Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century

Texts, Images, Objects

Kate Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134794737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Interrogating the multiple ways in which travel was narrated and mediated, by and in response to, nineteenth-century British travelers, this interdisciplinary collection examines to what extent these accounts drew on and developed existing tropes of travel. The three sections take up personal and intimate narratives that were not necessarily designed for public consumption, tales intended for a popular audience, and accounts that were more clearly linked with discourses and institutions of power, such as imperial processes of conquest and governance. Some narratives focus on the things the travelers carried, such as souvenirs from the battlefields of Britain's imperial wars, while others show the complexity of Victorian dreams of the exotic. Still others offer a disapproving glimpse of Victorian mores through the eyes of indigenous peoples in contrast to the imperialist vision of British explorers. Swiss hotel registers, guest books, and guidebooks offer insights into the history of tourism, while new photographic technologies, the development of the telegraph system, and train travel transformed the visual, audial, and even the conjugal experience of travel. The contributors attend to issues of gender and ethnicity in essays on women travelers, South African travel narratives, and accounts of China during the Opium Wars, and analyze the influence of fictional travel narratives. Taken together, these essays show how these multiple narratives circulated, cross-fertilised, and reacted to one another to produce new narratives, new objects, and new modes of travel.

SECTION III

Cultural Flows

Chapter 8

The Travelling Other: A Māori Narrative of a Visit to Australia in 1874

Conal McCarthy

In May 1874 a Māori traveller from New Zealand walked into an art gallery in Sydney, Australia. After his visit he wrote a letter expressing his surprise at the nudes displayed there:

Really the pakehas [Europeans] are a most extraordinary people. They are shocked if a button fall from a man’s shirt collar … and yet they manufacture naked images of stone and exhibit them to strangers! (Wahawaha 1874c, 202)

This glimpse of Victorian mores through the eyes of indigenous people reverses the usual direction of the gaze, as the Other turns to look back at us. Ludmilla Jordanova points out that historians could make more use of the anthropological notion of the ‘Other’ in order to ‘consciously make strange the societies we study, in order to see what has been inappropriately taken for granted, what was not previously brought up for critical inspection, and what is taken to be unproblematically like us’ (2000, 250). But despite a wealth of scholarship on travel, tourism, museums, and empire in the nineteenth century, the literature still leans towards a highly theoretical analysis of cultural encounter which lacks indigenous voices, historical context, and the fluidity of what James Clifford has called ‘travelling cultures’ (1997).

However, just as Europeans were exploring the Pacific, a rich corpus of written literature enables us to see what Polynesian people were thinking about during these interactions, and about their own encounters with a new world. This was not a one-way process, as these narratives speak of exchange, curiosity, and a thirst for novelty. When the prominent Māori chief Ropata Wahawaha first arrived in Australia, on his first and only trip abroad, he wrote home expressing his excitement at exploring a new land: ‘Then we looked about us’, he wrote, ‘which, in fact, was what I came for – to look at the world’ (1874a, 113).

This chapter presents a hitherto unpublished account in the Māori newspaper Te Waka Māori by this well-known tribal leader. On his trip to Australia with politician Donald McLean, Wahawaha went to many of the local sights, telling his readers about what he saw in a narrative that raises important questions about the colonial culture of travel. Sometimes, as in the fragment above, in which he comments on the European male predilection for the female nude, indigenous travel narratives make the familiar strange and force us to reconsider postcolonial tropes about identity, the culture of travel, and the gaze. In doing so they contribute to the aims of the present volume, which stresses the relational and provisional nature of travel and the ways in which divisions between home and away were broken down through narratives of travel which reach ‘across and between spaces, places, cultures and people’ (Hill, introduction in this volume).

The chapter is therefore concerned with the critical analysis of travel as a cultural and historical phenomenon in the nineteenth century, a period when new technologies, such as photography and steam, accompanied trade and colonial expansion. Laudable efforts to broaden the compass of academic research in recent conferences and publications on this topic do not alter the impression that most attention is still focused on the West observing the rest. Despite a wealth of postcolonial scholarship on travel, as well as tourism, performance, collecting, and display, there is a tendency to overstate the critique of contact and cultural encounter which insists that people, objects, and spaces merely served the interests of empire (Burton 1996; Clifford 1997). But as Antoinette Burton argues, native people ‘defied stasis by dodging, adapting to and resisting the juggernaut of imperial power’ (2012, 491). They were neither sycophants nor fools, and their travel stories reflect an ‘eyes-wide-open realpolitik, of the kind that historians have not often countenanced’ (492). Because these indigenous moderns travelled widely, they expressed a perceptive and, at times, critical appraisal of European modernity:

… the dynamism of indigenous responses was relentless because it was restless: native peoples were constantly on the move, cosmopolitans at home and abroad. Defying the fixity of place assigned to them by contemporary observers, friend and foe alike, indigenes the world over have long and deep histories of mobility, whether compelled or chosen. (Burton 2012, 492)

Likewise, Pamela Scully argues that historians have tended to ‘represent indigenous people as victims only, as if acknowledging their attempts to shape their futures in the context of a new imperial or colonial world makes them and the author complicit with colonialism’ (2012, 591). The literature rarely includes native or indigenous voices and perspectives, thereby confirming, in the present, the unequal power relations of the past, while condemning colonial exploitation and the political implications of Orientalism that were inscribed in the writings of travellers, scientists, ethnographers, soldiers, and adventurers (Thomas 1994; Henare 2005). Encouragingly, the agency of mobile indigenes has been emphasized in recent work based on travel stories which demonstrate ‘the great extent to which these individuals sought to influence the world: they were far from being merely subjects on which the world acted’ (Scully 2012, 591). My own work seeks to follow this lead, in particular attempting to open up debate on museums and exhibitions, which is similarly over-theorized and lacking in empirical historical context and an appreciation of indigenous agency (McCarthy 2012, 2015).

This imbalance is understandable when we consider the paucity of written sources from the hands of those colonized people living or travelling in other parts of the world. However, just as Europeans were exploring the Pacific, so Pacific peoples in turn were discovering the visual and material culture of Europe. From the late eighteenth century, when the Tahitian man Mai returned to London with explorer James Cook, and throughout the nineteenth century, Pacific Islanders joined ships travelling back to Europe and to other lands (McCormick 1977; Salmond 2012; Walrond 2012). In the British settler colony of New Zealand, the indigenous Māori people quickly learned to read and write, and their numerous travels overseas from the mid-nineteenth century were often recorded in private diaries or letters and published in newspapers and journals. This extraordinary body of writing in the Māori language surviving in the archive is a window onto another world, and for Europeans a way of seeing ourselves as others see us in the very act of observing them (Diamond, Keane, Meredith, and Somerville 2015).

History and Theory: Travelling Cultures

In this section I employ the work of anthropologist James Clifford, particularly the idea of ‘travelling cultures’, which theorizes cultural encounter in terms of social relations, as a complex, two-sided exchange (Clifford 1997). Clifford tells the story of the Native American Squanto, who met the pilgrims arriving in Plymouth in 1620. Much to their surprise this apparently primitive Indian spoke English, and had just got back from Europe. This is just one of many examples of a ‘disconcertingly hybrid “native” met at the ends of the earth’ (18–19). Clifford then proceeds to criticize ethnographic field work, and by extension travel writing, for excluding supposedly subsidiary figures such as helpers and informants, and for treating culture as static, bounded, localized, and essentialized. He advocates re-casting the figure of the informant as a traveller – insider-outsider, interlocuter, intermediary – and culture itself as a form of travel, in other words something always on the move and therefore hybrid and cosmopolitan, not a fixed stage for representation but a constantly moving space of change, displacement, migration, and interaction (25). Reflecting on the example of the Moe family, a performing troupe from Hawai’i travelling around the world (25–26), he calls for comparative accounts of travel from different perspectives, but acknowledges that written texts of such experiences are rare, the tip of a ‘lost iceberg’ (34).

Scholars in the South Pacific have for some time been alert to indigenous agency in the colonial period, hardly surprising given the extraordinarily vigorous response of local people to the arrival of Europeans. There is a literature on travel within New Zealand mostly focused on European experience but including the frequent and extensive interaction with local people (Wevers 2002). Less common is scholarship which explores cultural encounter from a bicultural rather than a monocultural perspective. Anne Salmond has written several volumes on European exploration in the Pacific, including Cook’s three voyages to New Zealand from 1769 to 1777, presenting the view from the beach as well as the boat (Salmond 1991; 1997). Revisionist scholarship has critically examined the myths of later Pakeha (European) ‘explorers’ of the hinterland of Aotearoa New Zealand, pointing out that they were usually led by guides who, needless to say, had been there before (Byrne 2001).

A stress on indigenous agency, and accessing the diverse range of opinions of colonized subjects, does not, of course, deny the painful loss of Māori land and independence as the result of European settlement. It serves rather to remind us that Māori views of what they were doing at the time were more complicated than implied in the somewhat black and white politics of the postcolonial present, and often contradictory (Smith 1999). Not all Māori scribes in colonial society were the anticolonial rebels celebrated today. Many, judging by what they said and wrote, saw themselves as loyal citizens of empire, what James Belich has called ‘brown Britons’ who were part of a settler colony which thought of itself as the ‘better Britain of the South Pacific’ (Belich 2001; McCarthy 2012). There is renewed interest in these loyalists, as well as the ambiguous go-betweens, Pakeha-Māori and other shadowy figures who do not fit modern liberal stereotypes of Mãori/Pakeha identity (Bentley 2007; Hilliard 2010; Paterson 2007).

Māori Narratives of Travel

New Zealand scholars are also fortunate in being to draw upon sources in te reo Māori (the Māori language) which capture the thoughts and feelings of observant Māori moving about in changing times, at home and abroad. This rich literature, and some of the travel themes it contains, are discussed below. Before European contact, customary Māori culture contained many stories of the journeys to Aotearoa from the Pacific homeland Hawaiki (Hogan 1994, 256), as well as kōrero (talk, news, story, narrative) about the exploration, naming, shaping, and peopling of the land itself (Orbell 1995). When Māori became literate, their writing often fused the forms of traditional song poetry and other performing arts with Western practices, so that letters to the editor, for example, were articulated like whaikōrero (formal speeches) and studded with allusions to oral traditions and whakapapa (genealogies) (Orbell 2002).

There was plenty for Māori travellers to share with their readers, who seem to have been hungry for news of the British world with which they were now connected. Māori went everywhere. By 1795, many years before any substantial European settlement, they were travelling to Sydney for trade and crewing European ships, and by 1800 there are records showing that they visited Asia, America, and Europe (Hogan 1994, 257). In 1814 missionary Samuel Marsden set up a school for the sons of chiefs in Parramatta, New South Wales. As Georgie Craw has shown, many Māori lived in or passed through Sydney. At this bustling port, which was the centre of a ‘Tasman world’, it was common to hear Māori spoken among the Māori workers on the docks (Craw 2013).

The first traveller to England was Moehanga of Ngā Puhi, who met George III in 1806, followed by the chiefs Hongi Hika and Waikato, who went with missionary Thomas Kendall to Cambridge University in 1818 to work on a grammar of the Māori language (Hogan 1994, 258–59). Throughout the century, concert parties, missionary groups, commercial enterprises, sports teams, and political deputations went overseas at frequent intervals. For example, in 1882 Hirini Taiwhanga and King Tāwhiao both led deputations to London to present grievances to the Queen (Hogan 1994, 261). Not all of these groups had scribes, but some kept written records or wrote accounts of their experiences for their own people in fora such as the Māori newspapers (Curnow, Hopa, and McRae 2002).

More complex and diverse views of the past are possible when scholars consult sources in indigenous languages, such as the many Māori newspapers published in nineteenth-century New Zealand, in which people expressed their views about race, civilization, education, land, technology, and many other matters (Paterson 2002, 2006). There are risks in this revisionist enterprise. Can the subaltern speak, we may well ask? At times the desire to correct past imbalances through attention to active audiences and indigenous agency can lead to skewed results, especially when they are based on fragmentary oral sources (Druett 2010). We are on more solid ground with actual written sources left by Māori themselves. If we chart these methodological reefs with care, this rich corpus of material has much to reveal.

Several books document the best-known trips overseas (O’Malley 2015), for example, the well-documented tour of England in 1863 by a group of Northland Māori under the care of a Wesleyan missionary (Mackrell 1985). Helen Hogan has written three books based on written Māori accounts of travel, two overseas and one within New Zealand (Hogan 1994; 1997; 2003). The overseas narratives include a diary kept by one of two Tainui men who went to Europe in the 1850s with an Austrian scientific expedition and lived in Vienna while they learned how to work a printing press given them by the Emperor (Hogan 2003), and the journal of a soldier in a native contingent who attended the coronation of King Edward in 1902 (Hogan 1997). Hogan’s invaluable PhD thesis examines no fewer than fourteen such stories, selected out of scores of manuscripts preserved in archives and museums.

It may well be asked whether these Māori travel narratives were similar to or different from European styles of travel writing. The s...