Themes

Travel writing is as old as literature, and has always formed a vital element of the literary canon. Take, for example, the western literary tradition. Here we could well start with the tales of that great traveller of the ancient Greek world recounted in Homer’s Odyssey, and follow the thread to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Miguel de Cervante’s Don Quixote, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This happened in part because travelogues were and remain hugely popular among reading publics. Indeed, so pervasive were they that we can identify different genres over time, each the outcome of particular needs pursued by their authors whether it be an allegorical path to salvation, a collection of antiquarian miscellanea, a pilgrimage to a state of grace, or a narrative proof of religious visions, all of which combined to lift western thought out of the constraints of the medieval world and help pave the way for modernity.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, to learn that travel writing proliferated at the time of  modern empires. The age of exploration which laid the foundation for many voyages of imperial endeavour was replete with tales of intrepid travellers who provided readers with access to strange, new lands from the comfort and safety of their armchairs. Mythical stories of Marco Polo and John Mandeville set the scene, but it was the exploits of real life voyagers which awakened the interests of colonial powers in the prospects of lucrative trade with the Americas and the East. It was Ralph Fitch’s account of his epic travels around India over 1583-1591, for example, which first alerted the East India Company to the potential of the Bombay region, then under the control of the Portuguese.

Within the intellectual world created by the Enlightenment, travel accounts increasingly strove for a vision of scientific and rational inquiry, by rendering narratives based on reliable sources and methodologies. It is no exaggeration to say that India, Africa, the Americas and other theatres of the British empire were created as objects of knowledge by such accounts. Thus, popular books such as William Sleeman’s Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, Emma Roberts’ Scenes and Characteristics of Hindustan, George Johnson’s The Stranger in India, and H. Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent represented India, Africa and their peoples to a British audience much more powerfully than statistical surveys or East India Company reports.

In few areas was the marriage between science and travel more evident and telling than in cartography. Captain Cook’s Voyages and Peoples of the Pacific described his pioneering efforts to map the islands of the South Pacific, while Major James Rennell, working very much along the trail blazed by Cook, published Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan which laid the foundation for the accurate mapping of the whole of India. Though such cartographical knowledge, these large regions came to be known to the British, and hence more readily were incorporated into the empire.

The programme provides a rich source of materials on travel and exploration. The two collections of primary sources edited by Peter Kitson et al, Nineteenth Century Travels, Explorations and Empires, Parts I and II, is extraordinarily broad-ranging, but there are more focused collections as well. Carl Thompson’s Women’s Travel Writings in North Africa and the Middle East, Parts I and II, is a case in point. In addition, there are specialist monographs, for example, the two titles by Martin Thomas, Expeditions into Empire, and Explorers of Arabia.