Studies in Travel Writing: To Cite This Article: I.S. Maclaren (2011) : in Consideration of The Evolution of Explorers and

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Studies in Travel Writing

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In consideration of the evolution of

explorers and travellers into authors: a
model
I.S. MacLaren
Published online: 03 Aug 2011.
To cite this article: I.S. MacLaren (2011): In consideration of the evolution of explorers and
travellers into authors: a model, Studies in Travel Writing, 15:3, 221-241
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2011.595926
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Studies in Travel Writing
Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2011, 221–241
In consideration of the evolution of explorers and travellers into

authors: a model
I.S. MacLaren*
Contemporary reading practices exert considerable pressure on the narratives of

explorers and travellers; consequently, an inextricable identity is usually assumed
between the eyewitness observer and the first-person narrator. Since the time of
Hakluyt, not discriminating among accounts written during and after journeys
and voyages, or not interrogating the implications for critical interpretation of the
Downloaded by [Universite De Paris 1] at 01:17 16 June 2013
stage of narrative under examination have marked reading practices of the genre.
Yet, exploration and travel writing often exhibits considerable discrepancies
between primary accounts penned in remote parts of the globe and their
subsequently published counterparts, often much more secondary than is
acknowledged. Emphasising difference rather than seamless continuity between
traveller/explorer and published author prompts the proposal of one model by
which analyses of narratives might be conducted, case by case. In light of it, the
Hakluyt Society’s series of publications receive discussion.
Keywords: Richard Hakluyt; authority of printed texts; authorship; stages of
writing by explorers and travellers; Atechnos; Hakluyt Society; Daniel Defoe;
Alexander Mackenzie; Meriwether Lewis and William Clark; Thomas Jefferson;
T.C. Boyle; Mungo Park; James Cook; George Vancouver; Jacques Cartier;
Paul Kane
Launching into Peter Mancall’s biography of Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616), readers
find a portrait of a book-bound man. Hakluyt looks at a walrus tusk sent him by
Alexander Woodson and understands what it is from his knowledge of ‘the French
explorer Jacques Cartier’s account of his journey to modern-day Canada in 1534’. Hakluyt
‘spent virtually his entire life in England, reading books, talking to survivors of journeys
abroad, and writing about the exploits of travelers’, Mancall writes.1 Hakluyt’s legacy
concerns books almost exclusively; the genre of exploration and travel writing in English,2
although it was much practised before Hakluyt put his stamp on it, was firmly taken in
hand by him (and followed though not emulated by Samuel Purchas and Awnsham and
John Churchill). An armchair traveller, he voyaged verbally, not actually, and with
practical applications in mind – trade, colonisation and evangelisation, for example.
A century after Hakluyt published his compilations, Daniel Defoe was likely referring to
that legacy of voyaging-in-words when he wrote about fashioning a person’s education. As
the correspondent in his Compleat English Gentleman (1729) puts it,
[i]f he had not travell’d in his youth, has not made the grand tour of Italy and France, [a
gentleman] may make the tour of the world in books, he may make himself master of the
geography of the Universe in the maps, attlasses, and measurements of our mathematicians.
He may travell by land with the historian, by sea with the navigators. He may go round the
globe with Dampier and Rogers, and kno’ a thousand times more in doing it than all those
*Email: ian.maclaren@ualberta.ca
ISSN 1364–5145 print/ISSN 1755–7550 online

ß 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2011.595926
http://www.informaworld.com
222 I.S. MacLaren
illiterate sailors. He may make all distant places near to him in his reviewing the voiages of
those that saw them, and all the past and remote accounts present to him by the historians that
have written of them. He may measure the latitudes and distances of places by the labours and
charts of those that have survey’d them, and know the strength of towns and cityes by the
descripcions of those that have storm’d and taken them, with this difference, too, in his
knowlege, and infinitely to his advantage, viz., that those travellers, voiagers, surveyors,
soldiers, etc., kno’ but every man his share, and that shar [sic] but little, according to the
narrow compass of their owne actings. But he recievs [sic] the idea of the whole at one view.3
Is this not quintessential Hakluyt? The navigation principally becomes the book and the
book metonymically the navigation, as the metaphor deployed by Defoe puts it. The
explorers are themselves ‘illiterate’, but their reader rescues them from this deficiency and
renders them articulate by reviewing the voyages in words. It is as if the explorers cannot
come home except in the form of a book. The ships become supernumeraries; the words
are the thing. They produce the idea of the whole at one comprehensive view; thereby, the
idea of the world rounds into focus. Before Hakluyt, it would have been too much to claim
that, until the book about an English expedition appeared, the expedition had not been
consummated, but by 1600 thanks to his indefatigable efforts the book became the
expedition. Little more than a century later, perhaps foremost in The Life, Adventures, and
Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720), Defoe had become one of the foremost
exploiters of that development.
According to Hakluyt’s own account of how he came to compile his works, an account
that appeared in his dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham that begins Principall
Navigations, words of Psalm 107 figured prominently: ‘they which go downe to the sea in
ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his woonders in
the deepe’.4 Starting with vindication and holy scriptural sanction, that is, with text,
Hakluyt spent a career rendering exploration and the literature of exploration one and the
same. It need hardly be pointed out that Divers Voyages (1582) and Principall Navigations
(1589), like their much stouter successor of 1598–1600, are titles not of a series of
expeditions but rather of a compilation of words.
D.B. Quinn remarks that the Elizabethan compiler ‘was commissioned to put together
all he could gather from printed or manuscript sources’.5 Although J.W. Jones agrees with
Quinn that Hakluyt’s work was both tenacious and careful, the Elizabethan lacked a keen
bibliographical interest even though he shows a bias for as early a version of an
expedition’s narrative as he could obtain. His legacy of not discriminating among the
authority of (1) accounts written en route, (2) retrospective manuscript accounts written by
the explorer/traveller, (3) copies of manuscripts, and (4) published narratives bemuses
readers possessed of a bibliographical interest in exploration and travel writing, which
seems, whether in prose or poetry, as capable as its later relative, the novel, of taking the
shape and features of other genres – histories, ethnographies (manners and customs),
missions, tales/legends/myths (marvels and wonders), satires, vocabularies, taxonomies,
maps, charts and tables of measurements of all manner of observed phenomena,
propaganda, political surveillance and intelligence, memoirs, geographies/gazetteers,
prospectuses for investors, miscellanies, newsletters, captivity narratives, and accounts
of shipwreck, for example – while still offering its own shape and truth-claim in its
veridicality, that is, its custom of predicating itself on the spatial and chronological
linearity that itinerary imposes on narrative. Cautionary studies such as Percy G. Adams’s
Travelers and Travel Liars (1962) notwithstanding, the habit of rendering the discursive
voice inseparable from – indeed, one and the same as – the voyager’s is commonplace.6
The Hakluyt Society’s practice has been, all volumes taken as a whole, similar: its website
Studies in Travel Writing 223
proclaims its aim to publish ‘primary sources’, but these may be previously published
books. ‘Often’, volumes comprise writings ‘previously available only in manuscript or in
unedited versions in languages other than English’, but by no means do all of its 220 titles
in 327 volumes have manuscripts as their base-text.7
Several matters round into focus if one dwells on this rather obvious habit of blurring
the distinction between, on the one hand, exploring and, on the other, inscribing,
transcribing, editing, publishing, and identifying manuscripts as a whole rather than
emphasising the different stages of their composition. One is that, in the wake of Hakluyt,
reading habits in contemporary times bring considerable pressure to bear on the texts
themselves. That pressure has not always been what it now is. Whether in manuscripts or
printed books, readers expected ‘the compilation of a travel narrative . . . as the production
of an informed personal commentary, filtered through an extensive and expected (but
often unacknowledged) use of earlier sources’.8 The first-person authority of the sojourner
was thus compromised as it was augmented.9 Moreover, however, even as readers
suspended their disbelief that the first-person explorer or traveller had observed and
recorded everything that a narrative provided – and had done so with fresh eyes,
unconditioned by earlier sources – they also came to place a premium on accounts that
took the form of printed books. The apparent uniformity of copies and the sheer physical
imposition of printed books, once bound, weighed in their favour as being more
authoritative than multiple copies of circulated manuscripts. Also, however, readers of
them could and did assume that many others were sharing public knowledge because they
were reading the same text at the same time. Gradually, it became commonplace to
understand that a narrative came to public attention when it came into print.10
Compounding this effect from at least the late eighteenth century onward (and no less
in effect today) has been what Jack Stillinger calls ‘the romantic notion of single
authorship[, which] is so widespread as to be nearly universal’.11
Expeditions and travels that did not issue in a published account engendered the least
interest and possibly the greatest dubiety. Consider a later pair of examples, a pair that
arguably forms part of Hakluyt’s legacy: it is commonly understood that David
Thompson (1770–1857), the premier cartographer of North America, the bicentenary of
whose expeditions of exploration is ongoing at present, never garnered fame in his lifetime
because his fastidious temperament disinclined him from publishing a book. Upon
retirement, he kept revising his journals and his manuscript of a comprehensive narrative.
In this he differed from Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1764–1820), the first European to cross
the continent and a counterpart who netted a knighthood a year after the publication of
his ghost-written narrative Voyages from Montreal (1801). Thompson lived out his
retirement in obscurity.12 USAmerican President Thomas Jefferson, he of the great library
of exploration and travel literature, esteemed books. He appreciated that the expedition
that he commissioned Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838) to
undertake across the continent that Hakluyt’s compilations brought into being in words
would amount to nothing until its printed narrative (published well after the death of
Lewis, as it turned out, and with authorial involvement by Nicholas Biddle [1786–1844], its
‘editor’) saw the light of day.13 Jefferson had heard of Thompson and his map-making, but
apparently it was the publication of Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal that prompted
him to send Lewis and Clark west in 1804.14
Were it not for Hakluyt, England probably would not have come to understand and
profit from exploiting the fact that publication and Pax Britannica could be one and the
same. Unlike the Spanish, for example, who jealously guarded unpublished their explorers’
narratives of eighteenth-century voyages to the New World’s Pacific Coast, the
224 I.S. MacLaren
British initiated claims to the portions of the globe that they explored by publishing
printed volumes by command of their monarch. The value of the published book for the
aspirations of Jefferson’s fledgling country was patent. Not surprisingly, then, after
Hakluyt had demonstrated the power that lay in the book-form of exploration (consider
the equation between exploration and narrative implicit in Voyages, Mackenzie’s title),
seldom was the print publication of the narrative of an important expedition left to chance.
The composition of narratives of important expeditions is not so quickly delineated,
however, for it has at its authorial core the explorer who explored because he could, and
not because he either would or could fashion a Voyage out of an expedition, a book out of
the physical effort to tour the world by foot, by horse, or in ships, outriggers, rafts, canoes,
or what have you. In an age before the advent of the professional travel writer, explorers
and many travellers, whatever their physical achievements, needed help to reach landfall
between covers. Either they were not themselves writers or they lacked discursive
experience sufficient to conform their own words to the ideological perspectives and tastes
expected by their readership. Mackenzie and the rhetorical device of atechnos remind one
of this sometimes arduous trip. A contrivance long in use before writers in English began
deploying it, atechnos permitted explorers or those writing under their names, by
deprecating their literary abilities, to assume the identity of authors at the hands of,
usually, unacknowledged writers who might themselves not have ventured out of Grub
Street. In Mackenzie’s Voyages, the prefatory use of atechnos sounds thus:
when, at length, the opportunity arrived, the apprehension of presenting myself to the Public
in the character of an Author, for which the course and occupations of my life have by no
means qualified me, made me hesitate in committing my papers to the Press; being much better
calculated to perform the voyages, arduous as they might be, than to write an account of them.
However, they are now offered to the Public with the submission that becomes me.15
Self-deprecation (one critic calls it an ‘apology’16) sounds sincere; admitting that the
matters of exploration receive inferior narration creates rich ground for implying that the
rehearsal of events is plain, unvarnished, and thus accurate and trustworthy. Precisely
because it became routine to edit logs and field notes for publication – ready them for the
press, as the eighteenth century was fond of putting it – non-authors grew intimidated by
the chore of preparing a sustained, publishable narrative. The nineteenth-century Scottish
botanist David Douglas (1799–1834) was terrified by the prospect of the sentence of
sedentary torture inflicted on him by his renowned mentor, William Jackson Hooker, who
pressed him for a written account of his botanising travels in western North America.17
In Water Music (1981), the historical novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle has a romp with
his scene depicting African explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806) shackled to a writing desk
by Sir Joseph Banks upon the Scot’s return to London in 1798 from his peregrinations in
search of the Niger River. Banks denies him a trip home to Scotland until he completes a
narrative suitable for publication, as decided by Bryan Edwards (1743–1800), secretary of
the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (African
Association) and known to be Park’s ‘editor’ if not his ghost-writer.18 Despite Boyle’s
inclusion of the historically accurate mention of the rich emolument of one thousand
guineas promised for the production of the narrative, his portrait of the explorer depicts
him as a paralysed author:
Words. They haunt him night and day, through his rewrite sessions with Edwards, through
breakfast, tea and dinner, words masticated over plaice and fowl, lucubrated at the hour of the
wolf, pried from the recesses of his memory like bits of hardened molding . . . [ellipsis in
original] words that fight one another like instruments out of tune, arhythmic, cacophonic,
words that snarl sentences and tangle thoughts until he flings the pen down in rage and
despair. He never imagined the book would be such drudgery. After the stark physical
challenge of Africa and the heady swirl of celebrity, the last thing he wants is to sit at a desk
and push words around like a professional scrabble player. . . . It’s an old but familiar feeling,
the terrible devastating Weltschmerz of the boy who wakes with the knowledge that he hasn’t
finished his Latin assignment. . . .
Edwards peers over the spectacles and fixes him with a wet, bloodshot eye. ‘May as well resign
yourself, old man, you’re a celebrity now and you’ve got public responsibilities. You know as
well as I do that great discoveries are as much a product of a good warm study as they are of
deserts and jungles’.19
But the very fact that a novelist can render risible an explorer’s terror of writing speaks
loudly to this widespread experience. If not from the point of view of the publisher, from
that of the ‘author’, the public demand for the book must have seemed alarming to many
sojourners. Yet, one seldom learns what narrative record accompanied an explorer back
home that could form the basis of the book hotly anticipated by its readers and coldly
feared by its ‘author’. Park’s makes a good example: at one point in his remarkably popular
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), published two years before Mackenzie’s
Voyages, his persona entrusts his papers to his servant; then he stands before his Moorish
captors bereft of every stitch of clothing save his top hat; thereafter, he somehow again
consigns his papers to his servant. Like a prestidigitator, he makes them disappear and then
reappear; meanwhile, readers of the book never learn the source of his supply of paper and
ink.20 By drawing no attention to the logistics of record keeping, the narrative encourages
readers to ignore the question and remain focused on the tale cast up by the eyewitness
(not until the emergence of professional travel writers and Baedekers in the mid-nineteenth
century does this game of hide-and-seek change its rules, and the alterations continue in the
electronic age on the websites of Lonely Planet and tour operators).21
It is this straightforward acceptance of the geographical explorer as the author and
first-person persona of the narrative that encourages one critic to describe Mary Louise
Pratt’s representation in Imperial Eyes of Park as ‘a skilled manipulator of the written
word, a novelist in the guise of geographical missionary’.22 This assessment of Pratt’s
analysis is not quite accurate, for she takes pains to distinguish her view from that of other
readers of Travels, such as the ‘eminent contemporary Africanist Philip Curtin’, who, as he
himself wrote, regarded Park as having ‘simply told with [sic] he had seen, without
arrogance, without special pleading and (since he was not a scholar) without
interpretation’, but Pratt does not distinguish the explorer from the published persona
of the explorer; indeed, her thesis depends on the eyewitness being possessed of the
imperial eyes that saw distant lands as, in some but certainly not all cases, the printed
narratives’ perspectives represent them.23
That is to say, Pratt’s analysis lacks what one finds in William H. Sherman’s anatomy
of exploration and travel writing. Indebted to William Lithgow’s Most Delectable and True
Discourse (1614), Sherman argues that in order for a narrative to take its final form, two
distinct journeys must (except with armchair travel writing) have occurred: the first
geographical, the second authorial.24 The present analysis considers how the relationship
of those two journeys obliges one to interrogate them, to substitute for them a more than
two-part model, and to pursue cases where the principal actor in the first journey differs
from the principal in the second.
***
As James Helfers noted more than a decade ago, what preceded Hakluyt’s efforts in
England principally took the form of ‘ephemeral literature – especially pamphlet accounts
226 I.S. MacLaren
of various voyages’.25 It took Hakluyt to give them a systematic book form.26 Although at
points he also took a more active role as a consultant and director if not an explorer, most
often Hakluyt developed and elaborated for himself the role of agent of a clearing-house
for the information that that ephemera contained, first in Divers Voyages as it pertained to
routes that might get round the obstacle of North America, subsequently in the two
editions of Principal Navigations as they pertained to the colonisation of that continent.
Thereby, he created the prototype of the career that many scholars of exploration and
travel practise today.
At the centre of that legacy lies a bibliographical matter, one often overlooked in
theoretical and critical assessments, whether literary or historical in orientation: Hakluyt’s
tendency to scruple not very much over the bibliographical status of the sources he
fashioned into parts of printed compilations. His larger concern was less an editor-
bibliographer’s – to describe the details out of which individual narratives emerged – than
a translator-editor-author’s – to shape each narrative into a whole that, like an explorer’s
efforts, issued in a discovery, a discovery of the myth of English exploration’s heroic ‘lost
and glorious past’.27 Consider just those that arose, or claimed to arise, from exploration
as distinct from commerce or diplomacy: one might already have been published; another
existed only in a single manuscript; many had appeared in print in another language but
not before in English; yet another was the work of his own pen after he had amassed what
information he could from sources he knew, to which he was directed, or which had made
their way to him.28 Yet, his compilations had the effect of setting them all on the same
bibliographical footing. Centuries later, they either claim the same degree of authorita-
tiveness, or most readers are inclined to ascribe it to them.29 It is not just the deficiency of
literary diffuseness, then, that gives one pause about Hakluyt’s collections, although that
trait has often been adduced; it is also the matter of their tacit shared authoritativeness.
The account of the eyewitness, who saw this or that with his own eyes, however feeble his
own ability to narrate the experience, exerts a claim on its reader that the work of a poet or
dramatist seldom claims. And Hakluyt, knowing as much, ensured that the claim was duly,
volubly, and manifestly registered.
We have this summary of some of the methods he deployed, a summary that also takes
stock of criticism about those methods:
An examination of scholarship on specific narratives reveals that Hakluyt did, in fact, exercise
a good deal of editorial judgment over his collected Renaissance narratives. Specifically, his
editorial intervention consists primarily of excision. He eliminates narratives for specific
political reasons . . . . He eliminated The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and David Ingram’s
narrative of his alleged American journey from the 1598 edition of the Principal Navigations,
possibly because of his doubts about their veracity (although in the case of Mandeville there is
no explicit evidence to confirm this motivation; he may instead have eliminated it because of
its wide availability in print). He kept out some versions of journeys because they conflicted
with his purpose of idealizing English character. Finally, he eliminated almost all scholastic,
deductive, geographical arguments – anything that interfered with the direct thrust of personal
description in a narrative.30
What remains is pure explorer, or so the invitation to readers to suspend their disbelief
implies. He exalted the eyewitness’s voice over the scholar’s/editor’s, and he regularly
made that voice sound coherent.
Although not identical, writings by explorers and travellers in the centuries preceding
the advent of the professional travel writer sufficiently resemble one another in
bibliographical respects to warrant the consideration of a common anatomy for them,
an anatomy that requires discrimination when it comes to assessing authorial motivation,
bias, and perspective, and the tendency of readers to treat any one narrative as a document
or as literature.31 Precisely because issues of authorial motivation, bias, and perspective
concern practitioners of postcolonial and other theoretical approaches to textual
representations of the Other, the authorial persona’s stability is crucial, but printed
narratives of exploration and travel writing often do not supply it. A six- or seven-stage
model rather than the two-journey idea that Sherman describes, while it makes no claim to
introduce an innovation hitherto unknown in the study of exploration or travel writing,
can serve to clarify a reading practice to which such writing ought to be but is only
irregularly subjected. In particular, I am concerned to advocate using a model to guide a
reading practice that emphasises how the experience of travel evolves from the eyewitness’s
first written account to that of the subsequent book. I do so even though evidence often
suggests that the circumstances by which narratives of exploration and travel evolve into
published form require case-by-case analysis. Occasionally, it is the persona of the explorer
or traveller alone that evolves through different stages; in other cases, different people play
a role in writing the evolving narrative. Furthermore, publication in periodical form can
precede that in book form, and differences between the two versions can be substantive for
one or more of literary, cultural, anthropological or historical scholars, even as they
remain inconsequentially incidental for others.
A: Manuscript- and pre-print-

dominated publication era B: Print-dominated publication
Stage (c. 51550 CE) Stage era (c. 4 1600 CE)
A1 field notes, diary, log book, con- B1 field notes, diary, log book, con-
taining entries made regularly if taining entries made regularly if
not daily while en route not daily while en route
A2 retrospective journal, report, or B2 retrospective journal, report, or
letter, completed by explorer/ letter, completed by explorer/
traveller upon return home or traveller upon return home or
at the end of a stage of a at the end of a stage of a
journey/voyage journey/voyage
A3 draft manuscript, with or without B3 draft manuscript, with or without
interlineations and other indi- interlineations and other indi-
cations of revision cations of revision
A4 published manuscript
A5 printed book (including immedi- B4 printed book (including immedi-
ately subsequent editions, ately subsequent editions,
translations, and pirated edi- translations, and pirated edi-
tions), or inclusion in a printed tions), or inclusion in a printed
compilation or periodical compilation or periodical
A6 scholarly edition (including facsi- B5 scholarly edition (including facsi-
mile reprint of first edition with mile reprint of first edition with
prefatorial/introductory mate- prefatorial/introductory mate-
rial, or fully annotated edition rial, or fully annotated edition
of any one or more stages 1 of any one or more stages 1
through 5) through 4)
A7 subsequent scholarly or trade B6 subsequent scholarly or trade
edition edition
The proposed model presupposes the evolution from traveller to author; that is, it is
less concerned with the professional travel writer than with the traveller whose journey
provided an occasion – perhaps the first and only – for authorship. The first stage is the
228 I.S. MacLaren
field note/diary/log book. It represents events and encounters recorded during the course
of exploration or travel. It often features all three tenses: past, present, and future. Entries
might occur as regularly as every day or even, as in the case of a ship’s log, every watch or
change of weather or tide. This stage is, as has been emphasised above, incapable of being
either unmediated by cultural assumptions or constrained by the limitations of language
(recall Captain Cook’s summation of the Haush of Tierra del Fuego on 16 January 1769:
‘in a Word they are perhaps as miserable a set of People as are this day upon Earth’; and
his descriptions on 23 and 24 June and 14 July 1770 of a kangaroo: ‘I should have taken it
for a wild dog, but for its walking or runing [sic] in which it jumped like a Hare or a dear
[sic] . . . . it bears no sort of resemblance to any European Animal I ever saw’32).
By contrast, what could be termed a journal (A2 and B2) is retrospective. Written at
the end of the journey and based on notes/diary/log book, or written at the end of a stage
of the journey, perhaps in epistolary form, and sent home as a report, the second-stage
narrative/journal tends to put more distance between travellers or explorers and the events
of their travels or explorations. Normally, the past tense dominates the narrative. (Because
diary and journal are often regarded as synonymous, the proposed model splits the hair by
emphasising when the writing was done and which tense[s] it features.)
The third stage is the draft manuscript for the eventual printed book, which is the
fourth stage. The third-stage manuscript exhibits a full narrative shape and perhaps,
although not typically, chapter divisions and other signs that one expects to find in book
publication. It is possible that the draft manuscript has no interlineations; that is, its text
was not being composed while being written but, rather, written using the journal, perhaps
with silent corrections and changes. Although far from invariably, it could amount to a
fair copy of the journal or diverge from it by condensation or amplification. The fourth
stage in a seven-stage model – a model that better represents centuries preceding not the
introduction but the domination of printing press publication – is the narrowly or widely
circulating/published manuscript (A4), the product of the culture of ‘scribal publication’,33
which could and often did exist in multiple copies thanks to the labours of (usually)
anonymous scriveners.34 The fourth stage in the six-stage model (a model more accurate
for narratives prepared in a predominantly post-manuscript culture) and the fifth in the
seven-stage model is the first printed edition (A5 and B4), and the next stage (A6 and B5) is
what the Hakluyt, Champlain, Hudson’s Bay Record, and other societies usually publish:
the annotated scholarly edition of one or another of the previous stages.35 Occasionally, a
subsequent stage occurs (A7 and B6); this is a second annotated edition,36 other editions
(for example, of Hakluyt’s books),37 or – rather different – a variation of a later edition,
such as abridgements of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, of J.C. Beaglehole’s edition of
Cook, or of Ruben Thwaites’s edition of Lewis and Clark.38
Because narratives whether circulated in manuscript or printed were seldom published
without the goal of monetary or other profit, seldom is it the case that the authorial voice
remains the same between an early stage and the published/circulating stage of the
narrative. It is usually shaved or trimmed – ‘bibbed and tuckered’ – for public
presentation.39 If such work lay beyond the willingness or talent of the explorer/traveller,
it was undertaken with or without his consent by others – scribes in the manuscript age;
editors and or compositors and or proofreaders in the age of print.40 They fashioned the
narrative into a saleable commodity, catering to readers’, publishers’ and armchair
travellers’ cravings, tastes, financial expectations and prevailing ideologies, including
profiles of homo monstrosus, variations on utopia (El Dorado, Atlantis, Arcadia, the Holy
Land, the Orient, the Antipodes), empirical observations of non-human nature, and
expressions of home-nation propaganda (pro or con). And why not, if the motivation for
publication of accounts of far-off places aimed both to instruct and to entertain?
But whether or not they regard stylistic changes as substantive depends as much on
particular readers’ interests as on bibliographical variants, for meaning both resides in a
text and emerges from its interpretation.41 An ethnographer might not care whether
Captain Cook thought that his fish are, as he himself put it, ‘kept till wanting and eat very
well’, or that they are, as Dr John Douglas (1721–1807), the editor of the official narratives
of Cook’s second and third voyages to the Pacific Ocean, phrased it, ‘kept till wanted; and
they are not a disagreeable article of food’. Deploying litotes (the affirmation of something
by the negation of its opposite), Douglas thereby rendered Cook more fastidious-sounding
and thereby elevated him above the level of the people from whom he bought the fish,
placing him nearer the level of the reader that Douglas had in mind for his expensive
edition. The invocation of imperial supremacy had much to do with the establishment of
such hierarchical implications, as vital in the wielding of discursive power as in the
wielding of bureaucratic and military power. Douglas claimed only to improve Cook’s
style, but the improvements will signify more from some readers’ perspectives than from
others’.42
Of course, a model lacks the subtlety needed to address fair copies, multiple copies of
the journal or even of the draft manuscript, cheaper abridged editions, facsimile reprints
and multiple scholarly editions on paper or in hypertext, not to mention interstitial stages
of publishing, such as uncorrected proofs, printer’s proofs (Vandykes, blues [or
blueprints], ozalids, diazos, and so forth), galley proofs (part of book publishing from
the later nineteenth century onward43) and page proofs. Yet the model is useful both for
identifying the state of the text that scholars of exploration and travel writing choose to
evaluate and interpret, and, one hopes, for encouraging consideration of the genesis no less
than the choice of stage of texts as a primary aspect of interpretation. With each stage both
the first-person narrator’s perspective on eye-witnessed events and the narrative’s audience
alter. Retrospection tends to creep in: the passage of time often gives the explorer/traveller
or a deputed writer a perspective unavailable amidst the immediacy of events. ‘It is worth
asking,’ Roy Bridges posited nearly a quarter-century ago, ‘whether the published
explorers’ records . . . constitute the best versions of the evidence which the explorer
actually gathered’.44
That travel and exploration writing seldom receives discussion about the status of the
text itself is worrying given the weight of ideological consideration to which books in this
genre have been subjected, perhaps especially by students of imperialism and colonialism.
It would be wrong to imply that the base-text ought always to be the earliest or the latest
one – not every alteration is ipso facto a corruption or a correction/improvement – but
equally unsatisfactory is the lack of discussion about why and how the explorer/traveller
himself or subsequent writers or editors – ‘‘non-authorial’’ authors45 – effected changes in
the course of publishing a first edition under the name of the explorer/traveller, or about
why and how editors reached their decisions about which stage to publish in a later
scholarly edition, the audience for which only distantly resembles a first edition’s. Other
genres of writing have received centuries’ worth of such critical attention, but it has been
largely denied to exploration and travel writing. As Jack Stillinger has hypothesised in a
consideration of texts by creative writers, ‘every separate version of a work has its own
legitimacy’.46 But what of explorers and travellers – often, authors only once – and their
works? Do they so seldom assume poses, adopt irony, reconsider events, people and places
encountered or reorganise experiences (or have any of these done by other hands to their
field writings) as to justify being read straightforwardly as though the person who
230 I.S. MacLaren
travelled, the one who wrote, and the ‘author’ who published a book about those travels
are identical? In short, is it appropriate to maintain a bold line between imaginative and
discursive writing (as a dismissive Northrop Frye would have insisted47) any more than it
is appropriate to insist that explorers and travellers, whose motive for their expeditions
and trips was not principally authorship, routinely produced book-length narratives so
little assisted by others as to justify reading their books as their work alone?48 Biography-
based interpretations of exploration and travel writing are common; textual far less so.
Following in Hakluyt’s wake, how has the Hakluyt Society conducted its work?
Consider the monumental edition of the writings of the Pacific-bound Captain Cook and
his fellow officers by J.C. Beaglehole, perhaps the single greatest contributor to Hakluyt
Society editions after David Beers Quinn. In 1967, the society published Beaglehole’s two-
part edition of Cook’s notes and journals and those of some of his fellow officers on his
third voyage (July 1776–October 1780). Nearly 200 years after Cook wrote, Beaglehole
brought the first and part of the second stages of the narrative into published form. In the
interval, Native Americans on the west coast of Vancouver Island had lived with the
opprobrium cast on them by Douglas, who alleged that they were cannibals. As
Beaglehole’s edition shows, that allegation does not appear anywhere in Cook’s fist. Is one
stage correct and the other incorrect? Certainly, the Mowachaht/Muchalaht people of
Yuquot, Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island think so. Nevertheless, it is also fair to propose
that what the Hakluyt Society gave the world with Beaglehole’s edition was, as his
biography of Cook demonstrates,49 a Cook of whom Beaglehole approved, not Cook
himself, even if the editor regarded the two as one and the same. It is but a truism to note
that all editing, whether declared or undeclared, colours a text. Hakluyt, for example, was
unexceptional in this respect; he rounded his voyagers into one comprehensive view,
gathering them together between the covers of a single or multi-volume book and therein
systematically arranging them.
However, the Hakluyt Society’s interests do not subscribe to the model proposed
above. In each of its series – no matter whether it is the first, second, or third – scholarly
editions of fourth-stage narratives (in the six-stage model), that is, of books usually printed
in or not long after the lifetime of the explorer/traveller, stand beside volumes containing
second-stage narratives, that is, scholarly editions of retrospective journals. Editors of
society volumes occasionally identify the base-text clearly, but often readers must open a
copy for themselves and examine it to determine the stage of the narrative. For all one’s
enormous debt of gratitude owed to the society for the works it has made available over
the past century-and-a-half, one is not less confused by the lack of discrimination its series
have shown about the textual status of the source chosen for publication. This assessment
is unjust when directed at particular titles and their editors, but, overall, one is stuck in a
bibliographical stew, a matter perhaps of little concern to nineteenth-century readers
hungry for narratives of maritime adventure, but one surely of concern to scholars now.
W. Kaye Lamb edited The Journals and Letters of Alexander Mackenzie, which the society
published in its extra series in 1970.50 More than a decade later, in its second series, it
published Lamb’s four-volume edition of the Voyage of Discovery of George Vancouver
(1757–1798), first published with the editorial assistance of the explorer’s brother in 1798,
George having died earlier that year, on 10 May. (A corrected edition in six volumes
appeared in 1801.)51 As for Mackenzie, the journal of his second expedition, when he was
canoed and led on foot across western North America to the Pacific Ocean, is the work of
William Combe (1741–1823), an English miscellanist and the author a decade later of the
satiric poem, The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812). However, the
journal of Mackenzie’s first expedition, when he was canoed down the Mackenzie River in
1798, is the explorer’s work.52 Vancouver’s book was published posthumously, and no
earlier stages of the narrative are extant. When one considers these two society titles, both
prepared by Lamb, the stage of a narrative appears not to be the decisive factor in the
decision to publish what prospective editors offer.53
Hakluyt’s legacy of not scrupling over a narrative’s identity endures, for better or
worse. The society’s edition of Mackenzie’s journals made its mark on the scholarly world;
its edition of Vancouver’s book appears not to have done so, probably because it does not
add anything to the record except in the editor’s annotations. Does this matter? Yes and
no. Scholars in every discipline need to exercise care, but general readers likely could not
care less; for them, having Vancouver’s book in print again would outweigh any other
consideration. A bibliographical stew can taste mighty good to hungry readers not too
fussy about ingredients. About ten years ago, 30 years after Lamb’s Mackenzie appeared,
the Narrative Press issued paper and electronic versions of a work it titled The Journals of
Alexander Mackenzie (2001). Was the title meant to indicate that a first- or second-stage
narrative had surfaced for Mackenzie’s sojourn across North America, the first crossing of
the continent by a European? No. It turns out that this is but a reprint of the book
published in 1801 as Voyages from Montreal. Mackenzie’s explorations became his
Voyages in 1801 and his Journals 200 years later. The latter forms part of what the
Narrative Press calls its series of ‘True First Person Accounts of High Adventure.’54 ‘The
Narrative Press,’ trumpets the end matter, ‘prints only true, first-person accounts of
adventures – explorations, circumnavigations, shipwrecks, jungle treks, safaris, mountain-
climbing, spelunking, treasure hunts, espionage, polar expeditions, and a lot more.’55
The Hakluyt Society series have never, of course, staked any such claim. Because they
contain both manuscript sources and books, and because the society did not have a six- or
seven-stage model in mind, editors of series one, series two, and series three have
understandably issued narratives of a variety of stages.56 (A title appears in one or another
series only because of the century in which it was published [one, the nineteenth; two, the
twentieth; three, the twenty-first], not because of bibliographical considerations.57) It
remains then for readers to whom the stage of a narrative matters to determine whether
they are reading the spelunker’s eyewitness words, or either her retrospective words or her
editor’s/ghost-writer’s (Mackenzie’s words or Combe’s, as it were). But would it interest
the Hakluyt Society to publish editions of the official, monarchically commanded books
prepared for the press by John Hawkesworth (1715?–1773)58 or John Douglas about
Cook’s voyages to the Pacific Ocean? Although not Cook’s work, for over two centuries
they held sway as Cook’s first-person voice, exerting unchallenged influence on the
European and eastern North American worlds’ perceptions of the peoples of the Pacific
Rim. Historical work virtually demands that these versions still be consulted.
Let us return to Peter Mancall’s portrait of Hakluyt, the walrus tusk, and the account
of Jacques Cartier’s expedition of 1534. Hakluyt understands the tusk by taking recourse
to the narrative record. However, Cartier’s voyage of 1534 yielded a narrative that, as
Marcel Trudel has noted, throws up an ‘awkward problem’: ‘The account of the first
voyage [20 April–5 September 1534] was published initially in Italian by Ramusio in 1565,
then in English [at Hakluyt’s instigation] by [John] Florio in 1580, finally in French by
Raphaël du Petit-Val in 1598; it is this last text which was used by Marc Lescarbot [ for his
Histoire de la Nouvelle France (Paris: Jean Milot, 1609)].’59 An Italian account published
more than 30 years after the voyage forms the basis for Hakluyt’s understanding of the
object in his hands. What needs to be overlooked to render this portrait convincing is what
twentieth-century Québécois nationalists overlooked in refashioning Cartier as the
‘discoverer’ of Canada: the ‘awkward problem’ that no manuscripts in the discoverer’s
232 I.S. MacLaren
hand were known by Hakluyt – or are known today – to exist for the voyage of 1534.60 Is
this an instance of the Marco Polo syndrome – the traveller apparently travelled but did
not necessarily write – or of its next-door neighbour, the John Mandeville syndrome – the
‘traveller’, not just his readers, did not leave his armchair but wrote for them a guidebook,
if not a sustained narrative, of exotic places and people using the mappa mundi as his
template?61 Perhaps neither, but the tides that vex the voyage into print of any account of
Cartier’s first expedition to the New World ought to concern us more than they did
Hakluyt. This is the foundational concern for those investigating or making use of
exploration and travel narratives in any discipline. They do not amount to the most
positive aspect of the legacy that Hakluyt’s way of collecting and compiling has left us, but
they characterise the genre to a sufficiently significant extent that they require ‘compleat’
scholars to consider the straight line insinuated for them between, on the one hand, the
eyewitness who returns from afar with ocular proof in written form of his extraordinary
deeds and of the world’s wonders, and, on the other, the narrative subsequently published
under the same person’s name and marketed as a commodity purporting to be no more or
less than the eyewitness’s account. Benjamin Franklin thought that the tide was turning in
1765 – ‘[ f]ormerly every Thing printed was believed, because it was in Print: Now Things
seem to be disbelieved for just the very same Reason’ – but that trend, if it existed, did not
endure.62 What endures as a reading habit is what might be called Gullible’s travels. Or
Hakluyt’s. Reading exploration and travel writing with circumspection would seem vital in
light of many concerns, not least, as Kenneth Iain MacDonald has reminded us, that ‘it
brings people and place into being through its own discursive mechanisms that cannot be
dissociated from the prior ideological representations grounded in the value hierarchies of
colonialism, value hierarchies that continue to maintain inequitable social and
environmental relations’.63
It would be a great boon to anthropologists, historians, literary critics, and common
readers were the discipline of book history and the study of exploration and travel writing
successful in drawing notice to the importance of distinguishing among the words that
explorers and travellers wrote following a day’s events, following the completion of a stage
of a journey and following their return home, and distinguishing any of those from the
texts written by others and published under the name of explorers and travellers following
their return home, following first-time publication (when cheaper subsequent editions
abridged or otherwise altered the first edition’s version) or following the passage of
centuries. Effectively productive of different entities, the stages of exploration and travel
writing require us to develop discrete reading strategies for interpreting them, not
conflating them so as, effectively, to accord them an identical degree of authority.
In November 2006, a $CDN31.5 million lawsuit by the Songhees and Esquimalt
peoples of Vancouver Island was settled out of court because it was agreed that a first-
stage narrative (B1) was more authoritative than a book (B4). An artist named Paul Kane
(1810–1871) visited the island in 1847 and wrote in his field notes that a Songhees village
stood on the shores of James Bay, the inner harbour of the city of Victoria where the
provincial legislature of British Columbia reposes today.64 For some reason, Wanderings
of an Artist among the Indians of North America (1859), the book published in London by
Longman under Kane’s name 12 years later, called it a village of Clallam, a group that is
now considered USAmerican, not Canadian, not permanent residents of Vancouver
Island, so not entitled to sue the British Columbia or Canadian governments.65 Lawyers
for these governments agreed that the eyewitness account, written in the traveller’s own
hand, had a worthier status than the book published long after Kane visited the Hudson’s
Bay Company’s post of Fort Victoria, even though it was published in London, then the
irreproachable centre of all things known. In the end, the governments agreed to pay the
Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations what amounts to rent on the land where the
legislature was built.
Case by case, exploration and travel writing repays scrutiny along the lines that the six-
(or seven-) stage model proposes.66 It may not repay in the millions, but there is
nonetheless a scholarly and, from time to time, somewhat like the case of the Treaty of
Waitangi,67 even a legal return to be garnered from a ‘compleat’ investment, one that does
not assume a straightforward and unproblematical link between eyewitness travellers/
explorers and their books’ first-person persona.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful for the comments and questions offered in response to a version of this paper presented
at the stimulating ‘Richard Hakluyt (c.1552–1616): Life, Times, Legacy’ conference at the National
Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 15–17 May 2008, jointly organised by Daniel Carey and Claire
Jowitt; the National Maritime Museum; the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent
University; and the National University of Ireland, Galway. As well, I acknowledge with sincere
thanks the extensive remarks made by Roy Bridges on another version of this paper.
Notes
1. Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 1, 4.
2. For the purposes of this analysis, writings by explorers and travellers will be regarded
generically as one. Other analytical approaches, discriminations, and emphases certainly
warrant a generical distinction being drawn between them and even among writings by
explorers. See, for example, E. Thomson Shields, Jr., ‘The Genres of Exploration and Conquest
Literatures’, A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy
Schweitzer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 353–68.
3. Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Gentleman, 1729; ed. Karl D. Büllbring, 1890; facs. rpt.
(Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library, 1972), 225–26; also in Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe. ed.
James T. Boulton (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 247–57 (255–56). It could be
argued that Defoe was only lifting a remark made by the Churchill brothers a quarter-century
earlier when, in the introduction to their Collection of Voyages and Travels, they wrote that ‘the
Relation of one Traveller is an Incentive to stir up another to imitate him, whilst the rest of
Mankind, in their accounts without stirring a foot, compass the Earth and Seas, visit all the
Countries, and converse with all Nations’ (Awnsham and John Churchill, ‘Introduction’, A. and
J. Churchill, compilers, A Collection of Voyages and Travels . . . , 4 vols. [London: John Walthoe,
1704], I: lxiii).
4. John Winter Jones, introd. Divers Voyages through the Discovery of America and the Islands
adjacent, collected and published by Richard Hakluyt . . . in the Year 1582, ed. Jones (London:
Hakluyt Society, 1850), v; from Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and
Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or ouer Land, to the most remote and farthest
distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the Compasse of these 1500 Yeeres: Deuided into
three seuerall Parts, according to the positions of the Regions whereunto they were directed
(London: pr. by George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589), 2.
5. David B. Quinn, ‘Gilbert, (Gylberte, Jilbert), Sir Humphrey’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography,
ed. George Brown and Marcel Trudel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), I: 331–36
(333).
6. Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962). Given the amount of shaping that Hakluyt can be seen to have made on accounts
in order to make a book of them (of which more, below, in this paper), it is noteworthy that, in
his survey of sixteenth-century English literature, C.S. Lewis declined to discuss most of the
narratives assembled by Hakluyt. Lewis described him as ‘usually behind the scenes’ because
they ‘owe nothing to art’; enjoyment in reading them must, by Lewis’s standard, owe ‘something
234 I.S. MacLaren
to the teller as well as to the thing told’, but they seldom do, and one narrator, although he ‘has
matter which no one could make dull, . . . brings it nearer to dullness than one would have
thought possible’ (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, The
Oxford History of English Literature, vol. III [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954], 438, 437; Colm
MacCrossan, ‘New Journeys through Old Voyages: Literary Approaches to Richard Hakluyt
and Early Modern Travel Writing’, Literature Compass 6.1 [2009]: 97–112).
7. http://www.hakluyt.com/hak-soc-objectives.htm?PHPSESSID%20=8d96466e05cd28104709a2
f6d2856d0e (retrieved Jan. 2010). Numbers given on the website are rounded to ‘over 200
editions’ and some ‘350 volumes’.
8. Michael G. Brennan, ‘The Literature of Travel’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
Volume IV 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 246–73 (258–59).
9. Even though this discussion concerns itself with the evolution of accounts, it is important also to
remember that even the first account is mediated. As Mary B. Campbell has remarked, ‘the
traveller in foreign parts is faced with a world for which his language is not prepared: no matter
how naı̈ve the writer’s understanding of language, the option of simple transparence . . . is not
open’ (The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing 400–1600 [Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1988], 3). Benefiting from Edward Said’s work, Tim Youngs noted in
1994 that at no stage of a narrative’s composition is the traveller separate from and thus
uninfluenced by the culture to which he or she belongs. Equally applicable to explorers is his
remark that ‘[t]ravellers do not simply record what they see. . . . They observe and write
according to established models . . . . No one who travels and writes of their experiences can be
said to be writing purely as an individual’ (Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900
[Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994], 5, 209). Notably without reference to either of
these points, Jerry M. Wiiliams develops a Foucaultian line of argument in ‘Challenging
Conventional Historiography: The Roaming ‘‘I’’/Eye in Early Colonial American Eyewitness
Accounts’, A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, 532–50.
10. Elizabeth Eisenstein notes succinctly that ‘print spread texts in a different way from manuscript;
it multiplied them not consecutively but simultaneously’ (Introduction, The Use of Script and
Print, 1300–1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004], 20; qtd. in ‘A Conversation with Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’, Agent of Change: Print
Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist
and Eleanor F. Shevlin [Amherst, MA and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007],
409–19 [414]).
11. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 183.
12. Alexander Mackenzie [with William Combe], Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence,
through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and
1793. With a Preliminary Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Fur Trade of
that Country (London: Pr. for T. Cadell; Jun. and W. Davies; and W. Creech by R. Noble,
1801). Many editions of Thompson’s unpublished and uncompleted narrative now exist. The
most recent is The Writings of David Thompson. Volume 1, The Travels, 1850 Version, ed. and
introd. William E. Moreau (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press; Seattle:
University of Washington Press; Toronto: Champlain Society, 2009). See also I.S. MacLaren,
‘Foreword to the 2007 Edition’, Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson across Western
North America, by Jack Nisbet (1993) (Seattle: Sasquatch, 2007), v-viii.
13. ‘Biddle, Nicholas’, Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 6 vols. (1887–1889); facs. rpt.
(Detroit: Gale, 1968), I: 257. Robert T. Conrad, later a mayor of Philadelphia, is the source of
the oft-quoted assignment to Biddle of the role of author of the long-delayed official narrative
of the expedition, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, 2
vols. (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1814). Based on her study of the correspondence
between William Clark and Biddle held in the Biddle Edition Archive, University of Virginia,
Alicia Yaffe has written that ‘Clark asked Biddle to edit the journals, write a manuscript, and
publish it’ (‘Historical Overview for the Publication of the Travels of Lewis and Clark’ 5http://
www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/lewisandclark/biddle/splash.html 4 [retrieved Feb. 2010]).
14. Peter S. Onuf and Jeffrey L. Hantmann have written that ‘Lewis and Clark . . . faithfully
chronicled their diplomatic encounters with the natives as they mapped their progress across the
continent, demonstrating both their own and the new nation’s presence in the vast, uncharted
space. But the expedition’s promise remained unfulfilled as long as the journals languished in
their unrevised, unpublished form’ (‘Geopolitics, Science, and Culture Conflicts’, Across the
Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America, ed. Douglas Seefeldt, Jeffrey
L. Hantmann and Peter S. Onuf [Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press,
2005], 6).
With respect to Jefferson’s knowledge of Thompson’s explorations, see Jack Nisbet, The
Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau (Pullman, WA: Washington State
University Press, 2005), 34. In rehearsing the observation of Donald Jackson, Deborah Allen
emphasises that the claim that Jefferson was prompted by Mackenzie’s book was made by
Edward Thornton, British minister to the United States, in a letter to Lord Hawkesbury (9 Mar.
1803, in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents, 1783–1854, ed.
Donald Jackson [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962], 26; discussed by Allen, ‘Acquiring
‘‘Knowledge of Our Own Continent’’: Geopolitics, Science, and Jeffersonian Geography, 1783–
1803’, Journal of American Studies 40 [2006]: 205–32; cited 206). See also Robert Thacker,
‘Introduction: No Catlin without Kane, or really understanding the ‘‘American’’ West’,
American Review of Canadian Studies 33, no. 4 (2003): 459–71. The standard source for writings
from the expedition is The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, gen. ed. Gary Mouton, 13
vols. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979–2001), and http://

lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu.
15. Mackenzie [and Combe], ‘Preface’, Voyages from Montreal, iii-iv.
16. V.B. Rhodenizer, Handbook of Canadian Literature (Ottawa: Graphic, 1930), 58.
17. See William Morwood, Traveler in a Vanished Landscape: The Life and Times of David Douglas
(New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973). Hooker observed that Douglas was ‘never so unhappy
as when he has a pen in his hand’ (qtd. in Jack Nisbet, The Collector: David Douglas and the
Natural History of the Northwest [Seattle: Sasquatch, 2009], 179).
18. See Olwyn M. Blouet, ‘Bryan Edwards, F.R.S., 1743–1800’, Notes and Records of the Royal
Society of London 54 (2000): 215–22. Blouet notes that Edwards kept Sir Joseph Banks informed
of ‘his progress in editing Park’s journals’ (222, n39).
19. T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music [1981] (New York: Penguin, 1983), 233–34. Of interest is a
similar, non-fictional sketch subsequently drawn by Roy Bridges regarding the book-making of
explorers of Africa: ‘In most cases, once the explorer had returned to Europe, he was likely to
find himself chained to a desk trying to produce an account of his travels for publication in all
the spare time he had between lectures and dinners in his honour’ (‘Nineteenth-Century East
African Travel Records, with an Appendix on ‘‘Armchair Geographers’’ and Cartography’,
Paideuma 33 [1987]: 179–96 [188]).
20. Surely those suspicious of his motives for exploring would not have permitted Park to retain his
notes during his captivity, yet the narrative is either silent or contradictory about the matter. See
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed under the Direction and
Patronage of the Africa Association, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London: pr. by W.
Bulmer, for G. and W. Nicol, 1799), 114, 127, 172. According to Kate Ferguson Marsters,
Park’s most recent editor, no field notes, journal or book manuscript are known to have
survived. That all such papers did not reach Britain with Park or that they were destroyed must
be considered alongside the knowledge that Park and his relatives were known for their
reticence, possibly because of the era’s debate about the slave trade (email correspondence with
the editor, October 7, 2003). Alternatively, a possible resting place for such papers might have
been the vast collections of Joseph Banks, which apparently have yet to be searched for them.
21. Indeed, some professional travel writers call attention to the retrospective aspects of their
published narratives. In From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium [1997]
(London: HarperCollins/Flamingo, 1998), William Dalrymple refers to his ‘diary’ or to
information learned subsequent to his journey in the Middle East (196, 245, 249, 265, and 422).
In an interview, Dalrymple mentions that, ‘for From The Holy Mountain, which was the longest
journey I’ve made I’ve got thirty notebooks piled up in a column in my study, which have
virtually everything written down but virtually not a single coherent sentence in the entire thing’
(‘The Era of Destruction: An Interview with William Dalrymple’, http://www.harpercollins.ca/
author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=50000779&displayType=interview; retrieved May 2005).
Dervla Murphy has the habit not only of providing indexes and bibliographies for her books but
also of quoting her ‘diary’/’journal’ from particular trips. See, for example, Silverland: A Winter
Journey beyond the Urals (London: John Murray, 2006), 80, 170, 183, 184, 206 and 220. At one
236 I.S. MacLaren
point, she grouses about the illegibility of her handwriting: ‘I had expected the Trans-Siberian
track to be smoother than BAM’s but it’s rougher and the notes I made en route have proved
hard to read’ (145).
22. Danielle Law, ‘Caught in the Current: Plotting History in Water Music’, In-Between: Essays &
Studies in Literary Criticism 5, no. 1 (1996): 41–50 (42).
23. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), 84; 2d ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 82; quoting Curtin, The
Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1964), 207.
24. William H. Sherman, ‘Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1720)’, The Cambridge Companion to
Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 17–36 (31).
25. James P. Helfers, ‘The Explorer or the Pilgrim? Modern Critical Opinion and the Editorial
Methods of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas’, Studies in Philology 94 (1997): 160–86.
26. After The Decades of the newe Worlde or West India, Richard Eden’s translation of Pietro
Martire d’Anghiera’s history of the voyages of Columbus and his successors in 1555, came
George Gascoigne’s edition of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Discourse of a Discovery for a new
Passage to Cataia, in 1576, Richard Willes’s publication in 1577 of an amplified compilation

that Eden left incomplete at his death, and the books by Dionyse Settle, Thomas Ellis, and
George Best that issued in 1577 and 1578 from Martin Frobisher’s three voyages to Baffin
Island. Thereafter, Hakluyt initiated what would become a takeover by books, and he did so in
a way original to collections of exploration and travel ‘in taking as [his] subject a single nation of
origin, rather than a single destination, or simply ‘‘discovery’’ in general’ (MacCrossan, ‘New
Journeys’, 102). But just as exploration and travel adopted various genres — letter, report, map,
tale, affidavit, and so forth — it also hesitated in adopting a particular form. Michael G.
Brennan emphasises just how gradual the evolution was through the 1557–1695 period: ‘On
some occasions conflicting accounts might be circulating simultaneously in manuscript and
print. In print the choices available to an author or bookseller ranged from sensationalist single
sheet ballads, hastily printed newsletters, crudely printed pamphlets, populist publications and
handy pocket guides in slim octavo and duodecimo, to expensive and lavishly illustrated quartos
and folios . . . . Later, following the Restoration, accounts of individual journeys were usually
published in folio’ (‘The Literature of Travel’, 246). (Brennan provides a brief description of
how Willes rendered the pro-Spanish tone of Eden’s first edition into English propaganda in
order to coincide with Martin Frobisher’s second and third voyages in search of Cathay and/or
an Arctic El Dorado [260]). For a suggestion of some reasons for the persistence of manuscript
publication, see Roger Chartier, ‘The Printing Revolution: A Reappraisal’, Agent of Change,
397–408, esp. 398.
27. Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 173.
28. The standard for Hakluyt’s sources is the indispensable Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols., ed. D.B.
Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974), 338–460. For a few examples of the variety, see 343,
no. 16 (‘adapted and translated’); 345, no. 26 (‘This had reached Hakluyt from his elder cousin’);
405, no. 22, (‘may represent some rather ill-digested information passed to Hakluyt by one of his
correspondents’); 407, no. 38 (‘transcribed and translated by Hakluyt from Lord Lumley’s
manuscript’). Notable in light of these few examples is MacCrossan’s description of Hakluyt as
‘an ambitious shaper of language’, and his description of Fuller’s recognition that Hakluyt’s
compilations ‘are complex literary productions, [and] that Hakluyt’s construction of them was a
form of ‘‘writing’’, in the deliberate sense of that word’ (‘New Journeys’, 102, 103). See also
Anthony Payne, Richard Hakluyt: A Guide to his Books and to those associated with him 1580–
1625 (London: Quaritch, 2008) and a valuable review of it by Fuller (Studies in Travel Writing
13 [June 2009]: 187–88), in which she notes that ‘Hakluyt’s editorial practices exhibited a
spectrum of relationships to the process of publication, from volumes bearing his name and
containing at least some of his modest output as author, to others whose appearance he merely
encouraged and inspired’ (188).
In her presentation at the ‘Richard Hakluyt: Life, Times, Legacy’ conference in 2008,
Margaret Small demonstrated just how much of the Coronado account published in Italian by
Ramusio was removed by Hakluyt in order to transform the explorer into a booster for
colonisation rather than an apprehensive analyst of prospects for it. (See ‘A World Seen through
Another’s Eyes: Hakluyt, Ramusio and the Narratives of the Navigazioni et Viaggi’’, in Richard
Hakluyt: Life, Times, Legacy, ed. Claire Jowitt and Daniel Carey [London: Ashgate,
forthcoming].) Although this specimen may possibly stand as an exception to Hakluyt’s
normal practice, it does indicate the extent to which his agenda as a proponent of New World
colonisation permeated his bibliographical practice.
This view contrasts sharply with MacCrossan’s observations that ‘Hakluyt has long enjoyed a
reputation as a largely non-interventionist editor, and comparative readings with source texts
suggest that such material was generally reprinted with remarkable faithfulness’; however,
MacCrossan does acknowledge some work that finds Hakluyt to be an interventionist editor
(‘New Journeys’, 105, 208n26). By contrast, Jerry M. Williams classifies Hakluyt among
‘copyists or interpreters . . . who saw the New World more through reconstructive acts of
imagination than via direct contact with the land’ (‘Challenging Conventional Historiography’,
534). In fact, the variety of authorial/editorial relationships that Hakluyt had to texts that he
collected into Principal Navigations has, it seems, discouraged rather than prompted thorough
study of him as an exception to the idea of ‘pure’ authorship implicitly valued by much literary
and editorial theory (Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 185–86).
29. G.B. Parks suggests that it was Hakluyt’s achievement, not the practice of his readers, to
foreground the whole over its parts. Hakluyt ‘gathered the materials of a history and dealt so
cunningly with them that they became a history while retaining the guise of raw materials’
(George Bruner Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages [New York: American
Geographical Society, 1928], xiv.)
30. Helfers, ‘The Explorer or the Pilgrim?’, 179.
31. Readers concerned to distinguish exploration from travel writing will find useful the discussion
offered of the Hakluyt Society’s understanding and practice. See R.C. Bridges and P.E.H. Hair,
‘Epilogue: The Hakluyt Society and World History’, Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth:
Studies in the History of the Hakluyt Society 1846–1996, ed. R.C. Bridges and P.E.H. Hair
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1996), 223–39, esp. 237–38.
32. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 4 vols. in 5
(London: The Hakluyt Society, 1955–1967): vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771,
Hakluyt Society Extra Series no. XXXIV (1955), 45, 352, 359.
33. Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century
England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 6. Love details a much more
complex process than occasion warrants or space permits here; see especially his discussion of
‘publication’ (35–89).
34. Peter Beal has argued that
the manuscript — private and personalised both in its means of production and in the
nature of its social function — eschews announcing itself; whereas the printed book
needs, in a sense, publicly to create its own context, its own social justification, its own
clientele, by displaying itself in every particular. Which is what, essentially, a printed
title-page is: a trade advertisement. . . . Scribes maximized the sense of the specialness,
even exclusivity, as well as ‘authority’, of their product in the eyes of its users. And the
fiction of exclusivity was sustained even when, in practice, scriptoria might be working
to full capacity to produce multiple copies of particular discourses currently in
demand.
(In Praise of Scribes [Oxford: Clarendon, 1998], 18–19.) On the production of copies of
manuscripts as distinct from copies of books, Ann Blair has commented that
[t]he production of manuscripts was closely related to demand, with manuscripts made
on commission or, if produced in a commercial scriptorium, at least with careful
anticipation of demand, because of the considerable cost of producing each copy.
Printing, on the contrary, produced books in numbers that often far exceeded demand,
since a printer could hope to recover the cost of production only by printing and
selling hundreds of copies.
(Ann Blair, ‘Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector’, Agent of Change, 21–42 [41].)
35. In ‘Samuel Hearne’s Accounts of the Massacre at Bloody Fall, 17 July 1771’, ARIEL: A Review
of International English Literature 22, no. 1 (1991): 25–51, I advanced a four-stage model, minus
the stages identified herein as A5-A6 and B5-B7.
238 I.S. MacLaren
36. For example, David Thompson’s Narrative, 1784–1812: A New Edition with Added Material, ed.
Richard Glover (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1962). This followed David Thompson’s
Narrative of His Explorations in Western America, 1784–1812, ed. J.B. Tyrrell (Toronto: The
Champlain Society, 1916).
37. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed.
Edmund Goldsmid, 16 vols. (Edinburgh: Edmund Goldsmid, 1884–1890); The Principal
Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James
MacLehose and Sons; Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1903–1905); The Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, introd. John Masefield, 8 vols.,
Everyman Edition nos. 264–265, 313–314, 338–339, 388–389 (London: D.M. Dent, 1907); The
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation . . . By Richard
Hakluyt, introd. John Masefield, 10 vols. (London, Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1927–1928).
38. For Hakluyt, among others, there are The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and
Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. R.H. Evans, 5 vols. (London: G. Woodfall for R.H. Evans
and R. Priestley, 1809–1812); Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen: Selected Narratives from the
‘Principal Navigations’ of Hakluyt, ed. Edward John Payne; notes C. Raymond Beazley
(London: Thomas De La Rue, 1880); Voyages & Documents, Richard Hakluyt, selected. and
introd. Janet Hampden, Oxford World Classics no. 562 (London: Oxford University Press,
1958); Hakluyt’s Voyages, ed. and introd. Irwin R. Blacker (New York: Viking, 1965); Richard
Hakluyt: Voyages and Discoveries, ed., abridged, and introd. Jack Beeching (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972). For Beaglehole’s Cook, there is The Journal of Captain Cook: Prepared from the
Original Manuscripts by J.C. Beaglehole for the Hakluyt Society, 1955–67, selected and ed. Philip
Edwards (London: Penguin, 1999); and for Thwaites’s Lewis and Clark, The Essential Lewis and
Clark, ed. Landon Y. Jones (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
39. Of course, in the case of compilations there is also the question of the company that a narrative
keeps. Mary Fuller has offered a thoughtful analysis of Hakluyt’s arrangements of texts in
‘Making something of it: Questions of value in the early English Travel Collection’, Journal of
Early Modern History 10 (2006): 11–38.
40. Harold Love has warned that ‘we deceive ourselves . . . when we assume that . . . a lack of cultural
respect for the authorial text was unique to the scribal medium. Print publishers were capable of
taking liberties with their exemplars that were equal to or sometimes greater than those taken by
the majority of copyists — something that, through the mediation of agents and editors, they
continue to do today (‘Fixity versus Flexibility in ‘‘A Song on Tom of Danby’’ and Dryden’s
Absalom and Achitophel’, in Agent of Change, 140–55 [142]).
41. See Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 16 and passim.
42. The Journals of Captain James Cook: vol. 3, pt. 1, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery
1776–1780, Hakluyt Society Extra Series no. XXXVI (1967), 304; A Voyage to the Pacific
Ocean. Undertaken, by the Command of his Majesty, for making Discoveries in the Northern
Hemisphere . . . . Written by Captain James Cook, [ed. John Douglas], 3 vols. and Atlas (London:
W. and A. Strahan, for G. Nicol; and T. Cadell, 1784.), II: 280. The nature of this and other
alterations made by Douglas receive discussion in MacLaren, ‘Exploration/Travel
Literature and the Evolution of the Author’, International Journal of Canadian Studies 5
(Spring 1992): 39–68.
43. ‘[A]lthough proofing in galley offered the advantage that substantial corrections could be made
to the type without the running-over that was necessary once the matter was made up into
pages, the practice does not appear to have been common in book printing until the later
nineteenth century’ (Phillip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography [1972] [Winchester,
UK: St. Paul’s Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995], 194). I am grateful to
Eli MacLaren for directing me to this statement.
44. Bridges, ‘Nineteenth-Century East African Travel Records’, 179. Bridges identified a three-stage
model (180). Both he and, rather more dramatically and without reference to Bridges’ work,
David Finkelstein have discussed the involvement of John Hill Burton in the production of John
Hanning Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh and London: W.
Blackwood and Sons, 1863): see Bridges, 189–90; and Finkelstein, ‘Breaking the Thread: The
Authorial Reinvention of John Hanning Speke in his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of
the Nile’, Text 9 (1997): 280–96, and ‘Unraveling Speke: The Unknown Revision of an African
Exploration Classic’, History in Africa 30 (2003): 117–32.
45. The term was coined by Stillinger (Multiple Authorship, 20).

46. Stillinger makes this observation of developments in the theory of editing beginning in the
1970s, and he adds the trenchant estimation that this emphasis prompted editions that ‘came
increasingly to look like the realization of editors’ rather than authors’ intentions’ (Multiple
Authorship, 198).
47. Northrop Frye, ‘Literary Criticism’, in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern
Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association,
1963), 57–69 [59]); qtd. in Stillinger (Multiple Authorship, 8). Frye’s dismissal of narratives of
exploration is by turns opaque and revealing: ‘writings . . . of many of the early explorers are as
innocent of literary intention as a mating loon’ (‘Conclusion’, Literary History of Canada:
Canadian Literature in English, gen. ed. Carl F. Klinck [Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1965], 821–49 [822]).
48. Noteworthy is Stillinger’s argument that ‘the frequency with which . . . multiple authorship turns
up, once one starts looking for it’ even in works of imaginative literature, ‘is rather strikingly at
odds with the interpretive and editorial theorists’ almost universal concern with author and
authorship as single entities’ (Multiple Authorship, 22).
49. J.C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (London: The Hakluyt Society, and A. and
C. Black; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974).

50. The Journals and Letters of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, ed. W. Kaye Lamb (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, for the Hakluyt Society, 1970).
51. A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and round the World, ed. J. Vancouver, 3 vols.
and Atlas (London: pr. for G.G. and J. Robinson, 1798). A Voyage of Discovery to the North
Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791–1795: with an Introduction and Appendices, ed.
W. Kaye Lamb, 4 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1984).
52. William Combe, The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque. A Poem (London:
R. Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1812).
53. It is important to note the tendency of many, myself included, to ascribe motive to the society
when its practice is not to initiate publications but rather to consider the proposals it receives.
Currently, the society expects editors in their introductions to clarify the nature of the text. The
annual report for 2009 emphasised the society’s commitment to the publication of ‘accurate and
reliable records of travel, exploration and discovery’. Further to this, see Roy Bridges, ‘The
Legacy of Richard Hakluyt: Reflections on the History of the Hakluyt Society since 1846’,
Richard Hakluyt: Life, Times, Legacy, ed. Claire Jowitt and Daniel Carey (London: Ashgate,
forthcoming).
54. The Journals of Alexander Mackenzie: Exploring across Canada in 1789 & 1793 (Santa Barbara,
CA: The Narrative Press, 2001).
55. The Journals of Alexander Mackenzie, [419].
56. The extra series plays a role if the undertaking appears too expensive to permit distribution of
copies to members of the society. With the costs of publication rising, the society has no plans
for new volumes in the extra series (email correspondence, W.F. Ryan, then honorary secretary
and extra series editor, to author, October 10, 2007).
57. Series One, Part One 1847–1873; Series One, Part Two 1874–1899; Series Two, Part One 1899–
1944; Series Two, Part Two 1945–2000; Series Three 1999- . See P.E. H. Hair, ‘Publications of
the Hakluyt Society 1847–1999’: http://www.hakluyt.com/bibliography/bibliography-first-
series-I.htm , . . . -first-series-II.htm, . . . -second-series-I.htm, . . . -second-series-II.htm, . . . -third-
series.htm, and . . . -extra-series.htm (retrieved Apr. 2008).
58. An Account of the Voyages undertaken by his present Majesty for making Discoveries in the
Southern Hemisphere, and successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain
Carteret, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, The Swallow, and the Endeavour: Drawn up from the
Journals which were kept by the several Commanders, and from the Papers of Joseph Banks, Esq.,
ed John Hawkesworth, 3 vols. (London: pr. for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773).
59. Marcel Trudel, ‘Cartier, Jacques’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1 (1000–1700), gen.
ed., George W. Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 165–72 (170). On
Hakluyt’s role in Florio’s translation, see Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, 64.
60. Trudel concluded that ‘the problem persists in its entirety’ (171). He does not overlook
mentioning another manuscript, but he clarifies its identity and significance: ‘A manuscript
preserved in BN [Bibliothèque nationale] (no. 841 of the Moreau collection) was edited by the
Quebec Literary and Historical Society in 1843, by Michelant and Ramé in 1867, by H.P. Biggar
240 I.S. MacLaren
in 1924, by J. Pouliot in 1934, and finally by Th. Beauchesne in 1946’. Trudel also is careful to
identify this manuscript as ‘only a copy of an original which has today disappeared’ (171).
Meanwhile, in the view of one of his modern editors, the nineteenth century essentially invented
Cartier, supplying the dominion of Canada and, later, French-Canadian nationalism with an
heroic figure because of ‘la nécessité politique’; thereby, did the narratives of his three voyages
necessarily and largely unproblematically assume the status of foundational texts for a history
and a culture (Michel Bideaux, introd., Jacques Cartier: Relations, ed. Bideaux [Montréal: Les
Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1986], 9). This discussion forms part of the argument in
MacLaren, ‘Herbert Spencer, Paul Kane, and the Making of ‘‘The Chinook’’’, Myth & Memory:
Stories of Indigenous-European Contact, ed. John Lutz (Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2007), 90–102.
61. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c.1357), transl., ed., and introd. C.W.R.D. Moseley
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 189.
62. ‘A Traveller’, letter to the editor, The Public Advertiser, 22 May 1765; rpt. in The Papers of
Benjamin Franklin, gen. ed. Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., 39 vols. (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1959–2008), vol. 12 (1968), 132–35 (135). A mere six years
later, it is worth remembering, James Cook, en route home to England from his first Pacific
voyage, wrote the following entry for 20 March:

In the pm saild the Holton Indiaman who saluted us with a 11 Guns, which
Compliment we returnd. This Ship during her stay in India lost by sickness between 30
and 40 Men and had at this time a good ma[n]y down with the scurvy, other Ships
suffer’d in the same proportion, thus we find that Ships which have been little more
than Twelve Months from England have suffer’d as much or more by Sickness than we
have done who have been out near three times as long. Yet their sufferings will hardly
if atall be mentioned or known in England when on the other hand those of [Cook’s
ship] the Endeavour, because the Voyage is uncommon, will very probable be
mentioned in every News paper, and what is not unlikely with many additional
hardships we never experienced; for such are the disposission of men in general in
these Voyages that they are seldom content with the hardships and dangers which will
naturaly occur, but they must add others which hardly ever had existence but in their
imaginations, by magnifying the most trifling accidents and Circumstances to the
greatest hardships, and unsurmou[n]table dangers without the imidate interposion of
Providence, as if the whole Merit of the Voyage consisted in the dangers and hardships
they underwent, or that real ones did not happen often enough to give the mind
sufficient anxiety; thus posteriety are taught to look upon these Voyages as hazardous
to the highest degree.
(The Journals of Captain Cook, ed. Edwards, 201–2.)
However representative of his age Cook’s remarks may have been, it would be misleading to
regard them as universal, for the late eighteenth century also witnessed repeated efforts to
specify knowledge, the encyclopedia projects, the establishment of the Linnaean Society (1788)
and the various geographical societies exemplifying this trend. See, for example, Barbara Maria
Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, science, nature, and the illustrated travel account, 1760–
1840 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1984).
63. Kenneth Iain MacDonald, ‘Ethics, Issues of’, Literature of Travel and Exploration: An
Encyclopedia, ed. Jennifer Speake (New York and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), 403–6
(405). While I take MacDonald’s point, it needs discrimination, for he speaks of colonialism as
if it were invariably the same phenomenon establishing the same value hierarchies and wielding
the same power in each place and time. Even in the writings of the same explorer, one finds a
range of responses to peoples with whom even just trade, leave alone settlement, occurred.
Nicholas Thomas is careful to tease out these differences in Cook’s writings and treatments of
aboriginal peoples. See Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York:
Walker, 2003).
64. Paul Kane, Portrait and Landscape Log 1846–1848, Stark Museum of Art, Orange, TX,
11.85/4.
65. [Paul Kane], Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America . . . (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), 209.
66. Because ‘the essential question, which continues to be debated, is whether authorial intention is
better represented in a manuscript or in a printed book’ (Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 197), it
appears advisable to proceed with investigations on a case-by-case basis.
67. D.F. McKenzie, ‘The Sociology of a Text: Oral Culture, Literacy and Print in Early
New Zealand’, The Library, vol. s6–VI, no. 4 (Dec. 1984): 333–65; rpt. in McKenzie,
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts [1986] (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 79–128.

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