explore

Verney Lovett Cameron (1844-1894), author of this account, was the first European to cross Equatorial Africa, coast to coast and mostly on foot. His original mission was to search for the missing explorer David Livingstone, but soon after leaving Zanzibar (an island off Africa’s east coast) early in 1873, he learned that the great man had died.

Verney Lovett Cameron (1844-1894), author of this book, was the first European to cross Equatorial Africa, coast to coast and mostly on foot.  His original mission was to search for the missing explorer David Livingstone, but soon after leaving Zanzibar (an island off Africa’s east coast) early in 1873, he learned that the great man had died.

John Randolph Spears (b. 1850) was a well-traveled journalist at turn of the century, eventually writing nearly a dozen books, primarily on nautical and maritime themes. This early title is about the land, sea, flora, fauna, and cultures of South America’s southernmost region. The “gold diggings” from the title are mostly done on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego, where, after heavy storms, gold shows up on the black sands. The quest for gold often creates conflicts with indigenous communities of the area, which Spears takes great care to describe with sensitivity (for the times).

One of a series of travel guides written by Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner, this book documents a fun-filled search for the “Lost Dutchman” and “Lost Nummel” mines in Arizona in 1965. The team utilized helicopters, jeeps, desert buggies, and mules in its search, which is captured in many photographs. The book also includes biographies of the search team members. It documents a bygone era of exploration and a form of adventure with wide appeal.

Didier Robert de Vaugondy (1723–1786), appointed geographer of King Louis XV in 1760, created this atlas to educate young students in the basic elements of geography. With his father, Gilles Robert de Vaugondy (1688–1766), he published one of the key atlases of the century called The Atlas Universel (1757) which employed modern surveyed maps to update and correct latitude and longitude points and revise place names.

The Southern Cross Expedition (otherwise known as the British Antarctic Expedition) holds a special place in history: it was the first British venture of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the first to ever winter on the Antarctic mainland, the first to visit the Great Ice Barrier in over 50 years, and a pioneer of Antarctic survival and travel techniques. Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, even stated that the expedition’s work helped him and other explorers.

Dark Companion chronicles the polar expedition of African American explorer, Matthew Henson. Born in 1866, four years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Henson went on to triumph as one of the first men to “stand on top of the world." On April 6, 1909, Henson along with Robert Peary co-discovered the North Pole. Hundreds had previously attempted and failed to reach the elusive polar ice cap.

Led by Captain Clarence E. Dutton, the U.S. Geological Survey’s exploration of the Grand Canyon in the early 1880s resulted in a scientific text and this stunning over-sized folio atlas, considered the greatest book by any of the government surveys of the American West. The expedition included artist/archaeologist William Henry Holmes and the artist Thomas Moran. Three double-page, color-tinted lithographed plates by Holmes, when set together, form the magnificent “Panorama from Point Sublime.” In the bottom left corner Dutton is depicted leaning over Holmes as he sketches the view.

In 1871, seventeen-year-old Fred Dellenbaugh, under the lead of Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War hero and the first director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, journeyed into the Grand Canyon and its subsidiary canyons and rivers with the intention of exploring, mapping, and recording descriptions of the uncharted territory. The men found themselves battling the great force of the Colorado River, with its fatal, quick rapids and mighty waterfalls. This is Dellenbaugh’s personal story, written thirty years after the great adventure.

This rare catalogue of an exhibition in Paris in 1883 – held by only six libraries in the U.S. – provides descriptions and brief historical explanations of 102 antiquities from Mexico and the Yucatan that famed French archaeologist Désiré Charnay (1828-1915) acquired during an expedition of 1880-1882, including plans of newly discovered Toltec palaces, Aztec statues and funeral urns, and bas-reliefs found in Yucatan villages.

René Primevère Lesson, having served as surgeon/pharmacist/naturalist on the round-the-world scientific voyage of the Coquille (1822-1825), subsequently published several works in ornithology and mammalogy. Les Trochilidées is the third and last volume of his classic work on hummingbirds, and its purchase completes the Smithsonian Libraries' set. Beautifully illustrated, the plates are color-printed and finished by hand to accompany the species descriptions and a general natural history of hummingbirds. This copy survives in sheets as issued, folded but un-cut and un-bound.