Lost Texts Press
Engraved plan of Ollantaytambo showing terraces, walls and the river bend

Folio 337 · Paris, 1880

Some of the world's greatest expeditions,
translated into English for the first time.

Above: Plan of the fortress and terraces at Ollantaytambo, engraved for Pérou et Bolivie, Paris 1880. The man who surveyed it was three days from Machu Picchu and turned the other way. His account has existed in French for 146 years. This is its first translation into English.

Into the collection

Expeditions recovered 3 translated · 9 under way

Engraved view of a ruined fort on a cliff above the Urubamba river
The fort above the left bank of the rio Urubamba, five kilometres upstream · folio 333

In translation 6 accounts

  1. LT·002 Viagem Filosófica Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira · Brazil, 1783–92 · Português A nine-year voyage up the Amazon, the first the Portuguese crown ever sent. Its 1,744 drawings survive on UNESCO's register. Nobody printed the voyage itself until 1887. Upcoming
  2. LT·003 The New Granada Writings Francisco José de Caldas · New Granada, c. 1801–10 · Español The sage of Bogotá measured mountains by the boiling point of water and walked beside Humboldt at Quito. A firing squad ended his life in 1816. Upcoming
  3. LT·004 The Inner Asia Journals Grigory Potanin · Russia, 1876–99 · Русский Five expeditions through Mongolia and the Tibetan borderlands. Potanin was the first to write down the epics of their Turkic and Mongol peoples. He also founded the first university in Asian Russia. Upcoming
  4. LT·005 Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens Karl von den Steinen · Brazil, 1894 · Deutsch The first European among the peoples of the Xingu. Part travelogue, part ethnography, down to a dictionary of a language no outsider had heard. Upcoming
  5. LT·006 Les Touareg du Nord Henri Duveyrier · France, 1864 · Français A young Frenchman's portrait of the Tuareg and the northern Sahara. Exact mapping and natural history, bound to a way of desert life now gone. Upcoming
  6. LT·008 The Expedition Reports Cândido Rondon · Brazil, 1907–15 · Português He strung telegraph wire across the Mato Grosso and went down the River of Doubt with Roosevelt. He met every people he found under one order: die if you must, but never kill. Upcoming

Every one of these is a firsthand record of somewhere hard to reach, written by the person who went. Each was read for a generation in its own language and then stopped there, because no one translated it. Not obscure. Not minor. Simply never carried into English. That is still true of thousands more.

How we choose them