Expedition into Empire

Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World

Martin Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317630128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Expeditionary journeys have shaped our world, but the expedition as a cultural form is rarely scrutinized. This book is the first major investigation of the conventions and social practices embedded in team-based exploration. In probing the politics of expedition making, this volume is itself a pioneering journey through the cultures of empire. With contributions from established and emerging scholars, Expedition into Empire plots the rise and transformation of expeditionary journeys from the eighteenth century until the present. Conceived as a series of spotlights on imperial travel and colonial expansion, it roves widely: from the metropolitan centers to the ends of the earth. This collection is both rigorous and accessible, containing lively case studies from writers long immersed in exploration, travel literature, and the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter.

1 What Is an Expedition? An Introduction

Martin Thomas

DOI: 10.4324/9781315756424-1

Setting the Scene

As preliminary forays into foreign territory, expeditions were integral to the making of the modern empires. They connected Europeans with indigenous trade routes and laid the groundwork for the foundation of colonies. Once settlements were established in ‘new’ territories, the young colonies launched their own expeditions that further advanced the process of imperial expansion. So it is no exaggeration to observe that exploratory expeditions have shaped our world. The momentous histories of human migration and dispossession, dating from the early modern era, were seeded by expeditionary voyages and the inland explorations that followed.

Expeditions involve more than travel. Systemized collection and dissemination of data lie at their essence. Being indelibly associated with the growth and diffusion of science, they affect not only what we know but how we know it. In addressing this subject, the historian Roy MacLeod suggests that the nineteenth century saw a shift in which the metropolitan centres ceased to be the exclusive locales for the advancement of science. For the Victorians, ‘the instrument by which the world was to be known was the expedition,’ which ‘became a major agent of Western influence, creating new disciplines, exploring new ideas, and establishing new forms of cultural appropriation.’ Science as both a practice and a metaphor was defined by its relationship with expeditions. That is why, according to MacLeod, science presents itself ‘as a symbolic act of perpetual exploration.’¹ Yet despite the profound impact of expeditions on diverse peoples throughout the world, there remains a considerable gulf between the effects of expeditions and what we know about them as cultural entities. This disparity was the motivation for Expedition into Empire, which emerged as a multi-author project—as befits a study of team-based travel.² And like many an expedition, there were personal inspirations for why, as editor, I initiated the journey. This background illuminates some major themes of the volume.

Several years ago, I began to study a large-scale research venture known as the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. A collaboration involving the National Geographical Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Australian Government, during 1948, it travelled widely through the extensive Aboriginal reserve of Arnhem Land in northern Australia. As a twentieth-century journey, sponsored by the publisher of National Geographic Magazine, the Arnhem Land Expedition (to use its abbreviated title) resulted in a vast cache of media including many hours of colour film footage, thousands of photographs, and audio documentation of Aboriginal music and ceremony made on electronic wire recorders. Aboriginal men and women displayed aspects of their lives and culture to the camera, as did the expeditionaries themselves. Naturalists and anthropologists enacted their own esoteric rituals as they gathered data or collected and preserved specimens in front of the camera. News of the expedition was communicated around the world.³

For some observers—and some of the participating scientists, too—the media archive produced by the expedition was mere populist ephemera. The scientific world had its ‘serious’ if specialist outcomes: four large volumes of reports, extensive collections of flora and fauna, and superb examples of Aboriginal art and material culture, now held by Australian and American museums.⁴ But 60-plus years after the expedition, the enduring value of the photographic and other ‘ephemera’ has been demonstrated in ways that the expedition and its backers did not anticipate. Aboriginal people have found their own uses for the expedition’s documentation of their culture and society, which they regard as their intellectual property. To research the place of archival media in contemporary Aboriginal society, I began to visit Arnhem Land to work with local experts in interpreting digitized copies of the audio and photographic documentation.⁵ This developed into a larger study of the Arnhem Land Expedition and of expeditions more generally.

Figure 1.1 Expedition leader Charles Mountford photographing a family group at Yirrkala during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, 1948. Photograph by Frank M. Setzler. By Permission of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (Photo lot 36, Yirrkala 48).

Figure 1.2 Mammalogist David H. Johnson performing taxidermy during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, 1948. Photograph by Howell Walker. By Permission of the State Library of South Australia (Bessie Mount-ford Papers PRG 487/1/2/204/2).

Some of the Arnhem Land people with whom I have studied were children when the expedition visited. To spend time with them, watching film from 1948, or hearing recordings of songs performed by their forbears, is an experience both poignant and intellectually challenging, for it complicates any simplistic assumption that the relationships between expeditions and indigenous societies can be nothing but exploitative. I have sat with old men as they tearfully review footage of an initiation ceremony, now defunct although still remembered with great affection. Film of a painter reveals his deft workmanship as he paints a kangaroo on a piece of bark. Archaeologist Denis Byrne suggests in a paper titled ‘Archaeology in Reverse’ that the backward movement of objects and data from repositories to communities expresses an essential aspect of our zeitgeist.⁶ In the work of ethnomusicologist colleagues with whom I collaborate, I have seen how song recordings documented by expeditions and independent ethnographers provide an enduring source of pleasure and fascination for many indigenous musicians today. Such material can inform contemporary cultures in productive ways.⁷

Acknowledging the contemporary relevance of these expeditionary outputs does not deny that imperial agendas were embedded in the original venture. Especially troubling to Aboriginal audiences is film footage of Frank Setzler, a Smithsonian curator, who can be seen toiling away at an ossuary site—a cave within a sandstone massif, familiar to all locals in the West Arnhem Land region—removing human crania and other bones from crevices. At the end of the expedition, these bones were exported to the United States where they found a new ‘home’ in the Smithsonian Institution’s United States National Museum (now known as the National Museum of Natural History).⁸ By the time a film archivist at the National Geographic Society unearthed this footage and showed it to me, the bones taken by Setzler were the subject of a repatriation claim, lodged by the Australian Government on behalf of communities affected by the theft. After years of disagreement and procrastination, the National Museum of Natural History eventually agreed to return them to their owners—another example of archaeology in reverse.⁹ More than six decades after their removal, a ceremony held in the West Arnhem Land settlement of Gunbalanya welcomed the stolen ancestors back to their homeland.

This particular example of how the impacts of an expedition have reverberated through time and across cultures is a sign of the multivalency of expeditions. Whenever they intrude on inhabited terrain, expeditionary journeys are intercultural phenomena. As vehicles for cultural display and inquiry, they probe the human interface. Of course, the tenor of their interpersonal encounters varies enormously, covering the full spectrum from empathy to murder. The history of expeditions is accordingly complex and their relevance is not confined to the societies or cultures that launched them. A well-established historiography, much of it indebted to Margaret Connell Szasz’s pioneering book on cultural brokerage, has drawn attention to the diverse roles played by indigenous people in mediating between indigenes and visitors during the age of empire.¹⁰ Fortunately, much of the triumphalism traditionally accorded to expeditionary projects has diminished, and more nuanced assessments of their activities, reportage, and relations with indigenous people have developed. These changing perspectives are inflected by the technological transformations we are witnessing in our own era. As my own research in Arnhem Land shows, digitization of archival data allows indigenous communities newfound access to the findings of expeditions past. This development only adds to the urgency of better understanding the phenomenon of the expedition.

Later in the book, I argue that expeditions are ‘cultural formations, as distinctive to their epoch as the novel or the photograph’ (Thomas, Chapter 4, this volume). Significantly, the dearth of attention usually afforded to them is not due to lack of public interest in expeditions or exploration. On the contrary, a veritable industry is devoted to the recounting and reprocessing of exploratory journeys. Old journals get reprinted, documentaries made for television, anniversaries celebrated, discoveries re-enacted, novels written, and history books published by the wagonload. Whether they are revered, reviled, lampooned, or surgically dissected with every instrument in the postcolonial toolbox, expeditionary journeys are etched ever more deeply into the cultural imaginary.

So exploratory expeditions continue to speak to large audiences, as they have done since their inception. Yet the great outpouring of cultural product concerning them is something of a hindrance to understanding the traits of the expedition itself. Popular accounts do not encourage the identification of cultural patterns, preferring instead to proclaim the exceptionalism of each adventure. Somewhat strangely, this limitation often extends to more scholarly treatments of exploration. ‘Biography has been its leading genre and hagiography its main mode of representation,’ complains Dane Kennedy in The Last Blank Spaces (2013), a comparative study of Australia and Africa as sites of imperial discovery.¹¹ Kennedy, like many of us who contributed to the present volume, is indebted to the seminal work of the geographer Felix Driver, who in Geography Militant (2001) writes at length about the codes, conventions, and networks that regulated the business of nineteenth-century exploration.¹² Driver’s study was largely researched in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, which in the nineteenth century was the preeminent organization for sponsoring and in other ways encouraging scientific exploration within the British Empire.

Informed by these sources, Driver necessarily concentrates on the role of metropolitan London in setting and controlling the geographical agenda. He discusses imperial practices that influenced the business of scientific travel: the issue of formal instructions to explorers, the standardization of requirements for keeping journals and recording data, the loan of scientific instruments to expeditions, and ‘expert’ evaluation of the findings of returned travellers to ensure that the rules of engagement had been observed. That interest in imperial control is evident also in the work of Kennedy, although he, like several contributors to this volume, places greater emphasis on the role played by colonies in launching exploratory expeditions. To understand this history, he argues, we need to ‘decenter our understanding of exploration as an imperial enterprise.’¹³ Just as importantly, we need to understand how imperialism lingers, even when the age of empire has supposedly ended. The history of the expedition provides insight into that process.

Questions of Form

That the Arnhem Land Expedition is historically recent, sitting somewhere at the limit of living memory, allows access to eyewitness accounts. In 2007, I recorded an interview with Gerald Blitner (now deceased), who as a young man worked as an interpreter and guide for the expedition. Blitner had an Aboriginal mother and a European father. Like many so-called ‘half-castes’ in northern Australia, he was taken from his family and brought up in a Christian mission where he learned English. He went on to become the classic cultural broker, mediating between the visiting researchers and older Aboriginal people who spoke little or no English. Blitner provided an extraordinary perspective on the expedition’s sojourn on Groote Eylandt, a sizable landmass off the Arnhem Land coast, where the party was stationed for some months. He explained how he came to dislike its leader, the Australian photographer-ethnologist Charles Mountford, whom he regarded as intrusive and tactless. Blitner told me how he did all in his power to assist the scientific work of other expedition members in preference to Mountford.¹⁴ Here was evidence of how the processes of investigation that a scientific expedition had set in train could be affected by the decisions of indigenous people. Undoubtedly, this is true of countless expeditions through the centuries, but it is acknowledged only obliquely—if at all—in the majority of official expeditionary records.

Blitner was not the only witness whom I interviewed. The late Peter Bassett-Smith, the expedition’s cine-photographer, recorded his recollections in oral-history sessions, as did the botanist Raymond Specht, now the sole surviving veteran.¹⁵ As I learnt fairly early in my practice as an oral historian, interviews are revealing not only for the wealth of data they throw up, but for their silences and omissions. These became obvious when I compared the oral-history interviews with other streams of evidence concerning the 1948 adventure, of which there are plenty. After all, expeditions are machines for producing discourse. Letters, diaries, and administrative records are part of a great cache of documentary evidence concerning Arnhem Land in 1948. The journal of another participant, the Sydney archaeologist Frederick McCarthy, unequivocally reveals that he, like Blitner, had no fondness for Mount-ford.¹⁶ Internal dissent began to threaten the expedition’s research agenda and its propagandist message of bilateral friendliness between Australia and the United States. That there were problems with the management of the expedition is hardly a secret. Even Mountford’s authorized biography—as pure an exercise in hagiography as one could find—is forced to concede that by mid-1948 dissatisfaction with his leadership w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What Is an Expedition? An Introduction—MARTIN THOMAS
• 2 What Is an Explorer?—ADRIANA CRACIUN
• 3 Settler Colonial Expeditions—LORENZO VERACINI
• 4 The Expedition as a Cultural Form: On the Structure of Exploratory Journeys as Revealed by the Australian Explorations of Ludwig Leichhardt—MARTIN THOMAS
• 5 The Theatre of Contact: Aborigines and Exploring Expeditions—PHILIP JONES
• 6 Expeditions, Encounters, and the Praxis of Seaborne Ethnography: The French Voyages of La Pérouse and Freycinet—BRONWEN DOUGLAS
• 7 Armchair Expeditionaries: Voyages Into the French Musée de la Marine, 1828–78—RALPH KINGSTON
• 8 On Slippery Ice: Discovery, Imperium, and the Austro-Hungarian North Polar Expedition (1872–4)—STEPHEN A. WALSH
• 9 A Polar Drama: The Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14—TOM GRIFFITHS
• 10 The 1928 MacRobertson Round Australia Expedition: Colonial Adventuring in the Twentieth Century—GEORGINE CLARSEN
• 11 The Expedition’s Afterlives: Echoes of Empire in Travel to Asia—AGNIESZKA SOBOCINSKA
• Contributors
• Index