The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing

Alasdair Pettinger, Tim Youngs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317041191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Showcasing established and new patterns of research, The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing takes an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and to travel texts themselves. The volume adopts a thematic approach, with each contributor considering a specific aspect of travel writing – a recurrent motif, an organising principle or a literary form. All of the essays include a discussion of representative travel texts, to ensure that the volume as a whole represents a broad historical and geographical range of travel writing. Together, the 25 essays and the editors' introduction offer a comprehensive and authoritative reflection of the state of travel writing criticism and lay the ground for future developments.

PART I

Framing travel

1

THE SCIENTIFIC TRAVELLER

Angela Byrne

This chapter discusses the role of natural history and the sciences in travel and exploration, before responding in more detail to the themes of interactions between the local and the global, and the significance of gender. The term ‘scientific traveller’ is used here in a broad sense, to refer to any travellers or explorers with an evident interest in gathering and disseminating scientific information. I emphasise the status of their travel as a scientific activity, and of their travel accounts as scientific discourse. Recognition of these factors may deepen our understanding of the ways in which women and outsiders participated in the sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following Carl Thompson’s important reappraisal of the travel writer Maria Graham as not just ‘a scrupulous eye-witness’ but rather as a serious contributor to scientific knowledge.¹

This chapter focuses on the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, a period of rapid European acquisition of new global knowledge. All over the world, specimens were collected, maps made and temperatures tabulated, all for publication, communication and display to a European public eager for new and exciting details. While the connection between natural history and empire stretches back to the seventeenth century, the figure of the ‘scientific traveller’ is bound together with the intellectual, imperial and cultural contexts of late eighteenth-century European exploration.² Scientific travel was fundamental to European imperialism and the acquisition of colonies in the period 1760–1850. In 1768–9, international teams of scientists travelled from several countries to Tahiti, Baja (California), Hudson Bay and St Petersburg to observe the Transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event with the potential to assist calculations of the distance between Earth and the sun and the size of the solar system. The period saw the initiation of the large-scale, state-sponsored scientific expedition with Cook’s Pacific voyages (the Endeavour, 1768; the Resolution and Adventure, 1772–5; the Resolution, 1776–80) and the publication of their ‘discoveries’ of unfamiliar animals like the kangaroo.³ The expedition also, of course, launched its botanist, Joseph Banks, as one of Britain’s pre-eminent gentlemen of science.⁴ Of the first expedition, to witness the Transit of Venus at Tahiti, one Royal Society fellow noted, ‘No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purposes of Natural History.’⁵ Around the same time, Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) fur traders in Rupert’s Land (Canada) communicated their findings on the geography and natural history of the sub-Arctic.⁶ By 1798, the hydrographer George Vancouver (1757–98) would remark, ‘Although the ardour of the present age, to discover and delineate the true geography of the earth, had been rewarded with uncommon and unexpected success [. . .] yet not all was completed.’⁷ Research continued in the early nineteenth century with Alexander von Humboldt’s excursions, which were published as Travels to the Equinoctial Regions . . . 1799–1804 (1819–29), receiving great attention and laying the foundations for his career as the eminent naturalist of the age. Almost contemporaneous were Mungo Park’s excursions into West Africa to ascertain the source and course of the Niger in 1795–7 and 1805–6; his account of the first expedition was a bestseller.⁸ In the 1810s, the much-lauded British Arctic expeditions of 1818–45 were foregrounded by the pioneering meteorological and oceanographic observations of the whaler and scientist William Scoresby the younger (1789–1857). Michael Bravo has demonstrated how Scoresby, despite participating in the sciences by collecting specimens while engaged in a private whaling enterprise and the recognition his studies in natural history earned in French circles, was viewed as a mere ‘accomplished artisan’ by the Royal Navy.⁹ James Cook and Joseph Banks are the subjects of so many studies that they have assumed the status of canonical scientific travellers, despite Cook’s lack of a formal education. This chapter focuses on the less popularly known but no less important figures of Thomas Pennant and Sarah Bowdich, demonstrating that the category ‘scientific traveller’ admits a broad range of participants. The focus here on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflects the intersections of European imperial and territorial expansion, romantic fascination with extreme climates and indigenous peoples, and the interdependency of scientific activity and travel.

Empire and scientific travel

As indicated in the introduction above, empire forms the cultural, social and intellectual backdrop to the activities studied in this chapter and the dominant critical frameworks employed in their study. Late nineteenth-century European high imperialism was foreshadowed by learned societies’ privately sponsored expeditions, such as the African Association’s searches for the sources of the Nile and Niger rivers, and competitive, ill-prepared expeditions in the Australian interior prompted by inter-settler colony rivalries, like Robert O’Hara Burke and William Will’s infamous ‘dash for Carpentaria’ in 1860–1. These expeditions cemented intersections of national pride, imperial expansion and international trade. While contemporaries idealised scientific travel as disinterested, it was crucial to the delineation, control and exploitation of colonial territories.¹⁰

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, postcolonial approaches offered fresh critiques of the imperial contexts within which scientific travellers, their research and their writings functioned. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone’ have provided the basis for the dominant analytical frameworks for the study of travel and exploration in broad terms since the 1980s and 1990s.¹¹ Similarly, Pratt’s vision of natural history as fundamental to the acquisition of colonies has been hugely influential as a framework for studying the links between natural history, travel narratives and an imperial, systemising vision of nature. Pratt demonstrates how:

Like the rise of interior exploration, the systematic surface mapping of the globe correlates with an expanding search for commercially exploitable resources, markets, and lands to colonize [. . .] It is not, then, simply a question of depicting the planet as it was.¹²

The political uses and imperial imperatives underpinning mapping and surveying projects around the globe have been particularly effectively demonstrated.¹³

Since the late 1990s, scholarship has to a large extent turned towards examining the intellectual frameworks that underpinned and sustained Europe and North America’s expanding empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Global knowledge networks emerged as far-flung naturalists communicated their findings to centralised repositories in state and university botanic gardens.¹⁴ Conceptualisation of the dynamic operations of these networks that emerged from the intersections of science, exploration and empire is largely indebted to Bruno Latour’s vision of natural history as a means of shipping things (specimens, records, drawings) back to the ‘centres of calculation’ where power and knowledge reside.¹⁵ This transmission of observations and specimens made colonial natural history ‘a world-making activity, which mediated colonial natures through their more portable forms’.¹⁶ Through sustained critical engagement with Pratt’s and Latour’s frameworks, a rich picture has emerged of transnational scientific networks mediated through learned societies, institutions and individuals located in European centres – such as the collections amassed at the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew through Joseph Banks’s tireless promotion of colonial science, and his use of his own network to expand the museum’s collections¹⁷ – as well as satellite nodes dotted around the imperial world. This is also exemplified in the work of Thomas Pennant, discussed in detail below. The notion of circulation has extended to the transformative power of interactions across different locations, and has itself come to be considered a type of production, taking such forms as local (re)appropriation.¹⁸ Raposo, Simões, Patiniotis and Bertomeu-Sánchez have usefully framed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greek, Portuguese and Spanish scientific travellers in terms of ‘moving localities’, arguing that these travellers were of Europe and retained an eye on Europe, but functioned through mobile and responsive ‘connections, allegiances and commitments’ that travelled with them and created mobile intellectual spaces.¹⁹

Environmental history and ecocriticism have, since the 2000s, begun to uncover the role of travel and exploration in the elaboration of what is now known as environmental consciousness and ecological thought. In a two-part 2006 article, Richard Grove and Vinita Damoradan provided a detailed outline of the long history of global environmental history.²⁰ Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism (1996) memorably traced these developments to the observations of travelling naturalists like Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–98), whose observations during the Resolution voyage of 1772–5 demonstrate a clear vision of human agency over climatic and ecological conditions, particularly the impact of Europeans on South Pacific island ecology. Specifically, Forster was concerned about the potential climatic impact of any deforestation on Tahiti, as without the protection of the thick tree cover the soil would be exposed to the heat of the tropical sun.²¹ Most famously, Alexander von Humboldt elucidated a vision of interdependent and interlinking organisms and habitats that would revolutionise scientific understanding of the interconnected lives of humans, animals, plants and geological matter. His exposition of the climatic influence of altitude (rather than latitude) also fundamentally altered understandings of climate, meteorology and plant and animal biology, displacing eighteenth-century theories like the French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s that had connected climate to culture based on a north–south dichotomy. The global, comparative vision employed by travelling scientists was made possible by their exposure to and rigorous observation of natural phenomena, geological features and the circumstances of existence of all forms of life, in a variety of environments.²²

Scientific travel has played a key role in the history of Western science itself, as impor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Framing Travel
• Part II Modes of Writing
• Part III Sensuous Geographies
• Part IV Interactions
• Part V Paratexts
• Bibliography
• Index