Travelogues

Eyewitness accounts by those "on the spot" at the cutting edge of Western expansion figure frequently in the primary sources used by students of colonialism. No doubt the best known are those book-length narratives that were aimed at a public eager to read about bold exploits in exotic places. But alongside them were logs, diaries, letters, field notes, official reports, news stories, and scientific monographs, addressed to more specialized audiences. Indeed many of them were not intended for publication.

Some still only exist as rare manuscripts in national archives and private collections. Others have been lost altogether. The nearest we have to the journal of Columbus's first voyage, for example, is a later summary by Bartolemé de Las Casas. The main—and sometimes only—source for early accounts (often in abridged and reworked versions) are the multivolume collections of voyage literature that appeared during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, such as those assembled by Giovanni Ramusio, Richard Hakluyt, and Theodore de Bry, to name some early examples.

In addition, one finds valuable testimony—if only in passing—in works that would not normally be considered travel narratives. First-hand reports appear in the memoirs or biographies of public figures, whose colonial experiences may have been short-lived. Indeed, they may be implicit in works that do not take a narrative form at all. The bilingual Allada Catechism (1670), prepared for missionaries in West Africa, can tell us a good deal about prevailing attitudes and local conditions, as can maps, charts, and atlases. Scholars of travel writing have also paid attention to the novels of writers such as Herman Melville, Pierre Loti, or Joseph Conrad, which owe so much to their authors' experiences on the imperial frontier. In addition, they have considered imaginative works that draw heavily on contemporary travel literature, even if, as with William Shakespeare's The Tempest or Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, their authors never left Europe.

The titles of anthologies and academic studies of travel writings indicate the prevailing tendency to classify such material in one of three ways: based on the nationality or gender of the author, the area of the world being traveled and written about, or the historical period in which the work was written. Sometimes one finds combinations of all three: "English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918" or "Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa," to pick two subtitles almost at random.

But it may be more useful here to offer a schematic grouping in terms of what might be called the positioning of the author; in other words, his or her role in the colonial project. While one cannot deduce from such positions the ideological stance of the text or its factual reliability, their very diversity should begin to indicate that colonial travel writing is not at all written in a single voice or from the same point of view.

First, there are those senior figures who were appointed as leaders of expeditions, or rulers of territory, and are better known perhaps for what they did than for what they wrote. Their writings—shaped as they often are by the desire to impress the monarch or government that appointed them—were used to promote and justify the colonial enterprise, or at least easily lend themselves to such readings. Examples would include Hernán Cortés's letters detailing the conquest of Mexico, Walter Ralegh's account of his search for El Dorado, and the famous narratives of circumnavigation by Louis Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook. Both Edward Eyre and Marie-Joseph-François Garnier, administrators in Australia and Indochina respectively, wrote extensively of their explorations in regions unknown to Europeans at the time.

Second, there are those who played a more intermediary role—as traders, interpreters, missionaries, diplomats, sometimes at the cutting edge of expansion, sometimes following in its wake. Here we might place the letters of Dutch merchant Willem Bosman from the coast of West Africa in 1705, the record of Isabella Bird's missionary work in the Far East, or Edward Lane's seminal study of Egypt and of Arabic language and literature. These diverse roles often overlap, as they do quite explicitly in the life and work of Roger Williams, whose Key into the Language of America (1643) is about conversion and trade as much as translation. Their writings are more likely to demonstrate an engagement with native beliefs and practices, an engagement most vividly symbolized by famous cases of cultural cross-dressing: for instance, the pilgrimage to Mecca carried out by British diplomat Richard Burton or the French religious scholar Alexandra David-Néel's epic journey to Lhasa, both undertaken in disguise.

A third group comprises those whose journeys to—and experiences on—the colonial frontier were in the capacity of rank-and-file employees, such as laborers, servants, sailors, and soldiers. They include Richard Henry Dana, whose experiences as a common seaman trading for hides on the Californian coast in the 1830s are recorded in Two Years before the Mast, and Hans Staden, who was captured by Tupinamba in the 1550s while serving as a gunner at a Portuguese fort off the coast of Brazil. George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934), based on his experiences as a colonial policeman, is a more recent example, but it is quite rare that such perspectives find their way into print. More marginalized still are the voices of fugitives, slaves, prisoners, and pirates, whose stories usually come down to us in the words of others.

Finally, there are those who traveled as more independent observers. Not directly involved in the colonial enterprise, their writings exhibit perhaps a greater variety of perspectives than the others. News coverage, for example, ranges from the investigative and critical journalism of Albert Londres in French Guiana or Michael Herr in Vietnam to the sensationalist reporting associated with the Spanish American and Boer Wars. More extended stays by those on professedly scientific missions are less obviously partisan. Alexander von Humboldt's delineations of the physical geography of the Americas or Margaret Mead's anthropological study of the sexual mores of Samoa are classics in their fields—but so too once was the racial classification proposed by the anatomist Josiah Nott and Egyptologist George Gliddon in Types of Mankind (1854), which drew on the latter's research while U.S. vice-consul in Cairo.

ASSESSING COLONIAL TRAVEL WRITING

It was only in the wake of decolonization in the post-World War II period that this vast body of writing began to receive sustained critical attention. One approach made extensive use of travel literature to trace a history of the attitudes of Europeans toward people of color, as they evolved from the confusions and misunderstandings of first contact through the development of more standardized prejudice, to modern racism. Another, by contrast, saw early accounts as marking an advance on medieval ignorance and paving the way for the systematic description and interpretation of other cultures by modern anthropologists.

When anthropologists began to take a more critical view of their own discipline and interrogate its colonialist assumptions (signaled by two influential collections of essays, edited by Talal Asad and Dell Hymes), this contrast began to lose its force. During the 1970s, the analysis of travel accounts moved away from the assessment of their accuracy or the scrutiny of their motives toward an attempt to understand the deeper rhetorical structures of the writings themselves and the institutional frameworks that lend them authority.

This new approach was pioneered, above all, by Edward Said, a literary critic drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of "discourse." His Orientalism (1978) takes to task a wide range of writings on the Middle East, from the Napoleonic Description de l'Egypte to the Cambridge History of Islam. His target is the very notion of an essentially unchanging "Orient," which they unquestioningly presuppose, whatever their ostensible sympathies. It was not so much what the "West" said about the "East" that is at issue here, but the assumed distinction between an "us" and a "them" that makes such statements meaningful in the first place.

Orientalism proved hugely influential on the growing number of studies of travel writing and colonialism that followed, and not only those concerned specifically with the Middle East. A case in point is Mary Louise Pratt's elaboration of the notion of "anti-conquest" in Imperial Eyes (1992), which finds apparently innocent descriptions of landscape serving the imperialist project as much as those accounts that celebrate the acquisition of territory, precisely because they disavow the relations of power that make them possible. Another is David Spurr's Rhetoric of Empire (1993), which investigates twelve basic tropes used to represent non-Western peoples, including affirmation and idealization as well as debasement and negation.

In a related and parallel development, similar concerns were evident in close readings of modern anthropological texts. Johannes Fabian, James Clifford, and others examined the conventions of the "classic" monograph, such as its use of the "ethnographic present," which suppresses the dialogue and negotiation of the fieldwork experience in order to generalize about a way of life that seems always to have been so.

Much of this scholarship has involved tracing recurrent themes and preoccupations across a wide range of writings. It has produced its own terminology—"monarch-of-all-I-survey" scenes (Mary Louise Pratt) or "allegories of salvage" (James Clifford)—and scrutinized familiar categories: wonder (Stephen Greenblatt), curiosity (Nigel Leask). William Pietz's rich, politicized etymology of the term fetish offers another approach. Many specific studies (of authors or geographical regions) have shed light on the relationship between colonial travel writing and broader issues, such as indigeneity (Peter Hulme), forms of exchange (David Murray), exoticism (Charles Forsdick), and the female gaze (Indira Ghose).

The field has been characterized by lively debate. Cannibalism has been a contested topic since William Arens raised doubts about the claims made in many travel accounts regarding the practice and argued that there is no evidence that it ever existed anywhere as a socially accepted custom. The interpretation of narratives is also at the heart of a famous disagreement between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere over the reception of Captain Cook when he landed in Hawai'i in 1778, a debate that touches on many key issues of cross-cultural judgment.

Sara Mills and others have fine-tuned the terms in which the issue of gender has been discussed in a colonial context. The general question of whether women write differently from men—and why—is of course complicated when the relationship between women and the people they write about is taken into account. This work has been accompanied by the extensive republication and anthologization of the accounts of women travelers, among them Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who accompanied her husband to Constantinople when he was appointed ambassador in 1716, and Mary Kingsley, the Victorian explorer and author of Travels in West Africa (1897).

A good number of studies of European and North American travel writings show how such works tended to legitimate the colonial project by presenting the colonized as peoples without history. While some of this scholarship has been legitimately criticized for its tendency to treat what it sometimes refers to as "colonial discourse" as monolithic and inescapable, with travel writing as its inevitable servant, much of it is more sophisticated than this. Many scholars, for instance, now acknowledge that even the most unsympathetic and propagandistic work can nevertheless tell us much not only about the practices and psychology of conquest and settlement but also about the places and peoples described, and can be used to theoretically reconstruct precolonial cultures for which there is precious little other evidence.

This is at least partly because the kind of colonial encounters described in travel writings—the day-to-day exchanges of words, ideas, and things between the colonizer and colonized—exhibit, despite the radically uneven power relations at play, a fair amount of negotiation and improvisation. For Mary Louise Pratt this is why the colonial frontier is perhaps better described as a contact zone, a term that has since been widely used by those who have read "classic" texts against the grain, paying attention to the hesitations, uncertainties, and contradictions in the writing that allow the complexities of this interaction to become visible—sometimes in conjunction with the (re)discovery of private notes, diaries, and letters never meant for publication, in which these complexities are often in greater evidence.

But more obviously "postcolonial" perspectives on travel writing are apparent in two other broad currents of scholarship. One approach focuses on a certain crisis of authority in the writings of Western travelers and tourists of the post-World War II period. In the last half-century or so, authors—having previously enjoyed an apparently exclusive relationship with the people they described—have begun to acknowledge (if only obliquely) that their accounts might be open to question. They sense the possibility of criticism not only by other Western travelers (who have been visiting "remote" locales in growing numbers) but also, more significantly, by the people they write about, people who must increasingly be counted among their readers. No longer feeling confident to repeat the imperious generalizations of the past, contemporary travelers often undercut them with self-parody (such as Eric Newby's shambling exploration of the Hindu Kush) or overwhelm them with pessimistic despair (Graham Greene's cynical portrayals of Liberia and Haiti, for instance).

THREE WRITERS OF TRAVELOGUES

From the accounts of expedition leaders, explorers, and traders to adventurers, pilgrims, and everyday people, travelogues allow us to view colonial history from varying perspectives. Among the many writers associated with travelogues, three of the most significant are Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Edward John Eyre, and Mary Kingsley.

The Italian geographer and Renaissance scholar Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485–1557) did not write travelogues based on his own experiences; rather, he compiled the travelogues of others. By obtaining as many as possible and translating them into Italian, along with maps, images, and his own commentary, Ramusio played an instrumental role in making the accounts of European explorers available to others. The fruit of his labor was a three-volume work titled Delle navigationi et viaggi.

The English explorer Edward John Eyre (1815–1901) was one of the first persons to begin the exploration of central Australia, and was the first to make an overland trip across Australia. His original goal was to find a way to drive livestock overland—but he ended up proving that there was no practical way of doing this. Eyre and his companions suffered through an extreme scarcity of water and food, and were slowed down by wind-blown sand. In addition, the Aborigines with whom Eyre traveled murdered a member of his party. These hardships are detailed in Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia and Overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound in the Years 1840–1. In this book, Eyre describes natives who thrived in what Europeans would deem impossible conditions.

The Englishwoman Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) published various accounts of her pioneering trips to West Africa, including the book Travels in West Africa (1897) and a large number of articles on African subjects. As a trader, Kingsley gained access to the Fan tribe, who were known to be cannibals. Only one European, a Frenchman, had visited them previously, and he had disappeared without a trace. Through their travels together, Kingsley and the Fan developed a sense of mutual respect.

In one village, Kingsley recounts in Travels in West Africa, she stayed in a chief's house, where she had difficulty sleeping because of a strong and disgusting odor. She soon discovered the odor was coming from a bag hanging from the roof beams. She shook the bag's contents "out in my hat, for fear of losing anything of value. They were a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears, and other portions of the human frame. The hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled. Replacing them I tied the bag up, and hung it up again. I subsequently learnt that although the Fans will eat their fellow friendly tribes folk, yet they like to keep a little something belonging to them as a memento" (Kingsley, London: Macmillian and Co, 1897).

Some travel writers have responded to this crisis more directly and reflexively by experimenting with the form of the travel narrative or anthropological monograph itself, producing "polyphonic" texts that mix genres and intentionally make it difficult for older, patronizing certainties to take hold. They may critically engage with earlier writers or work closely with interpreters and informants to produce what are in effect jointly authored texts, and they frequently reflect on their own practice and institutional location. Many of these techniques are evident in the various publications of Richard and Sally Price on Surinam that have appeared since the 1970s. But if such bold experiments have become increasingly common, it also has become clear that they were anticipated by modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s such as Zora Neale Hurston and Michel Leiris, whose unconventional ethnographies have recently been reappraised.

Another postcolonial approach to travel writing has focused on travel writings by authors from colonized and formerly colonized countries, especially those that recount journeys to Europe and North America. These range from the slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano, to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Viajes por Europa, Africa, y América (1849–1851), which records an attempt to seek overseas models for the young republic of Argentina to follow. Twentieth-century examples include the Ivorian Bernard Dadié's impressions of Paris and New York and the Egyptian Nawal al-Saadawi's My Travels Around the World (1991).

In Home and Harem (1996), Inderpal Gewal discusses the travels to Britain and the United States of Indian men and women toward the end of the nineteenth century. Accounts like these tend to be found, not in recognizable "travel books," but in diaries, letters, and autobiographies. But the memoirs of public figures who traveled to the West—whether to publicize a cause, secure an education, earn a living, or escape arrest—form a wealth of material. The experiences of lesser-known travelers are more likely to be recorded by oral history projects or evoked in the many fictional narratives of immigration, such as the multigenerational epics The Gunny Sack (1989), by M. G. Vassanji, and La Vie Scélérate (1987), by Maryse Condé.

However, the type of "writing back" that has, arguably, attracted most attention is the contemporary, self-consciously postcolonial travel narrative written by a successful author based in the West. Examples include the works of V. S. Naipaul and Caryl Phillips, whose writings—both fictional and nonfictional—offer, in effect, multiple ways of engaging with the Indian diaspora and "Black Atlantic," respectively. Perhaps more controversial—and certainly more unusual and striking—is A Small Place (1988), Jamaica Kincaid's scathing polemic addressed to tourists who visit her native Antigua.

The search for travel writing that challenges the Eurocentric legacy of the genre has been undertaken with some caution. Colonial discourse may not be monolithic and all-embracing, but it is nonetheless not easy to identify a straightforward alternative. Even when travel writing undermines colonial discourse through inversions, revisions, or uncertainties, colonial assumptions may remain. As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan suggest in Tourists with Typewriters (1998), the comic self-deprecation that marks a certain type of popular travel book diverts attention from serious questions of power and privilege, while the "counter-travel" of cosmopolitan writers of color run the risk of perpetuating the longstanding Western investment in the "exotic." Every attempt to subvert the tradition may always come close to being co-opted by it.

see also Columbus, Christopher; Cortés, Hernán; Hakluyt, Richard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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