Boswell's Account of Corsica appeared at a remarkable moment of eighteenth-century English travel. Its publication in 1768 occurred when Captain Samuel Wallis returned from his discovery of Tahiti, Lieutenant James Cook took command of his momentous Pacific voyages, Samuel Johnson renewed his promise of a Highland tour that resulted in a magnificent travel book, and a dying Laurence Sterne finished his exuberant paean to cosmopolitan touring in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Few modern commentators of Boswell recognize that An Account of Corsica is a distinguished example of eighteenth-century travel literature worthy of comparison with Sterne's fiction and yet anticipates the more famous biographical studies of Johnson. This first of Boswell's major publications made creative use of travel book conventions for a radical romantic celebration of liberty behind the maturation of both primitive Corsica and young Boswell himself on the Grand Tour. There was a conscious artistic shaping of his experiences abroad around the theme of liberty in the life of the narrator, the nation, and its leader, Paoli, for the propagandistic purpose of uniting England to Corsica's struggle for freedom. Although the entire geographical description is an integrated, pseudo-Rousseauistic exploration of the impact of freedom on the observer and the observed, it was the final autobiographical portion of the book with the Memoirs of Pascal Paoli that provided Boswell with a narrative model for his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) and Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).