ABSTRACT
Melville's Ishmael, sole survivor of an epic journey and some-thing of a travel writer himself, discovers the central dilemma of travel literature when he begins to tell the reader of Moby-Dick about Queequeg's home: "It is not down on any map. True places never are."1 Ishmael's attempts to represent the exotic island homeland of his friend are frustrated by the inherent difficulty of faithfully rendering the foreign into familiar terms. As every travel writer knows, maps and books can tell only part of the truth. By what process, using what models, does the traveler presume to describe, to interpret, to represent people and places who are other to him? What encounter is included, what person omitted? What vistas extolled, what river left behind? Despite these very real difficulties, every travel writer also knows that he or she will find a way. And the large, unruly, amorphous set of discourses we call "travel literature" is a testament to that effort.
