My latest completed book (or rather volume one of two) for pgdp is Aspects of Nature, by Alexander von Humboldt. This is a rather odd one, consisting of three papers by Humboldt, together with his own supplemental notes to each, which actually take up the great bulk of the text.
The papers are all based on Humboldt’s South American expedition: one on Steppes and Deserts, focusing on the Venezuelan prairie; the second on the Cataracts of the Orinoco; and the last on Nocturnal Life of Animals in the Primeval Forest. These are all quite easy reading, the latter two in particular rather narrative in tone.
The notes, written much later in Humboldt’s life, are a mixed bag, with interesting references to other sources and developments subsequent to the original papers, along with some very dry and outdated discussion of the heights of various mountain ranges, temperatures etc. For most people, these are unlikely to be read from start to finish.
The sections on the search for the source of the Orinoco river in particular give an impressive picture of the discomforts and dangers nineteenth-century explorers were willing to endure in order to gain scientific information. Attitudes can be hard for the modern reader to understand; Humboldt writes within a couple of pages of the sadness of language extinction:
It is even probable that the last family of the Atures may not have been long deceased, for (a singular fact,) there is still in Maypures an old parrot of whom the natives affirm that he is not understood because he speaks the Ature language.
and of doing a spot of grave-robbing:
We left the cave at nightfall, after having collected, to the great displeasure of our Indian guides, several skulls and the entire skeleton of a man.
One particularly interesting section for me was on native Americans and Inuit discovering Western Europe, from Roman until relatively recent times:
James Wallace, in his “Account of the Islands of Orkney, (1700, p. 60),” relates, that in 1682 a Greenlander was seen in his boat off the South Point of the Island of Eda by several persons, who did not succeed in bringing him to shore. In 1684, a Greenland fisherman appeared in his boat off the Island of Westram. In the church at Barra there was suspended an Esquimaux boat, driven thither by currents and tempests.
Volume two (which I should get round to some time this year) deals in similar style with the Physiognomy of Plants, Volcanoes in Different Parts of the Globe, the mysterious “Vital Force, or Rhodian Genius”, and the Plateau of Caxamarca.