http://www.travelbooksonline.com/northamerica.html North America Travel Books relating to North America and the North American Continent that you can read online for free! Travel North America with knowledge! This page offers a comprehensive selection of classic North American travel books and guides that you can read online for free. Click to learn more... en-us http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0012americapage1_250.html Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the founder of the first English colony in North America, was born about 1539, the son of a Devonshire gentleman, whose widow afterward married the father of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, served under Sir Philip Sidney's father in Ireland, and fought for the Netherlands against Spain. After his return he composed a pamphlet urging the search for a northwest passage to Cathay, which led to Frobisher's license for his explorations to that end. Read online for FREE! Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0001americapage1_250.html During the last autumn I made a tour into Minnesota, upwards of a hundred and thirty miles north-west of St. Paul, to satisfy myself as to the character and prospects of the territory. All I could learn from personal observation, and otherwise, concerning its society and its ample means of greatness, impressed me so favorably as to the advantages still open to the settler, that I put down in the form of letters such facts as I thought would be of general interest. Since their publication in the Boston, Post a few requests, which I could not comply with, were made for copies of them all. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0002americapage1_250.html I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names him. Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear, according as he is called by friend or enemy, and Scar-Face to those who knew him by the eye's grasp only. No other fashion, I think, sets so well with the various natures that inhabit in us, and if you agree with me you will understand why so few names are written here as they appear in the geography. For if I love a lake known by the name of the man who discovered it, which endears itself by reason of the close-locked pines it nourishes about its borders, you may look in my account to find it so described. But if the Indians have been there before me, you shall have their name, which is always beautifully fit and does not originate in the poor human desire for perpetuity. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0003americapage1_250.html In California's imaginary Hall of Fame, Bret Harte must be accorded a prominent, if not first place. His short stories and dialect poems published fifty years ago made California well known the world over and gave it a romantic interest conceded no other community. He saw the picturesque and he made the world see it. His power is unaccountable if we deny him genius. He was essentially an artist. His imagination gave him vision, a new life in beautiful setting supplied colors and rare literary skill painted the picture. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0004americapage1_250.html With respect to the people of the United States, I have given those impressions which as a traveller I formed; if they are more favourable than those of some of my predecessors, the difference may arise from my having taken out many excellent introductions, which afforded me greater facilities of seeing the best society in the States than are usually possessed by those who travel merely to see the country. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0005americapage1_250.html I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh. Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands, but beautiful in its own way! A strictly North American beauty - snow-splotched mountains, huge pines, red-woods, sugar pines, silver spruce; a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the richest color; and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty on its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me, a sheet of water twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in some places 1,700 feet deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned summits which wall it in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet in altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer's axe. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0006americapage1_250.html The author left Quebec, Dominion of Canada, July 4, 1874, with a single assistant, in a wooden canoe eighteen feet in length, bound for the Gulf of Mexico. It was his intention to follow the natural and artificial connecting watercourses of the continent in the most direct line southward to the gulf coast of Florida, making portages as seldom as possible, to show how few were the interruptions to a continuous water-way for vessels of light draught, from the chilly, foggy, and rocky regions of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the north, to the semi-tropical waters of the great Southern Sea, the waves of which beat upon the sandy shores of the southernmost United States. Having proceeded about four hundred miles upon his voyage, the author reached Troy, on the Hudson River, New York state, where for several years E. Waters and Sons had been perfecting the construction of paper boats. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0007americapage1_250.html Captain Bonneville is of French parentage. His father was a worthy old emigrant, who came to this country many years since, and took up his abode in New York. He is represented as a man not much calculated for the sordid struggle of a money-making world, but possessed of a happy temperament, a festivity of imagination, and a simplicity of heart, that made him proof against its rubs and trials. He was an excellent scholar; well acquainted with Latin and Greek, and fond of the modern classics. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0008americapage1_250.html The people of the young Republic of the United States were greatly astonished, in the summer of 1803, to learn that Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of France, had sold to us the vast tract of land known as the country of Louisiana. The details of this purchase were arranged in Paris (on the part of the United States) by Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe. The French government was represented by Barbe-Marbois, Minister of the Public Treasury. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0009americapage1_250.html In the rooms of the Historical Society, in Boston, hangs a portrait of a distinguished looking person in quaint but handsome costume of antique style. The gold embroidered coat, long vest with large and numerous buttons, elegant cocked hat under the arm, voluminous white scarf and powdered peruke, combine to form picturesque attire which is most becoming to the gentleman therein depicted, and attract attention to the genial countenance, causing the visitor to wonder who this can be, so elaborately presented to the gaze. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0010americapage1_250.html WE know more of the early days of the Pyramids or of ancient Babylon than we do of our own. The Stone age, the dragons of the prime, are not more remote from us than is our earliest childhood. It is not so long ago for any of us; and yet, our memories of it are but veiled spectres wandering in the mazes of some foregone existence. Are we really trailing clouds of glory from afar? Or are our 'forgettings' of the outer Eden only? Or, setting poetry aside, are they perhaps the quickening germs of all past heredity - an epitome of our race and its descent? At any rate THEN, if ever, our lives are such stuff as dreams are made of. There is no connected story of events, thoughts, acts, or feelings. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com/america/0011americapage1_250.html Two years before the mast were but an episode in the life of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.; yet the narrative in which he details the experiences of that period is, perhaps, his chief claim to a wide remembrance. His services in other than literary fields occupied the greater part of his life, but they brought him comparatively small recognition and many disappointments. His happiest associations were literary, his pleasantest acquaintanceships those which arose through his fame as the author of one book. The story of his life is one of honest and competent effort, of sincere purpose, of many thwarted hopes. The traditions of his family forced him into a profession for which he was intellectually but not temperamentally fitted: he should have been a scholar, teacher, and author; instead he became a lawyer. Click to read more... http://www.travelbooksonline.com A collection of over 200 free travel books and travel guides that you can read for free online for North America, Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia and South America... Click to read more...