Reise durch den Stillen Ozean

In 1875, a young German physician named Max Buchner signs on as ship's doctor for a sailing vessel carrying emigrants to New Zealand, embarking on what will become a transformative two-year circumnavigation. The voyage propels him through the tempestuous waters around Cape Horn, across the typhus-shadowed Indian Ocean, and into worlds that exist today only in memory: the volcanic landscapes and primeval forests of New Zealand, the courts of Fijian chiefs, the kingdom of Hawaii on the eve of annexation. Buchner records it all with a scientist's precision and a traveler's wonder, documenting Maori culture, Pacific Islander traditions, and the vast American frontier at a moment when steam and rail are about to reshape every horizon. This is travel writing as it once was: uncertain, dangerous, and endlessly revealing of how much the world contained before it shrank.