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7 Travel Warnings: Observations of Voyages Real and Imagined
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CHAPTER 7 Travel Warnings Observations of Voyages Real and Imagined Voyagers,navigators,and travelers of all sorts were enjoined to record the movement of the compass needle from true north along with the longitude and latitude of the observation; to observe the inclination of the dipping needle; to note the ebbs and flows of the tides with their times and heights; to sketch plans of coasts,recording promontories,rocks,and shoals,with bearings and soundings.The observant mariner should also note the character of the ocean’s bottom; changes of wind and weather at all hours (especially trade hurricanes,waterspouts,and the latitudes and longitudes where the trade winds begin change, and cease); unusual meteors; lightning and thunders; and the salinity of the sea at various depths,temperatures,and places. —ERIC J. LEED, THE MIND OF THE TRAVELER: FROM GILGAMESH TO GLOBAL TOURISM The early lists of the traveler developed into guidebooks and finally travel reports, a record of the detailed observations of the traveler. All of this was organized into the form of a journal from the Renaissance on, crafting what was to become a highly ritualized form of knowledge through which the world was appropriated as information about an elsewhere (Leed 1991, 188). A new focus on factual accounting left fantastical tales in the past as a new, scientific genre came into vogue. These reports were in a sense a bridge from the self to the observable world— a link to the myth of objectivity through which the self was cleansed in the light of reason and experience-based knowledge, thought to be universal. The report was shaped by the scientific rationale of the times, 242 TRAVEL WARNINGS sketching out a kind of narrative order, a set of conventions guiding the discursive meandering of the traveler. According to Eric J. Leed, writers following the recommendations of Baconian style sought to produce a believable report, free of the clutter of scholarly work, in the simpli- fied style and plain spoken cadence of sailor’s language. This unaffected prose was to rest on the supports of simplicity in all things, quantification , and the distance of cold fact and experience.Above all, as these recommendations became part of eighteenth-century narrative convention, the author must never become the subject of the text, as a strict distance must be maintained between the world of the observer and the observed. As this document took shape, it facilitated the objectification of other worlds through the development of its particular style: The travel report was a peculiar form of literature in which all subjectivities were projected outward, into the world, as objects to be described, recorded, classified, named, and catalogued. The travel report was classically an objectification of a self; that is, the materialization of emotions, and the transformation into“objectivity”of the stranger’s limitations, partialities, and ignorance. (Leed 1991, 189) In the popular register, however, as Mary Louise Pratt points out in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), survival literature —a more romantic and sensational rendering of the traveler’s tale— challenged the authority of “bourgeois” forms. Literature of “first-person stories of shipwrecks, castaways, mutinies, abandonments,” and other experiences of displacement was circulated as inexpensive pamphlets and collections (Pratt 1992, 86). Such literature provided an imagined space that brought diverse societies within the contact zone into relationships in the safety of a distant realm—an order removed from the constraints and the normalcy of home.This popular register,embraced for its representation of an exotic elsewhere and as entertainment,no doubt also helped to formulate a vision of this distant and other world: Throughout the history of early Eurocolonialism and the slave trade, survival literature furnished a“safe”context for staging alternate, relativizing, and taboo configurations of intercultural contact: Europeans enslaved by non-Europeans, Europeans assimilating to non-European societies, and Europeans [18.216.233.58] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 05:20 GMT) TRAVEL WARNINGS 243 confounding new transracial social orders. The context of survival literature was“safe”for transgressive plots, since the very existence of a text presupposed the imperially correct outcome: the survivor survived, and sought reintegration into the home society. (Pratt 1992, 87) Ethnographic writing is, in a sense, a kind of inheritance of both of these literary traditions, embracing an idea of humanity writ large: humanity’s “cultural accounts” have, willingly or not, painted a portrait of the preoccupations of ordinary people striving to satisfy the demands of...