4
In most of its forms, travel writing’s principal business has been to bring news of the wider world, and to disseminate information about unfamiliar peoples and places. Yet there are many layers of mediation between the world as it really is, and the world as it is subsequently rendered in travel writing. The scenes and incidents we encounter in a travelogue necessarily come to us in a filtered form, refracted first through the perceiving consciousness of the traveller, and secondarily through the act of writing, the translation of ‘travel experience’ into ‘travel text’. As discussed in Chapter 2, this translation involves at the very least a selective process whereby the writer prioritises some aspects of the travel experience over others, in accordance with authorial preference and generic requirement. As a result, even forms of travel writing that strive for accuracy and objectivity offer only a partial depiction of the world, and an incomplete picture of a far more complex reality.
Like a lens, therefore, travel writing necessarily distorts the world even as it brings it into view. At the same time, however, recognition of the distortions always inherent in the medium should not lead to a wholesale dismissal of its habitual claim to truthfulness and factuality. In this regard, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan’s assessment of travelogues as essentially ‘fictions of factual representation’ (1998: 10; my emphasis) is perhaps too vehement a critique. It is arguably a valid judgement on the modern travel book, a distinctly literary mode of travel writing that usually prioritises the aesthetic pleasure it gives the reader over the accuracy of the information it relays. But in other modes, and other eras, such a blunt equation of travel writing with fiction is more problematic. In particular, it obscures the extent to which travel writing has often constituted an adequate, if never an absolutely accurate, form of knowledge for its readers. Thus many travel accounts have helped subsequent travellers to make the same journey, providing vital information as to navigational routes over land and sea, and the language and customs of distant peoples. More dubiously, empire-builders have often found this information sufficient to their ends, gleaning from the genre useful intelligence on a range of strategic, economic and cultural issues. For travel writing to be practically useful in this way, there must presumably be some correspondence between the details given in a travelogue and the facts ‘on the ground’, so to speak; some travelogues, at least, must have some purchase on the reality of the places and cultures they describe. And to the extent that these correspondences exist, a travelogue is not simply a fiction or fabrication.
Poised in this way between fact and fiction, travel writing presents its readers with distinctive challenges that are broadly speaking epistemological in nature. That is to say, readers have always had to wrestle with questions relating to the validity of the knowledge seemingly offered by travel writing. How, for example, can one gauge the reliability of a travel account? How can one sift accurate observation from inadvertent misperception, or worse, wilful deception? And how can one adjudicate between two very different accounts of the same people or place? By what criteria do we regard one description as more trustworthy than another? These epistemological anxieties translate in turn into a rhetorical challenge for the writers of travel accounts. How can readers be persuaded of the truthfulness of a traveller’s observations? How can the travel text ‘obtain credit’ with its readers, convincing them that it is an authoritative source of knowledge about the world and its inhabitants?
The present chapter explores some of the ways in which the readers and writers of travel accounts have sought to address these concerns, focusing especially on the various strategies by which travellers have tried to present themselves as reliable sources of information. Prior to discussing these strategies, however, the chapter will tease out in more detail some difficulties and dilemmas that have always been attendant on travel writing’s role as witness to the wider world.
Discoveries and Wonders: Some Perennial Problems in Travel Writing
My intention and my subject in this history will be simply to declare what I have myself experienced, seen, heard and observed, both on the sea, coming and going, and among the American savages, with whom I visited and lived for about a year.
(Léry 1992: 3)
So states the French traveller Jean de Léry at the outset of his Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (History of a Voyage Made to the Land of Brazil; 1578). It is an emphatic reminder of the most basic fact underpinning the authority of Léry’s text and, indeed, the authority of all travellers – namely, that Léry has had personal experience of the scenes he is going to describe. The authority all travellers claim for themselves is thus that of the eye-witness, someone who has observed for him- or herself what others have only learnt about secondhand, through the reports of intermediaries. Such ‘autopsy’ (Greek for ‘self-seeing’, seeing for oneself) has long been privileged as a route to knowledge in Western culture. An early advocate of this ‘autoptic’ principle, or method, was the Greek historian Herodotus, who may also be regarded as one of the first travel writers insofar as he endeavoured to base his accounts of Egypt and other regions on his own observations rather than on hearsay. Thereafter, the value which has been placed on the reports of travellers has fluctuated; as we shall see, evidence or information acquired empirically has been more highly regarded in some periods than in others. Yet for the travellers themselves, a key means of asserting the accuracy and importance of their accounts has always been through reference to this autoptic principle, and through a vigorous insistence on their eye-witness status. For this reason, first-person verb forms will often be found even in modes of travel writing that are otherwise very impersonal; phrases such as ‘I visited’ and ‘I saw’ serve in part a rhetorical function, marking the text as a statement from someone who was actually present at the scenes described.
This appeal to the authority of the eye-witness, however, is not without its problems for travellers and travel writers. If on the one hand it lends the traveller’s report an authoritative status, on the other it may also render the traveller an object of suspicion. Rooted as it is in personal experience, the traveller’s account will often contain details that cannot be confirmed by any other witness, and that cannot receive external verification. The audience to any traveller’s tale must therefore frequently defer to the traveller, taking on trust his or her report. This requirement to trust the traveller, however, may engender scepticism rather than belief. As audiences have often recognised, it is easy for travellers to exploit the privileged, eye-witness position that they claim for themselves. It was proverbial in the seventeenth century, for example, that ‘Travellers may tell Romances or untruths by authority’ (quoted in McKeon 2002: 100). The proverb is an acknowledgement that the traveller’s classic retort – ‘You weren’t there!’ – has frequently been a licence to embroider the facts or to invent outright falsehoods. Hence the habitual linkage, in many different cultures and epochs, between travellers and liars, and the equally widespread equation of the terms ‘traveller’s tale’ and ‘tall tale’.
The longstanding association between travellers and liars, however, is not just a consequence of the many hoaxes and deceptions practised by travellers over the years. It also derives from a further predicament that perennially faces travellers as they attempt to describe people and places unknown to their readers: namely, the fact that these people and places may be so far beyond the ken of the audience, and may appear so strange or exotic, that they beggar belief back home. The historical record throws up many travellers who have been for this reason dis-believed, even as they sought to relate faithfully their experience. The eighteenth-century Scottish traveller James Bruce was one such victim of audience incredulity. Bruce visited Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) in the late 1760s, at a time when the country was little known to Europeans. He returned with a stock of colourful stories about the bizarre practices of this ancient, complex culture, including most notoriously the claim that the Abyssinians sometimes ate meat cut from living cattle. Readers and commentators back in London, however, regarded Bruce’s account of the Abyssinians as preposterous and implausible, and he was soon being lampooned on the stage as ‘MacFable’. Yet in time, later travellers to Abyssinia would corroborate many of Bruce’s observations.
Bruce’s initial failure to obtain credit with his audience was partly the consequence of the over-blown, self-aggrandising account he gave of his exploits amongst the Abyssinians. Yet it also reflects a failure in that audience to grasp, and to accept as genuine, cultural practices that were radically different and ‘other’ to their own. And whenever travellers have to describe events and phenomena that significantly confound the expectations of their audience, they are liable to be dismissed in this way, and labelled frauds and liars. As the editor of one seventeenth-century travel account grumbled, ‘they who never saw more than their own Village, never imagine that Steeples are of any other fashion than their own’ (quoted in McKeon 2002: 111).
Travellers themselves, of course, have often been confounded by their encounters with radical difference, and have frequently struggled to comprehend phenomena that surpass or overturn all previous expectations. For this reason, travel can be a deeply estranging experience, as the traveller is set adrift from the security of inherited norms and categories. Somewhat paradoxically, this estrangement may often be expressed, in part at least, by wonderment. As critics such as Mary Campbell (1988), Stephen Greenblatt (1991) and Anthony Pagden (1993) have observed, wonder constitutes a recurrent theme, and a stock trope, in travel writing. Wonder may be defined as the emotional and intellectual response that occurs when a traveller is confronted with something that temporarily defies understanding, and that cannot easily be assimilated into the conceptual grid by which the traveller usually organises his or her experience. The mixture of awe and bafflement that ensues will often operate at a pre-rational, even somatic level. Travellers report being rooted to the spot, or struck dumb in amazement; and the latter condition is one reason why tropes of inexpressibility and linguistic inadequacy are another commonplace in travel writing, with writers frequently protesting that even retrospectively they cannot find the words to convey fully their experience. Wonder is in this way an affective category with strong links to the sublime. Like the sublime, moreover, wonder is often a curious, unsettling amalgam of awe, fascination and fear. And as both Greenblatt and Pagden emphasise, it does not necessarily signal approval or pleasure; rather, ‘wonder precedes, even escapes, moral categories’ (Greenblatt 1991: 20). Thus the moment of dumbstruck wonder may as easily resolve itself into disgust and horror as into delight.
As this will suggest, in the encounter with the truly new and unknown, travellers will often face great difficulties simply comprehending their own experience, and what exactly it is that they have witnessed, even before they attempt the equally difficult task of describing that experience to others. To a great extent, of course, these two challenges, of comprehension and of communication, go hand in hand: to make sense of the travel experience will be simultaneously to arrive at a terminology and a conceptual framework that one can then use to recount that experience to others. In both enterprises, moreover, the same underlying methodology is often apparent. As Anthony Pagden has emphasised, in their endeavours to make sense of their encounters, and thereafter to describe them, travellers often proceed by a ‘principle of attachment’ (1993: 17) – that is to say, the traveller must seek to attach unknown entities to known reference points, and to familiar frameworks of meaning and understanding. Or to invoke a different vocabulary often used by Pagden and other critics, the ‘incom-mensurable’ must be rendered ‘commensurable’, by the finding of some common ground that can be used to measure and make meaningful what is otherwise simply baffling and alien.
This ‘principle of attachment’ can operate in many different ways, and at a variety of different levels. The most basic device at the traveller’s disposal in this regard is perhaps the simile, which is accordingly a rhetorical figure much used in travel writing. Through the use of simile, travel writers can establish a point of comparison that frames the unknown in terms of the known, as in the following passage from William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697):
[The guava fruit] grows on a hard scrubbed Shrub, whose Bark is smooth and whitish, the branches pretty long and small, the leaf somewhat like that of a Hazel, the fruit much like a Pear, with a thin rind.
(Dampier 1703: 222)
Simile is here utilised in its most simple form, to pick out points of visual resemblance between on the one hand, the guava and, on the other, the hazel and pear, plants more familiar to Dampier’s readers. This is a strategy commonly adopted by travellers. It is not without its hazards, however. In medieval and early modern travelogues especially, Mary Campbell has suggested, simile is often used excessively to create ‘perverse collages’ which destroy ‘the coherence of the alien subject in order to transmit a visualizable image’ (1988: 70). Moreover, it was probably the use of simile in this way that generated some of the hybrid monsters described in ancient and medieval geographies, as slippages occurred from similitude to a supposed statement of fact, possibly because of errors in scribal transmission. One medieval ‘wonder book’, for example, informs us that ‘there are on the Bryxontis wild animals which are called Lertices. They have ears of a donkey and wool of a sheep and feet of a bird’ (quoted in Campbell 1988: 70). This grotesque-sounding beast probably evolved out of an original eye-witness account that likened its ears, fur and feet to those of a donkey, sheep and bird respectively.
There are many other methods by which travellers and travel writers can ‘attach’ the unknown to the known. The scientific knowledge operative in a given period, for example, may constitute a key conceptual framework by which the traveller seeks first to comprehend, and subsequently to communicate, the new and the other. Examples of this mode of attachment are obviously most plentiful in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when more overtly scientific forms of travel begin to develop in Europe, but an interesting earlier example is provided by Marco Polo when he reports the existence of unicorns in Java. Modern readers might assume that this is a gesture towards the romance genre, and that Polo is simply inventing this detail to lend an air of the marvellous to his tale. Yet the truth here is probably more complex. Medieval natural history assumed the existence of unicorns; they are included, for example, in many bestiaries of this period. And there were horned quadrupeds not utterly dissimilar to unicorns to be found in the Indonesian archipelago in this period. What Polo (or his informant) probably saw was the creature that modern zoology would label the Sumatran rhinoceros. Having no concept of the rhinoceros, however, Polo ‘attached’, or assimilated, the animal that he saw to the closest matching conceptual category available in his culture: the unicorn.
When they could find no obvious reference point or conceptual category in their own culture for the scenes they witnessed, many European travellers historically have sought comparisons in the accounts of romance and fantasy known to their audiences. This is a more subtle way in which unknown entities and phenomena can be ‘attached’ to what is more familiar and known. It registers the sense of wonder and incomprehension that the traveller feels, whilst simultaneously finding some sort of reference point, albeit a fictive one, which can help audiences conceptualise the scenes being described. In this way, for example, early modern European travellers often figured the dazzling wealth of the Incan and Aztec empires in terms drawn from romance descriptions of sumptuous, magical palaces (see Greenblatt 1991: 132–33). By this means, also, European travellers could cast themselves, either implicitly or explicitly, as the virtuous knights-errant of romance fiction, protagonists whose heroic quests usually required them to overcome monstrous adversaries: a self-fashioning that often had fate-ful consequences for the native Americans who found themselves unwittingly cast in the latter role.
In various ways, then, travellers often proceed by some sort of ‘principle of attachment’, both as they seek to make sense of their experience, and as they seek to convey that experience to the reader. This is arguably all that a traveller can do when faced with the new and the different, yet at the same time it is an epistemological and descriptive procedure that can be highly problematic. In the first place, the truly new and the radically different will often ultimately resist recuperation in this way. Many travellers have complained that comparisons and analogies do not suffice to convey the true nature of the thing, people or place they wish to describe. Hence the frequency in travel writing of tropes of inexpressibility, as mentioned earlier. Thus the Spanish conquistador Bernal Diaz complained in his Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (1576), ‘However clearly I may tell all this, I can never fully explain to one who did not see’ (1996: 308). Jean de Léry similarly struggles to describe the Tupinamba, and eventually concedes that ‘their gestures and expressions are so completely different from ours that it is difficult, I confess, to represent them well by writing or by pictures’ (1992: 67). He goes on to suggest that the only way one can really grasp what the Tupinamba are like is by visiting them oneself. Yet this is to renege on the basic premise, and promise, of a traveller’s report, and to substitute tautology for description; it leaves Léry somewhat in the position of Mark Antony, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, when he parodies the conventional traveller’s tale by delivering the unhelpful information that the crocodile is ‘shaped … like itself’, and is ‘just so high as it is’ (Act 2, Scene 7).
The principle of attachment, then, may not suffice to make the new and the different comprehensible, either to the traveller or to their audience. Conversely, however, it may also sometimes operate too effectively. Having found some grounds for assimilating the unknown to the known, one temptation is to assume a greater similarity between familiar and unfamiliar entities than is actually the case. It was this assumption, Anthony Pagden points out, that led the sixteenth-century Spanish traveller Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo to attribute the practice of human sacrifice to the Taino tribespeople he encountered in America. He had no evidence for this claim; however, he had noticed that Taino men, like the ancient Thracians described by the Latin author Eusebius, took multiple wives, and on the basis of this initial point of resemblance Oviedo ascribes to the Taino other practices attributed to the Thracians, including human sacrifice (Pagden 1993: 24). Thus the necessary process of attaching the unknown to the known may easily lead to a series of what one might call ‘over-attachments’, and so to a variety of unwarranted assumptions and projections about the new phenomenon under consideration. Travellers and audiences who fall into this trap have in a sense not paid due deference to the intrinsic otherness of a new environment or culture; they have rendered the alien world too quickly comprehensible, and in the process effected a mistranslation of it.
As this will suggest, the traveller’s situation is always liable to produce inadvertent misperceptions and unwarranted extrapolations, as he or she struggles to make sense of places and cultures which inevitably blend familiar and unfamiliar aspects. All travellers have only a partial viewpoint on the scenes and events they are witnessing, and insofar as they generalise from their own experience to draw conclusions or make larger observations about a foreign people or place, they are necessarily reliant on the rhetorical trope of synecdoche. That is to say, they must take a part as emblematic of a greater whole, since no traveller can survey every inch of a new environment, or become familiar with every member, and every nuance, of a foreign culture. Further to this, the observations they make and the conclusions they reach will inevitably be to some degree subjective, reflecting their own personal tastes, interests and attitudes. Simultaneously, this subjective viewpoint will always have to some extent an ideological aspect, being the expression of attitudes, assumptions and aspirations inherited from the larger culture or subculture of which the traveller is a part. All travelogues can in this way be said to provide not so much a representation of the world as it really is, as the representation of one particular perspective on the world. That is to say, they arguably tell us much more about the conceptual matrices, the conscious and unconscious assumptions, and frequently the ambitions of the individuals and communities that produce them, than they do about the people or place they purport to describe.
Mindful of the perspectivalism inevitably attendant on any traveller’s report, some communities of travel writers and readers have developed procedural and stylistic strategies designed to minimise the distorting effects of the traveller’s subjectivity, and also the distortions inevitably introduced by his or her ideological orientation. Some of these objectivist strategies, which are intended to render the information provided by the traveller more objective and so supposedly more accurate, will be discussed later in this chapter; although it is worth noting at once that even seemingly ‘objective’ forms of travel writing usually reflect, to some degree, a distinctive ideological perspective on the world. However, it is probably fair to say that historically most travel writers and their readers have not been overly troubled by the idea that the traveller’s own cultural and ideological position informs and distorts any report of other peoples and places. After all, travel writers and their original, intended audiences have generally shared the same ideological assumptions, and what those audiences have accordingly usually wanted is to see the wider world translated into conceptual and moral categories that they recognise. Of greater concern to most readers of travel writing historically, though, has been the more straightforward issue of whether they are being lied to and deceived. To minimise this possibility, therefore, readers in every period will tend to demand of travel writing that it conforms to prevailing notions of what the historian of science Steven Shapin has termed ‘epistemological decorum’ (1994: 193). That is to say, if travelogues are to be credited by their readers, they must meet contemporary audience expectations as to what denotes reliability and plausibility in the travel account. And as we shall now see, it has been changes in these expectations, and in protocols of ‘epistemological decorum’, that have done much to drive the evolution of travel writing, and to produce its diverse modes and forms.
Epistemological Decorum in Travel Writing: Gaining The Reader’s Trust
In medieval times, the plausibility and reliability of travel accounts was usually assessed in relation to the account of the world provided by a well-defined canon of established authorities. This canon comprised, on the one hand, the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers and, on the other, the works of Classical philosophers, geographers and natural historians such as Aristotle and Pliny. Collectively these texts defined, for both travellers and their audiences, not only the known world but also what was knowable in the world, and what was likely to be true. Medieval travellers were certainly capable, to some degree, of questioning and problematising the prevailing wisdom and inherited conceptual categories of their culture. Marco Polo, for example, may construe the rhinoceros as a unicorn, but he is also able to point out all the ways in which this creature is unlike the conventional understanding of a unicorn: it is ugly, has hair like a buffalo, and crucially, is not easily captured by virgins. But generally, in cases where an individual traveller’s account contradicted the intellectual orthodoxy of the day, medieval readers kept faith with orthodoxy, and judged that report implausible, and probably untrue. Thus ‘epistemological decorum’ in travel writing, in this period, was closely bound up with conformity to the canon. The intellectual climate of the time placed less premium on the personal testimony of individual travellers than would later be the case, and it is for this reason that first-person accounts of actual travels form a comparatively small portion of what one can loosely define as medieval travel writing. For information on geographic and ethnographic matters, medieval readers were more likely to turn to texts that simply collated the existing canonical knowledge; as a consequence, even writers who had actually visited the people or places in question often eschewed a detailed account of their personal experience, so as to provide instead a compendium of relevant passages from earlier authorities.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the reports of travellers acquired a new prestige and significance in the aftermath of Columbus’s discovery of America. In the English-speaking world, philosophers such as Sir Francis Bacon and John Locke increasingly stressed the importance of empirical evidence and inductive reasoning. In this way, new protocols of ‘epistemological decorum’ took shape over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and these protocols influenced in turn the activities and accounts of many travellers. Thinkers such as Bacon and Locke, and institutions such as the Royal Society, set up in 1660 to promote Baconian principles in science and knowledge, issued numerous directives to travellers, seeking in this way to regulate and systematise not only the sort of information they gathered, but just as crucially, the observational methods they used to gather and record data. These guidelines as to observational techniques influenced in turn the writing of travel texts, with the result that by the late seventeenth century a fairly standardised stylistic and structural template had emerged for the travelogue. Derived from what was perceived to be ‘best practice’, so to speak, in earlier accounts, this template was intended to authorise the traveller’s report as reliable and trustworthy; although as we shall shortly see, it could also be used by mendacious travellers and fraudsters to lend a spurious air of plausibility to their fabrications.
William Dampier’s hugely popular, and hugely influential, New Voyage Round the World (1697) provides perhaps the best illustration of this new template, and of the protocols of epistemological decorum that underpinned it. Dampier’s bestselling account of his thirteen years as a privateer in the Caribbean begins as follows:
April the 17th 1681, about Ten a Clock in the morning, being 12 Leagues N.W. from the Island Plata, we left Captain Sharp and those who were willing to go with him in the Ship, and embarked into our La[u]nch and Canoas, designing for the River of Santa Maria, in the Gulph of St Michael, which is about 200 leagues from the Isle of Plata. We were in number 44 white Men who bore Arms, a Spanish Indian, who bore Arms also: and two Moskito Indians, who always bear Arms amongst the Privateers, and are much valued by them for striking Fish and Turtle, or Tortoise[,] and Manatee or Sea Cow; and five Slaves taken in the South Seas, who fell to our share.
The Craft which carried us was a La[u]nch, or Long Boat, one Canoa, and another Canoa which had been sawn asunder in the middle, in order to have made Bumkins, or Vessels for carrying water, if we had not separated from our Ship. This we joyn’d together again and made it tight; providing Sails to help us along: And for 3 days before we parted, we sifted so much Flower as we could well carry, and rubb’d up 20 or 30 pound of Chocolate with Sugar to sweeten it; these things and a Kettle the Slaves carried also on their backs after we landed.
(Dampier 1703: 1–2)
Prior to this opening, it should be noted, a short introduction serves to establish how Dampier came to be on this island in the Caribbean, who Captain Sharp is, and the circumstances that gave rise to the rift between Sharp and Dampier’s companions. The introduction gives this information in a brisk summary; with the start of the narrative proper, however, we begin to get a more detailed and precise account of movement, location, and activity. The narrative is presented in a journal format, and is clearly based on a log or diary that Dampier maintained at the time. Dampier, indeed, takes care to emphasise this fact in his preface. As he explains, the account ‘is composed of a mixt relation of Places and Actions, in the same order of time in which they occurred: for which end I kept a journal of every day’s Observation’ (unpaginated).
The keeping of journals was a key directive laid down for travellers by the Royal Society. It was intended to ensure that observations were recorded whilst still fresh in the memory, or even whilst the scenes and phenomena being described were still in front of the traveller, rather than being hazily remembered at a different location or later point in time. Accordingly, it soon became incumbent upon travel writers to demonstrate both that they had adopted such a disciplined approach to note-taking whilst travelling, and also that their published narrative was largely derived from these original, on-the-spot observations. Dampier’s adoption of the journal format is intended to reassure the reader on these points, as is the apparent artlessness of the writing style. For the most part his prose eschews elaborate tropes and figures of speech, and whilst his sentences are often long, they typically proceed by a comparatively simple, paratactic accumulation of clauses, rather than by a more elaborate, hypotactic syntax involving numerous subordinate clauses. His diction, meanwhile, reveals a marked preference for authentic-sounding vernacular terms, such as, in the passage above, ‘Canoas’ and ‘Bumkins’, over ostentatiously erudite or elegant phraseology. This use of a plain style corresponds to Royal Society directives against the use of excessive rhetorical ornamentation in travel accounts. The aim was partly to avoid ambiguity, and thus limit the potential for misinterpretation. Yet this style was also intended to signal that the printed text was indeed a transcription of Dampier’s original field notes, rather than an account written up retrospectively, and so potentially falsified or misremembered.
The protocols of epistemological decorum established by the Royal Society influenced not only how one recorded one’s observations and presented them to the public, but also what one observed and recorded. Abstract or metaphysical speculations were to be kept to a minimum, as were subjective impressions, and personal thoughts and feelings. Instead, writers were advised to prioritise the observation of measurable, material phenomena in the external world. Hence Dampier’s precise denotations of time, place, number and distance as he charts his movements around the Caribbean. The result is a narrative voice which makes much use of the first-person pronoun, in both its singular and plural forms, yet which nevertheless often seems very unemotive and impersonal. Rhetorically, this works to enhance the sense of Dampier as a dispassionate, rational and therefore reliable eye-witness to events and phenomena. As Jonathan Lamb puts it, the aim is construct a sense of the narratorial self as a ‘sturdy platform [for observation], superior to the stresses that might distort its measurement of things, or trouble the sense of its own consistency’ (2001: 78). In this way Dampier presents himself as what it is sometimes labelled a ‘Cartesian’ self or subject, and as an ‘I’ who seems simply a disembodied ‘eye’ surveying the surrounding scene; and the term ‘Cartesian’ here alludes to the influential theory of the self developed by the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, which postulated an absolute division between mind and matter, observing subject and observed object.
Further to this, the Royal Society, and figures associated with it like John Locke and Robert Boyle, followed Bacon’s example and published guidelines listing the ‘Heads’, or categories, of data they would like travellers to gather. Here the emphasis was generally on the acquisition of ‘useful knowledge’, by which was meant natural-historical and ethnographic information relevant to contemporary scientific debates, or else with an obvious strategic or commercial application. This observational rubric gives rise, in Dampier’s New Voyage, to an account in which a narrative proper, describing the movements and activities of the narrator, is interspersed with more static passages purely of description. This is what Dampier means when he describes his account as a ‘mixt relation of Places and Actions’ (my emphasis). However, it is not simply ‘places’ that are described in the observational segments of the account, but also a plethora of plant and animal species, along with meteorological phenomena, the customs of the Moskito Indians, and much else besides. Something of the precision of Dampier’s descriptive technique in these passages may be gauged from the account of the guava cited earlier in this chapter.
In many cases, it should be noted, these descriptive passages bring together observations that were obviously made over a period of time, and in several different places. They must therefore have been composed retrospectively, from detailed notes made at different moments in time, so Dampier is clearly being disingenuous when he insists in his preface that his observations are related strictly ‘in the same order of time’ as they were originally made. Yet by situating these observational passages within the larger journal framework, Dampier underscores and seemingly corroborates his claim that all the information he is presenting has been acquired ‘experimentally’, as he puts it at one point; he means empirically, through personal experience. The narrative portions of the text thus contextualise the passages of static description, allowing readers to understand how ’s observations were gathered, and reassuring them of Dampier’s status as an eye-witness to the phenomena he describes. Moreover, insofar as the journal format requires Dampier to present something of himself, and offer over the course of his account a degree of personal narrative, it also seemingly allows the reader to assess the overall trustworthiness of the author. The general plausibility of the experiences Dampier relates, the absence of any obviously romantic details such as monsters or supernatural events, and of course the plain style in which he recounts his experiences, all serve to demonstrate that the writer is a sober, reliable individual, not prone to exaggeration, or flights of fancy. And this sense of reliability and scrupulous note-taking, built up over the narrative as a whole, works to authorise each individual observation that Dampier presents to the reader.
Dampier’s New Voyage went through five editions in almost as many years. Its enormous popularity reflected the extent to which contemporary readers were persuaded of its truthfulness and reliability. Its success in this regard, coupled with the influence of the Royal Society more generally, helped to establish procedural, formal and stylistic paradigms which were widely followed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing, and which to a great extent continue to underpin the genre even today. For the critic Michael McKeon, these paradigms, and the epistemological protocols that give rise to them, are best characterised as ‘naïve empiricism’ (see McKeon 2002: 100–117). With regard to the writing-up of the traveller’s experience, this attitude of ‘naïve empiricism’ assumes that the most accurate and trustworthy of travel accounts are those that present themselves as fairly direct, unmediated transcriptions of the traveller’s original travel notes. An air of artlessness, and the apparent absence of any retrospective narratorial or editorial emendation, thus becomes a key marker of authenticity and reliability in travel writing. It is in this spirit, for example, that the editors John and Awnsham Churchill commend one account in their four-volume Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704) for having
nothing of Art or Language, being left by an ignorant Sailor [ … ]; and therefore the Reader can expect no more than bare matter of Fact, deliver’d in a homely Stile, which it was not fit to alter, lest it might breed a Jealousy that something had been chang’d more than the bare Language.
(Quoted in McKeon 2002: 109)
Or in the words of Shakespeare’s Othello, which were much quoted by eighteenth-century commentators in this context, the travel account should ideally aim to be a ‘plain, unvarnished tale’ (Act 1, Scene 3) that has undergone as little re-organisation or embellishment as possible in the transition from journal to print.
This air of artlessness and scrupulous, on-the-spot note-taking could of course be an illusion. It is for this reason that McKeon designates the formal and stylistic paradigms outlined earlier ‘naïve empiricism’. For many contemporary readers, Dampier’s New Voyage ushered in a new era for travel writing, in which the genre shook off its age-old association with fantastical romance to become instead a far more reputable and reliable vehicle for intellectual enquiry and scientific knowledge. Yet as McKeon points out, and as many sceptical commentators pointed out at the time, travel writing in the new style could just as easily be a vehicle for romance and fabrication. However plain and authentic-sounding the prose style, and however detailed the journal entries, there was in fact no guarantee that an account had not been significantly altered in its transition from original diary to published narrative. Modern scholarship, for example, has established that Dampier himself significantly altered some key episodes in his narrative, on occasions condensing several events into one and reworking them so as to cast himself in a better light (see Edwards 1994: 28–30). More worrying still, a journal format and a plain prose style in the published text did not in themselves guarantee that the narrative recounted events which had actually taken place. Daniel Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe (1719), for example, used the plain style pioneered by Dampier to create a powerful effect of realism, and the illusion of truthfulness. The same narrative conventions could also be exploited by outright fraudsters such as George Psalmanazar, whose best-selling Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704) fascinated European readers for several years with its accounts of polygamy, cannibalism and other bizarre practices. Only when the Formosan craze began to abate, however, did the author admit to compiling his narrative out of earlier sources, and making up the more lurid details.
The attitude of ‘naïve empiricism’ espoused in much eighteenth-and nineteenth-century travel writing, then, does not necessarily produce travelogues that are any more reliable and trustworthy than their predecessors. Yet adherence to the formal and stylistic conventions outlined earlier became in this period a rhetorical necessity for travel writers who wished to be believed. They were a key means by which writers fashioned a successful ‘fiction of factual representation’, in the phrase Holland and Huggan (1998:10) borrow from Hayden White (1976), and so persuaded readers of their reliability. To flout these conventions was accordingly to risk a sceptical response from the reading public. In this way, however, the prevailing conventions of travel writing often subtly constrained what travellers were able to report. If the yardstick for plausibility in medieval travel writing was set by the canon, and so by the precedents established by prior textual authorities, the new protocols of epistemological decorum tended to gauge plausibility by the prior experience of readers and commentators, and by prevailing audience expectations as to what sorts of phenomena were both possible and likely. A version of what is sometimes termed ‘probabilism’ thus operated in the reception of travel writing. In this spirit, for example, Samuel Johnson praised Jerome Lobo’s Abyssinian travelogue, which he translated into English in 1735, on account of the fact that it contained ‘no romantic absurdities or incredible fictions’ but only events that conformed to usual expectations of possibility and probability. He further insisted that the travel writer ‘who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him’ (Johnson 1789: 11). Yet as we have seen with the example of James Bruce, travellers have often encountered phenomena and practices which stretch ‘the bounds of probability’ that normally operate at home. Many travel writers, however, have been aware that their credibility and reputation for trustworthiness could easily unravel on the basis of just one seemingly fantastical detail in their account. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complained,
we travellers are in very hard circumstances: If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull, and we have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.
(1906: 156)
And so the new agenda and attitude in travel writing, born of the desire to produce a more accurate picture of the world and its inhabitants, sometimes had the paradoxical effect of bringing about the non-reporting of certain sorts of information. The African explorer Mungo Park, for example, is said to have told Sir Walter Scott that he left many remarkable stories out of his acclaimed Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), since he feared suffering the same fate as Bruce.
There were also further limitations attendant on the conventions of naïve empiricism, at least for some eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writers and their readers. The period saw European science become increasingly rigorous and specialised; it also saw a massive expansion in the number of overseas territories administered by the European powers. These were to some extent complementary and connected developments, insofar as the increasing rigour and specialisation of science was partly driven by the need of the colonial powers to acquire a detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the territories they controlled, or sought to control. As a consequence, a new sort of European traveller emerged, the scientific surveyor or ‘explorer’. From James Cook onwards, these were often highly trained professionals, whose activities were driven by, and contributed to, the increasingly sophisticated taxonomic and theoretical schema developed by figures like the Swedish natural historian Linnaeus. To aid them in their data collection, these explorers increasingly carried with them a plethora of scientific instruments: sextants, altimeters, thermometers, barometers and even, in the case of the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, a cyanometer, designed to measure the blueness of the sky. These instruments enabled measurements to be taken with much greater precision, thereby minimising the mediating and potentially distorting influence of the traveller’s subjective viewpoint. And this desire to find ostensibly objective techniques of observation and data collection, rather than relying on personal impressions, also led to the growing use, amongst some explorers and surveyors, of statistical or census techniques for gathering information about both the natural world and foreign cultures (see Edney 1997; Leask 2002: 161–66).
These developments contributed to the gradual abandonment, in some branches of travel writing, of the conventions of naïve empiricism outlined earlier. The growing specialisation of science, for example, generated an increasingly technical scientific vocabulary that could not easily be reconciled with the requirement for a plain prose style in the travel account. Increasingly, moreover, exploratory expeditions and surveys generated both more information, and also more data that was purely quantitative, than could be easily incorporated into a readable narrative of the explorer’s journey. For such travellers, moreover, a chronological personal narrative was not necessarily the most useful method of structuring their reports, at least when those reports were intended for scientific specialists and colonial bureaucrats. A chronologically ordered report might require readers to work through the whole narrative to glean all the observations relevant to a given topic. Far more useful, accordingly, were accounts which presented their information in a systematic fashion, with the observations relevant to each specific subject area brought together and consolidated in separate sections or chapters. In some cases, these chapters might then be integrated within a larger personal narrative of the traveller’s journey. Alternatively, they might be presented as appendices to the personal narrative; this is the strategy adopted in Park’s Travels, for example, where a long and frequently technical appendix written by the geographer James Rennell provides a digest of the new geographical information garnered through Park’s endeavours. In other cases, however, the element of personal narrative was abandoned altogether, to present simply a digest of the traveller’s findings, and possibly his or her theoretical reflections, on various topics. Perhaps the most striking example of this tendency in the form is the vast, multi-authored Description de l’Egypte (Description of Egypt). Commissioned by Napoleon and published in twenty volumes between 1809 and 1818, this provides an exhaustive and methodical account of Egypt’s antiquities, its natural history, and its current political and cultural state. However, this information is seldom framed within any sort of narrative of the journeys undertaken to gather it.
In this way some modes of travel writing became increasingly reliant on what one might term objectivist strategies for presenting information and appearing authoritative. Where the traditions of naïve empiricism sought to emphasise the extent to which all observations were rooted in the traveller’s eye-witness experience, these new modes typically downplayed or elided this personal dimension, focusing to a greater extent simply on the data gathered by the traveller. In this regard, it is worth contrasting the passage from Dampier’s New Voyage cited earlier with the following passage from John Barrow’s Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (1801):
The following day we passed the Great Fish River, though not without some difficulty, the banks being high and steep, the stream strong, the bottom rocky, and the water deep. Some fine trees of the willow of Babylon, or a variety of that species, skirted the river at this place. The opposite side presented a very beautiful country, well wooded and watered, and plentifully covered with grass, among which grew in abundance, a species of indigo, apparently the same as that described by Mr Masson as the candicans.
(190)
For all that Dampier’s account keeps its focus on events and material phenomena in the external world, his observations are framed by a first-person narration that frequently deploys the pronouns ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. Barrow, meanwhile, has excised this first-person framework for much of the passage above. After the initial clause, information is presented more baldly, with little reference to the narratorial self that traversed the African landscape to gather these observations. Thus Barrow presents himself even more emphatically than Dampier as a dispassionate, disembodied ‘Cartesian’ subject, concerned simply to survey the surrounding scene.
Barrow utilises this impersonal style within a larger narrative structure that broadly tracks the traveller’s itinerary. As noted, however, some forms of scientific or bureaucratic travel reports increasingly dispensed with this narrative dimension altogether, producing accounts which simply presented and analysed the information relevant to one specific topic or field, without making any reference to the author’s journey. As modern scientific disciplinarity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, many academic disciplines that had previously relied greatly on travel writing for their data began to strive for this sort of objectivism in style and structure, so as to distinguish themselves from more anecdotal, impressionistic forms of travelogue. These objectivist strategies were also adopted in many guidebooks, which similarly began to take on their distinctive modern form in the 1830s. Along with a more impersonal mode of discourse, moreover, many guidebooks and scientific treatises adopted non-narrative or graphic methods of presenting information, such as gazetteers, lists and catalogues, or tables and charts. Again, the rhetorical effect of these devices was an air of a greater objectivity, and so of increased authority. A table or list does not remind readers of the mediating role of a traveller/observer in the way that a personal narrative of travel does, and it obscures the processes by which the knowledge being offered was produced; we are seemingly presented with facts, pure and simple, rather than with just one individual’s observations, and his or her interpretation of those observations.
Of course, even these seemingly more objective and authoritative modes of travel writing can be mimicked, by both mendacious and playful writers. Once again, they are not intrinsically any marker of a greater reliability in the travel text, but rather just a different rhetorical strategy for conveying authority and obtaining credit from the reader. Like any form of travel writing, moreover, even such seemingly ‘objective’ texts necessarily render the world in a partial and to some extent skewed manner, since inevitably they record only some aspects of another people or place. Furthermore, whilst these objectivist strategies in both the collection and representation of data are often intended to overcome the inevitable subjectivity of an individual traveller’s viewpoint, the texts that result will still usually possess an ideological dimension. The information that a traveller and his or her culture choose to record, and the methods they use to obtain and present that data, are reflective of a culture’s attitudes, assumptions and ambitions towards the wider world. The long lists of ‘natural productions’ that fill the appendices of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century exploration narratives, for example, arguably constitute a kind of stock-taking; and here a seemingly objective mode of representation is in fact expressive of, and contributive to, the commercial and colonial agendas that underpinned much European exploration in this era (see Franklin 1979; Pratt 2008).
As this will suggest, the developments in travel writing outlined in this section, and the vigorous debates about the genre which drove those developments, were not undertaken as abstract intellectual exercises, or in a spirit merely of literary experimentation. Indeed, most of the travel texts discussed so far in this chapter should not really be regarded as ‘literature’, in the principal modern sense of this term. They served more pragmatic ends, although this did not prevent them also being read for pleasure and achieving immense popularity with the reading public. To borrow a useful distinction from Stephen Greenblatt, in these texts we see not the ‘imagination at play’ but rather the ‘imagination at work’ (1991: 23), struggling to overcome epistemological and representational problems so as to render travel writing a more effective technology for the transmission of information. This technology was required in the first place for the accumulation of knowledge, and travel writing in this regard played a major role in the emergence of Western science in its modern forms. In the model of scientific enquiry offered by the sociologist Bruno Latour, the traveller’s account may be considered one of the ‘mobiles’, or transportable forms of data, that are brought back from the field to the ‘centres of calculation’ that drive the scientific process (see Latour 1987). These ‘centres’ might be institutions such as, in Britain, the Royal Society, the Admiralty and the Royal Geographical Society; or they might be individuals, such as Sir Joseph Banks, who travelled on Cook’s first voyage and thereafter played a pivotal role in British exploratory activity. Either way, their role was to accumulate and disseminate the data gathered by travellers; to oversee the development of new theories and models in the light of this data; and thereafter to direct further missions to test, extend or put to practical use the new knowledge that had thus been formed.
These scientific endeavours were not conducted in a vacuum, divorced from the realpolitik of strategic and economic considerations. From its emergence in the seventeenth century down to the present day, European science has been driven as much by the requirements of the state as by pure intellectual curiosity. Across the same period, travel writing, as a key contributor to the advancement of science, has contributed significantly to the advancement of European power, and to the emergence of the Spanish, Portuguese, French, British and other European empires. The explosion in European travel writing from the fifteenth century onwards constituted a massive accumulation of what Greenblatt has termed ‘mimetic capital’ (1991: 6), providing a stock of hugely useful descriptions of the world. It was partly this ever-growing body of knowledge, along with superior weapons systems, that gave Europeans a decisive technological advantage over many of the indigenous peoples they encountered round the world; and the implications of European travel writing’s complex entanglement with the processes of empire, colonisation and exploitation will be discussed further in Chapter 6.
Authority and Veracity in the Modern Travel Book
What, though, of the ‘imagination at play’ in travel writing? What of the claims to truthfulness made by the modern travel book, the more literary branch of the travel writing genre which has flourished since the nineteenth century, and which today is what most readers recognise as ‘travel writing’? Through what strategies and literary devices do the writers of these texts seek to establish their trustworthiness and authority as eye-witnesses and commentators?
Insofar as they wish to convey truthfulness and factuality, modern travel writers have at their disposal all the literary devices and narrative conventions developed by earlier travel writers, and by other modes of travel writing. They may align themselves with the tradition of naïve empiricism, and present their whole narrative as just a lightly edited transcription of notes and journal-entries made ‘on the spot’. Alternatively, they may insert into a more obviously polished and written-up account just a few sections marked as ‘from my diary’ or ‘from my notebook’, thereby emphasising to readers that the narrative as a whole is grounded in personal experience. They may even utilise some of the more objectivist literary devices described earlier, incorporating into their accounts any number of tables, lists and graphs, so as to suggest that they are giving us plain facts, rather than a more subjective viewpoint.
These are just some of the authenticating, and as it were ‘factualising’ strategies available to the writers of modern travelogues, and every travel writer will make their own permutation of the various devices available to them in this regard. Usually in the modern travel book, however, these devices are located within an account that is still structured as a ‘mixt relation’, in William Dampier’s phraseology; that is to say, as a combination of narrative sections, in which the narrator describes the events of the journey and his or her personal travel experiences, and more descriptive sections of commentary and reflection, in which the traveller proffers an interpretation of those experiences, and essays some broader conclusions about the people and places that have been visited. Or as Rob Nixon has put it, we typically find in travel literature today an oscillation between ‘an autobiographical, emotionally tangled mode’ and a ‘semi-ethnographic, distanced, analytical mode’ (1992: 15). Thus Ryszard Kapuscinski’s travel essay ‘The Ambush’ opens with the information that ‘We were driving north from Kampala, toward Uganda’s border with Sudan’ (2007: 147) and then proceeds to weave together, on the one hand, a personal narrative of his experiences whilst accompanying a presidential motorcade and, on the other, a series of more general pronouncements about life in this part of East Africa. We are informed, for example, that
the residents of Kampala speak of their kinsmen from Karimojong (it is at once the name of a place, a people and a person) with distaste and embarrassment. The Karimojong walk around naked, and insist upon this custom, seeing the human body as beautiful (and in fact they are magnificently built, tall and slender). Their intransigence on this score has yet another basis: most of the Europeans who reached them in the early years of African exploration rapidly fell ill and died, from which the Karimojong deduced that clothing causes illness, and getting dressed is tantamount to sentencing yourself to death.
(2007: 151–52)
This is the ‘semi-ethnographic’ mode to which Nixon refers, a more impersonal and dispassionate prose style that conveys the sense that the observations being made are not simply the traveller’s personal impressions, but rather that they have a general validity, and are an objective statement of fact.
As a medium for presenting information about the wider world, however, the modern travel book has often generated considerable uncertainty and unease in readers; or at least, in more scholarly readers. As we have seen, an epistemological anxiety about the validity of the knowledge provided by travelogues has always haunted travel writing. But in the modern travel book, this age-old anxiety about the truthfulness and accuracy of travel writers is significantly compounded by a range of further factors. In the first place, for example, it is not always clear to what extent the modern travel book actually means to make any sort of truth claim, or undertakes to convey an accurate knowledge of the wider world. As discussed in Chapter 2, the modern travel book is usually both more overtly autobiographical, and more self-consciously literary, than most of the travelogues discussed so far in the present chapter. This emphasis on autobiography and ‘literariness’ causes the modern travel book’s agenda, and its generic contract with the reader, to be subtly but significantly different from that which operates in other forms of travel writing. In a sense, it ceases to matter as much whether the information we are being given is strictly true. Instead, readers understand that they are reading for the insights they will gain into the writer’s distinctive sensibility, and for the pleasure they will gain from an equally individual literary style. Take, for example, the following passage from Bill Bryson’s best-selling comic travelogue, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (first published 1989). Addressing his readers directly, Bryson informs them that when they drive in Kansas, as he has just done, they will frequently find old pick-up trucks pulling out in front of them, only narrowly avoiding a collision. This phenomenon is explained as follows:
Curious to see what sort of person could inconvenience you in this way in the middle of nowhere, you speed up to overtake [the truck] and see that sitting at the wheel is a little old man of eighty-seven, wearing a cowboy hat three sizes too large for him, staring fixedly at the empty road as if piloting a light aircraft through a thunderstorm. He is of course quite oblivious of you. Kansas has more drivers like this than any other state in the nation, more than can be accounted for by simple demographics. Other states must send them their old people, perhaps by promising them a free cowboy hat when they get there.
(1999: 280)
Clearly, no reader of this passage is going to complain if they subsequently visit Kansas and discover that the roads are not full of pick-up trucks driven by old men in outsize cowboy hats. And this is not just because their journey will have turned out to be less hazardous than Bryson here predicts. Most readers will recognise immediately that this is just an amusing comic riff, which is meant to be appreciated more for its absurdity and exaggeration than for its fidelity to the truth. In other literary travel books, similarly, readers will often recognise that a key agenda in many passages may not be accuracy of representation per se, but rather the telling of amusing anecdotes, or the crafting of an overall mood or tone. In these passages, accordingly, the authority that travel writers claim for themselves is not really bound up with the accuracy or otherwise of their accounts: rather it is predicated on whether they hold the reader’s attention, either by writing well or by telling an interesting story. They claim, in short, the authority of fiction, and by so doing side-step the requirement that they be strictly truthful in their reporting.
Yet this is not the whole story about the literary travelogue. If on the one hand the genre usually seems to prioritise the aesthetic effects it creates, and the aesthetic pleasure it gives the reader, over the accuracy of its account of the world, on the other hand the modern travel book will also usually present itself as being broadly a factual representation of real experiences and real places. Indeed, many travel writers in this tradition will often suggest that by virtue of their distinctive, uniquely insightful personalities, and/or their fine writing, they are able to offer a portrait of peoples and places that goes deeper, and is ultimately more truthful, than those accounts that stick pedantically to matters of clear, observable fact. Thus the writers of more literary travelogues often claim, somewhat paradoxically, the authority both of fiction and of non-fiction. Or as Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan put it, the modern travel book is ‘generically elusive, as unwilling to give up its claims to documentary veracity as it is to waive its license to rhetorical excess’ (1998: 12). It is this generic ambiguity that has often scandalised commentators, since obviously it creates enormous scope for confusion and misinterpretation, and for readers to construe as fact what was actually only intended as playful conceit or personal opinion.
Further to this, many scholarly commentators over the years have attacked the modern, more literary travel book for the ease with which it enables writers to claim an often unwarranted authority in their pronouncements on other peoples and places. As Holland and Huggan (1998), Debbie Lisle (2006) and others have recently emphasised, the fact of having ‘been there’, and so having personal eye-witness experience, will often confer a spurious legitimacy on what are actually very superficial and ill-informed accounts of other people and places. All too often, it is suggested, travel writers take what Graham Greene in his Mexican travelogue The Lawless Roads (1939) calls the ‘tourist view’ of a foreign destination, with the result that a whole nation such as Mexico is thought of ‘in terms of quiet and gentleness and devotion’ largely ‘on the strength of one prosperous town on the highway, [and] on the strength of a happy mood’ (1981: 42). That is to say, travel writers are notoriously prone to summing up whole cultures, and passing sweeping judgements on other peoples and places, on the basis of just a few personal impressions, or from merely anecdotal evidence.
Once again, this has been an accusation frequently lodged against all forms of travel writing over the centuries, and it derives from the perennial problem, noted earlier in this chapter, that all travelogues must to some extent proceed as a series of synecdoches, whereby parts are taken as representative of a larger totality. As Greene also writes in The Lawless Roads: ‘How to describe a city? Even for an old inhabitant it is impossible: one can present only a simplified plan, taking a house here, a park there as symbols of the whole’ (1981: 41). As we have seen, however, some modes of travel writing, from the seventeenth century onwards, have sought to limit or counterbalance this inevitable tendency in the traveller’s report. The protocols of naïve empiricism that emerged over the course of the seventeenth century, for example, aimed to reduce the potential for unwarranted generalisations by insisting that travellers simply observe the material phenomena in front of them, without extrapolating unduly from those immediate observations. (This was, of course, a rubric that was not always observed.) In the nineteenth century, meanwhile, disciplines such as Geography, Anthropology and Sociology developed more overtly scientific and academic modes of travel writing, and so imposed a degree of methodological rigour on travellers working in these traditions. Writers in these branches of travel writing were increasingly required to cross-reference their personal findings against a larger body of established disciplinary knowledge, and to offer a degree of explicit self-reflection on the theoretical assumptions brought to bear on another people or place. By these means, more academic modes of travel writing have sought to counteract the traveller’s frequent tendency to rush to hasty and wholly subjective conclusions.
The writers of more literary travel accounts, however, are not obliged to follow any sort of methodological or disciplinary procedure as they formulate their reports of other countries and cultures. That said, many of these writers will often claim a degree of scholarly expertise, making a show of specialist knowledge and academic rigour as they frame their observations. Yet as many critics have pointed out, in ‘literary’ works aimed at the non-specialist reader one must always keep in mind that any show of scholarship may be simply a facade, and a rhetorical strategy designed to bolster the writer’s credibility, rather than an indication of genuine expertise in a given field. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) presents itself at one level as a fairly scholarly enquiry into mankind’s nomadic impulses, yet in the eyes of most professional anthropologists the theory that Chatwin develops, and the account he offers of Aboriginal sacred practices, are both profoundly flawed and inadequate (see Huggan 1991; Shakespeare 1999, 489–90). The anthropologist Neil Whitehead similarly lambasts the apparent ethnographic rigour of Charles Nicholl’s Guyanese travelogue The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado (1995); as Whitehead points out, Nicholl provides the reader with numerous ‘mistaken linguistic etymologies’, and misidentifies at least one of the tribes he encounters (1997: 32).
If some travel writers claim in this way a scholarly authority that is often unjustified, others insist that their authority derives, somewhat paradoxically, precisely from their lack of specialist knowledge. As Holland and Huggan (1998) note, the persona of the ‘amateur’ or the ‘dilettante’ is frequently adopted by the narrators of modern travel books. In part, this is a narratorial self-fashioning born of defensiveness and a sense of belatedness; the writers of literary travelogues are often keenly aware that they are following in the footsteps of true explorers, heroic figures who reported real discoveries and made genuine contributions to knowledge. Yet this pose of comparative ignorance may simultaneously invest the traveller with an alternative form of authority. He or she is thus able to present themselves as an ‘everyman’ figure, and as the ordinary reader’s representative in the field; and implicit in this characterisation, usually, is the assumption that it is travellers equipped simply with bluff common sense who produce the most accurate reports, since they are supposedly free of the preconceived ideas, and the entrenched theoretical positions, that might accompany a more specialist knowledge of the region being visited.
In practice, of course, this amateurishness frequently produces a superficial and highly impressionistic account of another people or place. Just as frequently, moreover, such accounts simply reiterate and reinforce many of the prevailing stereotypes and prejudices already circulating in the traveller’s culture, notwithstanding his or her claim to be some sort of independent-minded free spirit. As a consequence, Holland and Huggan have suggested that whilst many modern travel books undoubtedly adopt what Rob Nixon has termed a ‘semi-ethnographic’ mode (1992:15), it is in fact more appropriate to regard them as ‘pseudo-ethnographic’ documents (Holland and Huggan 1998: 12; my emphasis), which can seldom be relied on to give us an accurate account of other cultures.
In this way Holland and Huggan, like Lisle and several other recent critics, are generally dismissive of the modern travel book’s claim to be a factual genre that presents us with reliable information about the wider world. Yet this is a critique of the form that needs to be qualified in several regards. It is worth noting, for example, that when anthropologists and other academic professionals scoff at the unreliability and superficiality of many travel books, what we are witnessing is to some extent a disciplinary turf war, in which academics wish to assert the superiority of their own modes of travel and travel writing. From their emergence in the nineteenth century onwards, scholarly modes of travel writing such as ethnography have always defined themselves against the supposedly lightweight and anecdotal travel book; this has been a key rhetorical device by which these disciplines have themselves heightened their own air of authority. More recently, however, some anthropologists have questioned whether there is such a clear dividing between, on the one hand, supposedly scientific, objective ethnography and, on the other, the supposedly impressionistic, subjective travel book (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz, 1988). Or, as Mary Louise Pratt puts it, ethnography has generally been in denial about the extent to which ‘its own discursive practices were often inherited from … other genres [such as travel writing,] and are still shared with them today’ (Pratt 1986: 26).
Rethinking ethnography’s relationship with the travel book in this way brings with it the implication that travel books may sometimes be a valid source of ethnographic information, even if that information is not always couched in the specialised idiom of the professional anthropologist. Certainly this seems a fair assessment of the many travel writers over the years who have lived long periods amongst the peoples and landscapes they describe, and who clearly have a deep knowledge of, and a great affinity with, those peoples and landscapes. One thinks here of travelogues such as Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs (1964), which is of course not free from its own prejudices and foibles, but which nevertheless offers an insightful account of the Madan people of southern Iraq. A work such as Hugh Brody’s Maps and Dreams: Indians and British Columbia Frontier (1981), meanwhile, sits somewhere between a formal ethnography and a travel book, being written to rigorous anthropological standards yet pitched at a more general audience. And finally, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986), a scrupulously rendered account of the interrelationships between different species in the Canadian Arctic ecosystem, reminds us that the modern travel book will sometimes be rigorously grounded in the natural as well as the social sciences.
It is worth remembering also that claims to scholarly expertise in the modern travel book are not always a façade, or a rhetorical device intended to bolster the writer’s authority. Some travel writers really are the experts they claim to be; thus Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (2008), a fascinating account of the Piraha people of Brazil, is the work of an academic linguist who has held professorships at several leading universities. In this regard, one must keep in mind the diversity of material embraced by even that subset of travel writing, the modern travel book. There are of course many shallow, inconsequential and sometimes highly prejudicial travel books, yet the genre also encompasses accounts which are far more scrupulously and conscientiously researched, and which accordingly make a significant contribution to our knowledge of the world. At their best, moreover, travel writers in this tradition turn the genre’s freedom from formal academic methodologies into an advantage rather than a limitation, using the form to cut across conventional disciplinary boundaries and engage with their theme in a variety of different modes. Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is again a case in point. It is grounded in impeccable science, yet it also combines that science with both a lyrical, emotional register and a historical perspective. Lopez’s aim here is to critique and redress the Cartesian tendency often inherent in accounts that adopt just a scientific perspective on the world. As we have seen, this Cartesian outlook or narratorial position seems to reflect and foster the belief that there is a radical schism between observing subject and observing object. For Lopez and many other environmentally minded travel writers, this is an attitude that is both psychologically damaging and environmentally disastrous; and Lopez accordingly endeavours to convey more fully how self and world, humanity and nature, act constantly upon and shape each other. In this way, the subjectivism permitted in the modern travel book is not always self-indulgent; rather, it may sometimes serve an important philosophical and moral function, exposing and countering the limitations and biases inherent in seemingly more rigorous, academic modes of intellectual enquiry.