ABSTRACT
In a 1999 New Yorker cartoon by the artist Bruce Eric Kaplan, a king, frowning and irritated, snaps at a startled looking figure, presumably Columbus: “Just tell me about the new continent. I don’t give a damn what you’ve discovered about yourself.”1 King Ferdinand’s provocatively unhistorical and ironic request is-besides a jab at confessional trends in contemporary literature-actually an inadvertent commentary on developments in European travel narrative of the early modern period. When foreign lands were less or barely known, travel writing was esteemed above all as a container of invaluable and rare information, as Ferdinand implies. Later on, as more travelers roamed the globe and facts and data became increasingly accessible, travelers dedicated more of their exploratory energies to new ways of narrating their journeys. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many, akin perhaps to the Columbus in the cartoon, began focusing more on their roles as narrators and protagonists and on developing their own poetics of travel writing. In short, a more personalized narrative of travel became as much a subject of investigation as the factual elements of the journey itself.
