This article examines the inscriptive practices and epistemological bases to truth claims in narratives

of travel. It does so, in part, to call for more work in geography that is attentive both to authors’ and
publishers’ redactive practices in travel writing and to the relationships among author, audience,
and publisher that underpin the content of travel texts. Our emphasis is on narrative as practice
and—with illustrative reference to works of travel on South America—in exposing the connections
between travelers’ modes of inscription and the different ways in which the truth and veracity of
their written accounts was established. Our broader concern is twofold: To take further current
interest in travel, geography, and writing and to connect the geographical study of travel narratives
to wider interdisciplinary interest in the communicative power of knowledge in print.

The discursive and representational practice of travel writing—it’s complicated practical and
epistemic history—has been subject to scrutiny from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (Adams
1962; Blunt 1995; Stagl 1995; Duncan and Gregory 1999; Kuehn and Smethurst 2008). Historians of
science stress the importance of voyages of exploration, and their related printed narratives, to the
making of modern science (Iliffe 2003; Liebersohn 2003; Secord 2004). Scholars in historical and
cultural geography have considered these practices of inscription and of reading central to the
production and circulation of geographical knowledge and to the regulation of those institutions
that facilitated travel, exploration, and trade (Driver 2001; Ogborn 2007). This focus on the
production and transmission of geographical knowledge in print has been paralleled by studies
scrutinizing the epistemic practices of geographical writing (Mayhew 2004; Ogborn 2004; Withers
2004a, 2004b). Historians of the book, among others, have illustrated the value of spatial and visual
perspectives in understanding the making, distribution, and reading of printed texts (Johns 1998;
Secord 2000; Barnes 2002; Livingstone 2005; Keighren 2006; Mayhew 2007). Literary scholars have
reviewed the connections between narratives of travel, empire, “self” and “other,” and literary form
(Leask 2002; Fulford, Lee, and Kitson 2004; Regard 2009). Taken together, this work shows that the
study of narratives of travel is an important shared enterprise.

Within geography, study of the material practices of travel writing, and the publication and
circulation of printed narratives, can usefully complement existing work on the discursive qualities
of travel texts (Kearns 1997; Sharp 2002; Guelke and Guelke 2004) and, for those interested in the
history of geographical knowledge, illuminate the practices that underlie knowledge’s making,
movement, and evaluation in written form (Latour 1999; Livingstone 2003). This being so, it is
surprising that relatively little consideration has been given to the epistolary and productive
practices that lie within and behind printed works of travel and exploration. Most work in geography
either focuses on the content of printed narratives to the neglect of epistolary conventions or
assumes as largely unproblematic the relationship among writers’ narratives, their experiences in
the field, and the printed version of their work. But as different studies have shown, publishers did
alter their authors’ manuscript narratives to serve different demands (MacLaren 1994, 2003;
Finkelstein 2002). Authors themselves also regularly modified their work prior to its publication. The
move from end route writing as one authorhasit, to the fuller journal, the draft manuscript, and the
published version was neither as smoothnoras linear as this staging suggests (MacLaren 1992).
Interrogating the embodied practices that facilitated travel writing— “seeing, collecting, recording,
mapping and narrating” (Driver 2001, 12)—is central to any investigation of the ways in which
authors sought to establish a correspondence between their lived experiences and the textual
representation of those experiences.
Because this is so, more remains to be known of the epistemic bases to authors’ claims in their
narratives about the truth of their experiences, about narrative as a practice, and about how authors
and publishers sought to establish a correspondence between what they saw or were told, and what
they wrote about in the published accounts.

Correspondence is a matter of epistolary culture and an epistemic desideratum: That what is written
about should correspond in some way to the world thus described. Epistolary practice is vital to
narrative dissemination and to the promotion of geographical knowledge, but it is understudied. In
epistemological terms, correspondence is often presumed: As a question of one’s own eye
witnessing or of the testimony of reliable informants. In both cases, knowledge is based on
testimony and testimony on trust—in one’s self, by direct encounter, or in others’ credibility (Coady
1992; Lipton 1998; Fricker 2004). Because publishers could alter their authors’ words, and authors
had to rely on others’ words as well as their own mediated experiences, correspondence between
the account as written and the account as published cannot be assumed and so must be tested
(Williams 2001).

In looking at such questions of inscription and epistemology in travel narratives, this article
addresses the claim that “closer attention to the practices, techniques and technologies of writing
itself can show how they give shape to the meanings of geographical knowledge” (Ogborn 2004,
296). Our aim is to urge that scholars consider inscription and epistolary practice in studying travel
narratives and, more specifically, that they treat authors and publishers as mediators of, rather than
simple producers of, travel texts. This is not a call to geographers to be attentive to genre. Although
literary form and convention have, historically, exerted an important influence on travelers’ actions,
observations, and descriptions, travel writing is more than simply stylistic question: Its practices and
performances are influenced by wider cultural imperatives—moral, aesthetic, and scientific (Batten
1978; Leask 2002). In drawing together current geographical and other work on travel and
exploration, writing, and textual production, our aim is to scrutinize the epistemic bases to authorial
claims as part of revealing what the study of travel narratives as embodied practice can reveal about
truth claims and the authenticity of textual narratives.

To illustrate these concerns, we examine the work of London-based publisher John Murray and
several of that firm’s published accounts of early nineteenth century travel in South America.
Murray issued more than 200 travel books during the first half of the nineteenth century. These
texts, together with their earlier manuscript incarnations and their authors’ correspondence with
the firm, provide an important record of how they were written, how they were edited and adapted
for publication, and how the claims they made about distant locales were evaluated and assessed.
In attending to the questions of how, where, when, and why Murray’s travelers recorded the details
of their journeys, we consider the degree to which form and epistolary style disciplined content and,
in turn, influenced the accounts’ and the authors’ perceived credibility. Given that Murray’s
travelers were, as with all others, only ever partial and imperfect witnesses, our concern is to
understand how they assured themselves— and, through the published versions of their work, their
audiences—of the truth, how the epistemological bases to their claims were differently judged and
how these assessments influenced their narratives. By examining for South America, the “material
realities of knowledge production” (Safier 2008, 9), in terms of inscription, epistemology, and
credibility, we seek to understand how Murray’s travelers addressed the problem of “mediating the
non-European world to a European public” (Leask 1998, 165).
The choice of South American travel narratives in this period is more than simply illustrative.
Colonial and postcolonial South America has, for historians of science, exploration, and geography,
become an increasingly significant research focus (Butzer 1992; Mundy 1996; Cafiizares-Esguerra
2001, 2005, 2006; Bauer 2003; Saldafia 2006; Barrera-Osorio 2008; Bleichmaret al. 2008; Safier
2008).

This work has overturned a prevalent view that, in terms of travel narratives, Europeans “invented”
South America or, even more specifically, that the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and
French botanist Aimé Bonpland together constructed South America in the Western imagination as
a consequence of their five-year exploration of tropical America between 1799 and 1804 (Brown
2006; Pratt 2008). The continent that Humboldt encountered at the turn of the nineteenth century
was, in fact, new neither to science nor to the European imagination but, by uniting Enlightenment
empiricism and Romantic idealism to reveal nature’s fundamental unity, he successfully cast it anew
(Dettelbach 1996, 2001; Leask 1998; Godlewska 1999; Walls 2009). In this respect, he and Bonpland
were, perhaps, justified in (re)presenting South America as a New Continent, but the written report
of their expedition was, in effect, an exercise in rediscovery, depicting a “virgin territory, ‘nature’
unmediated by civilization, awaiting the transformative magic of European reason” (Leask 2002, vii).

Although the revisionist work signaled to earlier has criticized this interpretation by stressing the
significance of indigenous natural knowledge within the South American context, it is also the case
that Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s imaginative reframing of South America—which met with a varied
reception in Europe—was concurrent with, and to some extent implicated in, South America’s
liberation from colonial rule (Rippy and Brann 1947; Rupke 1999). The revolutionary movements
that brought independence to the South American colonies between 1810 and 1825 were
accompanied by relaxation of travel restrictions, which made it possible for non-Iberian Europeans
to realize long-held commercial and exploratory ambitions (Whitaker 1960). In scientific and
political terms, South America was opened out in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it
was this manifestation that motivated British travelers to explore, commercialize, and write about
that emergent continent. Murray’s texts—part, then, of this larger “boom of travel accounts” that
followed an efflorescence of travel and exploration—came to serve as the basis to popular
understandings of South America, in Britain at least (Leask 2001, xvi). That they did so, and at a
particular moment, highlights the importance of placing textual narrative and its critical exegesis in
wider context.

The Inscription and Mediation of Geographical Knowledge: John Murray and Narratives of South
America

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, travelers “descended on South America by the
dozen” (Pratt 2008, 143). These travelers have been characterized both as “the helpless victims of
an almost invincible ignorance about conditions in Latin America” (Gregory 1992, 1) and as the
“advance scouts for European capital” (Pratt 2008, 143). The opening up of South America
motivated travelers to compose narratives based on their journeys, several of which served as the
basis for popular understandings of that continent in the post revolutionary period (Trifilo 1958;
Jones 1986; Brown 2006; Pefialoza 2008). Much as Humboldt’s writings had done, the work of what
has been described as a “capitalist vanguard” contributed to the “reinvention of America” in the
Western imagination (Pratt 2008, 143). If it is true that some British travelers were “simple migrants
and adventurers from humble or middling backgrounds” and “not at all” evangelists of British capital
(Brown 2006, 98, 99), it is nonetheless clear that mercantilist imperatives powerfully shaped the
British sense of South America in the early nineteenth century (Ferns 1953, 1992; Stone 1968;
Ridings 1985). That is not to say that there was one European imagination at work in constructing a
single South America. In relation to different influences— Romanticist ideology, Humboldtian
science, commercial enterprise—the travelers went about their business differently and so wrote
their travels in different ways. For that reason, South America was a continent read and narrated
variously as scientific curiosity and natural spectacle, site of adventuresome endeavor and
commercial possibility.

Between 1824 and 1839, John Murray issued almost a dozen accounts of South American travel
(Table 1). These narratives helped shape readers’ perceptions of South America and simultaneously
cement “the cultural verities of ‘home” (Gilroy 2000, 1). By taking the reader “out of his [sic]
armchair and into the furthest-flung parts of the world,” Murray’s texts collapsed geographical
distance while highlighting cultural dissimilarities (Carpenter 2008, 125; Seed 2004). In bringing a
poorly understood continent to the attention of the British reading public, Murray’s South American
volumes were geographically revelatory. They were also politically opportune, being published at a
particular moment in the post revolutionary history of the region. These texts reflected, then,
different authorial intentions but were part of a conscious publishing strategy. Murray’s South
American texts were issued during the culmination of Romanticism—a period in which travel writing
was “next in popularity to novels” (Jarvis 2004, 74). Under the guidance of John Murray II (1778-
1843), the Murray firm helped create and satisfy an increased popular demand for travel literature,
perhaps his “greatest contribution to the advancement of knowledge and of human understanding
of the world” (Carpenter 2008, 124). Murray’s strategy was commercial rather than philanthropic,
however, and reflected the changing economic circumstances of the region and, in Murray’s eyes,
his audiences’ preparedness to buy and read books on South America. When the failure of a number
of British-backed speculative mining ventures in the 1830s caused “everything connected with
Spanish America” to fall into disrepute, Murray was disinclined to publish anything further upon the
subject (National Library of Scotland [hereafter NLS] MS.40945). When the British diplomat
Woodbine Parish approached Murray in 1838 with his account of his long residence in Buenos Aires,
the publisher was dismissive: “The subject of South America is so utterly devoid of Public interest at
the present time, that I do not think that any work relating to it would have any chance of selling
sufficiently to defray the expenses of its publication” (NLS MS.41910). Although Murray eventually
did publish Parish’s volume, it was the last South American account the firm issued until 1847. In
just fifteen years, popular interest in South America and its associated travel accounts escalated
and, as Murray perceived it, evaporated.

Rather than offer an exhaustive analysis of the dozen or so travelers who contributed to Murray’s
South American canon, this article focuses on four authors whose background, training, and
observational and inscriptive techniques illustrate diversity in addressing the questions of writing
practice and epistemological reliance on one’s sources. They are Maria Graham (1785-1842), an
established author and lone female traveler; Francis Bond Head (1793-1875), the manager of a
speculative mining syndicate; and William Smyth (1800-1877), naval officer and artist, and his
traveling companion Frederick Lowe. The motivation for these travelers’ journeys was distinctive
and different. Graham was driven by curiosity over South American society and politics. Head
traveled to realize commercial objectives. Smyth and Lowe sought to chart a navigable river route
between Peru and the Atlantic. Their narratives are, in consequence, varied in form, style, and
content. For this reason, they demonstrate different imaginative conceptions of South America and
illustrate the dissimilar forms that travel writing assumed— forms that, when subject to scrutiny,
reveal different epistemological routes to truth.

Maria Graham and the Regulated Journal

Maria Graham’s narrative of South American travel was the first such commissioned by John Murray
II. In 1821, Graham’s husband, a British naval officer, was placed in command of HMSDoris and
ordered to South America as part of a squadron sent to protect the interests of British merchants in
the newly established republics (Marchant 1963). Having already published well-received narratives
of travels in India and Italy (Graham 1812, 1820), Graham saw South America as a further literary
opportunity. Before departing, she wrote to Murray to ask, “If I live to return & if I bring anything
worth publishing will you have anything to do with it?” (NLS MS.40185, 20 May 1821).

Graham’s experiences in South America resulted in two travel texts: Journal of a Voyage to Brazil
(Graham 1824b) and Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824a). Both embodied a Romantic concern
for subjective experience and an ethnographic attention to social organization (Mavor 1993; Hahner
1998; Hayward 2003; Pérez-Majia 2004). An explorer of culture as much as of territory, Graham
typifies what Pratt (2008, 141) termed the “exploratrices sociales.” Graham found herself at the
nexus of political transition in both Chile and Brazil; her texts were “firsthand accounts of those
historically important conflicts” (Pérez-Majia 2004, 77). Graham met the “principal actors” in
Brazilian and Chilean political life and members of the Creole elite (Mavor 1993, xi). Contact with
these individuals had an important bearing on Graham’s South American experience and on the
subsequent social and political focus of her travel account. The epistemic basis to her observations
and the stylistic qualities of her journal related, however, to earlier experience of travel and
authorship.

Graham’s (1812) Journal of a Residence in India had been compiled from letters sent to a female
acquaintance. Given the intimate and personal nature of this correspondence, Graham had felt it
necessary to omit in the published version of her work “such private details...as could not with
propriety be obtruded on the world” (Graham 1812, vi). In Graham’s view, transforming these
private missives (which she claimed originally not to have intended to publish) into a form suitable
for public consumption “lessened its [the volume’s] authority and tasked her self-denial” (Graham
1812, vii). In her subsequent travel narratives on South America, Graham eschewed the epistolary
format and instead presented regulated extracts from her written journals. The journal—the
“natural extension of the private diary” (Latshaw 1998, 142)—was, for her, a mode of and space for
inscription that occupied an epistemic gap between the public and the private. Although
constrained by its chronological framework as a diurnal register of events, the travel journal could
be “both informal and commodious”—containing as much or as little detail as the author felt able
or compelled to provide (Clapp 2004, 63). Despite journalizing’s quotidian rationale, there was no
expectation among Romantic-era readers that a travel journal was an immediate and unmediated
account of events. As Sherman (1996, 181) has noted, “The unspecified interval [between event and
record] might allow for retrospective mediation between the infinite particularity of the original
transaction and the judiciously culled (though still date structured) narrative.” What might be
thought of as the “narrative teleology” of a travel account is, in this respect, arrived at as the result
of authorial or editorial redaction (Currie 2005, 27). The published version of a travel narrative is,
then, “shaped retrospectively, determined by the results of the voyage, as the writer. .and/or editor
arranges events to lead up to and conform with those results” (Currie 2005, 27-28; MacLaren 2003).

Graham’s approach to journalizing was further structured by her desire for periodicity. She wrote
“regularly,” whether in her cabin aboard the Doris or in various domiciles on land, and journalizing
thus became a “daily, nay, almost hourly” activity (Graham 1824b, 207; Callcott 1835, 246). The
journal was a medium not simply for recording Graham’s impressions but also for reflecting on and
making sense of them. Regulated journalizing in part functioned as an entertainment: “a kind of
substitute for reading the new books of the day,” since the “uncertainty of the end keeps up the
interest” (Graham 1824a, 299). The tone and function of Graham’s journals changed, however,
following the illness and death of her husband end route between Brazil and Chile. Her text
thereafter became “a register of acute suffering; and... of alternate hopes and fears through days
and nights of darkness and storms” (Graham 1824b, 207). Graham excluded these grief-stricken
entries from the published version of her work, for fear that in offering “too much of a personal
nature” she might detract from the perceived objectivity of her text and contribute to an erroneous
conflation of femininity and unreason (Graham 1824b, iii; Blunt 1995). The admission of this elision
was, in the view of one critic, evidently “calculated to excite [in the reader] an emotion of tender
interest in her fate” (The Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany 1824, 703). Graham’s grief
even rendered her “unable and willing” to maintain her journal in the month following her
husband’s death (Graham 1824a, 113). Her arrival in Chile, and her first sight of the Andes, was
sufficient encouragement, however, “to take some interest in the things around me” and to resume
her journal (Graham 1824a, 113).

Graham’s travels in Brazil and Chile were not linear and “goal-directed”—as those of the capitalist
vanguard have been characterized—but occurred “in a centripetal fashion around places of
residence” (Pratt 2008, 154). A series of semi permanent abodes (typically provided for by Graham’s
elite contacts) offered her both spaces of with draw a land points of departure from which to
undertake “circular expeditions” of the social, topographical, and botanical novelties that
surrounded her (Pratt 2008, 156). These alternating periods of mobility and repose were an
imperative to and facilitative of Graham’s journal writing. She was conscious, however, of the
implicitly subjective nature of the form, and of the fact that the journal’s regularity did not equate
to its standardization:

There are days of hurry and happy occupation, that leave also a hurry of spirits, that permits but
the shortest and most concise entries; others there are, where idleness and the self-importance we
all feel, more or less, in writing a journal, swell the pages with laborious trifling; and some, again,
where a few short sentences tell of a state of mind that it requires courage indeed to exhibit to
another eye. (Graham 1824a, 145)
 The regulated journal as the basis to a travel account presented a tension, then, between its private
and quotidian composition and its hoped-for public and systematic expression. The published
versions of Graham’s journals were subject to a degree of reformulation and self-censorship on her
return to Britain in an effort to satisfy “public accessibility and private chastity” (Jones 1986, 78).
From her original notes, Graham produced what she termed a “copied journal”—a “more rational
and careful account” (Graham 1824a, 145). In reframing her observations thus, Graham’s intention
was to suggest that the act of transcription itself “may awaken associations and lead the writer to
other views” not considered at the time (Graham 1824a, 145-46). Graham was thus following that
redactive tradition in travel writing in which the author, in the process of revising a journal for
publication, seeks “to mingle the sense of dates, sequence, continuity, exactitude, and
comprehensiveness associated with the... journal with that of critical selectivity” (Sherman 1996,
162). Although Graham’s copied journals remained intimate and self-revelatory, they were also (and
explicitly so) mediated and regulated (Mavor 1993). For reasons variously of propriety, modesty,
credibility, and authority, they were not the same thing, materially or epistemically, as her original
handwritten notes.

Distance from the field, temporally and geographically, was seen by Graham to be necessary to the
distillation of reliable and relevant knowledge—her epistemic claim rested on a certain physical and
emotional detachment from her subject. Although she considered her copied journal to be “true to
nature, true to facts, and true to a better feeling than often dictates the momentary lines of spleen
or suffering,” she acknowledged that as a consequence of reinscription, “some shades of character
will be kept under by fear, some suppressed . . . through modesty” (Graham 1824a, 146). Graham
was making explicit, then, the plurality of truth and was essentially instructing her readers to “take
her writings as emotional, not literal, truth” (Hayward 2003, xvi). She was acknowledging that, in
her view, it was necessary not simply to tell the truth but also to be seen to be telling the truth:
Authorial and epistemic credibility rested in correct moral decorum (Shapin 1994; Lipton 1998). As
she noted to Murray, “of what use is it to tell [the] truth if it looks like a fib” (NLS MS.40186). Veracity
mattered to Graham, as it did to Murray’s other travelers, because she did not wish to be dismissed
as a travel liar (Sell 2006). It mattered, also, to her audience—whether they read her work for
pleasure or for its potential practical contribution to then-current questions of international politics
and trade.

Francis Bond Head—Rough Writing

Whereas the form and remit of Graham’s journals emphasized contemplation and reflection, social
exploration, and political analysis, the work of another of Murray’s travelers, Francis Bond Head,
was written to be sketchy, romantic, and thrilling, and thereby to satisfy a popular desire for work
of adventuresome travel. Head’s text—Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the
Pampas and Among the Andes (1826)—became “Far and away the most popular” of the “dozen
narratives of residence and travel in Argentina and Chile . . . published in England between
about1825 and 1835” (Haberly 2005, 287-88). Head’s representation of South America, particularly
his sympathetic view of the Gaucho, the nomadic inhabitants of the pampas, thus exerted a wider
influence on the reading public’s conception of South America than did those of his literary
contemporaries (Trifilo 1959). Precisely because Head’s narrative was seen to be “a most agreeable
specimen of the lighter kind of travels” (The London Magazine 1826, 232), it is instructive to
compare his approach to travel, observation, and inscription with that of Graham and others.

Following a military career during the Napoleonic Wars, Head was invited in 1825 to “take charge
of an Association, the object of which was to work the Gold and Silver Mines of the Provinces of Rio
de la Plata” (Head 1826, vi; Jackman 1958). In this capacity, Head led a party of Cornish miners to
inspect the prospects for gold and silver mining in the United Provinces. In completing his rapid
inspection of mines, Head traveled “up wards of six thousand miles” on horseback (Head 1826, ix).
The expedition was a costly failure: The provinces were in political chaos and the franchises
promised to the Association had largely been sold off to rivals (Head 1827). Although the commercial
imperative of his journey was clear, and in the vanguardist mode, Head took time to make “a few
rough notes, describing anything which interested or amused me” (Head 1826, x).

Head was explicit in describing his writing practice and in outlining why he chose to compose rough
notes rather than a more studied and considered journal: “During my journey I kept no regular
journal, for the country I visited was either a boundless plain, or desert mountains” (Head 1826, x).
With topographical monotony as a disincentive to regular writing, Head’s account was less
constrained than Graham’s by the diurnal regularity of the journal form. In consequence, his account
shifted between thematic discussions and chronological description. As for Graham, however,
writing provided Head with distraction and entertainment. His in-the-field notes were “made to
amuse my mind under a weight of responsibility to which it had never been accustomed” (Head
1826, xi). The suggestion that Head had not written his “too trifling” notes with a view to their
publication was, then, implicit (Head 1826, xi). Such an admission of modest intent was ubiquitous
in travel narratives—a mark of “epistemological decorum” in authorship (Shapin 1994, 193- 242),
and many narratives contained “highly conventionalized prefatory remarks” to that effect (Sherman
1996, 180).

Several of Murray’s South American travelers invoked British public and mercantile ignorance of
that continent as justification for seeking the publication of their accounts. To enter the field with
the explicit intention of publication implied arrogance: Epistemological decorum demanded appeals
to public edification and authorial effacement. Head’s contemporary and critic, the naval captain
Joseph Andrews, similarly emphasized his modesty and patriotic contribution to the British
understanding of South America in his Journey from Buenos Ayres (Andrews 1827): “To the
character of an author he makes no pretense. He is willing to contribute his mite to the general stock
of information respecting South America; but he is a sailor, whose course of life, like the contents
of the volumes, has been desultory” (Vol. 1, xxvii). William Smyth and Frederick Lowe(see later)
were likewise self-effacing in the preface to their Narrative of a Journey from Lima to Para (Smyth
and Lowe 1836): “We launch our little book, [and] should anything it contains hereafter prove in
any degree serviceable to our country, the highest object of our ambition will have been attained”
(iv). For Head, the notion of publication only occurred to him when the directors of the mining
company for which he was emissary “laid the blame” for the failure of the enterprise on him (Leask
2001, 275). Head’s stated reason for the publication of his notes was to counter the general public
and political ignorance of conditions in South America, which he perceived to have been the cause
of the syndicate’s failure. Publication was thus, perhaps, an “effort to clear his name” (Leask 2001,
275).
 In contrast to Graham’s largely sedentary inscriptive practices, Head’s notes were composed under
a variety of circumstances: “sometimes when I was tired, sometimes when I was refreshed,
sometimes with a bottle of wine before me, and sometimes with a cow’s-horn filled with dirty
brackish water, and a few were written on board the packet” (Head 1826, x). In revealing the
conditions under which he wrote, Head sought to explain deficiencies or omissions in his account
and to emphasize the arduous (and manly) circumstances under which his notes had been
composed—an epistemic claim that made a specific appeal to physical endeavor as a warrant of
experience and insight. Any potential failings of the text could be accounted for by the physical
exertion that the journey necessitated: Mobility determined rough writing. Elements of Head’s
account were, however, occasionally so terse as to lose definition and precision. One sentence in
which Head described his overnight accommodation was typical: “Our hut—old man immoveable—
Maria or Marequita’s figure—little mongrel boy—three or four other persons” (Head 1826, 54).
Later redaction was not predicated on production of a polished draft: Keeping it rough was
important (MacLaren 1992). He made this lack of major retrospective revision clear to his readers
in highlighting the “rough, unpolished state” of his account as “proof that I have no other object”
(Head 1826, xii). The epistemic implication of this statement was clear: Head’s text represented the
simple, unvarnished truth.

Although much is known of Murray’s editorial input in respect of his firm’s literary canon (Nicholson
2007), little material evidence concerning his South American narratives—manuscripts, proofs, or
correspondence— is extant. For this reason, it is difficult to quantify the extent to which Head’s
texts were mediated by Murray. What is clear is that although the original rough writing and lack of
editorial revision was seen by readers to be part of the “rhetorical appeal” of Head’s book, he was
subject to initial censure by one of Murray’s readers (Leask 2001, 276). In a letter to Murray, Head
recalled, “I was mauled by your adviser for my rough notes, which though heavily written were yet
kindly enough received by the public” (NLS MSS.42278-42279 (466A-C)).

The critical response to Head’s text was largely positive. The New Monthly Magazine and Literary
Journal (1827, 5) remarked, “We have seldom taken up a volume of personal narrative more replete
than this with information which...is of the highest importance.” Head was described as possessing
“an intellect of considerable grasp, as well as accurateness.” The excitement of Head’s book was
sufficient that “the reader is fairly instigated to stop and take breath, as if he had been bodily
accompanying the author.” In this respect, Head’s text provided a model of travel writing:

This is the kind of talent it is desirable to recognize in the writer of a book of travels, which proposes
to give the peculiarities of manners, and of country; to afford real information rather than ingenious
theories; and it is valuable in proportion to its rarity. We have an abundance of “picturesque
tourists,” and clever speculators; but here is a man who visits a part of the world, differing from our
own...and yet we venture to assert, that no individual with an average portion of intelligence will
rise from the perusal of this book, without having acquired a vivid and ineffaceable idea of the
interesting region it delineates. (The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 1827, 5)

Precisely because Head’s text was “hasty” and “not particularly smooth,” The London Magazine
(1826, 232) felt its style and content particularly suited its purpose: “In a small volume we cannot
have, neither do we want, much scientific or statistical detail—nor much political or historical
discussion: we are glad to find lively descriptions of manners, scenery, costume, and in short the
general appearances of man and of nature.” For this reviewer, the conditions under which Head
wrote his rough notes became almost tangible in print: “Head did not ride so fast as to prevent him
from taking notes on the back of his horse . . . [although] we fancy we can perceive the motion.”
The very fact that the circumstances of Head’s composition presented a physical challenge had the
consequence of rendering his text more immediate and thrilling than otherwise might be the case
(Thompson 2007). Rough Notes was enjoyable (and believable) precisely because it was “loose,
sketchy, and irregular in its manner” (La Belle Assemblée 1826, 173).

Smyth and Lowe and the Regimens of Instrumental Narrative

Being “free from pretense or affection of any kind” was a quality that commended the narrative of
William Smyth and Frederick Lowe to critics (The Eclectic Review 1836, 212). Smyth and Lowe
arrived in South America as naval officers aboard HMS Samarang but developed an independent
plan to identify and survey a navigable route between Peru and the Brazilian Atlantic coast by means
of the Amazonian distributaries. The expedition was privately conceived, financed by subscription
from British residents in Lima, and supported by the Peruvian government. The commercial
desirability of a transcontinental trade route was, for Smyth, clear—as was the “honorable
distinction of courageously achieving a useful discovery” which might follow its description (The
Edinburgh Review 1836, 396). Smyth, the expedition’s leader and narrative’s principal author had
previously served on HMSBlossom, one of five British ships dispatched during the 1820s to discover
the Northwest Passage (Paine 2000). That voyage, and British naval training, instilled in Smyth the
disciplines of regularly maintaining a log, collecting meteorological data, and conducting
astronomical observations to determine the ship’s location and also provided the opportunity to
contribute to the publication of that expedition’s account—Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and
Behring’s Strait (Beechey 1831) As has been shown of polar voyaging in this period, credibility in
reportage was associated with instrumental skill and qualities of personal endurance in the field
(Cavell 2008).

Smyth and Lowe make no explicit reference in their published text to the production of a diary or
journal but, given the quotidian regularity of their account, it is likely that one (perhaps both) of
them maintained a log of their journey between Lima and Para. The diurnal character of their
narrative is broken, however, by periods of extended residence when inclement weather or lack of
supplies prevented the authors from continuing their journey. On such occasions, Smyth and
Lowe— as Graham and Head had done—digressed from their focus on the practicalities of the
journey to a more general discussion of social organization, economic conditions, agriculture, and
natural phenomena. It is clear, too, that Smyth and Lowe’s log was altered, or at least supplemented,
after their return to Britain.

Smyth and Lowe were ultimately unsuccessful in achieving the object of their expedition but were
keen to communicate their findings so that errors on then current maps of South America might be
corrected (Smyth 1836). The fact that the authors failed in their original intention did not, in the
opinion of critics, diminish their authority. The Edinburgh Review (1836, 417) thought the
expedition’s object “obviously impracticable” and embarked on “without the least calculation,” yet
considered Smyth’s regular astronomical observations and their contribution to correcting the map
of South America commendable: “On Lieutenant Smyth’s observations we place the fullest reliance.
Those who know his professional abilities will not refuse him their confidence; those who do not,
will presume everything in his favor from the unaffected, manly, modest, and perspicuous style of
his narrative” (The Edinburgh Review 1836, 417). The implication of the Review’s statement was
clear: Smyth’s authority was secured through the demonstration of his surveying abilities and
through the unassuming and manly qualities of his prose. It was through regulated observation and
correct narrative style that Smyth and Lowe made their epistemic claim.

Epistemology and Credibility: Inscribing South America

The truth claims of travel narratives depend on establishing the legitimacy of the author’s
experiences and an assumption, rooted in trust, that that experience— either the author’s or that
of credible informants— corresponds in reliable ways to what is written (Shapin 1994; Lipton 1998).
Authors make different specific appeals to truthfulness and, as we have shown, employ different
inscriptive and redactive practices to establish reliability and credibility. Although the inscriptive
techniques of Graham, Head, and Smyth and Lowe were materially distinct, the form of their written
accounts was, in epistemic terms, similar: Each negotiated “the overlapping borders of public and
private discourse” (Gannett 1992, 192). The public display of private writing was a complicated
proposition. Unlike Head, Graham felt it necessary to revise substantially her original journal,
eliminating elements she considered too personal, and supplementing her text with appendices and
prefatory material to compensate for the inevitable incompleteness of her chronological account.
Head was, by contrast, less concerned by the lack of omniscience that the “disconcerting jolts,
silences and ellipses” in his account revealed (Thompson 2007, 122). The appeal and authority of
his account came precisely from its immediacy and thrill.

The inscriptive basis to (and the published form of) Graham’s, Head’s, and Smyth and Lowe’s
accounts made and depended on different epistemic claims. As the critical response to their
narratives demonstrates, their authority was evaluated and attributed in different ways. Graham’s
text was praised for “picturesque delineation, sagacity of observation, and liberality of sentiment”—
qualities that contributed to rather than diminished her perceived credibility (The Monthly Review,
or Literary Journal 1825, 180). The appeal of Head’s text lay in its “vivacity and good-humor” and in
the fact his “mere sketches” produced “all the effect of a finished picture” (The Quarterly Review
1827, 117). Smyth and Lowe satisfied a demand for unprepossessing prose (The Quarterly Review
1836).

Graham’s comparative moralizing approach to the description of Brazilian and Chilean societies
owed a debt to her education in Enlightenment Edinburgh, where she had earlier found her “taste
for literature gratified, and a love for science awakened” (Gotch 1937, 84). If, then, Graham’s
observational approach drew on “the ‘rational-reformist’ literary background of the female
moralist” (Leask 2002, 208), her engagement with South America was not simply one of an assumed
cultural and moral superiority. Although Graham had close associations with the political, military,
and mercantile elite in Brazil and Chile, her social exploration ranged across classes. A vociferous
opponent of slavery, Graham was quick to find fault in the slave-owning classes. As she reported of
the situation in Brazil, the “negroes are far superior in industry to the Portuguese and Brazilians”
(Graham 1824b, 197). In part, Graham’s censure related to the fact that “Brazil lacked... [a]
conception of the moral value of work” (Degler 1971, 246). Graham felt, however, that the degree
of civilization in Chile—which she equated with, among other indicators, the free conduct of trade
and agricultural efficiency—was severely retarded by systemic failures on the part both of the
former colonial administrators and the then-current directorship. In this respect, her analysis of
Chilean and Brazilian society (which, again, was “anchored. . . in comparisons with English customs
and behavior”) echoed Humboldt’s discursive construction of South American nature—something
infant, imminent, and ripe for transformation (Hahner 1998, 3).

Part of the explanation for this attitude is that Graham read Humboldt to inform her own travels.
In preparing for her South American journey, she had familiarized herself with what she took to be
the appropriate textual authorities—the initial volumes of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (von
Humboldt and Bonpland 1814-1829), as well as Robert Southey’s History of Brazil (1810). If it was
Graham’s initial intention to use Humboldt as a guide to the correct approach to travel and
observation, as at least one contemporary critic suggested (The Quarterly Review 1821), this aim
was soon modified. Enroute to Brazil, the Doris had made land at Tenerife and Graham explored
that island with reference to Humboldt’s account. Although she considered Humboldt to be “a
wonderful traveler & wonderfully gifted & qualified,” she found his observations “too fine &
philosophical” (NLS MS.40185, 22 September 1821). As she noted to Murray, “I saw many things...
that he has thought beneath him [including details of domestic and social organization] & I strained
my eyes after many another that has, I presumed changed places since he was there” (NLS
MS.40185, 22 September 1821). Although Graham might have proceeded in Humboldt’s spirit,
determined to emulate his careful observation of natural phenomena, she did not treat his textual
account as an unflawed manual of correct travel.

Much of Graham’s knowledge came from witnessing directly the natural and cultural features of the
countries she visited: Observation had a primacy in securing truth (Withers 2004a). Truth came from
firsthand witnessing, only secondly and as corroboration from reliable others. Her close association
with elite and political figures allowed her to “write down from their verbal account the main
particulars” of the political and military situation and thus to offer what one critic termed “strictly
original testimony” and a “record of the evidence of living witnesses’—a mode of testimonial writing
that came to characterize women writers’ accounts of South America (The Monthly Review, or
Literary Journal 1825, 190; Maier and Dulfano 2004). Reliability and truthfulness were issuing that
Graham addressed as a question of method, and through adherence to a “strict set of rules” (Mavor
1993, xii). If Graham had not personally been witnessing to the events, she sought to describe in her
travel accounts, she “took care to interview living people who had, besides consulting documents
of every kind” (Mavor 1993, xii). As she understood it, truth was “the moral and intellectual
perceptions by which our judgements, and actions, and motives, are directed” (Graham 1824b, 158).
Truth in her view was not a matter of abstract fact but a personal and individual imperative vested
in observation and credible interlocutors more than the written words of authoritative others.

Graham’s efforts to describe South America’s varied landscapes nevertheless depended, like her
ethnographic gaze, on a Eurocentric frame of reference. This meant that, on occasion, her
comparative method of description was insufficient without recourse to established referents. The
extremes of topography afforded “a peculiarity to the landscape... which distinguishes it...from any
I have seen before” (Graham 1824a, 185). Attempting to portray the landscape between the Chilean
coast and the inland settlement of Quillota, Graham faltered: “The near view is like some of the
finest parts of Devonshire; but the hills of Quillota, over which the volcano of Aconcagua... towers,
render it unlike anything in England, I might say in Europe” (Graham 1824a, 185). Although Graham
felt a particular affinity with the “pastoral and picturesque” agricultural landscapes of Chile—the
“grassy hills, and small shaded streams, and groups of cattle” were reminiscent of Devonshire—she
was not awestruck, in the pejorative sense of that term, by the Andes (Graham 1824a, 193). She
was moved by the beauty and the sublimely visceral nature of the mountains that, “capped with
snow, shooting into the heavens, with masses of clouds rolling in their dark valleys, presented to me
a scene I had never beheld equaled” (Graham 1824a, 197). Graham’s representation of the
landscape had no pretension to objectivity. Her subjective immediacy and inherent partiality—
which Graham did not attempt to conceal (indeed they conformed to conventional expectations of
female writers)—were the means by which her veracity was secured. Strangeness prompted
uncertainty, not recourse to precision. Her subjective aesthetic response was part of a culture of
sensibility that “prized attention to, and display of, feeling as a sign of natural virtue” (Dettelbach
2005, 53). Unlike those travelers who, “obsessed with Humboldtian biodistribution,” celebrated
“landscapes of ‘empty’ lands” (Cafiizares-Esguerra 2006, 6), Graham’s aesthetic and ethnographic
preference was for peopled vistas.

Smyth’s and Lowe’s engagement with South America was also marked by an aesthetic sensibility
but one differently realized: Smyth, a trained artist, supplemented his account with numerous
illustrations. Their principal and constant concern was the correct determination of location,
altitude, and distance traversed. A strained naval officer, the authors used a pocket compass to take
bearings and to survey the road from Lima, “marking every town and village. . with such notes as
might prove useful to persons making the same journey” (Smyth and Lowe 1836, 16). There was a
difficulty, however, in estimating the distances traveled. The authors’ description of the process
illustrates the problems of securing reliable knowledge and attributing authority to their different
informants:

The distances from one town to another have never been measured but are estimated according
to the ideas of the muleteers, who generally differ. We adopted those obtained from Dr. Valdizan
(who, having frequently travelled the road, was likely to give us an account nearest the truth),
correcting them, as far as we could, by our own observation of the time spent in their performance.
(Smyth and Lowe 1836, 16)

For Smyth and Lowe, the problem of evaluating third-party testimony in relation to nonstandard
indigenous metrology was a persistent problem: “opportunities were not so numerous as could be
wished-for of procuring accounts that could be relied on” (Smyth 1836, 13). On one occasion, they
obtained what they took to be reliable information from a pair of Spanish travelers on the run after
murdering a priest:

From one of them, who was very intelligent person, we got a good deal of information respecting
the towns and countries which he passed through in his flight. The map which we sketched from his
dictation of the course of the Caciquiari...will, perhaps, be the best mode of giving the information
which we obtained from him, and which, in all cases of doubt, was corrected by reference to two
other persons resident at Barra. (Smyth and Lowe 1836, 294-95)

There seems to have been no moral quandary about accepting information from someone who had
committed murder: The fact that he was an intelligent informant (and a European) functioned as
the warrant of his credibility. Truth was contingent: Epistemic necessity overcame moral judgment.
What mattered was the inherent value of the geographical data—whether from the authors’
astronomical observations or from murderous third parties whose information was routinely
compared against more than one source to assure its reliability (Licoppe 2002). For Smyth and Lowe,
their technical observational expertise was uppermost in assuring the utility and trustworthiness of
their narrative: Verbal testimony was required only as corroboration of instrumental exactitude.

In contrast, Head’s self-confessed benightedness with respect to scientific and ethnographic travel
simultaneously underlined and undermined the simple and unvarnished quality of his account. In
affecting the role of guileless witness, there were occasions when Head hardly believed what he was
seeing, such as the fact of “women of all ages, without clothes of any sort or kind, ... bathing in great
numbers in the stream which literally bounds the promenade“ in the city of Mendoza (Head 1826,
69). His less-than-rigorous observational technique was, however, the subject of censure. For one
critic, Head was unsophisticated: “Whatever does not instantly correspond with his English notions
on these subjects [customs and religion], he sets down as absurd, corrupt, and impious” (The
Monthly Review 1826, 152). In part, these criticisms related to the brevity of his observations, for
he “galloped through, rather than visited” the South American towns he sought to describe (The
Monthly Review 1826, 152). Head’s “intelligence, education, and professional ability” were not in
question, but the ways in which he chose to apply them to his investigations were (The Monthly
Review 1826, 152).

Audiences also condition truth claims. The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal saw Head’s
text as a model for thrilling and informative travel writing precisely because of its rough state. For
the same reason, The Monthly Review concluded quite the opposite: “Such a style of writing as that
in which Captain Head has indulged, if it were adopted to any extent in England, would soon
contribute to make the very name of our country detested throughout the world” (The Monthly
Review 1826, 153). As these differing critical responses make clear, opinion as to the value of textual
immediacy was not shared and universal. The standards by which Head’s credibility and veracity
were assessed were even particular to individual readers. Charles Darwin read Head’s account while
aboard HMSBeagle and thought it “a most perfect & spirited outline of their [the population of the
Provinces of the Rio de la Plata] manners & customs” (Keynes 2001, 207) even as his own worldview
was being altered utterly by experiences in South America (Desmond and Moore 2009).

Conclusion

This article has shown that examining travel writing’s material transformation from manuscript to
print is important and that more work needs to be done on the ways in which travelers’ accounts
were mediated by their publishers and on how they were shaped to conform to “particular cultural
values and perceived tastes in contemporary readers” (Finkelstein 2002, 152). As the writing,
publication, and reception history of Murray’s South American travel texts demonstrates, authors’
inscriptive and observational practices (as with their professional qualifications and social standing)
had an important bearing on perceptions of their credibility and trustworthiness. Authors sought
authenticity and correspondence with their world in multiple, even paradoxical, ways. For Graham,
it was the considered and contextualized nature of her journal that marked out its value and validity.
Head, by contrast, saw the unmediated irregular quality of his narrative to be a warrant of its
honesty, straightforwardness, and authenticity. Smyth and Lowe’s credibility rested in their prior
authority as naval officers, in their recourse to instruments in the field, and in audiences’ reception
of their claims to be guided by them. Despite these different conceptions of literary legitimacy,
Murray’s travelers were united by the affectation of authorial modesty.

Rather than emphasize their observational abilities or professional training as Smyth and Lowe had
done, the majority of Murray’s travel writers chose to affect ingenuousness as a means to ensure
epistemological decorum. In part, this modesty reflected their reluctance to assume the role of
author. Graham, Head, and others appealed to public edification as justification for the publication
of their narratives. In contributing, thus, to British popular and political understanding of South
America, Murray’s travelers could—regardless of the factors that originally motivated their travel—
be seen to have performed a patriotic and selfless duty.

This evidence has wider significance. The journeys untaken by Graham, Head, and Smyth and Lowe
illustrate the diversity of British travelers’ engagements with post revolutionary South America. The
observational approach of Murray’s travelers naturally depended on a Eurocentric frame of
reference, and their assessment of the social and natural conditions of South America was mediated
through British moral and aesthetic precepts. Personal observation and audience expectation were,
thus, central to the claims these authors made. But each also depended on third-party informants
from different social and ethnic groups. This difference in social status either certified others’
evidence because of who they were (for Graham) or corroborated it despite who they were (in
Smyth’s and Lowe’s case). The ways in which Murray’s authors evaluated the testimony of their
informants as truthful mattered to how their own accounts were, in turn, assessed by critics and by
the reading public. The narrative accounts these travelers produced were not united by a discursive
tendency to represent South America as “backward and neglected,” primed for European
enlightened intervention (Rojas 2002, 8). There was not one European imaginary at work. Few of
Murray’s South American travelers had formal scientific training. They were not Humboldt’s
disciples. Whereas some carried his printed narrative as a mobile informant, others traveled to test
him, or to see for themselves. The different moral, aesthetic, and scientific perspectives through
which Murray’s travelers viewed that continent meant that each represent edit in importantly
different ways. The fact that this process of geographical revelation resulted in the literary
construction of not one South America, but many demonstrates the importance of attending to the
processes of authorial inscription and narration that underpinned the production of travel texts and
not alone to their content as an unmediated “truth claim” about others’ geographies.

What was taking place there and with these authors was more common than might be supposed:
Darwin modified his written reports on South America and on much else for fear of offending his
wife and peers; African travelers regulated their published work for fear of audience reproof; polar
explorers commonly redacted their narratives between the field and the study (Withers 2004a;
Cavell 2008; Richter 2009). Because this is so, the way in which travelers chose to write their
accounts matters as a subject of scholarly attention, as does the relationship between narrative as
practice and audiences’ and publishers’ perceptions of texts’ value and credibility. To understand
what travel and exploration narratives meant to different reading publics, it is necessary to attend
to the different subjective positions of exploratory narrators and to their inscriptive practices. The
particularities of observation and inscription, redaction and mediation, and the questions of trust
and correspondence on which they depended might then be seen to be central to the production
and communication of geographical knowledge in print and to its reception and evaluation. The
study of writing as craft and process constitutes an imminent but important focus for scholars
concerned with knowledge making and circulation, trust and credibility. This is not to suggest that
geographers’ study of travel writing cease to focus on the representation of place or on the
practicalities of travel. It is to suggest that by examining the materialities of writing and narrating it
is possible to understand more fully the epistemic bases to travel and observation and so to
understand better the representational techniques that frame and condition those textual
depictions central to current intellectual concerns in the history of the book, the history of science,
and the study of geography in and of print.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose funding (AHRC
AH/F009364/1) permitted the research on which this article is based. Our particular thanks go to
David Mc- Clay and Rachel Beattie at the National Library of Scotland, who offered much useful
assistance in our investigation of the John Murray Archive. We are grateful also to Audrey Kobayashi,
and the anonymous reviewers of this article, who did much to focus our thoughts on travelers’
inscriptive practices and their epistemic implications.