ABSTRACT
On returning home most explorers enthusiastically told of their adventures and achievements. Even those who were more inclined to rest frequently felt obliged to give some form of public report recounting their journey. Jonathan Raban has described journeys as “shapeless, unsifted, endlessly shifting accumulation[s] of experience” which are only shaped when a traveller describes them as meaningful stories.1 Similarly, Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out that although explorers were expected and encouraged to make “discoveries” in foreign lands, the “discovery” itself had no existence of its own:
It only gets “made” for real after the traveler (or other survivor) returns home, and brings it into being through texts: a name on a map, a report to the Royal Geographical Society, the Foreign Offi ce, the London Missionary Society, a diary, a lecture, a travel book.2
