Charting Early American Travel: Mobility, Mapping, and Identity

Travelers provide uniquely contemporary perspectives on their surroundings with detailed descriptions of roads, accommodations, landscape, and other travelers. From these accounts, a vivid sense of immediacy emerges. Focused on recording periodic observations, travelers may not necessarily attempt to synthesize events or to frame their journeys thematically. In this regard, recent early Americanist work on travel writing more directly examines connections between exploration and motive and traveling and identity. Edward G. Gray’s The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler, for example, recounts the travels of John Ledyard, so that we learn not only where and how Ledyard traveled but from what motivation. The relationship between traveler and place also receives careful analysis in Brian Yothers’s The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876, as he examines travelers’s responses to venerable sites in journals, letters, fiction, and poetry from both secular and religious travelers. John D. Cox’s Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity focuses on the period between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War to investigate the role that “intranational travel accounts played in the formation of an American national identity” (2). In addition to investigations of individual travelers, two recent essay collections that focus on travel, cartography, and geographical space broaden and enrich the study of travel literature: Cartographies of Travel and Navigation, edited by James R. Akerman, and American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500–1900, edited by Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu. From these studies, we learn how the traveler’s account and the cartographer’s vision shape cultural and individual identity while influencing further explorations.

Cartographers and travelers share a curiosity for adventure, for finding out what lies over the horizon. As their maps and journals document and speculate, the unknown becomes the known, until at least a new horizon appears, whereby new charts are made and new journeys are recorded. In this cycle of exploration, evaluation, and revision, the traveler’s log and the cartographer’s vision track culture as a dynamic enterprise, rather than as a predetermined narrative. Early American study of travel literature has consistently examined these cycles and relationships (see, for example, Bohls, Buzard, Fish, Gilroy, Kolodny, Lueck, Marx, Pratt, Sayre, Schriber, and Sears). Travel as literary trope has also engaged scholarly attention (see for example, Greenfield, Melton, Seelye, Spengemann, and Verhoeven). Travel literature encourages these investigations as travelers and explorers chart new routes and imagine new empires, often expressing an undaunted optimism while facing the open road and the wide sea whether by foot, horse, ship, rail, automobile, or air. Stereotypes and presumptions are also challenged when travelers visit new locales and when cartographers publish their findings: the “Island of California” can only persist for so long. Collectively, the five works reviewed here consider the ideological and social motives that propel these ventures, whereby happenstance often mixes with desire resulting in both orchestrated efforts and chaotic exploits. Examining history as an interaction between traveler’s accounts and cartographer’s maps heightens the interplay between motive, perception, and exploration. The study of early American travel literature will clearly benefit from these well-researched and vigorously interdisciplinary studies.

Adventurer and merchant, John Ledyard (1751–1789) is a compelling subject, especially in the hands of Edward G. Gray, whose The Making of John Ledyard...