within the British realm.
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Canizares-Esguerra, Jorge, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds. 2013. The black urban Atlantic in the age of the slave trade. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
DOI: 10.9783/9780812208139Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses on the disparate experiences of Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean in the early modern era. Contrary to the widely held notion that slavery was a primarily rural phenomenon, the articles here focus on the roles that slaves played in the burgeoning cities of the Atlantic World.
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Canny, Nicholas, ed. 1994. Europeans on the move: Studies in European migration, 1500–1800. Oxford: Clarendon.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198204190.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
European explorers often seem to be brave souls whose very act of leaving their communities marked them as different. But as the essays here suggest, movement was common across Europe in the early modern period, even if those migrations tended to be a short distance. Hence, explorers can be seen as those who traveled farther and earlier, blazing a trail—quite literally in some instances—for already movement-oriented people who would eventually follow them.
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Eltis, David, and Richardson, David. 2010. Atlas of the transatlantic slave trade. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
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The most detailed study yet of the economic system that European explorers helped bring into existence. The authors document where the 12.5 million slaves traveled from 1501 to 1867.
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Games, Alison. 1999. Migration and the origins of the English Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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In the 17th century some English were concerned that the world described so temptingly by European explorers might lead to drastic population decline at home. Although that fear became more pronounced in the latter decades of the 18th century, Games here reveals that the English carefully tracked many of its emigrants. In the process, she provides new insights into the near-term consequences of explorers and those who promoted colonization.
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Germain, René. 1996. Déplacements temporaires et déplacements définitifs dans le centre de la France aux XIVe et XVe siècles. In Voyages et voyageurs au moyen age: XXVIe Congrès de la S.H.M.E.S. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne.
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Like the essays in Canny 1994, Germain found a great deal of migration in the era before the age of exploration, thereby forcing us to expand the time frame for understanding the context propelling investigations outward—even in a society once thought to be as traditional as France, which was a nation that did not embrace either exploration or colonization as avidly as some other European countries.
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Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400–1800. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511800276Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The best study to date of the ways that Africans were not only victims of the slave trade but also active participants in the Atlantic economy, some of whom engaged in the slave trade as a way to make wealth and gain access to European trade goods.
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Wills, John R. 2002. 1688: A Global History. New York: W. W. Norton.
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A breathtaking romp around the late 17th-century world, this book contains numerous examples of the writings of explorers, as well as some consideration of the impact of phenomena such as long-distance trade and the Columbian Exchange.
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Explorers’ Accounts and Modern Ecology

Environmental historians eager to reconstruct past ecological regimes have, on occasion, turned to the writings of explorers, especially Europeans who traveled to the western hemisphere. Although these texts have been more frequently the subject of scholars interested in travel narratives, careful reading can reveal much about issues such as climate and the populations of nonhuman animals. Such texts need to be read with care, especially since early observers often lacked adequate vocabularies to describe what they saw, as can be seen in Elliott 1992. But despite the limitations, early texts and the images that occasionally accompanied them do provide glimpses into environments later eclipsed by the spread of European-style agriculture, which led to widespread deforestation, described in Williams 1992 and the decline in indigenous fauna and flora, explained in Gade 2010. Explorers’ accounts also provide details about indigenous peoples’ understanding of their natural world, explained in Heiser 1951. Yet however accurate such works might seem, it is useful to remember that all materials reflect their contemporaries’ understanding not only of the present but of the past—and for Europeans that meant an effort to understand how news coming from explorers needed to be read in the context of a body of literature that came to them from Antiquity, a point brilliantly made in Grafton 1995.

Elliott, J. H. 1992. The old world and the new, 1492–1650. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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First published in 1969. Elliott’s brief book launched a vast outpouring of scholarship focused on how Europeans integrated the writings of explorers into their understanding of the world. The writings of explorers and the earliest wave of colonizers figured prominently in his analysis.
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Gade, Daniel W. 2010. Shifting synanthropy of the crow in eastern North America. Geographical Review 100:152.
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This assessment of human-crow interactions uses the reports of White and Harriot from the outer banks of North Carolina in 1585. The work contributes to the study of animals that fare well in environments shaped by humans.
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Grafton, Anthony. 1995. New world, ancient texts: The power of tradition and the shock of discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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This lavishly illustrated volume is one of the most original products of the outburst of scholarly activity encouraged by the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s initial voyage. The volume reveals how explorers’ thinking necessarily reflected an understanding of natural history shaped by their reading of classical literature.
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Heiser, Charles B. 1951. The sunflower among the North American Indians. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95:433–435.
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Draws explicitly on the writings and illustrations produced by the first English travelers to the outer banks of modern North Carolina, notably the ethnographer and natural historian Thomas Harriot and the painter John White, whose watercolors from his trip of 1585 helped define Europeans’ view of the Americas and their indigenous peoples.
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Williams, John. 1992. Americans and their forests: A historical geography. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This monumental study of North American forests extends from the writings of the earliest European explorers to the 20th century. Williams traces the different uses of forests and the rise of conservation efforts, which came to the United States long after the destruction of many old growth forests.
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Travel Narratives: Sources

The explorers whose exploits continue to be told in often breathless prose, either as heroes or as villains (depending on a modern observer’s political orientation), became famous because they or those with them produced accounts of their journeys. In some cases, like Magellan’s, the explorer did not even survive the journey that made him or her famous, but instead the world learned about the daring adventurer through the efforts of another—in Magellan’s case by the scribe Antonio Pigafetta in Pigafetta 1994. The narrative, like other early modern explorers’ accounts, focuses primarily on the contacts that Europeans had abroad but also contain details about environments that travelers had never seen before, in this case the southwest Pacific. In some cases, the accounts that passed from one hand to another recounted travels that might not have taken place or that contained such outlandish claims that it might be hard to take them seriously, as was the case with the narrative of a 14th-century English knight named Sir John Mandeville in Mandeville 1983, who might have never left home. His narrative contains fantastic claims, such as finding dog-headed people and individuals who have but a single hole on their face and suck their nutrients through straws. Other narratives, by contrast, are not only more credible but also useful for understanding earlier environments. The Vinland Sagas, available in a superb edition in Magnusson and Pálsson 1965, document what the explorers had seen—including details about the environments they had encountered in Iceland, Greenland, and the Maritime Provinces of modern-day Canada. Similar details can be found for China in the account of the journey of Marco Polo, with an accessible translation in Polo and Rustichello of Pisa 1958. Yet however truthful such accounts appear, all need to be read with an understanding that they are examples of a specific genre, which can be found across all cultures but that have been studied most intensely for Europe by Bakeless 2011, Campbell 1988, and Fuller 1995 (all cited under Travel Narratives: Analyses). European narratives did more than tell of the world beyond the continent; they also provided the intellectual foundations for new ways of understanding, evident in the later rise of the study of ethnography and anthropology (Hodgen 1964, Rubiés 2002 [both cited under Travel Narratives: Analyses]). Crucially, scholars of non-European travel narratives such as Subrahmanyam and Alam 2007 (cited under Travel Narratives: Analyses) have emphasized the importance of studying the global phenomenon of travel writing.

Magnusson, Magnus and Hermann Pálsson, trans. 1965. The Vinland Sagas. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
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Norse explorers sailed westward from the end of the 10th century until the 14th century. These works can be employed, as they have been by Crosby 1986 (cited under General Overviews) to understand the relationship between European explorers and unknown environments, as well as fleeting information about encounters between travelers and small numbers of indigenous peoples in the North Atlantic.
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Mandeville, John. 1983. The travels of Sir John Mandeville. Translated by C. W. R. D. Mosely. London: Penguin.
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Few travel narratives had as far-ranging an influence in the early modern age as Mandeville’s, which was translated into virtually every known European language and for which scores of manuscripts survive. But what explains its popularity? This excellent edition includes a long introduction by Mosely that provides the context for Mandeville’s manuscript
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Pigafetta, Antonio. 1994. Magellan’s voyage: A narrative account of the first circumnavigation. Translated and edited by R. A. Skelton. New York: Dover.
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This translated version of Pigafetta’s account first appeared as volume one of Yale University Press’ two-volume version of a French manuscript, published in 1969. The events here took place from 1519 to 1522, from the launching of Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships to the arrival of the lone surviving vessel, which bore Pigafetta and the seventeen others who brought news of the death of the commander in the Philippines.
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Polo, Marco, and Rustichello of Pisa. 1958. The Travels. Translated by Ronald Latham. London: Penguin.
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Marco Polo (b. 1254–d. 1324) ventured from Venice to China in 1271 and spent the next twenty years in the East. While in prison he met Rustichello of Pisa, who worked with Polo on a narrative of his journey. Polo was not the first European to visit China—indeed, his father had been there before him—but this account, which combines the explorer’s observations with Rustichello’s literary abilities, has long been used by scholars to understand long-distance travel by Europeans in the centuries before 1492.
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Travel Narratives: Analyses

Travel narratives might seem authentic. Yet, as scholars have revealed, such accounts (much like maps) often served the interests of those who left them behind or who supported their ventures. As a result, all need to be read with an understanding that they are examples of a specific genre that can be found across all cultures but that have been studied most intensely for Europe by Bakeless 2011, Campbell 1988, and Fuller 1995. European narratives did more than tell of the world beyond the continent; they also provided the intellectual foundations for new ways of understanding, evident in the later rise of the study of ethnography and anthropology as described in Hodgen 1964 and Rubiés 2002. As Pratt 1992 argued, travel accounts published in Europe often encouraged investments designed to benefit the lives of the elites, a process that continued well after the early modern era. Crucially, scholars of non-European travel narratives such as Subrahmanyam and Alam 2007 have emphasized that it is time we look carefully at the global phenomenon of travel writing. While most scholars’ treatment of travel narratives has focused on the words that those on journeys produced, Todd 2007 explores the reception of the images created by the painter Maria Sibylla Merian in early-18th-century Surinam.

Bakeless, John. 2011. The eyes of discovery: America as seen by its first explorers. 2d ed. New York: Dover.
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First published in 1950. Bakeless’s collection of firsthand accounts remains an excellent source for understanding how Europeans initially described the western hemisphere.
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Campbell, Mary B. 1988. The witness and the other world: Exotic European travel writing, 400–1600. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Campbell’s work examines European travel writing from the early Middle Ages into the early modern period, including analyses of earlier accounts to the East and later (for example, by Columbus and Sir Walter Ralegh) to the West. A literary scholar, Campbell assesses travel texts, which were among the most important and revealing sources for centuries, as a genre: in so doing he reveals how writers developed and conformed to certain modes of representation.
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Fuller, Mary C. 1995. Voyages in print: English travels to America, 1576–1624. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This foundational assessment of the then-booming literature on English travelers by the literary critic Fuller pays close attention to the historical context of the creation of accounts, simultaneously seeing the evolution of this type of writing as a genre and the product of a particular political moment.
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Hodgen, Margaret. 1964. Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
DOI: 10.9783/9780812206715Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hodgen analyzes the relationship between early modern explorers’ accounts and the rise of what would become the modern discipline of anthropology. In particular, European writings about non-Europeans prompted scholars to think more systematically about ideas of culture. Non-Europeans often fared poorly in the assessment of explorers, but the growing body of literature about them allowed scholars to step back and decipher the ways that civilizations functioned.
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Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge.
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Pratt looks at the impact that European travel writing had on those who read accounts when they circulated in Europe. These explorers’ accounts created a European image of the world beyond the Continent that became an intellectual currency among those eager to find profits abroad.
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Rubiés, Joan Pau. 2002. Travel writing and ethnography. In The Cambridge companion to travel writing. Edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 242–260. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL052178140XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Following in the tradition of Hodgen 1964, Rubiés provides an excellent interpretation of the ways that the writings of early modern travelers, many of them explorers, shaped the European study of human civilizations.
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Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Muzaffar Alam. 2007. Indo-Persian travels in the age of discoveries, 1400–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Presents a close reading of travel accounts circulating in Persia that detailed Central Asia, South Asia, and Iran. The long perspective of the author allows them to create, in often startling depth, the intellectual horizons of a wide range of authors, both Muslim and non-Muslim.
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Todd, Kim. 2007. Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the secrets of metamorphosis. New York: Harcourt.
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Most European explorers who went into the field were men. Few of them possessed the artistic abilities of Maria Sibylla Merian, who traveled to Surinam and in the early 18th century produced a series of paintings of insects that seemed so outlandish to scientists at home that they initially dismissed their significance. But Merian was a scientific explorer, and her images simultaneously advanced European knowledge of a novel environment and also contributed to the understanding of the process of metamorphosis.
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European Explorers

Many European explorers’ accounts appeared in written form, often in print, almost as soon as travelers returned home. The first account by Christopher Columbus in Obregón 1992, known as the “Barcelona Letter,” was published by the end of 1493 and soon editions in different languages circulated across Europe. Ramusio 1978–1988 and Hakluyt 1965 are compilations of stories and were published either to satisfy readers’ desire for knowledge of the world beyond Europe or perhaps for political or economic goals, such as encouraging additional explorations or even colonization efforts. Indeed, among Ramusio’s readers was Richard Hakluyt the Younger, who defined his life work as an editor of travel accounts after reading the Navigationi e Viaggi. Ramusio’s three volumes, which appeared in print from 1555 to 1559, have never been translated in their entirety into English, though portions, by writers such as Jacques Cartier and Leo Africanus, began to appear in translation by the end of the 16th century. At the end of the 16th century Hakluyt published an expanded version of his work (a modern edition is in the works), but he did not keep all of the sources from the first edition; among those he dropped was the narrative of Mandeville, which Hakluyt apparently no longer found reliable. Some accounts, such as codices produced in Mexico and Peru, were never published during the lifetime of their authors, while others, such as the reports of Acosta 2002 and Léry 1990 found immediate audiences, and sometimes even illustrators created images for them without having seen these distant places with their own eyes. De Bry’s engraving of flying fish leaping onto the decks of a sailing ship, created to illustrate Léry’s narrative, perfectly captures the sense of ecological optimism that helped fuel the European conquest and colonization of the Americas. The sea, such images suggested, need not be an impediment to a long crossing. Cortés 1992 includes stunning details about the Aztecs and their world, including the ways that they preserved specimens in their capital city. Sahagún 1950–1982 is a three-part text. The original illustrated manuscript contained two written versions—one in Nahuatl and the other in Spanish; however, the Spanish, as scholars have noted, is often not an accurate translation of the material in the indigenous language. But a series of images does not always correspond to either of the texts and so constitutes a third form of commentary. Book 11 consists of a natural history and is primarily in Nahuatl, suggesting that this material might more closely reflect indigenous natural knowledge than if it had appeared in Spanish. Mancall 2006 brings together many of the most important accounts of explorers from around the world. Among the contents is an excerpt from Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, written in 1615–1616 and only recently translated in full by Rolena Adorno and José Cárdenas Bunsen from a manuscript in the Royal Library in Copenhagen and can be found online.

Acosta, José de. 2002. Natural and moral history of the Indies. Edited by Jane E. Mangan and translated by Frances López-Morillas. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822383932Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Acosta was a Jesuit missionary who traveled to Peru and Mexico in the latter decades of the 16th century. First published in 1590, the volume contains a wealth of information on the natural history of these regions claimed as part of New Spain, as well as a series of detailed chapters on indigenous history, rituals, and the fateful encounter with Hernán Cortés and his conquistadores during the conquest of Mexico.
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Cortés, Hernán. 1992. Letters from Mexico. Translated by Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
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Cortés’s letters, intended to document his efforts conquering Mexico, provide remarkable details about local environments and human uses of nature—including a notable chapter about the Aztec aviary in Tenochtitlan (i.e., modern Mexico City).
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Hakluyt, Richard the Younger. 1965. The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation. Edited by David Beers Quinn and Raleigh Ashlin Skelton. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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In the age of William Shakespeare, Hakluyt was London’s greatest producer of nonfiction narratives. This work contains accounts of explorers and diplomats dating from the Middle Ages until the Elizabethan era, many of them with precise details about the environments that explorers visited. This facsimile of Hakluyt’s 1589 masterwork features a detailed introduction by Quinn and Skelton as well as a masterful index by Alison Quinn.
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Léry, Jean de. 1990. History of a voyage to the land of Brazil. Translated by Janet Whatley. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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First published in Geneva in 1578, Léry’s account contains abundant information about the ecology of the Atlantic basin and Brazil in the generations before widespread environmental change. An edition in Latin produced in the Frankfurt workshop of the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry in 1592 gave vivid expression to the ideas of Léry, who was the first Huguenot missionary in the western hemisphere.
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Mancall, Peter C., ed. 2006. Travel narratives from the age of discovery: An anthology. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This volume brings together thirty-seven travel narratives from the 15th and 16th centuries to reveal that peoples across the world, not only Europeans, traveled long distances in the early modern era. Many of these accounts contain observations about the environment, but the narratives are equally rich with thoughts about foreign cultures—including European cities seen through the eyes of non-Europeans who went there.
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Obregón, Mauricio. 1992. The Columbus Papers: The Barcelona Letter of 1493, the landfall controversy, and the Indian guides. New York: Macmillan.
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In the first letter he wrote about his experiences in 1492, Columbus described the environment of the West Indies as well as his relations with natives he met there. This edition presents a facsimile of the original publication, a new translation of this classic text, a substantial introduction (which includes illustrations drawn from Ramusio’s volume about the western hemisphere), and images of maps created by Europeans in the generations before 1492.
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Ramusio, Giovanni Battista. 1978–1988. Navigationi e viaggi. 6 vols. Edited by Marica Milenesi. Torino, Italy: Einaudi.
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Ramusio (b. 1485–d. 1557) was, among other things, the secretary to the Council of Ten, the governing body of Venice during the heyday of La Serenissima (or “the Serene Republic”). He avidly gathered travel accounts and organized them for publication, though he died before seeing his work in print. The third volume focuses on explorers’ accounts of the western hemisphere.
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Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1950–1982. Florentine Codex: The general history of the things of New Spain. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.
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Perhaps the best-known codex produced in Spanish America in the 16th century, the Florentine is notable for Sahagún’s extensive description of the mores and history of the Mexica. He found this information through extensive interviews with locals, who learned Spanish.
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Non-European Explorers

Europeans put new names on the places they went in the early modern period—Hispaniola, Hudson Bay (and Hudson River and Hudson Strait), the Straits of Magellan—and so have left the modern globe with distinctive markers of the success of their explorers. But non-Europeans traveled extensively too, even if the mark they made on maps was less prominent. Few ventured as far as Ma Huan 1970, but since the Chinese made only marginal impacts on the places they went, early-21st-century maps bear fewer markers of their efforts. The first printing of Ma Huan’s book was in 1451, but no copies survive. This edition represents Mills’s effort to create a coherent text from three prior versions—one of 1617, another of 1824, and a third put together sometime before 1644. Further, many non-European travelers apparently made minimal changes to local environments. There are no known examples of Asian travelers spreading Old World diseases, though the migration of Africans (see McNeill 2010, cited under Columbian Exchange) did have public health consequences. Yet if they made less of a mark on places they visited, non-Europeans nonetheless shared Europeans’ desire to describe the places they visited, which means that the travel narratives left by such figures as Babur 1996, Africanus 1600, and Abd-Er-Razzak 1857 contain the kinds of details about local environments that can be used to understand earlier ecological regimes. Some of these reports circulated widely. The earliest version of Leo Africanus’s report was published by Ramusio in the first volume of his Navigationi e Viaggi. Babur’s manuscript, a translation of the Chaghatay Turkish original, had many readers in its time and remains an excellent source for contemporary 16th-century observations of India.

Abd-Er-Razzak. 1857. Narrative of my voyage into Hindoostan, and description of the wonders and remarkable peculiarities which this country presents. In India in the Fifteenth Century. Translated by R. H. Major, 3–49. London: Hakluyt Society.
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Abd-Er-Razzak was sent by the Timurid Shahrukh to be the ambassador in the Khorasani capital of Vijayanagara in the 1440s. That expedition became the basis for this account, in which the author paid attention to the intersection of politics and environments, including details about military uses of elephants. His account includes details of his journey from his hometown of Herat to Calicut, Magalor, Beloor and Vijayanagara.
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Africanus, Leo. 1600. A geographical historie of Africa. Translated by John Pory. London: Impensis Georg. Bishop.
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There is no complete modern version of the narrative of the Granada-born Leo Africanus, who traveled and wrote during the first half of the 16th century. Known as al-hassan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan in his youth, his narrative is the most extensive for early modern Africa, a place he described in depth after he had moved to the Vatican of Pope Leo X, who renamed him Johannis Leo de Medicis (or Giovanni Leone).
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Babur, Zahiruddin Muhammed. 1996. The Baburnama. Translated by Wheeler M. Thackston. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Babur, born a prince of Fergana in Transoxiana (modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) in 1483, traveled through and conquered much of the Mughal Empire. His narrative is part travelogue, part autobiography, and part memoir of a man who modern commentators have seen as both poet and a tyrant.
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Ma Huan. 1970. Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan: The overall survey of the ocean’s shores. Translated by J. V. G. Mills. Cambridge, UK: Hakluyt Society.
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Ma Huan (fl. 1380–1451) was the primary chronicler of the expeditions of the Chinese Cheng Ho (b. c. 1371–d. 1435), who led a series of ventures toward the West during a period when the Ming dynasty embraced the possibilities of long-distance trade. The text includes descriptions of places near (such as Vietnam) and far, including notable cities such as Calicut and Mecca.
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Matar, Nabil. 2003. In the lands of the Christians: Arabic travel writing in the seventeenth century. New York: Routledge.
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Matar’s superb compilation of accounts presents a view of the world dramatically different from that of Europeans who traveled to the region they routinely called the “East.” This book presents the first English translations of the writing of explorers who ventured throughout Europe and South America.
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