One of the most often cited defining traits of Americans is restlessness. From nomadic Native Americans to the European colonizers and immigrants crossing oceans to start new lives to space exploration, Americans have seemed to share the desire to move, to explore, to test frontiers, and to push boundaries. That trait has inspired many contributions to a huge literary nonfiction genre, travelogues. It's one of my favorite genres, especially the travelogues that blend history, memoir, encounters and conversations with a wide range of Americans, and keen observations about American history, culture, and attitudes. This is the first of a series of posts about some of the books that fit this genre. In some, authors re-trace paths of historic explorers, while some authors set out with a particular theme or mission in mind. Some are histories of famous treks in American history and the explorers who did the trekking. A few are journals and primary accounts written by the actual participants, and there are a few works of fiction as well.
Here's a selection of books from the start of European colonization to about 1800. It's nowhere close to an exhaustive list, just books that I've read and encountered.
One of the first recorded American treks made by Europeans was the odyssey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, including the first documented African explorer of America, Esteban. They were the sole survivors of the 1527 Narvaez expedition that originally landed in the Tampa Bay area of west Florida. As the result of tragedy after tragedy and conflict after conflict, the expedition traveled around the Gulf, losing members along the way. Finally, by the time they reached the area of Galveston Texas, only four men remained alive, and they were captured and traded among various Indian tribes. For the next eight years, they walked throughout Texas and Mexico before reuniting with Spanish forces in northwestern Mexico.
Hernando de Soto was another early Spanish conquistador who landed in Florida and marched north. He and his expedition were the first Europeans to explore deeply in the American southeast, credited with being the first Europeans to cross the Mississippi River, raping, pillaging, and murdering along the way. This book provides an overview of de Soto's expedition, but its main focus is on the rather recent (and ongoing) archaeological discovery of a Spanish mission established in the wake of de Soto's journey deep in central Georgia.
Much less well known than de Soto, or even de Vaca, is the story of Jacques Le Moyne. Le Moyne was a French artist who was part of a Huguenot (French Protestant) expedition of 300 members to the New World that fled the religious violence in France to found a settlement in the New World in 1564. The exact whereabouts of Fort Caroline is not known. The orthodox view that it was on the St. John's River near Jacksonville Florida, but there is a theory that it was in South Georgia on the Altamaha River. In any event, the Spanish attacked the fort and slaughtered almost all of the inhabitants. A few individuals, including Le Moyne, escaped and returned to France. Le Moyne's significance is that he was the first European artist to travel to North America with the express purpose of documenting its flora and fauna, and he also documented the culture of the local Indians, the Timucua, a large group who dominated southern Georgia and northern Florida. These illustrations were widely published and copied throughout Europe, providing invaluable documentation and history. This book is a fascinating account of his life and work and the French-Spanish conflict.
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William Bartram, who lived from 1739 to 1823, is widely regarded as the first great American naturalist. He is credited with identifying, collecting specimens, and classifying numerous plant and animal species and documenting his travels, particularly through the southernmost colonies of South Carolina and Georgia and the territory of Florida, then under Spanish control. Beyond his observations of plants and animals, he also wrote about his encounters with enslaved people and Indians as well as the white colonists. Travels is indisputably a classic of the historical travelogue genre.
Less well known than William Bartram was Mark Catesby, a naturalist and artist who explored the Caribbean and the Carolinas in the 1720s and 1730s. Between 1729 and 1747, he published the first account of North American flora and fauna, including 220 color plates of his illustrations. It was hugely popular, and Catesby became a major influence on later naturalists including Bartram, with whom Catesby corresponded in his later years.
Few travelogues in history have had as great an impact on history as has Equiano's Travels, also known as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Elaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789. The book details Equiano's kidnapping in Africa at age 11, the horrors of the Middle Passage, his extensive travels across continents, and his eventual purchase of his own freedom, serving as a powerful anti-slavery text that influenced the British abolitionist movement.
The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West is a 2019 book by David McCullough that chronicles the settlement of the Northwest Territory (modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) by New Englanders in the late 18th century, focusing on the first settlement in Marietta, Ohio. The book tells the story through the experiences of key figures like Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam, detailing their struggles against the wilderness and their efforts to establish a society based on ideals of religious freedom, free universal education, and the prohibition of slavery, as outlined in the Northwest Ordinance.
During his presidency, George Washington made the effort to visit each of the thirteen states, both to educate himself about his country and also to reinforce the young country's unity. The new country was still somewhat of a loose collection of often quarrelsome states. There was absolutely no certainty that this wild, new, and unprecedented experiment was going to work. Washington wanted to talk to ordinary citizens, thank them for their support, and to imbue them with the idea of being American first, rather than a New Yorker or Virginian or Georgian. It was a major success, a great example of Washington's innate political genius. He was an expert at imagery and setting the stage, and he used various techniques throughout his journeys to reinforce his message. Nathaniel Philbrick, one of my favorite narrative nonfiction writers, decided to pack up his wife and dog (a la John Steinbeck in Travels With Charley) and follow Washington's routes. This was a great read, and I highly recommend it.
