Learning Hospitality: George Buchan's Narrative of the Loss of the Winterton (1820)

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SummaryShipwreck narratives were a publisher's staple during the eighteenth century. They appeared as pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsheets, and occasionally as more expensive book editions. George Buchan's Narrative of the Loss of the Winterton East Indiaman (1820) is a complex text that weaves together a historical account of a tragedy and its aftermath, an ethnography and natural history of Madagascar, and the unequivocal pronouncement of the author's evangelical commitments. This article concerns Buchan's response to the catastrophic interruption of his journey. It argues that the hospitality extended by the Madagascans to the Winterton cast-aways resonates with the author's prudential efforts to be hospitable to authorial, cultural and ideological difference. Interrupted journeys – even amidst tragedy – can be generative in that epistemological agendas and ontological itineraries are unsettled. Buchan contends with an experience that does not conform to his expectations, which presents an occasion for learning. His narrative illustrates how difficult it is to overcome received notions, even in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. A persuasive counterpoint to contemporary right-wing rhetoric regarding the possibilities created by disaster, Buchan's narrative illustrates the complexities of accommodating difference, at the same time as it sets out – hesitantly – what a constructive response to violent upheaval might entail.