By P. Smethurst
Taking as a kick off point the parallel incidence of Cook's Pacific voyages, the improvement of typical background, scenic tourism in Britain, and romantic shuttle in Europe, this booklet argues that the impression of those practices was once the creation of nature as an summary house and that the style of trip writing had a primary position in reproducing it.
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Extra info for Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840
Example text
The ‘museum’ of Hans Sloane in London, which later formed the basis for the British Museum’s collection, was not a museum in the modern sense. 65 The principle behind juxtaposition various curiosities from around the world was almost entirely aesthetic. It was comparable to the organisation of curiosities as spectacle in the journals of William Dampier, no doubt having similar effects on the public. ’66 This desire for an ideal space, to stand 36 Travel Writing and the Natural World where Adam stood, was not displaced by science, and contended with secular forms of museum order shaping the traveller-scientists’ view of distant lands.
Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World largely panders to an appetite for stories of pirates and privateers, where nature and natives are regarded as exotic curiosities rather than as scientific discoveries. Dampier might have adopted the letter of the Society’s directions, but not the spirit. 34 The question of narrative order must be considered at this point, as it impacts on the processes contingent on museum order. Most of the travel writing sub-genres discussed in this book are in the form of narratives, and narrative order is a factor in their truth-telling claims.
Although Buffon still had his following in the field, his majestic descriptions of nature were the result of considerable analysis of specimens at European centres. This information was not generally available to naturalists in the field, and even if it had been, it would have overwhelmed the travel narrative if the traveller-scientist had attempted to incorporate it; not that this deterred Humboldt in his Personal Narrative (see Chapter 5). Neither Linnaeus nor Buffon had direct experience of the natural world outside Europe.