The poet and naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso traveled around the world from 1815 to 1818. His original diaries remained unpublished and are presented here for the first time ever. Chamisso's notebooks contain impressions and scientific results, descriptions of four continents and oceans, geographical sketches, zoological and botanical observations, reports from first encounters with indigenous people. The edition's two volumes present the original text with commentary, essays and glossaries. Like the travel notebooks of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, Chamisso's diaries document an early stage in the history of the natural sciences when the spirit of discovery and the trust in the unity of the sciences created a sometimes Eurocentric but also future-oriented consciousness of a newly discovered and unified world.