Early Travel Research Articles

Amazonian ethnobotany and the search for new drugs.

Tropical rain forests offer enormous prospects for the discovery of new drugs for use in Western medicine. The Amazon supports 80,000 species of higher plants and a diverse Indian population. Focusing attention on those plants used as medicines by indigenous peoples is the most efficient way of identifying the plants that contain bioactive compounds. There is an urgent need for more ethnobotanists and ethnopharmacologists to be trained to document as much information as possible before it and the plants are lost through destruction of the rain forest and acculturation of the indigenous peoples. Ethnobotanical studies have identified plants documented by early travellers; these include Paullinia yoco and Ilex guayusa which are used as stimulants and have been shown to be rich in caffeine. Studies of the hallucinogen prepared from Banisterioposis caapi have shown that the native people know which plants to add to the mixture to lengthen and intensify the intoxication produced by the beta-carboline alkaloids in the plant. Three major snuffs are used in the Amazonia; the plants from which they are derived have been identified. One of the snuffs also has antifungal and curare-like activities; chemical analysis on the active principles has not been done. Several plants are considered as prime candidates for scientific study as sources of useful chemicals for medicine or industry. These include some used to prepare teas or other infusions for treatment of various symptoms of senile dementia.

What was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing

This paper examines an aspect of Australian-born photographer and film maker Frank Hurley's media repertoire that has to date received little attention: his travel writing; but it does so in the context of its relations with other media he used at the same time. In the 1910s and 1920s, travel writing was closely connected with other media, especially photography, lantern slide projection and early cinema. Like his photographs and films, Hurley's writing was never meant to have a singular or definitive form: it was modular and mobile, created for the purpose of being used in a variety of forms, whether by Hurley himself or by other media personnel, and often in the service of other media.

Le Réveil helléniste et les goûts culturels bourgeois: Le poème "Vénus de Milo" de Leconte de Lisle et son arrière-pays esthétique

From the eighteenth century, interest in Hellenism had been stimulated by early travel accounts, and by researches into Greek religion. In France, archaeological findings and enthusiasm for Greek literature induced critical speculations which culminated with the placing in the Louvre of the Vénus de Milo. Public fervour extended beyond pictorial and plastic arts into bourgeois tastes. Victor de Laprade's poem "Psyché" based on a theme found in decorative arts expressed this taste. Approaches to phenomena of Hellenic culture were subsumed into poetry about Greek female statues, notably Leconte de Lisle's own "Vénus de Milo" of 1846. Free of the political echoes of the poet's earlier poetry, this poem expresses admiration for the artistic integrity of the statue and converts visual experience into linguistic. Critical discussions, public taste and learned inquiry are transformed into creativity. (In French)

Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859–1924): the cycling geologist

Abstract Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859–1924), Professor of Geology at the Royal College of Science for Ireland, was an avid cyclist and shared this passion with his wife Blanche. Born in London, Cole studied at the Royal School of Mines and lectured for a number of years at Bedford College for Ladies. Largely concurrent with his professorship he served as Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland at a time when it was in moderate decline. He undertook many cycling tours around continental Europe and Ireland. These trips were recounted in two early travel books. The Gypsy Road: a Journey from Krakow to Coblentz , published in 1894, provides a delightful account of a tour undertaken by him on a tricycle and his companion on a penny farthing, across what is now Poland, the Czech Republic, and eastern Germany. In a later slim volume entitled As We Ride , co-authored with his wife, a number of expeditions to France and the Balkans are eloquently described. Between 1902 and 1908 he organized a week-long geological excursion to various parts of Ireland for his students, and transport was by train and bicycle. His cycling trips provided him with the opportunity to collect research materials, make geological observations, and to photograph features of interest. Subsequently much of this material was used in his publications and in teaching. Cole's main academic studies were in igneous and metamorphic petrology. He valued and promoted fieldwork as an essential component of geological training. He was heavily involved with professional and amateur scientific societies, and was a prolific author of both academic and popular geological papers and books.

Seventeenth-century English travel literature and the significance of foreign foodways1

Early modern English travel writers describing Europe often included detailed descriptions of foreign foodways in their narratives. These descriptions served not only to satisfy readers’ curiosity about the details of foreign life, but as a means of marking cultural differences. In particular, the role of such descriptions was to emphasize and reinforce attitudes about foreign countries that were not specifically related to food. Instead, the underlying theme was international power relations. This tendency is most clearly revealed by comparing representations of the foodways of the Irish and the Ottoman Turks. These regions were superficially described as having similar traits, such as simple foods, lack of social distinctions in the serving of food, and a lack of proper accoutrements of food serving. However, similar practices were interpreted differently according to the needs of the authors. While the Irish were regarded as bestial and unskilled, the Turks were seen as deliberately austere, much as the English viewed themselves. Both the English and the Turks were also able to manufacture refined edibles if they wished. The typical austerity of Turkish foodways was believed to contribute to their military discipline, a valuable lesson for the English.

Inhumation and cremation in medieval Mongolia: analysis and analogy

The authors study burials of the medieval period in western Mongolia shortly before emergence of Genghis Khan. They find that both inhumation and cremation are practised, with a variety of accompanying rituals. Systematic micro-analysis of bone fragments on the one hand, and the accounts of early travellers on the other, allow these researchers to propose detailed explanations of mortuary practice in thirteenth century Altai that will be highly suggestive to prehistorians working elsewhere.

Seventeenth-Century North American Travel Narratives: Nation-ness and Self-Reflectivity

Much critical analysis has been dedicated to exploring the relationship between European and foreign societies to expose the often oppressive aspects of European imperialist expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as these develop into a consciousness of colonialism. For example, Nabil Matar discusses the 'superimposition' of England's American identity upon un-colonizable Muslims. Matar notes, 'Unable to defeat the Muslims, as [the English] had the American Indians, and unable to situate them in a world view convenient to their colonial and millennial goals, as they had done with the Americans, writers and illustrators applied constructions of differentiation from the American Indians to the Muslims.'1 In order to maintain a sense of national superiority, the English would superimpose 'the moral constructions they had devised to legitimate the colonization and ... the destruction of the Indians on the Muslims'. This superimposition of identity serves an important role in the English consciousness of strengthening English people's conception of themselves and figuratively weakening the Muslims. Matar continues, 'Superimposition provided them with a strategy to confront the non-Christian Other, and helped them redress their colonial and cultural inadequacies before other European countries such as Spain and France.'2 The English would overlay a constructed Amerindian identity upon the Muslims as a means of enervating the political, cultural, and colonial power inherent in the spread of Islam.While I agree with Matar's assertion that this superimposition provides a means to orient the English in experiencing Islamic society, I maintain that he neglects an important aspect of this interchange: the reciprocity inherent within one culture's interaction with another. Not only does England's imposition of an identity provide an orienting means to bring the cultures together, to experience one another, it serves concurrently to subvert and alter the home culture's very notion and conception of itself as it experiences the foreign culture.3 I will use Benedict Anderson's concept of nationness and Niklas Luhmann's systems theory to detail how European travel narratives by representative and influential travel writers at chronologically decisive points in the seventeenth century document the alteration of the European consciousness as it experiences the foreign. Specifically, early seventeenth-century travel accounts by Adam Smith and Samuel de Champlain point to the influence of universalism within the mindset of the Europeans as they moved into North-American frontiers: whether in viewing the land or the peoples, Europeans regarded all through the lens of Christian and European virtues. Later seventeenth-century travel narratives by John Josselyn and Baron de Lahontan, however, point towards recognizing and accepting particularism: that is, particular cultural differences validate certain foreign cultural practices in European minds.4As the Europeans first encountered the foreign, they thought of themselves as a people belonging to a loose association of communities that subscribe to one religion and set of values: Christendom. This universalizing notion of Christendom orients Europeans to the experiences of the foreign.5 For example, in 1600 on his journey to the West Indies, James Lancaster carried letters of diplomacy written by Queen Elizabeth. In one letter to the King of Aceh, she writesThe eternal God, of his divine knowledge and providence, hath so disposed His blessings and good things of His creation for the use and nourishment of mankind, in such sort: that notwithstanding they growe in diuers kingdomes and regions of the world, yet, by the industrie of man (stirred up by the inspiration of the said omnipotent Creator) they are dispersed into the most remote places of the universall world; to that end, that euen therin may appeare unto all nations His maruellous workes.6In this letter from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Aceh, the Queen couches her diplomatic rhetoric in very medieval, Christian-universalizing terms. …

Travel and Material Culture: Commodity, Currency, and Destabilised Meaning in Women's Home Tour Writing

This study explores the influence of material culture on patterns of identity construction within eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century home tour travel writing by women. Considering the ways in which material goods were used to promote and maintain travellers' own identities, and to position the peoples encountered in the spaces of travel, it is nevertheless argued that they frequently complicate and challenge, rather than reinforce, definitive social and cultural hierarchies. The fact that travellers in Britain engage with material culture in much the same way as those abroad—as is evidenced in the discursive similarity between the home tour narratives considered here and the colonial travel texts produced in a later period—raises important questions for the way in which we consider the notion of ‘foreignness’ in relation to travel in this period. Likewise, the examples here challenge traditional views of eighteenth-century women's role in material culture as merely one of consumption, as opposed to the more positive and creative masculine act of production. The shifting meanings of objects in women's home tour travel narratives engender a positive critique of commonly held assumptions regarding the ways in which we read gender, class, national and regional difference through the material.

New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing (review)

Studies in American Fiction245 ments makes The Shape ofthe Signifíer-weü worth reading for students of American literature and culture, as well as for those interested in theoretical questions about historicism, identity politics, and economic justice. University of Texas at AustinPhillip Barrish Read, David. New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2005. ? + 177 pp. Cloth: $37.50. At first glance, David Read's New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledgein EarlyAnglo-American Writing(University ofMissouri Press, 2005), seems like a wistful tilting at windmills. In his effort to "present an alternative to . . . interpreting early European colonialism . . . [as] a kind of large-scale intentionality," Read offers readings drawn from a select group of early American texts that highlight "the efforts of individual writers to articulate a historical phenomenon and their own involvement in it" (10, 9). To many readers of early modern English texts and criticism, Read's approach will no doubt sound sound like a reactionary call for a return to old fashioned "intention," canonical works, and new critical formalism. Despite its introductory polemic, however, New World, Known World is not as intransigent as it sounds. It offers several interesting readings of early texts that may indeed benefit scholars in the field by forcing them to test their own interpretive dogmas against some fresh analysis by a wellread disciplinary outsider (Read's previous book examines Spenser and New Spain). Even skeptics ought to grant that Read has chosen works undeniably central to British writing about colonial North America—John Smith's Generali History, William Bradford's OfPlymouth Plantation, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, and Roger William's Key into the Language ofAmerica—whose individual authors were historically significant figures as well. Even if one were to quibble with the validity of Read's periodization (1624-1649) or his exclusion of Anne Bradstreet, enough nagging questions are raised by New World, Known World to excuse its quixotic critical undercurrents. Read's critique finds its intellectual antecedent in Wayne Franklin's Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers (1979), a work that emerged from a growing dissensus in the early American literature community over the "hegemonic " role of Puritanism in colonial writing. Read, in fact, borrows Franklin's conceptualization of the colonial literary milieu as having been born of the "epistemological problem" that the new world created for Europe . Early colonial texts Read therefore calls "knowledge projects" that depend upon "literary objects . . . shaped by and around metaphor, symbol, allegory, irony, affinity to genre, rhetorical technique, poetic diction" (15). 246Reviews Where Franklin's critical foes were scholars who slighted early travel literature and failed to combine "critical and historical methods," Read's adversaries are practitioners of new historicism and cultural studies. Read begins his own assault on early American critical shibboleths by examining John Smith's Generali History for an incoherence that he believes belies many critics' assertions that the work exhibits a "deeply authoritarian , thoroughly politicized system of social control" (32). In particular, Read finds fault with critics' tendency to insist that Smith's descriptions of the Native Algonquians of Virginia are little more than mastering tactics in a larger imperial hegemonic scheme. Read takes pains to show that even in its incoherence, Smith's narrative at least exposes "the existence ofboth consciousness and will among Native Americans" (24). In Powhatan's speeches he finds an "energía' that points away from a coherent colonialist discourse and toward an ironic posture that reflects "persistent habits ofmind" in the colonial American past, suggesting its "powerful otherness" (38). Read is most convincing in pursuing this "incoherence" in his subsequent discussion ofWilliam Bradford, in which he poses the startling question , "Was William Bradford the first economic historian?" Offering a qualified "yes," Read demonstrates that the second section in OfPlymouth Plantation pits "community" against polyglot cosmopolitanism through its meticulous account of Plymouth's business dealings with Isaac Allerton and the Dutch. Here, Read is right on target, taking on overly providentialist readings ofBook II and showing that Bradford had decidedly different goals from those imposed on him by critics who wish to see everything in theological terms. In subsequent chapters on Thomas Morton and Roger Williams, Read explores other avenues...

From pastoralism to tourism: The historical impact of changing land use practices in Namaqualand

We use the concept of ecological revolutions to explain the environmental history of Namaqualand, from the advent of pastoralism 2000 years BP, to colonial settlement in the 18th century and finally to the recent trend of de-agrarianization from the middle of the 20th century. Early traveller's records and census data are used to assess changes in the human population of the region and how this affected wildlife and agricultural practices. Pre-colonial indigenous hunter-gatherer (Bushmen) and pastoralist (Khoekhoen) populations in Namaqualand consisted of probably no more than a few thousand individuals. Over the next three centuries, the general population rose steadily to more than 65,000 people but has fallen in recent years. Wildlife appears not to have been abundant in Namaqualand's pre-colonial landscapes and large springbok ‘treks’ were probably a rare event. The number of domestic livestock in Namaqualand peaked in 1957 largely as a result of an increase in the number of sheep which have fallen steadily since this time. Crop production was absent from Namaqualand's pre-colonial landscapes but increased to cover nearly 30,000 ha in the early 1970s. The area under cultivation has declined by nearly two thirds since this time largely as a result of the large-scale abandonment of wheat farming in marginal environments. We touch on differences between the communal areas and private farms, particularly in terms of their human populations and agricultural impact on the land. Repeat landscape photographs support our main findings which suggest that both rocky, upland habitats and rivers have not been transformed substantially by land use practices in Namaqualand. Instead, sandy pediments have borne the brunt of human impacts in the region. Finally, we highlight the beginning of a new ecological revolution in Namaqualand due to changes in the global and national political economy.

The value of evidence about past abundance: marine fauna of the Gulf of California through the eyes of 16th to 19th century travellers

AbstractEyewitness accounts written by early travellers to ‘the new worlds’ provide valuable insights into how seascapes once looked. Although this kind of information has been widely used to chart human impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, it has been greatly overlooked in the marine realm. Here we present a synthesis of 16th to 19th century travellers’ descriptions of the Gulf of California and its marine wildlife. The diaries written by conquerors, pirates, missionaries and naturalists described a place in which whales were ‘innumerable,’ turtles were ‘covering the sea’ and large fish were so abundant that they could be taken by hand. Beds of pearl oysters that are described had disappeared by 1940 and only historical documents reveal the existence of large, widespread, deep pearl oyster reefs, whose ecology and past functions we know little about. Disqualifying the testimonies of early visitors to a region as ‘anecdotal’ is dangerous; it may lead to setting inappropriate management targets that could lead to the extinction of species that are rare today but were once much more abundant. Moreover, it represents unfair historical judgement on the work of early natural historians, scholars and scientists. We suggest that the review and analytical synthesis of reports made by early travellers should become part of the pre‐requisites for deciding how to manage marine ecosystems today.

Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan Victoria Weston (bio) Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan. By Christine M. E. Guth. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004. xxii, 234 pages. $60.00, cloth; $29.95, paper. Cultural identities, consumerism and its varied impacts on discourses in art history, and the male body as canvas for personal expression are among the many topics addressed in Christine Guth's immensely engaging new book, Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan. The Longfellow referred to in the title is not the famed American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but his conflicted son, Charles. Thanks to the stature of his poet-father, Charles Longfellow's effects, including a rich collection of souvenir photographs and correspondence, have been preserved at Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through these and other personal effects, Guth places Longfellow among early travelers who visited Japan during the formative years of that country's opening to the West. Charles Longfellow makes an interesting case study for examining the interactions and cultural transactions made between Japan and the United States. Longfellow traveled to Japan in 1871, just a few years after the inauguration of the Meiji era (1868) and at a time when elites in the United States were identifying destinations more unusual than Europe for travel. Longfellow ended up spending two years in Yokohama and Tokyo, where he then returned once more in 1885. Guth employs his letters, souvenir photographs, and other personal effects of the 1871–73 sojourn to recount Longfellow's exploits and to situate them in larger cultural contexts. Longfellow, as Guth explains in her introduction, is unlike other Americans previously studied for their travels to Japan because he was neither an art expert nor a professional in any standard sense. He was a tourist, plain and simple, and what he encountered, spoke of, and collected speaks to the average tastes of American elites fascinated by the potential exotic destinations held for adventure, freedom from accustomed social responsibilities, and the purchase of enviable trophy objects. Longfellow's collection, covering a range of objects prized by Victorian tastes, offers interesting contrasts to collections formed by Western connoisseurs studied in the history of fine art. Situating Longfellow within broader cultural contexts transports this book from one that is biography driven to one richly revealing of life in 1870s Japan and the American Northeast. As the title of the book indicates, Guth discusses the tattoos Charles Longfellow acquired in Japan, but this is actually a relatively short discussion. Charles Longfellow, his travels in Japan, and the products of that travel are the subjects of this book, and Guth's [End Page 185] work examines these experiences in ways valuable to our understanding of the period overall. Among her many topics, for instance, is Longfellow's collection of souvenir photographs. In exploring these, Guth discusses commercial photography in Japan, the impact of photos on foreigners' itineraries, the relationship of tourist sites to the Japanese tradition of meisho, the esteem foreigners had for these photos as mementoes and as art objects made unique by their hand coloring, the motivations of both the Japanese and the Westerners who had themselves photographed, and the social uses made of photo albums in American parlors. She treats domestic objects, world travel, tattooing, and more in similarly nuanced ways. Guth employs a wide range of primary sources to contextualize the experiences of Americans in Japan. Works written by the early "Japan hands" are well known, but Guth adds the accounts of more casual travelers and in doing so opens the topic considerably. Her discussion in general does something quite formidable: she bridges her topics, connecting contemporary Japan and the United States. As Guth explains in her introduction, there is scholarship on Meiji Japan and on the growing taste in the United States for things Japanese, but very little that brings these two together. The reader gains insight into Longfellow's Japanese-made tattoos, for instance, by understanding their social significance in both Japan and the West. Guth's first chapter on the many meanings of world travel sets the stage for Longfellow in Japan. In approaching this subject, Guth addresses issues of social class, gender, and...

Perspectives on Travel Writing by Glenn Hooper, Tim Youngs

MLR, I0I.4, 2006 I075 Herman and Bart Vervaeck observe, one of the most important arguments in favour of structuralist narratology is that it encourages the literary critic to 'describe the workings of the narrative more satisfactorily' (p. iOO) and thus delve deeper into the relationship between form and content. In this respect, students of literary criticism still have much to learn from classical narratology. On the other hand, readings that are too formalistic can lead to a blindness to wards phenomena external to the text that influence the processes of narration. This is acknowledged inChapter 3, which is dedicated to a discussion of postmodern nar ratology, narratology and ethics, gender and narratology, and possible worlds. This is the weakest chapter in the book because it does not properly engage with liter ary critics who have sought to establish a link between a text's narrative form and wider ideology. Herman and Vervaeck deny that there is any 'compelling or causal connection between a formal textual element and a contextual, ideological element' (P. I32). They are not prepared tomake the leap of faith that somany literary critics do when forging a link between a narrative's formal structures and the wider cultural or ideological context. The authors' cautious scepticism and preference for amore scientifically defensible model for literary criticism reveal an underlying frustration with those critics who let their own subjectivity and ideological position inform their judgements. However, the authors acknowledge that we cannot have literary criticism without these since all literature requires a reader and a context. This contradiction remains unresolved by the end of this chapter. The Handbook ofNarrative Analysis therefore ultimately acknowledges that narratology remains beguiling precisely be cause no theory or model can ever completely map the creative processes involved in the production of narratives. UNIVERSITYOFBRISTOL CARAGH WELLS Perspectives on Travel Writing. Ed. by GLENN HOOPER and TIM YOUNGS. (Studies in European Cultural Transition, i9) Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2004. X+2IO pp. C45. ISBN O-7546-0366-o. This new collection is issued through the Ashgate Studies in European Cultural Transition series and presents eleven new essays which in their different ways engage with what the editors identify as the extreme fluidity of travel writing. Jan Borm opens the volume by arguing arrestingly that travel writing does not constitute a genre, but is rather a convenient umbrella term covering a diversity of works. In particular, he reminds the unwary reader-and the point cannot be made too often-that it is amis take to expect too much factual accuracy in this context. Helga Quadflieg elaborates on this position and also strikes akeynote theme of the volume when she proposes that early travellers such asRichard Hackluyt have a double subject: 'In exploring Others, these travellers explore themselves, and in describing Others they write themselves' (p. 29). Far from being a simple move abroad, travel writing thus should be read as a reflection on or interrogation of the traveller's own culture. Betty Hagglund explains Anne Grant's views of early nineteenth-century North America as being refracted through the imagery of children's story books and being shaped by contrasts with the Scottish Highlands. As the business of tourism developed, Glenn Hooper finds a particularly strident rhetoric promoting visits to Ireland around the time of the potato blight and interrogates the implications of the term 'prospects' for material change in that country. Many of the contributors focus their essays on cultural encounters. Jean-Yves Le Disez examines the tension between wildness and gentrification in ac counts of Brittany; Peter Hulme considers the impact of the USA on the Caribbean in the nineteenth century; and Erdmute Wenzel White describes writing on Brazil as Io76 Reviews instances of the 'fantastic made literal' (p. I02). Here travellers' fascination with the 'visible world' leads them to stress the exotic and the dangerous. The circumstances of travellers' lives can induce different forms of self-consciousness in their writings. Loredana Polezzi shows how British-born Estella Canziani adopts a series of Italian, British, and American identities in her account of Italy. And Padmini Mongia locates amulti-generic strategy inAmitav Ghosh which reflects the perceived 'impossibility of finding any pure traditions or...

Siberian Discovery by D. s> Collins (review)

REVIEWS 153 Using these principles,Poe has identifiedtwenty-nine texts offeringthe best ethnographicinformationfound among the foreign accounts (vol. i, pp. 6-7). However, not all these best texts are included in the series. EarlyExplorations feature Collins and Fletcher (vol. i), Herbersteinand Margeret (2), Korb (3), Meyerberg (4), Neuville (5), Olearius (6), Paul of Aleppo (7 and 8), Petreius (9), Possevino (i o), Reutenfels (ii) and Staden (I 2). The editor does not explain explicitly why he has preferredthese thirteen texts to the remaining sixteen. However, hejustly notes that the chosen texts are the most important eye-witnessed, analyticaland narrativeethnographicaccounts of pre-modern Russia. The readerwill not findcriticalor analyticalcomments to most of the travel accounts in Poe's volumes. Only the accounts of Korb and Paul of Aleppo have introductions by nineteenth-century editors, and the editions of Possevino and Staden feature detailed historical comments by Hugh F. Graham and FritzEpsteinrespectively.Biographicaldata on the authorsin the introductory notes to each volume is sketchy and in places superficial. What the reader gets from the series is the unique opportunityto study early travel texts as cultural artefacts. Without going to the library's rare book department, we can now easily access printed texts that circulated across early-modern Europe and formed common views of Russia. Many familiar engravings appear here in their original context; we can also see original typescripts (illegible in places despite the best effortsof the publisher),page layouts, and even typos. Marshall Poe and his publisher RoutledgeCurzon should be praisedfor undertakingthisproject. In the introduction,Poe writes with impressive confidence that 'this work will be of immense value'. He is right. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies SERGEI BOGATYREV University College London Collins, D. (ed.). Siberian Discovey. I2 vols. Curzon Press, Richmond, 2000. 4,000 pp. Maps. Illustrations.Notes. ?950.??. THIS comprehensive and beautifully bound edition provides readers with facsimileeditions of fourteen raretravelaccounts through Siberiaby Western Europeanauthors.The collection isprefacedby a detailedandwell referenced introduction by David Collins, which gives the full context of each work as well as placing the genre of travelliteraturewithin an authoritativehistorical frame. These twelve volumes are an important addition to any librarywhere students are taught not only the geography of Eurasia but also the cultural historyof the concept of Europe.As Collinsnotes in his introduction,the early eighteenth-centurytravelaccounts of Siberiaplayed an importantrole in the development of political and historic thought in Europe a role which is now forgotten.This collection predominatelyemphasizesworksfromthe start of the twentieth century an interesting period on the cusp of the great revolutionswhich changed the face of most of Siberia. The collection is arrangedin a not quite strictalphabeticalorderwhich also worksmore or less chronologically. I54 SEER, 84, I, 2006 The collection opens with facsimile editions of the seventeenth-century works of IsbrantIdes and Adam Brandwhich were up until now most easily accessible only in a Russian edition. These are travel accounts of a Dutch envoy and his secretary on theirjourney to Peking. The work is deservedly famous not only for its pioneering descriptions of indigenous peoples in Western Siberia and the Baikal region, but for its wonderful primitivist engravings. There can be no better introduction to the history of colonial curiosity in Eurasia as to the history of how early Europeans understood themselvesin relationto others. Volume two provides a copy of the well-illustrated I927 English-language edition of Sten Bergman's Through Kamchatka byDog-SledandSkis(Swedish original 1924). This is an invaluable glimpse at the cosmopolitan fur trade society in Kamchatkaconsistingof Scots, Scandinaviansand Americans. Volumes three and four are reproductions of the works of two important diplomats (althougharguablynot as rare).CharlesHawes (1904) and Fridtjof Nansen (I 9I4) give forward-lookingdevelopmentalist accounts of Sakhalin and the YeniseiNorth respectively.Bothworksfallinto an importanttradition of regionalist studies which focuses on populist concerns for the welfare of local peoples. These two reprintscan servewell any reading course looking at the ideology of social development and in particular in these two regions which are well documented in other works by Anton Chekhov and Maria Czaplicka. The theme of industrialexpansion in Siberiais reinforcedby volumes five, six and ten. Volumes five and six present the worksof a Britishengineer and an economist. Volume ten includes, seemingly for ironic contrast, the travel account of an American...

Lake Rudolf as an Iconic Geographic Space in East Africa

Iconic geographic spaces come into being because they are unique and offer opportunities for self-challenge and accomplishment. Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana) in East Africa has been such an iconic space during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. While a number of early travelers to the lake pursued objectives such as hunting, scientific inquiry, and furthering the aims of colonial powers, they also frequently derived self-satisfaction from having “reached” this iconic geographic space. An examination of some of these travelers' experiences reveals the centrality of the lake's iconic space attraction for them and how it met individual needs for self-fulfillment and accomplishment.

Early Modern European Travel Writing After Orientalism

Early Modern European Travel Writing After OrientalismGERALD MACLEAN, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 267 pp. $59.95.RICHMOND BARBOUR, Before Orientalism: London's Theater of the East 1576-1626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 238 pp. $75.00.DANIEL CAREY, ed. Asian Travel in the Renaissance. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 234 pp. $39.95.The personal travel narrative was just coming into its own in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its origins range from faith-based pilgrimage narratives to the histories of Herodotus to the fictional melange of Mandeville. Early modern travel writers based their narratives sometimes on firsthand information, sometimes on prior writings, or sometimes on rumor. Moreover, like other forms at the time, travel writing is an admixture defying easy classification: part autobiography, personal letter, geography, natural history, ethnography, and more. Because of these factors, travel writing is notoriously unreliable as a source of knowledge about early modern culture. Modern disciplinary divisions further complicate travel writing as a subject. Is it the domain of literary scholars, historians, geographers, or someone else? When scholars utilize travel writing, it typically has been employed only in the service of other research. Literary scholars, for example, have used travel writing to illuminate dramatic texts, but rarely as a means of insight in to early modern cultural practices.That said, the insights travel writing can provide are often a product of these difficulties. As a record of cross-cultural encounters, for example, travel writing can reveal how the English regarded the cultural other, and how they regarded themselves. However, it was not until the emergence of interdisciplinary fields such as cultural studies and post-colonial studies, and especially with the advent of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), that travel writing (though mostly post-Enlightenment European) became a rich source for studies of the rise of modernism, colonialism, and capitalism. Examining discursive and material practices through travel writing has helped scholars from various fields see the instability of travel writing as a source of insight rather than confusion. However, the insights gained from this work, especially about the development of discourses and practices of colonialism, are not as easily applied to the early modern period. The dominance of European economic and military power and the stability of binaries such as East/West and Christian/Muslim that characterize post-Enlightenment cross-cultural encounters cannot be assumed relevant in the early modern period. What is more, the dominance of scholarly interest in European colonialism sometimes has led to skewed readings of early modern cross-cultural encounters that attempt to establish originary points for later colonial projects.The Ottoman and Mogul Empires, rather than European states, were economic and military centers of power in the early modern period. Encounters and exchanges between these cultures and Europe were often asymmetrical, and characterized by anxiety and fear on the part of the Europeans and indifference on the part of the Ottomans or Moguls. Imperial projects in the New World were clearly established in the sixteenth century, while such projects in Asia and Africa, comparatively, developed more slowly. European interest in these areas tended to focus on trade and commercial competition rather than colonization. This is not to say that the Europeans did not portray themselves as culturally or morally superior; the writing of travelers, diplomats, merchants, and others all deployed a range of rhetorical strategies to manage the instability and asymmetry of these encounters.The books under consideration here, mostly the work of literary scholars, are continuations of the interdisciplinary practice begun by Said and first adapted to the early modern period by scholars such as Nabil Matar and Daniel Goffman. …

Turtle Tears and Captive Appetites: The Problem of White Desire in the Caribbean

In the last two decades, scholars of racial history have pointed out that the category of race as it developed in the nineteenth century did not yet exist in that form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 Early modem Europeans envisioned their differences as defined not necessarily by race but, rather, by other oppositional qualities-for example, the holy and the heretical, the civilized and the savage, or, arguably the most important category in the eighteenth century, the free and the enslaved.2 In this article, I examine this third construction of early modem differentiation-the free and the enslaved. I argue that Anglo-Caribbean travel writing demonstrates the development of a proto-racial, proto-abolitionist hermeneutic of appetite by which travel writers code slave rebellion and white power through tropes of culinary violence. I assert that, while race did not yet exist as a physiological category in the early modem period, the physiological category of appetite certainly did, and early modern travel writers relied on this category to position themselves against or alongside the Africans whom they encountered. Though for a time racial discourse coincides with and then eventually supplants appetitive language as the primary mode for expressing physiological differentiation, during the early modem period a rhetoric of gastronomy serves as the dominant and most significant form for expressing the bodily differences and similarities between slave and free.

Performance assessment of solute transport upscaling methods in the context of nuclear waste disposal

Abstract Stochastic simulations of solute transport in heterogeneous log 10 K random fields were conducted at two different support scales to assess solute transport upscaling methods in the context of nuclear waste disposal. A very fine grid-scale is used to obtain a reference solution of the real problem, which is based on data from the Sellafield site. A coarse-scale model is obtained by upscaling the heterogeneous grid-blocks onto equivalent homogeneous hydraulic conductivity tensors calculated using the Simple Laplacian Technique. Random fields were designed with different degrees of heterogeneity such that the standard deviation of log 10 K ranged between 0 and 1. It is shown that the early arrival time of particles at a control location, reflected in the lower limit of the 95% confidence interval of the mass flux cumulative density function stochastic process, associated with the upscaled model is strikingly similar to the one associated with the real solution for all heterogeneities. This is encouraging for the application of upscaled stochastic models to the design of nuclear waste repositories where the design of a nuclear waste disposal facility relies on the estimation of the early travel time of radionuclides arriving at a control location. On the contrary, the late arrival time of particles at the control location is largely underestimated by the upscaled model.

Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (review)

Reviewed by: Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest Thomas Frederick Howard Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest Lawrence S. Earley . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2004. 322 pp., map, photographs. $27.50 cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2886-6). Much of the coastal plain from North Carolina to east Texas is "piney woods," familiar to travelers on hundreds of miles of highways I-10 and I-95. But as Lawrence Earley shows us, what they see today is a much altered and diminished shadow of the vast and seemingly infinite longleaf pine domain that impressed such early travelers as William Bartram, Basil Hall, and Charles Lyell. Only scattered old growth remnants survive of what was one of the largest forest realms in North America, some 92 million acres dominated by Pinus palustris. Earley does an excellent job of describing both the original forest and the profound alterations of the last 150 yr. Earley, a former editor of the magazine Wildlife in North Carolina, is identified as a freelance writer on the dust jacket, though "independent scholar" would serve as well. He writes for a general readership, but the level of documentation and a 24-page bibliography make this book suitable for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in geography or environmental history. The book consists of fourteen chapters, with a prologue and epilogue. The chapters are grouped in four parts, labeled Ecology, Exploitation, Forest Management, and Ecosystem Restoration. There are 35 photographs and drawings, and 10 pages of index. Much in Earley's discussion of ecology will be familiar to readers who keep up with southeastern conservation issues, such as the role of fire in maintaining the longleaf pine ecosystem and high-profile denizens like the red-cockaded woodpecker and the gopher tortoise. Perhaps less familiar is the remarkably high rate of endemism in longleaf forest. Both Native Americans and the earliest European/African settlers seem to have trod relatively lightly on this land, using it chiefly for hunting or running cattle and hogs. Serious exploitation of longleaf pine came with an intensification of non-Indian settlement, and, broadly speaking, took two different forms: the production of "naval stores," and logging. (The pulp and paper industry came much later and used replacement species of pine.) A thorough discussion of that mysterious term "naval stores" is a welcome feature of the text. The links between pines and ships are manifold and ancient. Some are obvious, such as wood for masts and planking, but the heart of the matter is non-wood products like tar and pitch, rosin and turpentine. It takes some effort of imagination to realize how much wooden ships depended on these other products of the pine tree. Ropes are one of many examples; a single sailing ship required miles of rope, and they all had to be treated with pine tar. Longleaf is among the most resinous of pines, which accounts both for the plant's usefulness for naval stores and the prominence of fire in its ecosystem. In principle, the collection of resin from pine trees need be no more destructive [End Page 153] than the gathering of sap from sugar maples, but in fact early methods were crude and tree mortality reached 75%. Turpentine, a humble paint thinner at the hardware store today, is distilled from resin and 150 yr ago it was in demand for many other applications. As late as the midnineteenth century the effects of turpentining were restricted largely to forest tracts near navigable streams, but railroad construction eventually opened up the entire coastal plain. The destructiveness of turpentining became infamous and pressures for conservation began to mount. Only with Charles Herty's introduction of the cup method, which allowed a more sustained tapping of the trees, did the situation improve. Use of longleaf pines for construction timber began in colonial times, but commercial logging was long limited to areas near rivers large enough to permit the passage of rafts of logs. Furthermore, the commercial value of longleaf was depressed by consumer preference for construction timber from the white pine (P. strobes) of the northeastern and Great Lakes states. The...

"The Hungry Soul": Sacramental Appetite and the Transformation of Taste in Early American Travel Writing

"The Hungry Soul": Sacramental Appetite and the Transformation of Taste in Early American Travel Writing