The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing

Carl Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415825245
• eBook ISBN: 9781134105212
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As many places around the world confront issues of globalization, migration and postcoloniality, travel writing has become a serious genre of study, reflecting some of the greatest concerns of our time. Encompassing forms as diverse as field journals, investigative reports, guidebooks, memoirs, comic sketches and lyrical reveries; travel writing is now a crucial focus for discussion across many subjects within the humanities and social sciences.

An ideal starting point for beginners, but also offering new perspectives for those familiar with the field, The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing examines:

• Key debates within the field, including postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality and visual culture
• Historical and cultural contexts, tracing the evolution of travel writing across time and over cultures
• Different styles, modes and themes of travel writing, from pilgrimage to tourism
• Imagined geographies, and the relationship between travel writing and the social, ideological and occasionally fictional constructs through which we view the different regions of the world.

Covering all of the major topics and debates, this is an essential overview of the field, which will also encourage new and exciting directions for study.

Contributors: Simon Bainbridge, Anthony Bale, Shobhana Bhattacharji, Dúnlaith Bird, Elizabeth A. Bohls, Wendy Bracewell, Kylie Cardell, Daniel Carey, Janice Cavell, Simon Cooke, Matthew Day, Kate Douglas, Justin D. Edwards, David Farley, Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler, Laura E. Franey, Rune Graulund, Justine Greenwood, James M. Hargett, Jennifer Hayward, Eva Johanna Holmberg, Graham Huggan, William Hutton, Robin Jarvis, Tabish Khair, Zoë Kinsley, Barbara Korte, Julia Kuehn, Scott Laderman, Claire Lindsay, Churnjeet Mahn, Nabil Matar, Steve Mentz, Laura Nenzi, Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Manfred Pfister, Susan L. Roberson, Paul Smethurst, Carl Thompson, C.W. Thompson, Margaret Topping, Richard White, Gregory Woods.

Part I

KEY DEBATES AND CRITICAL APPROACHES

1

Truth, Lies and Travel Writing

Daniel Carey

The capacity of travel writers to distort the truth – amplifying their observations, claiming credit for what they never witnessed or inventing fabulous narratives wholesale from the imagination rather than experience – has always been recognized. The richness of possibility in this domain did not escape the notice of Thomas More, William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. At the dawn of early modern travel and exploration, More’s Utopia (1516) features an imagined traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who ostensibly makes his way on the fourth voyage of Amerigo Vespucci to the New World before setting off on his own and encountering an island whose actual existence he insists upon, despite the name Utopia indicating itself (to readers with sufficient Greek) as ou topos, no place. In the next century, Shakespeare’s Othello dazzles Desdemona with tales of ‘antres vast’, cannibals and men with heads between their shoulders – a predilection condemned by Iago as nothing more than ‘bragging and telling her fantastical lies’ (II.i.226). By the time we reach Gulliver in 1726, the potential for abusing one’s readership with untruths has become so familiar that Swift reinvented it on a grand scale, providing his hero with an engraved portrait in the second edition supported by the motto ‘splendide mendax’ (splendid or glittering liar; for a reproduction see Barchas (1998: 268)).

These famous examples speak to a long tradition of suspicion about the veracity of travel writing, registered in a widely echoed proverb that ‘travellers lie by authority’. In other words, the lack of witnesses competent to dispute their claims meant that they enjoyed a licence to invent what they liked and to impose it on a credulous audience. Among the many commentators on the art of travel – as the practice developed its modern, secular form in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – it was common to condemn the tendency to engage in fabrication and to urge those who ventured abroad to adopt a more circumspect approach. As Francis Bacon put it in his essay ‘Of Travel’ (1626), the returned traveller should remain ‘rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories’ (Bacon 1999: 42). However, the problem has never really gone away and remains endemic in modes of storytelling based on a supposedly factual foundation. Any narrative form of this kind invites doubt and scrutiny, even as we find ourselves drawn, in the case of travel, to the extraordinary and remarkable in reports from exotic climes.

How then have travel writers, committed to telling the truth, sought to demonstrate their trustworthiness and so protect themselves from the accusation of lying? Focusing especially on the period between 1500 and 1800, when travel writing in its modern Western form took shape, this chapter explores the procedures and rhetorical gestures travel writers have used to reassure readers and authenticate their accounts. At the same time, it considers how recipients of travel narrative – among them, some of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment – have negotiated the problem and determined for themselves what to rely on and what to reject.

Telling the truth

Given the built-in problem of verifying the claims of travellers, their routine insistence on truthfulness has often constituted little more than a bare assertion. Title pages provided an opportunity for some authors to advance the claim and convince their audience of the reliability of the information they purveyed. Thomas Harriot, the distinguished mathematician and agent of Sir Walter Ralegh in his scheme for settlement in North America, presented his famous account as A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia (1588). Some thirty years earlier, the German soldier Hans Staden published a widely circulated narrative of his captivity in Brazil, enlivened as the title page noted by its description of Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen (wild, naked, grim men-eating people). These sensational scenes were nonetheless part of what he designated a Warhaftige Historia (1557), a true history.

Within the text itself, a number of strategies existed for handling the problem of engaging belief, but the prefatory materials remained the most obvious venue for addressing the issue in a forthright fashion. The implicit pressure to do so appears early on. Marco Polo’s travels, related while in prison to Rustichello da Pisa in 1298–99, survive in numerous manuscript versions and textual traditions. At the outset, the reader is told that the book will contain the ‘greatest marvels’ and ‘diversities’ of the countries Polo traversed, which he relates because he ‘saw them with his own eyes’. Yet it is quickly acknowledged that other information reported by Marco Polo derives from what he heard, cited from worthy sources, with the promise that the distinction between his own witness and that of others will always be made clear. The volume also comes with the assurance that it remains ‘right and truthful with no falsehood’ so the ‘things said may not be counted fables’ (Polo 1938: I, 73).

In this early instance, we see several key concerns put in play. The first is the repetitive emphasis in travel accounts on eyewitnessing as a criterion of truth. Of course this is an insufficient guarantor for a number of reasons, not least because it presupposes that the reality observed by travellers is somehow pellucid. In the case of reportage on the existence of exotic creatures, self-authenticating statements might carry some weight, even where they posed the challenge of conveying the unfamiliar. But it is not so clear that describing the meaning and history of complex customs (for example, sati: see Carey 2014) becomes any easier simply by being present at their performance. In any case, the invitation to believe the traveller is typically circular – the text invites its own verification rather than supplying an external means for doing so. The second key concern is that despite the common insistence on personal witness, few travellers ever confine themselves to this narrow compass. Often the source of what they report is acknowledged along with reassurance of the reliability of the individual(s) who informed them, which has its own element of circularity. Elsewhere, authors often provide information beyond their experience without stating it; indeed they sometimes give it the appearance of arising from their lived encounters. Finally we have the worry over the fabulous. These forms – ‘authentic’ accounts of travel and their fictional counterparts – were always in the process of converging in the early modern period, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe (1719).

In light of these dilemmas, what resources could be deployed to engage the confidence of readers? One way to preempt accusations of falsehood and fabrication was to take note of the proverb that questioned the truthfulness of travellers and to make this issue a matter of open discussion. William Parry, who published an account in 1601 of his journey to Persia as part of the retinue of Sir Anthony Sherley, quoted it in his opening sentence. As he framed the issue, the problem was whether such distrust arose from actual lies or rather from the unwillingness of some to believe anything that exceeded their own experience. He offered an elaborate reply (based, I suggest, on Plato’s allegory of the cave): the person raised in the confines of a cave would have no conception of the ‘glorie and great magnificence of the visible, celestiall, and terrestriall globes’. Given this predicament, the ‘home-bred’ man was bound to experience wonderment when exposed to the ‘eminent and opulent places of the world’ (Parry 1601: A3r). In recognition of the problem, he vowed to report only what his eyes had seen.

For legitimate travellers keen to shore up their credibility, another tactic involved pointing to authorities outside the text that were capable of authenticating its contents. The Jesuit Christoval de Acuña, who ventured into the Amazon in a royally sponsored mission in 1639, acknowledged in his Preface that ‘Novelty and Unbelief’ were, as he put it, ‘twins of one birth’: the delight in knowing things of new vintage was undermined by perplexity and doubt. To address this concern, he included a certificate signed by the leader of the expedition, Pedro Texeira, who testified to Acuña’s participation in the journey and his diligence in making observations ‘to which entire credit should be given’ (de Acuña 1859: 43, 44). In a similar vein, Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681) – a report of his captivity of nearly twenty years on the island – came with a number of endorsements, including a preface by the prominent Royal Society scientist Robert Hooke, an opening testimonial from Christopher Wren, who stated that it ‘seems to be Written with great Truth and Integrity’ and another from Knox’s effective employer, the East India Company, which declared his report ‘worthy of Credit’ (Knox 1681: n.p.; see also Shapiro 2000). We can make a distinction here between the certification of Acuña made by Texeira – another participant in the expedition, and so a fellow eyewitness to the events described – and the various endorsements of Knox, which essentially constitute a series of character references. For travellers of lower social status especially, such testimonials from people of note were an important means of establishing their general trustworthiness. Yet they also offered an important strategy even for travellers of higher social status. Knox’s contemporary, Richard Ligon, had the standing of a gentleman, which he called attention to on the title page of his True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), although he wrote the work in a debtor’s prison. He nonetheless included not only a dedication (to Brian Duppa, then Bishop of Salisbury), a conventional method for seeking patronage, but also a letter from Duppa himself in which the bishop remarked that he had read a number of previous relations of the New World and found Ligon’s excelled them (in an echo of the title) as more ‘exact’. He praised Ligon’s descriptions as ‘so drawn to the life, that I know no Painting beyond it’ (ibid.: b1r). Duppa’s status as a churchman lent him credence which he could transfer to Ligon, but the dilemma remains that of determining how precisely he could certify the accuracy of the account, however ‘true’ and ‘exact’ it claimed to be.

Again, these claims form an important part of the paratextual apparatus, framing the text with reassurances and inviting acceptance of the ensuing content. Within the text itself, further means of consolidating the author’s position existed. Learned references performed something of the same function as prefatory allusions to external advocates, providing corroboration of what the traveller purported to witness while establishing intellectual authority and erudition. George Sandys represents a paragon of this tradition. Later to distinguish himself as a translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, his early fame rested on the account of his travels to Egypt and the Holy Land published in 1615, and marked by its elegant and easy range of classical reference. His example encouraged others to follow suit, like Sir Thomas Herbert who embedded his travels from England to Persia in an even denser web of ancient precedent. This humanist-inspired tendency eventually subsided as the observational and scientific focus of travel came to the fore in the eighteenth century – notably in the New World, where such citations lacked relevance. Printing the first account of Niagara Falls, from the Swedish-Finnish naturalist and disciple of Linnaeus Per Kalm, the editor of the volume in which it appeared noted that Kalm’s description agreed with the account given by the French Jesuit Charlevoix – an ‘Author of good credit’ although Charlevoix was ‘much less circumstantial’ – as well as a report in the Philosophical Transactions (Bartram 1751: vi). Kalm himself did not offer allusions of this kind, but he did dispute the exaggerated measurement of Niagara Falls given by the Franciscan Louis Hennepin, who the Canadians regarded as ‘un grand Menteur’, a great liar (ibid.: 84).

The impression of conveying truth relied in part, as this example suggests, on the power of describing ‘circumstance’, or what we might call situatedness, in a vivid fashion. One of Richard Ligon’s great strengths was his virtuosic talent for description. The watermelon, for instance, posed a challenge to get across to English readers but Ligon rose to the occasion, describing it as being as ‘big as a Cloakbag, with a suit of clothes in it’. The rind had the appearance of ‘polisht glass’ in pure green, ‘engrayl’d’ as he put it with straw-coloured patterns of an infinite variety. The fruit itself was ‘waterish and wallowish’ in flavour, and was consumed in thick slices, ‘cut round about a twelve-penny loafe, an inch thick’, replete with purple seeds that dyed the surrounding fruit but slipped out with ease (Ligon 1657: 80). As this example also demonstrates, the unfamiliar – which might lead to readerly scepticism and disbelief – was often negotiated via the use of simile and metaphor, so that the strange was described through reference to the familiar in an enactment of what Anthony Pagden calls the ‘principle of attachment’ (1993: 17; see also Thompson 2011: chapter 4).

Part of what Ligon achieves, independently of that consideration, is a sense of being there, the actuality of lived experience. This trait he holds in common with a later naturalist, Charles Darwin, whose account of the Beagle voyage appeared two centuries later. Darwin had the benefit of formal training and knowledge of elaborated systems of taxonomy to raise the estimation of his account, but what strikes the reader immediately is his dexterous ability to capture the vibrant quality of nature. In a description of the octopus, he notes the difficulty of catching them:

By means of their long arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and when thus fixed, it required great force to remove them. At other times they darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same instant discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink.

(Darwin 1913: 7)

He then gives a more minute description of the changing colour of the creature, which altered according to its surroundings. ‘These changes’, he remarked, ‘were effected in such a manner that clouds, varying in tint between a hyacinth red and a chestnut-brown, were continually passing over the body’. He concluded with a scientific analysis that these ‘clouds, or blushes as they may be called’ resulted from the ‘alternate expansion and contraction of minute vesicles containing variously coloured fluids’ (ibid.).

In the absence of technical knowledge of this kind, Ligon sought to back up his descriptions with a number of engravings. While forming part of the text, they gave an even stronger impression of ostensive reference, although we know that illustrations (and their transmission and reproduction) provide no guarantee of accuracy in themselves. He also provided a map of Barbados, lending further illustrative conviction to his presence on the island.

Growing recognition of the potential of travel to provide a source of information, valuable enough to merit attention despite doubts about the honesty of travellers, emerges among a range of commentators in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Writers who contributed essays, orations and treatises on the art of travel (ars apodemica) focused especially on the utility of political, social and moral description; another tradition, which included Samuel Hartlib, Robert Boyle, and members of the Royal Society, emphasized the benefits of travel for advancing natural history. The Royal Society produced sets of inquiries for various territories around the world in order to direct the attention of travellers to specific issues in need of investigation, while Boyle offered ‘General Heads’ in 1666 for what to observe when compiling a natural history of any country. A further advantage of producing lists of inquiries, according to the Royal Society’s first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, who distributed them via the Philosophical Transactions, was that they facilitated cross-checking. Before truth could be ascertained, ‘confirmations’ of what travellers reported were required. In the eighteenth century the German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis adopted this strategy when he prepared instructions for the five members of an Arabian expedition which set off for Yemen in 1761, inviting them to respond to the same set of questions so as to compare information (see Carey 2013).

The ‘plain style’ famously endorsed by the Royal Society’s historian Thomas Sprat in 1667 (although ignored by many) suited those humble travellers who lacked formal education and whose bare records, in journal format, suggested fidelity. This rhetorical approach ostensibly promised an uncompromised relationship between personal witness and textual record. In this way the published travel account was increasingly expected to offer fai...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing
• Also in this Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Key Debates and Critical Approaches
• PART II Historical Overviews
• PART III Styles, Modes, Themes
• PART IV Imagined Geographies
• Index