Adams - Perception and the Eighteenth-century Travelers

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PERCEPTION AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRAVELER Author(s): Percy Adams Source: The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 1985), pp. 139-157Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41467348Accessed: 13-06-2015 16:58 UTC

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The Eighteenth Century, vol. 26, no. 2, 1985

PERCEPTION AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRAVELER

Percy Adams

Distinguishing between internal and external qualities in phenomena, Jean-Paul Sartre in a famous essay on Albert Camus argues that the method of Camus in L'Etranger was borrowed from Hemingway and other "American neo-realists" who, like Hume in the eighteenth century, he says, "deny the existence of any but external relationships between phenomena." And so, Sartre continues, while such a denial runs counter to the findings of "contemporary philosophy," which has demonstrated "that meanings are also part of the immediate data," the world of the absurd people of Hemingway and Camus "is the analytical world of the neo-realists." Nevertheless, even as he disagrees with the psychology, Sartre concludes that the method of the "neo- realists" has proved its worth through the centuries: "It was Voltaire's method in L'Ingénu and Micromégas , and Swift's in Gulliver's Travels. For the eighteenth century also had its own outsiders, 'noble savages,' usually, who, transported to a strange civilization, perceived facts before being able to grasp their meaning. The effect of this discrepancy was to arouse in the reader the feeling of the absurd."

Sartre's conclusion about the inability of early fictional travelers to grasp the meaning of phenomena new to them is a conclusion even more appropriate for many kinds of real travelers of that day and earlier, as well as for the people at home who read their books. Perhaps the Grand Tour literature of the eighteenth century had less of the "absurd" than was reflected by travelers to continents other than Europe; for that literature, voluminous, popular, and well established after 1600, followed a well-known pattern. Pictures of Roman ruins were standard even before they were seen by English tourists such as the poet- statesman George Sandys (1610) and the attractively eccentric Thomas Coryat (1611). Long before Byron or even Thomas Gray, the Alps were beautifully described by a host of travelers, including John Evelyn, John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Bishop Berkeley, just as St. Paul's and the English countryside were familiar to French travelers and readers long before Prévost

139



140 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

put them into his novels in the 1730s. But when Europeans left their little continent and traveled to Russia, to the East, and to Africa - still largely dark - or to the New World and the South Pacific, they saw and reported people and scenes often extraordinarily new to them; and when they tried to tell their friends at home what they had experienced, the absurdity was compounded. Wayne Franklin in Discoverers, Explorers , Settlers is only one of many to observe the phenomenon well for early travelers to America, where, he wisely notes, not only was there "an initial failure of even a verbal understanding between red and white" but "the profusion of unknown natural objects in America placed an extra burden on the traveler's mind and language."1 The art historian Jay Appleton in The Experience of Landscape had already put it another way: "it is precisely because of its initial lack of associations that the raw American landscape had to be argued into respectability."2 The experience - both sudden and sustained - was indeed a cultural shock for European visitors, whose vaunted sophistication was often found wanting. What Sartre says of the readers of contes philosophiques in the eighteenth century, then, was true of the readers of travels, both in that century and earlier; for what they read surely aroused in them the "feeling of the absurd," especially if they were at all like those many readers who, the great circumnavigator Bougainville complained - echoing a hundred famous travelers like Walter Ralegh in South America and William Biddulph in the East - believed nothing they had not seen.

Franklin suggests that the accounts of travelers to America prove that "'Realism' is to be defined . . . according to the world which" the writer visits.3 And of course reality is multilateral in exactly the ways a character of Marcel Proust is multilateral - for two people it is not alike and it changes with time, with training, and certainly with place. Every tutor accompanying young men on a Grand Tour, for example, lived with multiple images - the latest ones mingling with those of former visits - just as every eighteenth-century Englishman taking that Tour set out with images acquired by reading Joseph Addison's popular account of his visit to the Continent published at the beginning of the century. Tristram Shandy made that Tour, he says, with "most of the family, except my mother." Later he returned in the company of Death. Reaching the Garonne during his second visit (vol. 7), he recalls images from the first, puts them with images of the second, and then sits down to combine them all in fresh images as he writes:



ADAMS- PERCEPTION AND THE TRAVELER 141

I have been getting forward in two different journeys together, and with the same dash of the pen - [and as a result] have brought myself into such a situation, as no traveller ever stood before me; for I am at this moment walking across the market place of Auxerre with my father and my Uncle Toby, in our way back to dinner - and I am at this moment also entering Lyons with my post-chaise broke into a thousand pieces - and I am moreover this moment in a handsome pavilion built by Pringello, upon the banks of the Garonne . . . where I sit rhapsodizing all these affairs.4

Sterne's giving Tristram these superimposed images of France is by no means unique, as he thought. They are, for example, like the several layers of perception Samuel Clemens tried to control as he prepared to write Life on the Mississippl. As a mature writer, in order to relive old impressions, he had taken boat to travel again the great river he once knew so well as a young man, but at the same time he was making use of articles about the river which he himself wrote for the Atlantic during the intervening years. If, then, the readers of L'Ingénu and Gulliver indeed felt the cultural shock experienced by their fictional protagonists, they were undergoing what had long been felt by travelers in all parts of the world and by their readers. For each of them it was "that crucial moment" Lévi-Strauss speaks of in Tristes Tropiques when, "thanks to the great voyages of discovery," the European community began "to achieve self-knowledge," that is, to find another realism to replace or modify, the old one.5 Goethe knew it in the eighteenth century. When Schiller asked him to collaborate on The Journey , in which they would describe reality by changing it, Goethe told him it was an old theme.6

It is, of course, an old theme. And yet, some say, reality, experience, perception - ours and that of other observers we tentatively trust - may be all we have to start with if we pursue what we call knowledge, whether of facts or the human heart. Although Leibnitz could correctly complain that Locke was no mathematician, by the mid-eighteenth century Locke's building- blocks theory of knowledge had apparently become more widely accepted, even on the Continent, than the rationalism of Descartes or the more mystical Leibnitz.7 Then Hume would be even more empirical and Kant would combine Locke and Descartes. It can be and has been shown, however, that long before Locke and Newton, long before the Royal Society's influential pleas in the 1660s for exact information, travelers often thought they were providing new facts, new perceptions of old facts - that is, bringing home building blocks.8 And as the eighteenth century moved on and travels became even more




gigantic as a form of historical-geographical-psychological- belletristic literature, the writers of travels may have been influenced by Cartesian rationalism to arrange their blocks better. They may also, by hearing of, or "intuiting," Hume's theory of "causality," sometimes have been aware that because certain impressions lead so consistently to certain conclusions the mind tends to make the leap automatically and thus is subject to errors, even grave errors, when the observer encounters new experiences - that is, certain travelers, even before the eighteenth century, may have recognized certain of the "absurd" elements in their reports. For example, each succeeding Renaissance traveler to India - from the Genoese merchant Santo Stephano (1499) to Lodovico di Varthema (1510) to the Dutch J. H. Linschoten and his Voyage to the East Indies (1598) - reported and improved on the story that at Calicut in southwest India a bridegroom turned over his new bride to another man for the first night's deflowering. The embellishment that this tale received shows how well the absurdities were recognized by the travelers themselves; and by the time a novelist such as Richard Head in The English Rogue (1665) made real pornography of the custom, at least some readers, perhaps not all, recognized the absurd in the novel even without being aware of the fact that travel perceptions can, and often do, become part of the myth-making process.

And the study of the perception of travelers - its accuracy, its multilateral nature, its inherent absurdities - is surely the most intriguing, even if one of the most obvious, of all studies of historical perception. The reasons are many and can be found in the nature of traveling, where - especially if one is recording experiences and visiting strange lands - the image-making faculties are sharpened, where one automatically makes comparisons and finds what seem to be similarities or striking differences between places and cultures, where one is ready to be reminded, disappointed, surprised, awed, shocked, and where one takes notes and reshapes first images that, recollected in tranquility, are reshaped yet again when notes become books or when the traveler makes a second or third visit and superimposes image on image. Whether or not a study of the perception of travelers is the most intriguing of such studies, however, it is indispensable to historians who attempt to analyze the images one culture has had of another. To make that point and other points about the nature of the reality of travelers and their readers, we can conveniently take departure from two books. The




first is by the British historians P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams and entitled The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment ; the second is by Barbara Stafford, art historian at the University of Chicago.9 The subtitle of the fine study by Marshall and Williams indicates their concern with changing European images of other worlds during the eighteenth century. Stafford's study brilliantly relates the illustrations in travel books, especially of the late eighteenth century, to the contents of the books themselves, to the social, artistic, and especially scientific background, and - since art and image are almost synonymous - she teaches us much about perception, notably in a chapter on the ' 'Hegemony of the External, or, Perceptual Primacy."

The psychology of cultural perception, these books demonstrate, is a fascinating topic. Yet, while the books are fresh and stimulating, the topic is ancient. In 1962, for example, there were in the United States three conferences on the then popular theme "The Image of America and National Defense," and in 1975 there was the huge conference in Los Angeles on "First Images of America." Almost every paper in any such meeting or in any book published on the theme must depend ultimately on travel writers and on commentaries on travel writers. And just as these "images" change with new discoveries and new attitudes - the theme of Henri Baudet's Paradise on Earth , for example, is "changing European taste with regard to Paradise" - so new discoveries and new attitudes give rise to schools of history.10 One might expect a sophisticated age such as ours to settle on an objective, scientific approach to history, but we seem more concerned with new approaches, new ways of perceiving, than with objectivity. Traditional narrative history that treats broad periods and issues has been more or less supplanted by monographic history that analyzes a small segment of a particular culture - crime, marriage, the family, medicine. Moreover, it is said, the French sneer at traditional history while Americans do not understand the French "logical" approach, especially of a Michel Foucault, the reason perhaps being that Foucault seems bent on destroying, that is deconstructing, history.11 Hayden White's Metahistory : The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) - as brilliant as Foucault's The Order of Things (1966) - is a rewriting of nineteenth-century history by demonstrating that it evolved from Metaphor (late eighteenth century) to Metonymy to Synecdoche to




Irony. But, as with Foucault, one becomes so involved with pyrotechnics - in White's case with the grand metaphor- that one forgets "historical" history. Robert Darnton's The Literary Underground of the Old Regime , based upon the discovery of "an enormous cache of untouched archives," attempts not to deconstruct the history of eighteenth-century France but to revise it, to make us perceive that period in a different way. Even closer to our concern with the perception of travelers is the current academic debate over who can be an objective Orientalist - a Westerner or an Arab. At or near the center of this debate, and bitterly opposed to each other, are Bernard Lewis and Edward Said. The latest book in the debate is The Muslim Discovery of Europe y by Lewis, which - although strangely ignoring the travelers who provide a basis for cultural perception - not only reviews the misunderstanding and ignorance, even willful ignorance, these two cultures experienced in their relationships with each other but also provides a study of changes in historical perception, including those in our day. All of these schools, these conflicting approaches to history, combined with the myriad current reappraisals of the past from the point of view of Blacks, American Indians, women - that is, minority history, "con- science" history - point to the fact that any study made now of the nature of perception in some former time is doomed to be some kind of failure. Karl Popper, the great twentieth-century historian of science, is surely wrong to damn all eighteenth- century empiricists as being subjective, but he is surely right in concluding that Bacon's inductive process in the acquisition of knowledge should be modified so that the last step leads us not to "fact" but, rather, to a problem on a higher level. Yet, in spite of this kind of skepticism, this uncertainty about which Locke and Hume would be as certain as Popper is, the search for objective perception, as well as the study of the influences on perception, must go on. If we cannot attain "truth," perhaps we can restate the problem at a higher level. The Great Map of Mankind , by Marshall and Williams, helps with the problem.

It helps by being the mature work of two specialists who depend heavily on their former work - Marshall, the Orientalist, on his studies of Warren Hastings and on his books about India, especially The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (1970); Williams, the Americanist, on such studies as Perspectives of Empire (1973), which he did with John E. Flint. The Great Map, we are told, is concerned not so much with the



AD AMS- PERCEPTION AND THE TRAVELER 1 45

"growth of objective knowledge" but with the evolution of "images and conceptions." Marshall, particularly good on the Eastern Indian, argues the thesis over and over that, while "European preconceptions" of Asia were not fundamentally altered by new knowledge in the eighteenth century, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that England "'made' and remade Asia in the eighteenth century to fit its own changing preconceptions" (p. 176) about family life, the Christian religion, and rugged individualism. Williams, particularly good on the American Red Man, concentrates on the images brought back from North America, West Africa, and the Pacific, with Cook and the two Foresters, both on Cook's second voyage (1772-1775), monopolizing the report on the Pacific. Cook, for example, complained in Boswell 's presence, that because of language barriers he and his fellow explorers were forced to depend entirely on their senses for whatever "information they got, or supposed they got" (p. 281).

Nevertheless, in spite of its many attractive qualities, the book poses problems that have to do with the "conceptions" of today's readers, who must depend on other observers also when seeking truth. The title is larger than the content: the "map of mankind" is fully drawn for only parts of Asia and North America; West Africa, Russia, the Pacific are vague in outline; and much of the world - South America, the East Indies, most of Africa, all of the continent of Europe - is neglected, Europe of course because it was not one of the "New Worlds" of the subtitle. Furthermore, the "Images" of that same title are English images, those of the nearby Continent being looked at only as they relate to England; and "the Age of Enlightenment" - a term Americans have all but discarded as inappropriate for England, and only less so for France of Diderot's time - is meant here to apply to all the eighteenth and part of the seventeenth century. And, finally, if one of the two authors concentrates on the effects British culture had on its observers abroad, or on its interpretations of those observers, and the other is more concerned with the perceptions of the travelers themselves - the building blocks they acquired - are the partners perceiving perception in the same way? If not, is the result less - or more - satisfactory? At any rate, it would seem obvious that the new worlds of Glyndwr Williams, no one of which had a written history or literature, were quite unlike those much more sophisticated Asian worlds of P. J. Marshall.




As every psychologist from John Locke to Jean Piaget has known, however, no two observers perceive the same way. And in travel literature there are from ancient times two extremes in recording observations, one type of traveler noting - perhaps monotonously - names, distances, menus, or wind directions; another type stressing reactions, opinions, personal adventures. The product of one is more objective, factual, in the extreme form offering a kind of guide book that perhaps is of great interest to the historian, the geographer, the scientist; the other is more subjective and personal, appealing perhaps to the reader of belles lettres, the psychologist, the student of human nature, in its extreme form an autobiography like that of Benvenuto Cellini or Rousseau, each of which becomes a travel account at times. Charles Batten, the title of whose book Pleasurable Instruction (1978) indicates the two antipodal aims in travel writing, believes that English readers of the eighteenth century "tended," in general, "to doubt the authority of a traveler's descriptions whenever that traveler's narrative appeared even slightly fictional"12 - that is, when it became subjective; and for England Batten correctly finds cults that conditioned the perception of eighteenth-century travelers - the splenetic with Smollett, the sentimental with Sterne, the picturesque with Samuel Ireland, while George Parks long ago found travelers at the end of the eighteenth century turning to "Romantic." 13

The point is, however, that the two extremes have always been prominent. The travelers with a subjective emphasis belong to a large group that before 1700 includes world famous Italians in the East such as Lodovico di Varthema (1510), Fernão Mendes "Mendax" Pinto (1614), who was a friend of Saint Francis Xavier, and Pietro della Valle (1652); and it includes Englishmen such as the eccentric and popular Thomas Coryat (1611) and the voluminous writer of travel letters James Howell (c. 1650). The travelers most objectively inclined were inspired in part by the "Directions," suggestions, and encouragement of Richard Hakluyt, of Robert Boyle and other leaders of the Royal Society, and of Gemelli Careri, world traveler and circumnavigator, whose intelligent suggestions of 1698 were republished, for example, by the Churchills in their English travel collection of 1704. Nevertheless, no matter how hard a traveler might try to follow such suggestions, no matter how influenced he or she was by Lockean empiricism or the fast rise of science in the eighteenth century, no matter if that traveler happened to be a




trained scientist, he or she often displayed personal feelings while recording observations. One thinks of the great nineteenth- century traveler-scientist Humboldt, for example, but for the eighteenth century one may put beside the coldly factual geologist William Coxe's Travels in Switzerland (1779) the personal, lyric account of the Pyrenees by the French geologist Ramond de Carbonnières (1789). But if we place at the objective extreme John Ogden's wonderfully detailed road map of England (1674), the Jaillot family's eighteenth-century road maps of France used in the fourth volume of Tristram Shandy , and all those hundreds of early road and city guides which themselves vary in the amount of commentary they contain, that is, in their objectivity, while at the other extreme we place the highly subjective, colorful, sentimental, fictionized "ramblings" of John Dunton's Л Voyage round the World . . . Done into English by a Lover of Travels (1691), or Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768), or some hundreds of other indispensable pseudo-travels - interior, intellectual, spiritual - up to our own day, we shall discover that without exception every traveler is a victim of one or more of Bacon's "Idols." That is, as Locke and Hume knew, it is impossible for two sets of human eyes to see alike or for a human mind to record exactly what its eyes see or what other eyes are reported to have seen. For travelers and their readers - today as well as in the eighteenth century - Bacon's four "Idols" become many, some of which may only seem to be obvious.

Take, for example, what may seem to be one of the most obvious - the influence of religion on the traveler's perception. Three brief examples will show the pervasiveness and complexity of this influence. First, the great Jesuit travelers in Canada were often edited by superiors in France to make the American Indian more attractive and Jesuit evangelizing more successful, while Jesuits in China - from Matteo Ricci in the late sixteenth century to Louis Le Comte at the end of the seventeenth century - made Confucius almost a Christ and often lauded the Chinese way of life over that at home. The tradition stemming from such reports led directly to the discrediting of the Jesuits and to the great "Rites" controversey of about 1700, with William Temple accepting the favorable report and Defoe attacking it; and the influence persisted in Europe, if not in England, with Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes still quoting Le Comte after mid-century.

Second, while Frank Manuel and others have shown the effects on Europe of travel reports about the great diversity of religions




in the world, in chapter 4 of The Great Map of Mankind Marshall has a most succinct essay that demonstrates not only those effects, including the rapid rise of relativism in religion, but the effects that theorists at home had on the travelers who went out and reported. For example, while the image of Muhammad grew, we are told, "from the status of an ignorant, crafty trickster to that of a kind of pagan hero of antiquity" (p. 100), the English - Christians and deists alike - believed, or thought, or hoped that Muslims were in general hypocritical in their religion. At least travelers to the East had to report on that problem. Although Joseph Pitts, a seaman living among Muslims for years as a captive, pronounced them sincere (1704), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Georg Forster, both much later, dissented, Forster, in the Near East only briefly, finding "a deep hypocrisy" wherever he went (p. 102). This theme, Marshall concludes, led by the end of the century to the hope - not expressed by everybody to be sure - that "Muslims might be won back in time to Christianity" (p. 102). And today a favorite charge still made by Eastern Orientalists - supported by Edward Said and attacked by Bernard Lewis - is that the Western Orientalist is a "missionary," "a sort of Christian fifth column."14

A third example of the complex effect of religion on perception - one out of many other possible examples - can be found in European illustrations in, and out of, travel books. In her study of travel illustrations Barbara Stafford concentrates on science and art history while Glyndwr Williams reminds us well of the tradition of the Noble Savage as found in eighteenth- century art work (p. 281). And to show us how an artist could color a painting to provide a thesis, he quotes (p. 281) Bernard Smith's analysis of "A View taken in the Bay of Oaitepha, Otaheite," by William Hodges, who accompanied Cook and was one of the two or three most significant travel artists of the eighteenth century. This view, Smith argues convincingly in European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 , tries to show "the existence of the Tahitian paradise not by pointing to classical parallels of dress, physique, and customs with their idealistic associations but by seeking for an explanation and a unifying factor in the salubrity of the climate."15 But if we turn from science, climate, and social customs, we find that when European artists took up the subject of foreign religions as reported by travelers they left a tradition that is by no means fully explored for us - religious dances in America; the faces of




Confucius, Buddha, Muhammad; the Eastern dervish; and children being sacrificed in Mexico or, as the fake traveler Psalmanazar reported, in Formosa. Bernard Smith has done much to explore that tradition and succeeds best perhaps with the South Pacific in the early nineteenth century. There, we are shown, the natives were more or less Noble Savages until European missionaries began to have difficulty evangelizing them. Then, as hundreds of illustrations show, the erstwhile children of nature often appeared ugly, deformed, unattractive in every way as they are shown torturing or murdering the noble missionaries. One of the most intriguing related facts is this: as French Jesuit superiors at home altered seventeenth-century reports of Canada to make American Indians more noble and more receptive to Christianity, so editors at home altered nineteenth-century illustrations of the South Sea islanders to make them ignoble for rejecting Christianity.

These small hints at the influence of religion on the perception of travelers lead naturally to the influence of other environmental factors, and Marshall and Williams in The Great Map and Stafford in Voyage into Substance do more than hint at some of these. Marshall teaches us again how European traders could change the favorable image of the Chinese developed by missionaries to make them corrupt, grasping, mercenary. The extreme importance of this economic perception grew with the formation of the great trading companies after 1600 and reached its zenith by the mid-eighteenth century. Even better, perhaps, is Marshall's iterated thesis that, during the eighteenth century, English observers abroad and at home judged nations of the East as backward, unambitious, effeminate, or pliable by English standards of technology, English desire for and success in building empire and power, English theories of manifest destiny, or English ideal family life. Williams, dealing with races considered even less advanced, does best with changing attitudes about the attractiveness of primitivism and the continued conflicts between theories of progress and decadence.

My perception of the history and influence of the Noble Savage myth does not, however, quite agree with his when he deemphasizes the continuance of that myth and concludes that "the European cult of the noble savage was overborne by a rougher, American belief - 'the only good Indian is a dead Indian'" (p. 222). In the first place, readers of The Great Map are at this point asked for the first and only time to shift their focus




from an English image to one held by North Americans. And, in the second place, while frontiersmen knew the necessity of defending themselves against the Red Man, American writers of every kind - like the Europeans - continued to sentimentalize him. The tradition of Lahontan's Adario - the noble, eloquent critic of European customs - not only lived on: it grew. Old books by Bissell and Fairchild, document that growth for Britain, which, one needs to note, depended heavily on French writers for much of its image of the North American natives. But it depended just as heavily on Americans of the eighteenth century, among the many famous ones being Governor Cadwallader Colden with his dozens of nobly eloquent warriors, William Smith with his history of Bouquet's expedition that ended with white prisoners begging to return to a primitive life with their captors, Jefferson with his defense of the Red Man's virility and praise of his oratory, Franklin with his continual use of a simple but eloquent Red Man to confound Moravian, Swedish, and other missionaries, William Bartram enjoying wild strawberries with dusky maidens near the Tennessee River, Crèvecoeur concluding his Letters from an American Farmer with a lyrical essay sending the disillusioned colonist west to live with Red Men, and Freneau in the 1780s with his "Dying Indian" and "Indian Burying Ground."

There are, to be sure, as Glyndwr Williams and other historians show, two traditions about the untutored savage. One gives us the idealized stoic with his virtues and none of our vices who is represented by thousands of fictitious characters in all kinds of literature as well as by the real Creeks in London, by the Logans who could rival the Roman orators, by the children of the sun reported by Columbus, and by the Omoos and Aoutourous of Tahiti. The other gives us the ignoble savage who stems from Columbus's Dr. Chanca and his "beasts" of the West Indies, from those Spanish settlers who, despoiling and killing "unhuman" natives, had to be corrected by the pope with his edict pronouncing those natives "human," by John Wesley and the "beasts" of Georgia who refused to be converted to Christianity, and by the sophisticated Thomas Ashe going from England to live among American Red Men he found to be dirty and thieving. Just as there were a battle between ancients and moderns and a perennial conflict between primitivism and progress, there has always been the argument over how noble the savage was and is. Today, after all our discoveries concerning the




altering of texts to promote the "noble" image, discoveries that tipped the scales at least slightly in the direction of the "ignoble" image, historians such as W. E. Washburn - sometimes called "revisionist," "minority" historians - are with considerable success trying to cure our ailing perception of the Noble Savage. The Great Map of Mankind is hardly revisionist in any respect, but its picture of the North American image of the Red Man does not, I think, conform to the one found in what was published by Americans in eighteenth century.

What Marshall and Williams seem to do best in The Great Map is to show, contrary to some received opinion, that in western Europe sight, perception, was perhaps as culturally determined in the eighteenth century as it is today; that is, the way people looked at, listened to, or drew conclusions about what they encountered in life was determined in part by their preconceptions about religion, the ideal family, the aggressive masculine talents for trading or for building empires, or the need to evangelize or improve or democratize "inferior" or "backward" nations. Yet, at the same time, both authors demonstrate the growth of relativity in the thinking of western Europe. And while the gaze of travelers was often culturally determined, no group in all history has contributed so much to that growth. For his advanced relativity in Les Lettres persanes and L'Esprit des loix , Montesquieu was, in fact, depending most on travelers and on a travel tradition that goes back at least as far as the fake but indispensable Mandeville, who borrowed from real travelers not only to warn Englishmen that they must not look at Muslims with a biased Christian eye but to give examples of differences between the Arabic and English languages. Montesquieu learned most from French travelers such as Chardin and Bernier, but he could have learned also from the English Joseph Pitts (1704), who - we have noted - lived among Muslims, learned their language, and gave them high ratings by English standards; or he could have learned from Gemelli Careri, the Italian lawyer whose Giro del mondo (1698) was widely read - it was given more space in translation by the Churchills in 1704 than any other book received - and who in an oft-repeated preface urged travelers to learn languages before setting out so they could understand better and judge more fairly. By the end of the century, as Marshall and Williams argue, more and more writers urged relative rather than biased standards. One traveler unknown to them - his journal was published after they went to press - was




Alexander Walker, a Scotsman who as a very young man accompanied an expedition to the northwest coast of North America in 1785-1786 and kept a fascinating journal of his experiences.16 Then, after spending some years in India as a mature student of the languages and culture of that country, he revised parts of his American journal that were, he decided, unfair to the natives and then in other places argued publicly for objectivity - that is, relativity - in English accounts of other nations.

But while relativity in perception - total objectivity - may be the aim of some travelers, it has probably never been attained and may be no more desirable in a travel writer than is the giving of opinion, especially if we "approve" of the observer. And there are hindrances to objectivity other than those stressed in The Great Map. Barbara Stafford, for example, is not so interested in the cultural biases of the viewer as in certain others. She understandably does much with the influence of color on perception; and while she does not find that a traveler's sex is a great influence on the travel report, she traces the use, often blatant, often indicative of the traveler's training, of male-female metaphors in travel literature, of the personifications that stem naturally from vitalistic theories of the earth. She may be best on the difference between the lay traveler's eye and the eye of the trained scientist, although she shows well that scientists are not all dully objective, that they can be so pleased, perhaps excited or exalted, by a sight or an experience that their reports become personal, perhaps lyric - as with Humboldt or Georg Forster or Ramond de Carbonnières. She goes further, however, by making a wonderful contrast between what Foucault calls the more scientific "panoptic gaze" and Blake's poetic "prophetic vision." Among the intriguing conclusions Stafford offers us is that even the most objective of scientists who travel - like the ones who shift test tubes at home - often are propelled by a lust for discovery, for finding unique phenomena in nature that can lead to a private epiphany or, when reported at home, to public approval.

This search for the new, the strange, is in fact a trademark of the travel tradition. It has led travelers of all kinds to concentrate on the unique and neglect the humdrum. It has caused them to go out of the way to find something said to be different, to exaggerate, to report wishful thinking, to tell outright lies. This "lust" has always been whetted by editors and readers and can be




traced not only in the titles of travel books themselves but in titles of books that synthesize travels or that provide any history of a culture foreign to the writer's primary audience. "New" (with its companions "singular," "strange," "curious") is a standard word in travel literature of all centuries. Charles Batten reminds us that in the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson's account of Scotland offered "new scenes," that Boswell was "discovering" Corsica to England, that Edward Burt's travel "Letters" promised "Facts and Circumstances intirely New," and that the Critical Review explained how travelers fed a "love of novelty" which is "inseparable" from the "mind of man."17 But long before the eighteenth century André Thevet's seminal volume about Brazil was published as Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1558), Frampton's English title for the even more seminal natural history of the New World by Nicolas Monardes promised accounts of "rare and singular vertues of divers and sundrie Herbs," R. Coverte back from India in 1612 offered "A true and Most incredible Report," and John Josselyn's stay in America resulted in the still famous New England's Rarities Discovered (1672). One of the best seventeenth-century travel accounts for the history of science, one with several editions, is that of B. Monconys (1665; 1695), whose title translated began thus: "Voyages in which savants will find an infinite number of novelties." Then, in the eighteenth century, even the great and widely used Jesuit letters were collected as "Edifiantes et curieuses." Perhaps most indicative of the passion for discovering something different is that kind of travel book whose author admitted to selecting materials to please a particular audience's taste for strange facts, as Elias Habeschi did on returning from China to use the title Objects Interesting to the English Nation (1793). And we still want our travelers to tell us something strange: in 1937 a great book of the Middle Ages was published as Les Voyages merveilleux : Vie et aventures de Marco Polo y a title totally unlike the original.

Hakluyt, government officials, the Royal Society, the Republic of Science in general - all fought this tradition by giving written advice, even instructions, to travelers setting out. Over and over Hakluyt urged Renaissance voyagers to keep journals that would record facts about climate, soil, plants - especially facts about commodities the English nation could trade for - as he did in 1576 when he provided "Notes . . . for their directions" for Martin Frobisher and his companions. Even here, however, emphasis is



1 54 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

often on the uncommon. After Frobisher's three voyages, for example, George Best, who went along, wrote up the twelve values accruing from such expeditions and let Hakluyt publish them, the eighth of which reads in part: "How pleasant and profitable it is to attempt new Discoveries, either for the sundrie sights and shapes of strange beasts and fishes, . . . the sight of strange trees, fruite, foules, and beastes. . . ."18 Columbus had had similar instructions from Ferdinand's officials; and on every voyage he took in the eighteenth century, James Cook had them too, but by that time the language was coldly objective. The "Catalogue of Directions" published in the 1660s by the Royal Society and addressed to "seamen and other far travellers" had an influence now well known. The "Directions" were republished in part by the Churchills in 1704: and then in France J. F. Bernard, even though skeptical about the objectivity of all the travelers in his huge collection of the 1720s, paraphrased the "Directions" with approval. In each case the emphasis was on objectivity. But when in the report of his voyage Captain John Narbrough seemed to be following its advice, the Royal Society's Transactions of 1694, as R. W. Frantz long ago showed, praised him with an essay that began thus: "The present Collection [Narbrough's account of his voyage] must needs contain many uncommon and useful Things."19 That is, "useful" is best when balanced by "uncommon." And even if the Royal Society and other such influences had been able to persuade travelers to be objective, its kind of objectivity would seem to be a selective kind, too. At the other extreme, no one, as far as I know, has ever written a set of "Directions" that stressed subjectivity, opinions, or that urged travelers to record everything no matter how suspect or how vague. Always we have claimed to admire something called accurate perception, especially if accuracy is applied to reports of strange lands or peoples.

How far then can we trust the perceptions of travelers in the eighteenth century and before? If, as George Parks believes,20 travelers - like other writers - tended to be more and more subjective, more "romantic," as the eighteenth century moved along toward what is normally called a romantic period with its tormented souls that embark on dark, interior journeys, one must remember that such a theory seems to contradict our notion that the eighteenth century was also making great strides in natural and physical sciences and in the scientific method. In mathematics and physics Europe moved from Newton and Halley




to Laplace, in chemistry from Boyle and Hooke to Lavoisier, in botany from John Ray to Buffon and Linnaeus, and in geology from J.-E. Guettard to John Hutton. All these are areas that both produced and affected great numbers of travel accounts. It is this fact - the close association of science and the literature of travel - about which Barbara Stafford's book is so thorough and so convincing. Her travelers, and the illustrations for their books, help us explain how western Europe could move so easily from Bacon to Berkeley to Hume to the positivism that Comte was explaining before 1830, at a time when the "romantic period" is normally considered still at its height. It is a tradition that asks for accurate description of phenomena and people - as accurate and unbiased as humans are capable of - and not for opinions or analyses. And this objective, rational tradition may, for the masses of humanity, have been as dominant as a "romantic" tradition that has been found in poetry, music, and other arts. One can, however - at least after Stafford's book - argue that these two traditions cannot be separated, that one sharpens, enlivens, the other, as Goethe's travels in Italy provided him not just with accurate facts but with romantic exoticism when he wrote Wilhelm Meister , and as Humboldt's scientific "panoptic" gaze was - to our benefit - vitalized, not contaminated, by his love of beauty and his romantic anticipation of sights to be seen and discoveries to be made, that is, by the same kind of imagination, well developed, found before him in Marco Polo, della Valle, Joseph Addison, Cornelius Lebruin, Georg Forster, Ramond de Carbonnières, and a multitude of other travelers.

Samuel Johnson found an "irreconcilable contrariety" in what Jacob Spon and George Wheler reported about the trip to Greece and Italy which they took together in the 1670s; Rousseau complained in Emile , "I have passed my life in reading the accounts travellers give, and have not met with two that have given me the same idea of the same people"; and Cornelius de Pauw, so important to William Robertson and other historians, concluded that all Europeans writing from China were liars and all travel books, whether ancient or modern, had both errors and falsehoods.21 Such notions about the failure of travelers to perceive clearly, objectively, even honestly, have been perennial. Yet it is important to note that Johnson not only read voluminously and approvingly in travel literature, as Thomas Curley has demonstrated, but that he and Boswell - often like Spon and Wheler - disagreed about what they experienced on




their journey to Scotland: the number of trees they saw, the passage from Skye to Raasay, the water crossing at Iona (was Johnson carried over by Highlanders or did he wade across "vigorously"?). One must note too that in spite of his complaints Rousseau did read many travelers and that for the sake of his beliefs he took from them what he wanted, as - in order to argue for primi ti vism - he borrowed, and changed what he borrowed, from the fake travel book by someone calling himself François Coreal.22 And, finally, just as important, one must also note that de Pauw, in order to argue with Dom Pernetty, Thomas Jefferson, and other opponents of Buffon's theories about the degeneracy of life in the Americas, carefully selected or twisted evidence from the many travel accounts he read and then developed "a one-sided picture, written according to a preconceived thesis. ' ' 23

In other words, although travelers since the beginning of time have gone out, come back, and reported what they saw and what they concluded about what they saw, philosophers, historians, political scientists, artists, literary figures, and all other readers have compared them, learned from them, complained about them, and often - very often - distorted them. A perception reported was not always the perception received or re-reported. Or, to use Kant's terms, apperception (conscious "seeing") becomes perception (sensory information received in space and time). Nevertheless, what the travelers brought back was absolutely all - in theory at least - that anyone had to start with. One could in the eighteenth century, or now, expect a Cartesian mathematical certainty in the acquisition of knowledge; one could, with the eighteenth-century empiricists, realize that certainty lies in direct perception but that perception is a quality not of the perceived object but of the mind of the beholder; or one could, with Locke and Hume, be more than mildly skeptical about certainty in observation, or with Karl Popper believe that our only hope is to employ perceptions to arrive not at truth but at "truth" on a higher level - but whatever western Europeans thought about methods of collecting information, when it was a question of places and people at any distance, travelers and their perceptions, no matter how absurd the situation for them or their readers, were indispensable.



ADAMS- PERCEPTION AND THE TRAVELER 1 57

NOTES 1. Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of

Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 2. 2. Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (New York: Wiley, 1975), p. 41. 3. Franklin, p. 238. 4. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,

ed. James A. Work (New York: Odyssey, 1940), pp. 515-516. 5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p.

102. 6. Goethe, quoted in Walter Veit, ed., Captain Cook: Image and Impact

(Melbourne: Hawthorn, 1972), p. 14. 7. This is the conclusion of Coates, White, Schapiro in their Emergence of

Liberal Humanism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 181 and elsewhere, although the popular Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1966) insists on the persistence of Descartes, Leibnitz, and rationalism through the eighteenth century while neglecting Locke, Hume, and empiricism.

8. See, for example, Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), chaps. 2 and 10.

9. Marshall and Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Landscape and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1750-1830 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).

10. Trans. Elizabeth Wentholt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). 11. See especially Foucault, Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge

classique (Paris: Pion, 1961), and the much admired - and attacked - The Order of Things. For much more on this currently popular subject, see a review by Gordon S. Wood of Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 , in New York Review of Books, 12 August 1982.

12. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 56. 13. Parks, "The Turn to the Romantic in Travel Literature of the Eighteenth

Century," MLQ 25 (1964): 22-33. 14. See New York Review of Books, 24 June 1982, p. 50. 15. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), pp. 46-47. 16. Walker, An Account of a Voyage to the North West Coast of America in

1785 and 1786, ed. Robin Fisher and J. M. Bumsted (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). See my review of this book, with two others, in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 25 (1984): 287-294.

17. Batten, pp. 91-95. 18. Hakluyt, The Principali Navigations (London: Dent, 1913), 5:171. 19. Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas, 1660-1732,

University of Nebraska Studies, vol. 32-33 (1934; rpt. ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 19; and Philosophical Transactions 18 (1694): 167.

20. See note 13 above. 21. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland [with James

Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides], ed. Allan Wendt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 110; for Rousseau, see Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars: 1660-1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 232; and de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les égyptiens et les chinois (Berlin, 1773), 2:24-28.

22. See Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, p. 126. 23. Henry Ward Church, "Corneille De Pauw and the Controversy over His

Recherches philosophiques sur les améicains," PMLA 51 (1936): 185.



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