Journals and letters, translated from the original French, bring Michaux’s work to modern readers and scientists
 
Known to today’s biologists primarily as the “Michx.” at the end of more than 700 plant names, André Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America.
 
Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, André Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785–1797 is the first complete English edition of Michaux’s American journals. This copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger scientific context of the day.
 
To carry out his mission, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships—debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild animals, even shipwreck—that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of Madagascar.
 

In these times of social media saturation, many are the travelers who set off to track down an Instagrammable meal at a hole-in-the-wall featured by Anthony Bourdain or David Chang. Seamus O’Brien, however, journeyed to an unfamiliar locale with an analog guide from another era: the notes made by Joseph Dalton Hooker as he chronicled his journeys in the Sikkim Himilaya in the northeastern most corner of India. Eager to see the plants described in Hooker’s account, O’Brien set off nearly one hundred and fifty years later to trace Hooker’s footsteps through the natural wonders of the Himalayas, recounting the adventure in this new book. With Hooker as his guide, O’Brien compares mid-nineteenth-century notes to twenty-first-century reality—and he discovers that remarkably little has changed. Accompanied by Hooker’s maps and illustrations, the book is a testament to the region’s splendor and to Hooker’s skill as a botanist and cartographer.