Introduction: mapping the art of travel and exploration

Abstract

This paper introduces a set of six essays for a special issue of the Journal of Historical Geography on ‘The art of travel and exploration’. Taking the voyages of Captain Cook as a reference point, it argues that the centrality of Cook in the historiography of exploration and its attendant visual culture has tended to eclipse other important visual records and archives, which the essays here are instead concerned to address. They are, therefore, post-Cook, focussing on the period from the 1770s to the 1840s, to offer a variety of interpretative strategies, and treating of subject matter relating to a series of distinct global places and cultures, as a means of demonstrating the significance of diverse forms of visual culture connected with travel and geographical exploration. It takes mapping, and in particular an artistically enhanced version of Cook's chart of the southern hemisphere made on his second voyage, as a case study both to suggest the interconnectedness between art history and historical geography through travel imagery, and also to outline the ways the essays here move beyond the Cook paradigm, through addressing in various, individual ways four key critical areas which mark out travel imagery from other forms of visual culture. Broadly, these can be defined as: issues of time, place and circumstances of production; practices of observation and recording; the imperial context; the influence of Cook.