The Traveler As Scientist
But why, aside from his own self-advertising, did the eighteenth-century traveler—and by extension the eighteenth-century travel writer—develop into this kind of cultural hero? After all, travelers are no longer cultural heroes, unless they happen to find themselves in novel conveyances like space capsules circling the moon or one-man sailboats circling the globe. And travel accounts no longer form a major branch of literature, except in the eyes of a very few readers, most of whom happen to be planning their own trips.
Voyages of discovery—at least as conceived of in the eighteenth century—are but rarely possible in the twentieth century. Going to Anacapa Island recently, my family found coreopsus plants, Indian middens, and a butterfly that lives nowhere else in the world. We saw exciting things, but we discovered nothing. Others had already seen, described, and explained everything we encountered. But had we been an eighteenth-century family, even with our deficient twentieth-century educations, we could have discovered something on Anacapa and, better yet, published a description of it. If the eighteenth century is the age of traveling for discovery, the twentieth century is—alas—the age of tourism. Discovery has largely disappeared; sightseeing has taken its place.
Essential to discovery in any age is not only the possibility for true novelty but also a scientific spirit, the kind that Jean d'Alembert describes as ruling his century:
Our century is called . . . the century of philosophy par excellence. . . . If one considers without bias the present state of our knowledge, one cannot deny that philosophy among us has shown progress. Natural science from day to day accumulates new riches. . . . The true system of the world has been recognized, developed, and perfected. . . . In short, from the earth to Saturn, from the history of the heavens to that of insects, natural philosophy has been revolutionized.[20]
In a similar vein, James Keir claimed in 1789 that "the diffusion of a general knowledge, and of a taste for science, over all classes of men, in every nation of Europe, or of European origin, seems to be the characteristic feature of the present age."[21]
"To know how to travel well," said Chevalier de Coetlogon, is "a very great Science" and "in great measure the Source of all other Sciences."[22] One of my colleagues at UCLA has claimed that during the hundred years between 1680 and 1780, science and literature were as close in their ultimate aims as they have ever been.[23] This is especially true for eighteenth-century travel literature. The scientific spirit that sent travelers in search of new discoveries and
inspired them to write about those discoveries also sent readers in search of new travel accounts to peruse. And these readers were not merely ones we would call "scientific types" in the twentieth century. William Wordsworth, for example, wrote the following request to James Webbe Tobin in 1798:
I have written 1300 lines of a poem [i.e., The Recluse ] in which I contrive to convey most of the knowledge of which I am possessed. My object is to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society. Indeed I know not any thing which will not come within the scope of my plan. . . . If you could collect for me any books of travels you would render me an essential service, as without much of such reading my present labours cannot be brought to a conclusion.[24]
Wordsworth is scarcely famous for his unbridled love of all things scientific; for him, "we murder to dissect." Yet Wordsworth's letter implies that in subject matter and ultimate goal—if not in form—little difference existed between his projected poem and the travel accounts he was planning to read.
It would be folly to claim that the scientific mood of the eighteenth century was caused by the Royal Society. But the Royal Society certainly captured this mood and in so doing helped propagate it. A major part of the society's work involved investigating foreign lands. As Thomas Sprat indicates in his famous History (1667), the Royal Society undertook a four-part approach to such research, employing fellows to examine treatises already written concerning foreign countries, to interview "seamen, travellers, trades-men, and merchants," to compose questions that remained to be answered about foreign countries, and to send these questions to correspondents in the remote corners of the world.[25] Indeed, the Royal Society's thirst for discovering foreign parts smacked of enthusiasm: "Almost as much space of Ground remains still in the dark, as was fully known in the times of the Assyrian , or Persian Monarchy . So that without assuming the vain prophetic spirit . . . we may
foretell, that the Discovery of another new World " is still at hand.[26] To achieve these discoveries, the Royal Society was not slow in publishing its "Directions for Sea-men, Bound for Far Voyages." These initial directions largely involved straightforward record keeping. They instructed travelers to measure depths, register weather, plot coastlines, collect seawater, and the like. The purposes for such directions were similarly straightforward: to attain its ends, the Royal Society must "study Nature rather than Books , and from the Observations, made of such Phaenomena and Effects She [i.e., Nature] presents, to compose such a History of Her, as may hereafter serve to build a Solid and Useful Philosophy upon."[27] The Royal Society expanded these directions, before long issuing specific inquiries for travelers bound to such places as Suratte, Persia, Virginia, the Bermudas, Guiana, Brazil, and Turkey.[28] And in the spirit of the Royal Society, that archdeist John Toland published a series of "Queries fit to be sent to any curious and intelligent Christians, residing or travelling in Mahometan countries; with proper directions and cautions in order to procure satisfactory answers."[29]
Even in their most superficial characteristics, many eighteenth-century travel accounts display a fairly obvious influence by the Royal Society. Dampier's New Voyage was dedicated to the Royal Society—something that Swift could scarcely have failed to notice. Cook's voyages were sent out by the Royal Society. William Halifax's travel account was published in the society's Transactions . Smollett's Travels contains a register of the weather—the kind of record the Royal Society had requested travelers to keep as early as 1666.[30] Addison's Remarks on Italy contains acoustical experiments conducted in the neighborhood of Milan—the kind of experiments the Royal Society liked to print in its Transactions . This list could easily continue.
The scientific spirit meant that travelers investigated the entire range of nature: they looked for and attempted to describe anything that was not already known involving in-
animate nature, plants, animals, and men. The title page of Dampier's New Voyage (see Figure 2.1) proclaims that it describes such disparate subjects as "Soil, Rivers, Harbours, Plants, Fruits, Animals . . . Inhabitants . . . Customs, Religion, Government, Trade, &c." Similarly, the title page of Smollett's Travels promises observations on "Character, Customs, Religion, Government, Police, Commerce, Arts, and Antiquities" with "a particular Description of the Town, Territory, and Climate of Nice."
The eyes of travel writers were on the physical representations in front of them, rather than on the classics or the Bible.[31] At least implicitly, travelers found themselves—whether they knew it or not—on the Moderns' side in the old Ancients versus Moderns dispute.[32] Their appeal was to experience, not authority. As the English editor of Anders Sparrman's Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope said in 1785, "every authentic and well written book of voyages and travels is, in fact, a treatise of experimental philosophy."[33]
The scientific goals of travelers and travel writers tended to be practical or theoretical, or in some cases both. The practical ones involved promoting trade, colonizing foreign lands, discovering new foods, finding useful minerals, learning new crafts, and the like. It is in this vein that Dampier claims he had "a hearty Zeal for the promoting of useful knowledge, and of any thing that may never so remotely tend" to his country's "advantage."[34] Travelers with a theoretical goal tended to assume with Pope that all of nature (be it inanimate, vegetative, animal, or human) is essentially uniform: "All Nature is but Art unknown to thee." As Hume pointed out, "Should a traveller . . . bring us an account of men, wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted . . . we should immediately prove him a liar, with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narrative with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies."[35] Such a uniform view of nature does not mean the traveler should stay at home; rather it means that he should search out new bits of information that can
modify his larger view of nature. Although nature does not change, man's view of it does. And for this reason the century's great thinkers—men like Adam Smith, David Hume, and John Locke—combed travel accounts to support the theories they were developing.
Travel accounts thus served as storehouses for vast amounts of information. Some travelers seemed largely happy with collecting new information; others seemed primarily interested in synthesizing and explaining the information they collected. The first group focused on what Locke called "observations," the second on what he called "reflections." The great collections of travels—especially the Churchills'—served as forerunners of the encyclopedias.[36] And in an age when indexes were rare, travel accounts quite frequently contained extremely thorough ones.
While eighteenth-century travelers looked for anything new in the wide range of nature, their scientific investigations in such areas as geology and human nature posed some of the strongest challenges to conventional thinking. (England had to wait until the nineteenth century for Darwin's investigations to pose similar challenges to its views on flora and fauna.) In dealing with both geology and human nature, travel writers tended to be experimental philosophers; in so doing, they captured the scientific spirit of the century and the scientific interests of its readers.