By P. Smethurst
Taking as a kick off point the parallel incidence of Cook's Pacific voyages, the improvement of common heritage, scenic tourism in Britain, and romantic trip in Europe, this e-book argues that the impression of those practices was once the creation of nature as an summary area and that the style of trip writing had a critical position in reproducing it.
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Additional resources for Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840
Sample text
In his journals, Cook is often anxious about looking beyond surface appearance, and troubled by his failure to interpret signs presented to him. The indecipherable ‘text’ of the contact zone is a common trope, whether it arises from attempts to ‘read’ natives or alien nature: both the cultural environment and the unfamiliar (foreign) natural world were context-dependent. But to accept the degree of uncertainty implicit in thick description would have meant going against the empirical methods of the new sciences and also the process of mobilisation prescribed by Latour.
Other protocols included methods for acquiring the measurement of shoals, the elevations of coastlines, and observations of latitude and longitude. Although such protocols were at the time crucial to the epistemological projects of science, today they are far more useful as guides to the structures of knowledge, dominant ethos and focus of interest at the European centres of calculation. Overarching all such protocols was the empirical directive, and it was this that changed the representation of flora and fauna in travel writing, 22 Travel Writing and the Natural World from diverting curiosity, which had been a mainstay of travel books and travel romances since the Classical era, to careful and systematic observation.
Without some form of corroboration, it becomes difficult for the reader to distinguish facts in exploration narratives from mendacious voyage literature, hoaxes and realistic fictions, all of which were in vogue in the eighteenth century. The incorporation of factual data into an established journal form seems sufficient to complete an illusion of reality; this would be a significant step towards the realist novel, although not necessarily the main cause of its emergence. 35 Like Dampier, authors of travel hoaxes sometimes appealed to the Royal Society as the arbiter of scientific ‘truth’ to endorse their narratives.
