ABSTRACT
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed a surge in longdistance trade accompanied by the growth of colonial settlements in the new world, and trading posts in the Far East. Trade and travel engendered a world of mobile people and portable property. Imported goods and fashionable display became a commonplace part of many peoples' everyday lives. In analysing this period, J. G. A. Pocock discerns the rise of a 'social personality founded upon commerce: upon the exchange of forms of mobile property.'1 Commercial contacts with foreign lands were supplemented by growing numbers of what cultural historian Barbara Stafford calls 'scientific travellers' whose accounts became available to a broader reading public. In her study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel accounts, Stafford asserts that there were two contrasting modes of perception that pervaded these works. One, the picaresque, depended on 'the astonishing, the novel, the unusual, and the extraordinary' for its allure and could be found in wonder tales, travel literature, and novels. The other mode, used by the scientific traveller, depended on viewing nature as empirical evidence.2
