Table Of ContentBibliography of natural history travel narratives
Bibliography of
Natural History
Travel Narratives
A.S. TroelSTrA
KNNV Publishing
2016
Inhoud
Preface 7
Introduction 9
The evolution of the natural history travel narrative 13
Travel narratives, arranged alphabetically by author 25
Secondary sources 466
Geographical index 476
Preface
Natural history travel narratives are interesting for Additions and corrections are welcome and may
several reasons. They are interesting from a historical be reported at [email protected], subject:
perspective because they make us aware of the efforts BibliographyNHT.
spent, and the methods used in taking stock of our
natural environment. They show us the collector and Acknowledgements
the naturalist as subject to the same pressures and act- First of all, it needs to be said that the editorial work
ing under the same political constraints as everyone by Cis van Heertum has resulted in considerable
else, and how this influences their results. Quite often improvements to the text. Bob Gilbert very kindly
they also have a marked literary appeal. offered to read through all the biographies, which
In many instances these travel narratives record a resulted in further corrections and additions.
world which has disappeared. Flora, fauna and society My wife of more than 50 years, Olga Troelstra, née
are forever changing, and so traveller’s tales describe Bakker, has encouraged me during the whole process
situations of the past. Although we might often wish of writing. I could always explain to her the practi-
for more detail to allow for a better comparison of past cal problems which I encountered, and I valued her
and present, these accounts, fragmentary as they often comments. Her knowledge of Russian came in very
are, are all we have. The study of zoogeography, for useful when Russian titles had to be transliterated and
instance, includes a historical component, and in order translated.
to track and document changes, we have to use the Jan-Frits Veldkamp of Naturalis Biodiversity center
records of the past. has always taken a lively interest in the project, has
Having read many natural history travel narratives, located sources of information for me and suggested
I thought it would be good to have an overview. My the names of several travellers for inclusion in the list.
starting point was the collection of natural history Michael Ohl of the Naturkunde Museum, Berlin led
travel narratives in the Amsterdam University Library. me to the truth about Quasdanovitch and Sonnerat
As the list grew longer, I became more ambitious and with his questions and help.
decided to try and cover as many natural history travel I would like to thank my colleagues at the Artis
narratives in book form as I could find. Library, Hans Mulder and Jip Binsbergen, for having
It is impossible for a single person to compile a helped me to find items and for their useful sugges-
bibliography dealing with so wide a field based on tions. Marijke Duyvendak of the library of the Faculty
autopsy (i.e. the personal inspection of the editions of Science at the University of Amsterdam was very
involved) alone. Therefore I mainly based myself on helpful in providing scans or copies of some fairly
sources accessible via the internet: digital catalogues obscure publications.
of libraries, scans of books available on the internet Werner Rovers provided me with some biographical
and so on. Only a relatively small part of my descrip- data concerning A.J. van Stockum and G.F. Venema.
tions is based on personal inspection. Ann Lidstone, Honorary Secretary and Archivist of
Often, however, the information available on the the Lidstone Family History Society, kindly furnished
internet about a specific edition is less than we could me with valuable information about William Lidstone
wish for, sometimes it is even unreliable — as becomes (1843–1927).
obvious when, for example, digital catalogues contra- And last, but not least, I am grateful to KNNV
dict each other. For this reason the present attempt Publishers for their willingness to take on this project,
at a bibliography cannot match a bibliography solely and to Alexander Reeuwijk for his editorial commit-
based on autopsy, but it is my hope that it may be a ment.
useful basis for further study.
PrefAce | 7
Introduction
Scope of the bibliography R. Kohler in his book All Creatures (2006), around 1900
there was no sharp borderline between hunting and
Character of the texts considered natural history and many journals contained articles
This bibliography attempts to cover the field of natural belonging to both categories: hunting and natural
history travel narratives in book form. Ideally, a natural history, whether popular or scientific. At this time
history travel narrative is a chronologically ordered many hunters styled themselves ‘hunter-naturalists’,
story of travel, located more or less precisely in time, with Theodore Roosevelt as the best-known example,
in which natural history observations and the collect- justifying their hunting activitities with the production
ing of natural history objects play an important part. of zoological specimens for museums and scientific
Natural history is interpreted here as embracing bota- collections. I have included hunting narratives if they
ny, zoology, mineralogy and geology. contain a sizeable amount of biological information.
There are, of course, many more journeys, made On the other hand, ‘pure’ hunting stories do not quali-
at least partly for the sake of natural history, beyond fy for inclusion.
those that resulted in a published narrative. Some
travellers, while diligently collecting specimens of flo- Editions and translations
ra, fauna and rocks chose to leave out this part of their For every text I have attempted to list all editions
activities in their narratives. Their stories have not and/or printings, as well as translations with their
been included. In other cases, the report of an expe- editions and printings, up to the present. That being
dition is divided into a description of a bare itinerary said, there are practical limitations. One such limi-
— a lean and very matter-of-fact narrative — without tation is dictated by the extent of my own linguistic
any natural history details and presentation of the knowledge: it is hard to collect information about
scientific results in the form of a systematic treatment editions in an unfamiliar language. Another obvious
or listing. Since the natural history is not integrated in limitation is related to the availability of national
the narrative, expedition reports of this type have also catalogues in digital form.
been left out. Thus the coverage of publications in French,
Well into the nineteenth century, ethnology was tra- English, German and Dutch is good; in Portuguese,
ditionally regarded as part of natural history by many Spanish, Italian and the Scandinavian languages at
travellers. In this bibliography, however, I have chosen least fair; the coverage of editions in other languages is
to regard ethnology as a subject distinct from natural fragmentary.
history, and therefore a narrative with ethnology, but I have not tried to list facsimile editions on micro-
without natural history, does not qualify for inclusion. fiche, or editions on cd-roM, and as a rule also no
It is certainly not unusual to see a traveller setting eBooks or spoken books. After 2000, a true avalanche
out as a zoological collector, but ending up as a writer of printing-on-demand (short: Pod) ‘editions’ became
of a travel narrative mainly devoted to ethnology, or, available, made from scans of older editions in the
if you like, its modern equivalent cultural anthropol- public domain — often of poor quality — and as a rule I
ogy. Zoologists seem to be more liable to fall prey to have not included those. On the other hand, however,
this ‘disease’ than botanists or geologists. This was self-published books that were made available as Pod
certainly a way to ensure more public attention for the are included. I use the quotes around ‘editions’ inten-
narrative than would have been the case with a story tionally: it is hard to compare such ‘editions’, which in
containing less ethnological content. Some travellers their material form are usually undated, with editions
simply became so fascinated by their contacts with on paper in the usual sense. Their existence is not a
people from widely different cultures, that ethnology solid indication of public interest in a particular text.
quite naturally took precedence in their report. In oth- In this respect the number of downloads of a text from
er cases, the large share of attention for ethnology is a site such as Archive.org is probably more significant.
dictated by a sense of urgency: old customs, forms of Most of them have been produced from scans availa-
government, specimens of material culture were con- ble in the public domain.
ceived to be under threat of disappearance, even more
rapidly than flora and fauna. However, if the narrative Inclusion of papers
still contains a significant amount of references to nat- As stated above, the bibliography concentrates on
ural history, it has also been included. books. Nevertheless, in a few cases narratives pub-
Do hunting stories qualify? As observed by lished as articles in journals have been included.
INTroducTIoN | 9
This is in particular the case where a series of articles The entry continues with a list of editions and trans-
formed the basis for a book with largely the same con- lations. If a place of publication and publisher are not
tents. To understand the genesis of a text, it is relevant mentioned for a particular edition, it is taken to be the
to look at its earlier publication form as a series of arti- same as for the preceding edition in the list.
cles. A more comprehensive coverage of articles with For greater readability, each new edition or transla-
natural history narratives would certainly be desirable, tion is headed by the symbol ¶, followed by the year of
but the size of this bibliography would have swelled publication. For easy reference to editions or transla-
beyond reasonable proportions and the extension tions appearing in the same year, I have added a letter,
would have involved more work than I would have thus 1937, 1937a and so on. As the year of publication
been able to achieve on my own. of a copy I take the year indicated on the title-page; or
if this is absent, the year of printing which is usual-
Organization ly given on the verso of the title-page; if there is no
The bibliography is made up of three parts. The main year indicated on the title page, nor the year of a later
part is a list of the published natural history narra- reprinting, the year of copyright, if indicated. If this
tives, alphabetically ordered by author. The second information is absent and the year of publication has
part is a list of secondary works (books only), listed been deduced from other information, I place the year
alphabetically by author and year. The list contains all in square brackets.
the sources in book form of biographical and biblio- However, not all catalogues I consulted apply exact-
graphical information used by me, and a few others ly the same rules in this respect, producing a dilemma
besides. Articles with bibliographical and biographical which cannot be resolved without actual inspection of
information on the other hand are distributed over the the book. Also catalogues do not always agree in their
authors in the main part of the bibliography. The third use of square brackets. In order to resolve the dilemma
part is a concise geographical index. I followed in these cases the opinion of the majority.
Details of the contents of a publication are put under a
Author names and biographical information separate heading labelled ‘Contents’.
In the main part of the entry, author names appear in
bold. If an author usually cited using one of his first Editions and printings
names or a variant name, this is indicated by bold Data on most editions have been collected by consult-
italics. If the first name thus commonly used is a var- ing digital library catalogues, scans of books available
iant of an official first name, it appears in italics and on the internet and (for recent books) information
parentheses. provided by publishers. A small part of the data was
The name of the author is followed by remarks on obtained by autopsy, in particular books present in the
spelling variants of the name, and biographical and Artis Library, now part of Special Collections of the
bibliographical references. These are followed by a Amsterdam University Library, and my own collec-
brief biography. Each biography usually contains the tion. Sometimes catalogues of antiquarian booksellers
outlines of a life, enabling the reader to ‘position’ the provided supplementary information, though this is
natural history narratives in the life of the author. In a source which can be accepted only conditionally, as
some cases, however, there is very little or no infor- the information provided is not always accurate.
mation to go on. The digital catalogues used are (in descending
Two remarks are in order. The first remark relates order of importance) (1) catalogues accessible via the
to the variant spelling of the German name ‘Carl’ as Karlsruhe Virtueller Katalog (KVK), (2) the Library of
‘Karl’. In the nineteenth century these two forms were Congress online catalogue, (3) catalogues of public
considered completely equivalent, and I shall not institutions not directly accessible via KVK.
bother to point this out each time the occasion arises. The difference between a new edition and a new
The second remark is concerned with the references. printing (with at most minor corrections) is hard
For a first orientation I nearly always used Wikipedia, to see in most cases. Therefore I shall use edition
often in several languages, but to refer to Wikipedia (without qualification) in a wide sense, that is to say
as a source would be repetitive and consequently has it may refer to an edition in the narrow sense, or to a
been left out in the entries. virtually unchanged reprint. If I want to indicate that
a text has been revised or completely reset, I shall use
Listing of titles ‘new edition’. A considerable difference in the number
For each author, the title description of every basic of pages between two editions usually points to a
edition of a publication is headed by the year of pub- completely reset edition (not just a printing), or a new
lication in bold, followed by the bibliographical data. edition to which considerable material has been add-
The basic edition is usually the first edition. There are ed. However, I had to resort more often than I liked to
some exceptions, for example: British and American terms such as ‘probably’ and ‘presumably’, for matters
editions of the same work often appeared in the same which can be decided only with certainty by autopsy.
year, and it is not always clear which appeared first. I decided, with some regret, to leave out (with very
10 | INTroducTIoN
