travel

Charles Alphonse Combes (1891-1968), born in Paris, moved to the Côte d’Ivoire in 1925 and never looked back. He began taking art students and in 1937 his studio became the École des Arts Appliques, the first art school in the country. It is now a museum in Abidjan, Musée Charles Alphonse Combes.

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.

This rare second edition of Journal of researches... is the final definitive text of Darwin's "first literary child," revised to reflect his developing ideas on evolution. It chronicles his historic five-year voyage on the Beagle to Brazil, Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Peru, the Galapagos Islands, New Zealand, Australia, and other countries and islands along the way. This journey was the most important event in Darwin's intellectual life.

Ronald Cohen, architect and artist, was born in South Africa and later moved to London where he succeeded as an interior designer. On holidays, he traveled and painted widely in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Africa, always drawn to different varieties of architecture.  “But then I discovered Cape Town,” he wrote, “and there I found absolutely everything to delight my senses—the wonderful clarity of the light, the expansive golden beaches, the granite rocks and the sparkling sea . . .

The ancient city of Palmyra was, for a number of centuries, an important trading center for materials transported across the Silk Road to and from many points in Asia and the Middle East. Much of our current understanding of silk in antiquity comes from the study of material from Palmyra. This book on Palmyra textiles picks up from earlier scholarship, seeking to identify the origin of these silks and to expand their cultural context.

More than six decades before the Panama Canal, a trans-Isthmian railroad carried thousands of travelers every month between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Crossing in this manner represented a third option to people (and freight) traveling to California (recently added to U.S. territory as a result of the war with Mexico) from the eastern United States. They could now avoid the perilous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope as well as the long trek across the great plains and Rocky Mountains.

In 1870, Alvan Southworth, ever in pursuit of stirring adventure, went to Egypt as a correspondent for the New York Herald to report on the lavish court of its ruler, Ismail Pasha, and to investigate the upper reaches of the Nile. He soon realized there was a larger story: the state-sanctioned slave trade in Egypt’s territory of Sudan.

Léo Dex was the pseudonym of the brillant and distinguished aeronautical engineer Edouard-Léopold-Joseph Deburaux, who was commander of a company of hot-air balloonists attached to the French Army’s First Corps of Engineers. Under his given name, he wrote many books and papers on the possible uses of hot-air balloons for exploration and warfare. His grand experiment in balloon exploration—sending hot-air balloons across the Sahara from Tunisia to the region of Timbuktu—ended in failure, and he died shortly thereafter.

Published in 1886, Wonderland was a free guidebook promoting travel via the Northern Pacific Railroad to the minimally developed and gloriously natural northern territory of the United States between the Mississippi Valley and Alaska. Wonderland includes a reference to a previous journey through Alaska made by E. Ruhamah Scidmore, who published a travel guide titled Alaska, its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago in 1885.

Author John Mawe, a dealer and expert in gems and minerals, was the first to reveal the full range of Brazil’s mineral wealth, which the Portuguese government kept closed to Europeans. Briefly detained as a spy in Montevideo, he reached Brazil and was given access to the inland mining districts, including Minas Geraes. There he recorded the localities, processes, and tools of the industry, along with a great deal of general information about the land and people of Brazil. His book was a bestseller, ultimately published in many editions and translations.

After serving with the Texas Rangers in his late teens and early 20s, then studying for a career in medicine (in Kentucky), and then for the ministry (at Princeton), Charles Webber finally settled into journalism, writing for several literary reviews. Enticed by tales of gold and quicksilver in the country north of the Gila River in Arizona, Webber organized an expedition to the region, writing this and other books to promote it.

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).

From the National Air and Space Museum Library's rare book collection, this 1953 classic is another publication from the Golden Book series on aviation for young readers. It was given to the Smithsonian’s National Air Museum (as it was called then) in 1957 by Paul Garber, the first curator of aeronautics for the Smithsonian. It is filled with aircraft illustrations, flight history, and biographies of well-known aviators of the period. Due to its age and paper quality, it is in need of some preservation treatment.  

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.