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The Global Perspective of Enlightened Travelers:

Philosophic Geography from Siberia to the Pacific
Ocean

Larry Wolff

To cite this article: Larry Wolff (2006) The Global Perspective of Enlightened Travelers:
Philosophic Geography from Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, European Review of History—Revue
européenne d'Histoire, 13:3, 437-453, DOI: 10.1080/13507480600893148

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13507480600893148

Published online: 19 Jan 2007.

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European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire
Vol. 13, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 437–453

The Global Perspective of Enlightened

Travelers: Philosophic Geography from
Siberia to the Pacific Ocean
Larry Wolff

This article begins by discussing the phrase ‘philosophic geography’, as noted in the journal
of John Ledyard in the 1780s, in the context of his project to walk round the world and,
particularly, to cross Siberia to reach North America. The concept of ‘philosophic
geography’ was related to Ledyard’s sense of the difference between ‘civilisation and
incivilisation’, and involved making judgements about lands and peoples according to the
supposedly ‘philosophical’ values of the Enlightenment. Ledyard’s vision was global
inasmuch as it was related to his intended circumambulation of the globe, and the
hypothesised trans-Pacific resemblance between the indigenous peoples of Siberia and of
North America. This vision was also harnessed to eighteenth-century American imperial
aspirations concerning continental North America, which in some ways corresponded to
Russian imperial domination in Siberia. Ledyard’s global vision emerged from the context
of his earlier participation in Captian Cook’s third voyage, which explored the northern
Pacific, including Alaska, and first brought Ledyard to the juncture between Siberia and
North America. The article proceeds to consider the ways in which Siberia, also viewed as
‘Tartary’, and the Pacific Ocean served as global points of reference for ‘philosophic
geography’ in the late eighteenth century, and how those points of reference were applied to
such seemingly irrelevant imperial projects as Venetian Dalmatia and Habsburg Poland,
that is, Galicia.

In 1787 the American explorer John Ledyard set out to walk round the world. This
intended global circumambulation began in Paris, where Ledyard received the semi-
official sponsorship of Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister to France.
Ledyard walked around Scandinavia to St Petersburg, and then moved eastward across
the Russian empire into Siberia. His intention was to reach the Pacific Ocean, cross
over the straits at Alaska, and then continue eastward across the American continent
ending up somewhere in the Atlantic vicinity of his native Connecticut. To his
tremendous outrage, he was arrested by order of Catherine the Great in the midst

ISSN 1350-7486 (print)/ISSN 1469-8293 (online) q 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13507480600893148
438 L. Wolff
of Sibera, at Irkutsk—for traveling in Russia without official permission—and his
whole enterprise was undermined by Catherine’s orders to deport him from her
empire, westwards; he had to return the whole way that he had already come. His
global ambition to walk round the world was never to be fulfilled, and Ledyard actually
died a few years later, in 1789 in Egypt, at the age of thirty-eight, under somewhat
mysterious circumstances, as he was preparing to set out to explore Africa. A man of
unbalanced temperament, he allegedly became so angry at obstructions to his
intended journey that his rage brought on some sort of fatal medical attack. Though
hardly philosophical in the face of difficulties, Ledyard was notably ‘philosophic’ in the
eighteenth-century sense of the word, meaning that he was intellectually shaped by the
values of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. It was in the course of his
circumambulatory project that he articulated the concept of ‘philosophic geography’,
in order to clarify his own enlightened agenda as a traveler.1
The term ‘philosophic geography’, apparently coined by Ledyard in his diary during
his Russian misadventure, was intended to contrast with the sacred geography that
oriented the globe according to Christian concerns, like the medieval mappings that
placed Jerusalem at the center of the known world or made Columbus imagine that the
New World might be the gateway to paradise. For an enlightened traveler like Ledyard,
only secular values were relevant to his geographical sense of place, and his global map
was oriented according to the rational, or ‘philosophical’, concerns of the
Enlightenment. It should be noted, however, that while ‘philosophical geography’
was intended as an enlightened advance over medieval sacred geography, it was not
necessarily practiced in the spirit of modern positivist and scientific geography, based
only on the neutral observation and description of data. The enlightened traveler of
the eighteenth century, such as Ledyard, was keen to interpret philosophically his
geographical observations, and his global vision was conditioned by his enlightened
values. His global vision derived, in part, from his earlier experience as a participant in
the third voyage of Captain Cook, and from the earlier philosophical and geographical
interest in both Siberia and the Pacific Ocean in the eighteenth century.

‘From Civilization to Incivilization’

The single most important value for Ledyard, evaluating the terrain through which he
traveled, was summed up in the eighteenth-century neologism ‘civilization’. This term,
which had not existed when Ledyard was born in the colony of Connecticut in 1751,
began to acquire its modern meaning in the writings of the French physiocrats in the
1750s and 1760s. The expansion of commerce was supposed to have consequences for
the refinement of manners and advancement of learning: in a word, not well-defined,
‘civilization’. In the 1780s the term already seemed indispensable to Ledyard, who
reached the Volga at Kazan in 1788, and reflected upon ‘the nice Gradation by which I
pass from Civilization to Incivilization’. He claimed to perceive the evidence of that
passage in details of manners, dress, language and skin color among the regional
populations of Russians and Tartars.2 Not only did he invoke the new term
 European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 439

‘civilization’ as a very abstract noun, but he also employed an antonym, ‘incivilization’,

to enhance the analytical power of his philosophical mapping. At the same time the
meaning of both terms remained imprecise and unstable, and Ledyard claimed to
discern anthropological and racial aspects of civilization.
Much farther to the east, at Yakutsk, he specified the geographical coordinates of
civilization and incivilization: ‘I again remark that by the same gentle gradation in
which I passed from the height of civilized Society at Petersburg to incivilization in
Siberia, I passed from the Colour of the fair European to the Copper-coloured Tartar.’
As he walked along, Ledyard thus sorted out the correspondence between observable
variations like skin color and abstract values like civilization. Such thoughts led him to
a global generalization: ‘General Remark is that far the greatest part of mankind
compared with European Civilization are uncultivated & that this part of Mankind are
darker Coloured than the other part viz European. There are no white Savages and few
uncivilized people that are not brown or black.’3 From St Petersburg through Kazan to
Yakutsk Ledyard sought to discover an intimate disciplinary relation between
ethnography and geography, both meaningfully correlated with the polar principles of
civilization and incivilization. Ledyard’s ‘enlightened racism’ (though the phrase
seems obviously oxymoronic outside the eighteenth-century context) was harnessed
to the principle of civilization and oriented according to the geographical map.
Though his observations were local at Yakutsk, regional in Siberia and national across
the Russian empire, his philosophic geography was global in its speculative
generalizations.
In fact, the whole purpose of Ledyard’s circumambulation was anthropologically
global. He was eager to confirm his hypothesis that the ‘Tartars’ of Siberia (Ledyard used
the name ‘Tartar’ very loosely to describe all non-Russian Siberian peoples) were
anthropologically identical—in terms of race, customs and level of civilization—to the
Indians of North America. There was thus a scientific purpose, beyond mere athleticism
and adventurism, to walking across Siberia and then across America. Ledyard believed
that the geographical contiguity of the North Asian and North American continental
masses, at the Bering Straits, had produced an anthropological identity of uncivilized
populations across both continents. He wrote a letter from Siberia to Jefferson in Paris:
I shall never be able, without seeing you in person & perhaps not even then, to
inform you how universally and circumstantially the Tartars resemble the aborigines
of America: they are the same people—the most antient, & most numerous of any
other, & had not a small sea divided them, they would all have still been known by
the same name. The cloak of civilization sits as ill upon them as our American
Tartars—they have been a long time Tartars & it will be a long time before they are
any other kind of people.4
In Ledyard’s global vision he perceived a geographical analogy between Europe, with
Tartars in the east, and America, with Tartars in the West. There was, on the one hand,
a transatlantic civilized correspondence between Europeans and Americans, that is,
Americans like Ledyard of European descent, the citizens of the newly independent
republic. There was, on the other hand, an aboriginal transpacific correspondence
440 L. Wolff
between the Tartars of Siberia and the Indians of America (the ‘American Tartars’).
Thus, the two abstract poles of civilization and incivilization were oriented according
to specific geographical domains. Enlightened analysis produced a global
differentiation based on the philosophical value of civilization.
Ledyard’s geographical knowledge was, in fact, fully global, for in the previous
decade he had accompanied Captain Cook on the latter’s third and final voyage, from
1776 to 1780. While his fellow Connecticans were serving in the American army of the
Atlantic colonies against the British in the Revolutionary War, Ledyard was sailing
under the British flag in the Pacific Ocean, exploring the world on behalf of the British
crown and the international Enlightenment. Cook on his third voyage revisited many
of the islands of the South Pacific, such as Tahiti, that had been on the itinerary of the
earlier voyages; he also now attended closely to the North Pacific, attempting to
discover, or rule out, the existence of a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the
Pacific. Ledyard thus had the opportunity to see the North Pacific. He was present at
the discovery of Hawaii in 1778, and was there again when Cook was killed in 1779.
The expedition also visited the west coast of North America, around Oregon, and
explored the northern straits between Alaska and Siberia. This was the first occasion
for Ledyard to reflect upon the ethnographic relation between the Siberians of the
Russian empire and the Indians of North America. In the following decade Ledyard
would undertake his project to walk round the world and study the Siberian Tartars
and the American Indians in juxtaposition.
For Ledyard in the 1780s, the Siberian project was governed by American concerns,
and global geography was guided by national political interests. ‘The American
Revolution invites to a thorough discovery of the Continent’, wrote Ledyard from
France in 1786, before setting out on his circumambulation. ‘It was necessary that a
European should discover the Existence of that Continent, but in the name of Amor
Patria let a Native of it Explore its Boundary. It is my wish to be the Man.’5 Ledyard had
actually missed the American Revolution while exploring the Pacific; he had been
twenty-five years old in 1776, and would have been in his fighting prime. Now at
thirty-five he felt himself fired with a patriotism that conveniently vindicated his
exploratory ambitions, his sense of science and adventure. Ledyard’s interest in the
western territories of North America, and in its Native American inhabitants,
corresponded to the early stirrings of American imperial preoccupation. The
American Revolution created an independent Atlantic state that inevitably looked west
with some aggrandizing interest in the vast American continent. Ledyard’s originality
was to start in France and travel east, for the better exploration of the American West.
It was his ‘philosophic geography’, his determination to define the geographical
relation between the Old World and the New World, that dictated his itinerary.
Jefferson’s sponsorship of Ledyard further suggests the plausibility of interpreting
the latter’s voyage in terms of American imperial interests in the western continental
United States. ‘If I do not tire you with the Repetition of my thanks I shall at least do
injustice to the other parts of my Letters unless you will be so good as to accept of a
single honest heartfelt Thank You for the whole’, wrote Ledyard to Jefferson in August
 European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 441

1786, suggesting that the latter’s support, whether official or unofficial, was certainly
significant and probably financial. As American minister in France, Jefferson did
attempt to go through official channels to procure permission for Ledyard to travel in
the Russian empire. Jefferson wrote to Ledyard in August 1786 with word from
Catherine, ‘I saw Baron de Grimm yesterday at Versailles, and he told me he had
received an answer from the Empress, who declines the proposition made on your
account, she thinks it chimerical. I am in hopes your execution of it from our side of
the continent will prove the contrary.’6 American imperial interest pertained to the
exploration of the American continent—‘from our side’—but for Ledyard, as a
philosophical geographer of the Enlightenment, the Siberian complement to the
American exploration was anthropologically essential. From Catherine’s point of view
Ledyard’s exploration of Siberia did not necessarily contribute to her own Russian
imperial interest. In a letter to Grimm in 1787 she commented, concerning Ledyard,
that ‘someone who makes discoveries for others (trouvaille pour les autres) does not
always do so for us, in view of the difference in languages, customs, and usages.’7
Russian imperial concerns might be better served by explorations under Russian
sponsorship, and Catherine did in fact sponsor many such expeditions.
‘My friend, my brother, my Father —I know not by what title to address you—you
are very dear to me’, wrote Ledyard to Jefferson in 1786. Meanwhile Jefferson wrote to
a third party in 1787, without seeming to suggest the same level of sentimental
attachment: ‘I had a letter from Ledyard lately dated at St. Petersburg. He had but two
shirts, and yet more shirts than shillings. Still he was determined to obtain the palm of
being the first circumambulator of the earth. He says that having no money they kick
him from place to place and thus he expects to be kicked round the globe.’8 In fact, he
ended up being kicked out of Russia in 1788, and never managed to complete his
voyage with the intended exploration of the American West. Jefferson, fifteen years
later as president of the United States, would send Lewis and Clark to carry out the
exploration of north-western America, precisely the mission that Ledyard had hoped
to accomplish from the other direction. Both Ledyard and Jefferson in the 1780s were
capable of imagining that American national interests, analogous to those of the
Russian empire, could be furthered by the practice of philosophic geography. The
enlightened analysis of the relation between civilization and incivilization pointed
toward an imperial project.

‘The Errors of the Modern Maps’

The global synthesis of geography, ethnography, anthropology and empire was forged
in the age of Enlightenment, and most particularly through the highly publicized
voyages of Captain Cook, which joined the spirit of enlightened scientific investigation
to British imperial ambitions around the world. Ledyard, later articulating the term
‘philosophic geography’, would have found the concept already implicit in his
experience with Cook. The captain’s three voyages, extending from 1768 to 1780,
sought to complete the project of global oceanic geography that was initiated in the
442 L. Wolff
Renaissance age of discovery. Cook was filling in blanks on the global map as he
mapped the South Pacific and ruled out the existence of an undiscovered great
southern continent. The instructions of 1768 for the first voyage mandated ‘the
making of Discoverys of Countries hitherto unknown, and the Attaining a Knowledge
of distant Parts which though formerly discover’d have yet been but imperfectly
explored’—and thereby to enhance ‘the Hounor of this Nation’ and ‘the Dignity of the
Crown’. The instructions stipulated ethnographically that Cook was ‘to observe the
Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives’, while authorizing him
politically to act ‘with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient
Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain’.9 Geography,
anthropology and empire were explicitly combined in Cook’s instructions, and they
emerged as casually commingled concerns in the captain’s journals.
He was also capable of harnessing his observations to the philosophical concerns of
the Enlightenment. In north-eastern Australia in 1770 Cook noted the kangaroos
(indeed he ate the kangaroos), and demonstrated his ethnographic empiricism with a
detailed description of the human populations he encountered:
The Natives of this Country are of a middle Stature, straight bodied and slender-
limbed, their skins the Colour of Wood soot or of a dark Chocolate . . . . They go
quite naked both Men and women without any manner of Cloathing whatever, even
the Women do not so much as Cover their privities. Altho none of us were ever very
near any of their women, one gentleman excepted, yet we are all as well satisfied of
this as if we had lived among them.10
His detailed observations of skin color in Australia would be echoed by Ledyard twenty
years later in Siberia. Cook also permitted himself a certain measure of generalization,
as with regard to the nakedness of the Australian women, even though there was only
one English gentleman who got close enough to testify. Furthermore, Cook went
beyond empiricism when he entered into the realm of philosophical reflection:
We are to Consider that we see this Country in the pure state of Nature, the Industry
of Man has had nothing to do with any part of it . . . . From what I have said of the
Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people
upon the Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being
wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences
so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them.11
This was not just philosophic geography, but fashionable philosophic geography,
showing Cook attuned to the enlightened values of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Whereas
the sacred geography of Columbus involved speculating on the location of a terrestrial
paradise at the mouth of the Orinoco in 1498, the enlightened philosophic geography
of Cook meant trying to identify the state of nature. Focusing on the question of what
it meant to be more or less civilized, Cook in Australia offered philosophical lessons to
an enlightened English public whose empirical experience of geography was far more
limited than his own.
On the third voyage, in 1778, Cook, together with Ledyard, proceeded to explore
the North Pacific and, after the discovery of Hawaii, continued north to Alaska, the
 European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 443

Aleutian Islands and Kamchatka in eastern Siberia. He collected geographical

information as he proceeded, intending ‘to make some improvement to Geography
and Navigation’ while also attempting to explore the possibility of a north-western
passage, to the north of North America. Cook was well aware of the exploratory efforts
that had preceded him in this region, largely under Russian sponsorship, particularly
the voyages of Vitus Bering and the geographical compilations by Gerhard Mueller and
Jakob Staehlin of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. On 31 August 1778, Cook
was able to announce the sighting of the Asian coast of Siberia: ‘I was now well assured
that this was the Coast of Tchuktschi, or the NE Coast of Asia, and that thus far
Captain Behring proceeded in 1728, that is to this head which Mr Muller says is called
Serdze Kamen, on account of a rock upon it in the shape of a heart.’12 Cook was thus
compelled to become a Slavicist as he explored the North Pacific and recognized the
Russian role in the mapping of the region.
Though he intended to keep an open mind about local geography as he made his
own observations, Cook’s only established points of reference came from earlier
Russian ventures. ‘I must conclude, as Behring did before me, this Promontory to be
the Eastern point of Asia’, wrote Cook about geography. On the subject of ethnography
he similarly oriented himself with regard to Russian expertise: ‘These people must be
the Tchuktschkians a Nation that at the time Mr. Muller wrote the Russians had not
been able to conquer, and from the whole of their conduct with us it appears that they
have not yet brought them under subjection.’ Cook was ready to recognize the
achievements of his predecessors: ‘In justice to Behring’s Memory, I must say he had
delineated this Coast very well and fixed the latitude and longitude of the points better
than could be expected from the Methods he had to go by’.13 Yet, Cook was also
pleased to be able to correct the geographical errors of past expeditions: ‘Having now
fully satisfied myself that Mr Staehlin’s Map must be erroneous and not mine, it was
high time to think of leaving these Northern parts, and to retire to some place to spend
the Winter.’ Cook sought to obtain supplies for the winter by befriending local
Russians on the American side of the straits, and an Indian named Derramoushk
served as messenger and intermediary. ‘I also sent along with Derramoushk and his
party Corporal Ledyard of the Marines, an intelligent man’, noted Cook, ‘in order to
gain some further information, with orders, if he met with any Russians, or others, to
endeavour to make them understand that we were English, Friends and Allies’.14 Thus,
a decade before his own individual voyage, Ledyard entered into his first encounter
with the Russian subjects of Catherine the Great on the Siberian – American frontier.
Ledyard returned to Cook two days later with three Russians—perhaps seamen,
perhaps furriers—but, according to Cook, ‘for want of an interpreter we had some
difficulty to understand each other’. The captain nevertheless quizzed them about
geography: ‘I laid before them my Chart, and found they were strangers to every part
of the America Coast except what lies opposite to them. One of these Men said he was
on the America Voyage with Behring, he must however have been very young for he
had not now the appearance of an old man.’ Another Russian proved to be ‘very well
acquainted with the Geography of these parts and with all the discoveries the Russians
444 L. Wolff
had made and at once pointed out the errors of the Modern Maps’.15 Cook was seeking
to establish exactly how much the Russians had already accomplished in exploring the
American side of the northern Pacific, and the extent of their claim upon the territory.
That territory, as Cook accepted, had a name of its own: ‘I have already observed
that the American Continent is here called by the Russians as well as Indians Alaska,
which is the proper Indian name for it’. The inadequate Russian mapping of the
region, however, left much geographical work to be done: ‘If Mr. Staehlin was not
greatly imposed upon what could induce him to publish so erroneous a Map, in which
many of these islands are jumbled in irregular confusion without the least regard to
truth and yet he is pleased to call it a very accurate little Map? A Map that the most
illiterate of his illiterate sea-faring men would have been ashamed to put his name
to.’16 For Cook in the North Pacific, as in the South Pacific, the geographical
imperative was overwhelming, and every erroneously mapped island would have to be
correctly repositioned on the charts. Cook’s global vision focused with special
attention on the northern adjacency of Asia and America as a global geographical
juncture. He intended to return after the winter to correct the Russian maps by the
long light and relative warmth of the Arctic summer, but he was murdered in Hawaii
in February 1779, and would never return to Alaska. In the 1780s Ledyard would try to
return on his own, but would be prevented by the Russians from crossing Siberia.
Cook’s mapping of Alaska in 1778 involved ethnographic observations, pointing
toward a philosophic geography:

It is now time to give some account of the native inhabitants, who (to all appearance)
are the most peaceable inoffensive people I ever met with, and as to honesty they
might serve as a pattern to the most civilized nation upon earth. But from what I saw
of their Neighbours with whom the Russians have no connection, I have no reason to
think this was their original disposition, but rather think it owing to their connection
with, or rather subjection to the Russians. Indeed if some of our gentlemen did not
misunderstand the Russian, they told them they were obliged to make some severe
examples before they could bring them to any order; if this was done at first it was
excusable since the most happy consequences have attended, and one sees now
nothing but the greatest harmony subsisting between the two Nations.17

The two ‘nations’ were the Russians and the Indians. Cook did not call the latter
Eskimos or Inuits, and neither did he suggest that they were Tartars, related to the
Siberians, as Ledyard would seek to prove in the following decade. Living at such high
latitudes they could not, like the Australians, go naked, though their clothes were
sufficiently unusual, by European standards, to merit anthropological notice:
‘The woman’s frock is made of sealskin.’18 The philosophical cue in Cook’s description
was his suggestion that such a ‘peaceable inoffensive people’ might ‘serve as a pattern
to the most civilized nation upon earth’. The chastening remark might have been
addressed to the English and French, supremely civilized nations who were again at
war in 1778, in the conflict surrounding the American Revolution. For Cook, the ever
imprecise notion of civilization clearly had a moral character, featuring honesty and
peaceableness.
 European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 445

The peaceableness of the Alaskans was not due to their living, like the Australians, in
the ‘pure state of nature’. The Alaskan Indians’ exposure to the Russians had
compromised the purity of their natural condition, and Cook, in this case demurring
from the philosophy of Rousseau, suggested that the ‘connection with’ or rather
‘subjection to’ the Russians had brought about the peaceableness of the population.
Those who lived more naturally (‘their Neighbours with whom the Russians have no
connection’) seem to have made a less amiable impression upon Cook. He accordingly
affirmed that peace and harmony came about as the consequence of imperial subjection,
indeed of exemplary punishments. Cook thus allusively endorsed the punitive beating
of the North Pacific Indians as a necessary means toward the desirable end of rendering
them disciplined and pacific. This was a lesson in the happy consequences of imperial
subjection, for Catherine ruled over a Russian empire, and Alaska lay at its most remote
eastern extremity. Philosophic geography, addressing the balance of civilization and
incivilization, thus incorporated ethnography and anthropology, and endorsed the
ideology of empire. Ledyard, an ‘intelligent man’ as Cook remarked, would have learned
from the captain the lessons of philosophic geography among the Indians of the North
Pacific, at the global juncture of Asia and America.

‘To the Last Frontier of the Russian Empire’

Ledyard’s ambitious attempt to explore Siberia anthropologically in the 1780s was
thus foreshadowed, and even perhaps suggested, by Cook’s reports from Alaska and
Kamchatka in the 1770s. In the 1760s, however, Siberia had actually made a dramatic
earlier appearance on the mental maps and in the philosophic geography of the
Enlightenment. In 1761 the abbé Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche traveled to
Tobolsk to witness the astronomical transit of Venus, and he published in 1768 a
controversial work entitled Voyage in Siberia (Voyage en Siberie), which offered a
controversial report on ‘the customs and usages of the Russians’. Topographically, he
emphasized the flatness of the Russian empire, creating an ecological consistency from
Petersburg to Tobolsk, including an ethnographic convergence of Russians and Tartars
subject to the same climate. The intermingling of Russians and Tartars also produced
both moral and medical consequences, such that, according to Chappe d’Auteroche,
‘venereal diseases are so prevalent in Siberia and northern Tartary that it is to be feared
that in time they may totally destroy the human species there’.19 It was such critical
remarks that provoked Catherine’s imperial wrath, and she herself wrote and
published an ‘antidote’ to Chappe d’Auteroche, rebutting and attacking his alleged
slanders of her empire.
In the Social Contract of 1762 Rousseau had prophesied European doom at the
hands of the Siberian Tartars: ‘The Russian empire would like to subjugate Europe and
will find itself subjugated. The Tartars, its subjects or neighbours, will become its
masters—and ours.’ Rousseau was dissenting from the enthusiasm of the Enlight-
enment, most notably of Voltaire, for the Russian empire as reformed by Peter the
Great in the early eighteenth century.20 In Rousseau’s view, the imperial balance
446 L. Wolff
of civilization and incivilization between Russia and Siberia would ultimately be
overturned by the barbarous triumph of the latter. Rousseau, of course, never went
anywhere near Siberia himself, and his geopolitical appraisal was purely academic and
speculative.
Chappe d’Auteroche, on the other hand, did go to Siberia, and responded directly to
Rousseau’s prophetic anxieties. ‘When I was in St. Petersburg on the point of departing
for Siberia’, wrote Chappe d’Auteroche, ‘people wrote to me from the French capital to
examine well this country out of which might emerge at any moment whole peoples
who, like the Scythians and the Huns, would come seize upon our little Europe.
I found, instead of those peoples, marshes and deserts.’21 Empirical geography was
thus invoked in the controversies of philosophic geography. Russia, in the view of
Chappe d’Auteroche, was less civilized than Voltaire imagined, but Siberia was less
menacing than Rousseau supposed. The geographical observation of marshes and
deserts rebutted the speculative hopes and fears of the philosophes.
Ever since the Renaissance, geography pursued a sort of purposeful disenchantment,
filling in place names on the map while exorcising mythological fears from the
imagination, including the picturesque monsters that lurked on the margins of
cartography. The geography of the Enlightenment, including the voyages of Captain
Cook, was determined to fill in the remaining blanks on the terrestrial and oceanic
maps of the world. Catherine herself in 1771, when she was engaged in war against the
Ottoman Empire, recognized that the contested lands of south-eastern Europe that fell
within the range of her imperial ambition belonged to the domain of geographical
nebulousness. ‘Isn’t it true that here are plenty of materials to correct and augment the
geographical maps?’, she wrote to Voltaire. ‘In this war one has heard named places
that one never heard spoken of previously, and which the geographers thought were
deserts.’22 The geography of Chappe d’Auteroche revealed marshes and deserts instead
of populations, while the geography of Catherine revealed populations instead of the
anticipated deserts. In each case, the philosophical lesson of geography pointed toward
a greater or lesser degree of society, a greater or lesser promise of civilization, in the
Russian empire.
Chappe’s publication in 1768 coincided exactly with the departure of Cook’s first
voyage to the Pacific and, in fact, their efforts were geographically complementary. The
unexplored terrestrial depths of the Russian empire posed a geographical challenge
that corresponded to the uncharted marine extent of the Pacific Ocean in the late
eighteenth century. Cook’s third voyage in the 1770s suggested that these were
intersecting challenges, meeting at the global juncture of Alaska and Kamchatka. For
Ledyard, traveling in the 1780s, the circumambulation of the globe was fraught with
imperial implications as he studied the Tartars of the Russian empire in the hope of
proceeding to study the Indians of North America.
Siberia and the Pacific became global points of reference in the late eighteenth
century, as European states sought to articulate the issues of civilization that were
relevant to projects of empire. Three years after Chappe’s publication concerning
Siberia, the Paduan abbé Alberto Fortis published in Venice in 1771 his observations
 European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 447

on the island of Kres, in the north-eastern Adriatic Sea. Kres was a possession of
Venice, and Fortis, an enlightened natural historian, undertook in the early 1770s to
investigate Venice’s Adriatic empire on the eastern coast of the sea, culminating
in the publication of his Voyage in Dalmatia (Viaggio in Dalmazia) in 1774. Already in
the preliminary essay on Kres in 1771 Fortis was interested in the ethnography of the
Adriatic Slavs, and their relation to the wider Slavic world. At a time when the
linguistic and cultural connections among Slavic peoples were only minimally
appreciated in the western circles of the Enlightenment, Fortis was aware of wide-
ranging geographical implications: ‘The Slavic nation and the Slavic language are the
most extensive that are known in the world. From Carniola to the last frontier of the
Russian empire one can travel far and wide speaking this language alone.’23 Fortis’s
philosophic geography of the Adriatic thus followed the itinerary of Chappe into
remote Siberia, to the frontiers of the Russian empire.
For Fortis philosophic geography meant understanding the imperial significance for
Venice in ruling over an empire of Slavs, and he therefore articulated the relation of the
Adriatic islanders and mainland Dalmatians to the wider world of Slavs. Johann
Gottfried Herder would make this issue of Slavic relations more emphatic in the
fourth volume of his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind (Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), published in 1791; in the section on ‘Slavic
Peoples’ (Slavische Völker) he would identify the domain of the Slavs ‘from the Don to
the Elbe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic’. At the same time Herder was geographically
conscious of the ‘monstrous heights which are called Asiatic Tartary’. He envisioned
the Eurasian land mass as a ‘descending plain’, from ‘the Tartar heights westward’,
making Europe topographically accessible to Asiatic ‘hordes’ of Tartars.24 Just as Fortis
recognized the ethnographic relation between the Adriatic coast and the last frontier of
the Russian empire, Herder believed that the ominous shadow of Tartary was hanging
geographically over Europe. Such geographic and ethnographic relations had
philosophical implications for issues of civilization and empire.
Not only Siberian Tartary, publicized by Chappe, but also the Pacific islands,
publicized by Cook, could be geographically invoked as philosophically relevant to the
Venetian empire in Dalmatia. The most supposedly primitive population of Dalmatia,
the noble savages of the Venetian empire, comprised the Morlacchi of the inland
mountains, a pastoral people who became subjects of special public interest in the age
of Enlightenment when Fortis included an anthropological chapter on their customs
in his Viaggio in Dalmazia. Fortis believed that he could discern in the customs of the
Morlacchi ‘the innocent and natural liberty of the pastoral centuries’, something like
Rousseau’s state of nature. In 1788 the Venetian woman of letters Giustiniana Wynne
published a long anthropological novel, Les Morlaques, in French, concerning the
customs of the Morlacchi. Wynne introduced her subject with some Rousseauist
reflections on Dalmatia:

The islands, the shores, and the towns experience the advantages of civilization,
which commerce and populous society attract in their wake; everywhere else this
448 L. Wolff
vast country, although so close to Italy and in great part subject to the Republic of
Venice, offers the image of nature in primitive society, such as it must have been in
the most remote times, and such as it has been found among the inhabitants of the
most unknown islands of the Pacific.25
The seemingly bizarre juxtaposition of Adriatic Dalmatia and the Pacific islands
followed the logic of philosophic geography and was governed by the idea of
civilization. In this case, ‘civilization’ was conceived in relation to commerce and
population, much as the physiocrats had originally used the term in the previous
generation. Relative remoteness from civilization, whether the narrow width of the
Adriatic Sea, or the vast extent of the Pacific Ocean, determined the philosophical
association between Dalmatia and Tahiti or Hawaii. Indeed, Cook, on his first voyage,
visited Tahiti in 1769 and Australia in 1770, while Fortis crossed the Adriatic in 1770 to
explore the island of Kres; the publication of Viaggio in Dalmazia in 1774 coincided
with Cook’s visit to Easter Island on the second voyage, and just preceded Cook’s
discovery of Hawaii in 1778, on the third voyage. The seemingly peculiar association
between Dalmatia and the Pacific islands, as sites of both primitive customs and
natural liberty, was forged in the coincident chronology of enlightened geographical
exploration.
Edmund Burke, in 1777, articulated the global relation among uncivilized lands in
his geographical exposition of the ‘great map’ of primitive peoples:
But now the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once; and there is no state or
gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same
instant under our view. The very different civility of Europe and of China; the
barbarism of Tartary, and of Arabia. The Savage State of North America, and of New
Zealand.26
Burke’s map of mankind in the 1770s reflected the gradations of civilization and
incivilization observed by Ledyard in the 1780s. For Burke, as for Ledyard, the
barbarism of Tartary might be linked to the savagery of North America. The global
vision of incivilization extended from New Zealand in the South Pacific, which Cook
visited on the first voyage, to the farthest frontier of the Russian empire in Siberia. By
this logic it was perfectly natural for Wynne to associate Dalmatia and Tahiti, Eastern
Europe and the South Pacific. Civilization was the key to this map, and the guiding
idea of philosophical geography. It was also essential to enlightened ideologies of
empire because the perceived absence of civilization inevitably encouraged the
construction of a civilizing mission.
If Burke’s vision of the map of mankind, from Tartary to New Zealand, reflected a
global British vision with imperial implications in the eighteenth century, Fortis and
Wynne, relating Dalmatia to the last frontier of the Russian empire or the most remote
island of the Pacific Ocean, reflected a Venetian global vision based on the principles of
philosophical geography. Just as the celebrated seventeenth-century Venetian
geographer Vincenzo Coronelli constructed globes for Louis XIV to reflect the latest
contemporary geographical discoveries, so the eighteenth-century juxtaposition of
Dalmatia and the Pacific islands reflected the global and philosophical geography
 European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 449

articulated in the voyages of Captain Cook.27 The imperial significance of Dalmatia for
Venice in the 1770s and 1780s was thus expressed in geographical reflections on
civilization and incivilization.
The Habsburg Empire in the 1770s and 1780s was similarly attuned to the nuances
of philosophic geography, the value of civilization and the corresponding relevance of
the idea of Eastern Europe. Over the course of the eighteenth century Europe was
increasingly envisioned as fundamentally divided into coherent halves, Western
Europe and Eastern Europe, more and less civilized, with Slavic peoples located in the
latter domain. This idea of Eastern Europe was relevant to both Venetian and
Habsburg imperial perspectives. In the eighteenth-century Habsburg Empire it was
possible to apply the idea of Eastern Europe to lands and populations that had been
connected to the dynasty for centuries, like Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Croatia and
Slovenia. Particularly illuminating, however, was the case of Galicia, the territory
annexed in the first partition of Poland in 1772, a territory that had no historic
connection to the Habsburg Monarchy, indeed no historic existence whatsoever prior
to the partition. Galicia was an invention of philosophic geography in the late
eighteenth century, a convenient designation intended to attribute legitimacy to
Vienna’s participation in the partition of Poland, invoking an almost forgotten and
virtually irrelevant Hungarian claim to the medieval Rus principality of Halicz. The
invention of Galicia as a province thus roughly coincided historically with the
invention of Eastern Europe as a region, and the ideology of civilization, so important
for the concept of Eastern Europe, inevitably colored the imperial appropriation of
Galicia.28
Franz Kratter, a young German who spent six months in Galicia in 1784, published
in Leipzig in 1786 an account called Letters about the Present Situation of Galicia (Briefe
über den itzigen Zustand von Galizien). Emphasizing the supposed chasm of
civilization between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, he reported that the Polish
nobleman in Galicia was ‘the most inhuman, abominable, wild thing (Wildling)’ and
‘remote from every mannered society, from his youth destined for unlimited
command, through coarse, wild and horrible actions hardened to the point of tigerish
insensitivity’.29 Thus, the mannered society of the civilized world—of Kratter’s own
German reading public—was placed in stark contrast to the wildness of Galicia. That
contrast served to pose the challenge of the Habsburg imperial mission, redressing the
philosophical balance between civilization and incivilization.
That balance was sometimes ethnographically articulated in terms of the
difference between civilized Germans and the population of Galicia: Polish,
Ruthenian or Ukrainian, and Jewish. In 1790, after the death of the Habsburg
emperor Joseph II, the Habsburg official Ernst von Kortum responded to complaints
from Galicia about German bureaucrats and immigrants as an imperial presence
in the province. Kortum contended that the presence of Germans was necessary,
like Habsburg imperial rule, as a matter of civilization. In order to demonstrate
this principle, he proposed a hypothetical imaginative experiment in philosophic
geography:
450 L. Wolff
Imagine for a moment all the German inhabitants gone from Poland and Galicia,
with their industriousness and business, and then imagine the image of those lands.
Would one find any other counterpart except—Tartary, or at best (höchstens)
Moldavia and Wallachia? Consider the Polish towns that once had, with their
German inhabitants, a sort of prosperity, and are now the sad residence of Jews,
poverty, uncleanliness, and ignorance. Then deny my contention.30
Here the Enlightenment’s perspective on Eastern Europe coincided with the Habsburg
imperial view of Galicia. Just as the idea of Eastern Europe played upon an alleged
geographical overlapping between Europe and the Orient, so the province of Galicia
appeared as just such an amalgam of western and eastern elements. Kortum’s
imaginative experiment stripped away the western aspects of the supposed amalgam in
order to demonstrate that what remained would be ethnographically Polish and Jewish
and economically backward, the eastern residue of Eastern Europe. The equation in
philosophic geography was framed accordingly: Galicia minus the Germans equals
Tartary. The same Tartary that Ledyard explored in the 1780s was for Kortum in 1790
the fundamental eastern point of reference for Eastern Europe as epitomized in
Galicia. Like Ledyard, Kortum possessed his own implicit concept of ‘incivilization’, in
this case involving ‘Jews, poverty, uncleanliness and ignorance’.
Kortum suggested that, even ‘at best’, Galicia, without its Germans, would resemble
the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, then ruled by Greek
Phanariot princes who lay ultimately under Ottoman sovereignty. Thus Kortum
outlined a clear hierarchy of lands and peoples, scaled according to the gradations of
civilization and incivilization. Tartary lay at one end of the scale, then Moldavia and
Wallachia, then Galicia and finally the Germans. Yet, it was only the German imperial
presence, under the aegis of Habsburg imperial rule, that raised Galicia above
Moldavia and Wallachia, for, as Kortum claimed by his experiment, the decomposition
of the Galician amalgam left Jews and Poles who were scarcely superior to the Tartars
of Siberia and ethnographically equal to the Romanians of Moldavia and Wallachia.
He omitted to mention the Ruthenians of Galicia, but presumably believed that they
too, like Poles and Jews, belonged to the domain of Eastern Europe. For Kortum the
Jews of Galicia were not only representatives of poverty, ignorance and backwardness,
but were also, by origin, biblically Oriental, and therefore contributed to the Oriental
character of Eastern Europe. Philosophical geography thus functioned as a sort of
experimental science. Giustiniana Wynne could imagine Dalmatia adjoining Tahiti.
Kortum could picture Galicia ethnographically altered, stripped of its Germans. He
proposed his experiment only for the sake of argument, but his argument was
intended to serve the ideology of the Habsburg Empire in Eastern Europe.

Conclusion: ‘The Great Barrier’

Ledyard coined the term ‘philosophic geography’ in his diary in 1788, when he was
expelled from the Russian empire, deported to the west from Siberia, and ended up
crossing from Poland into Prussia. There, on the frontier between the German and
Polish lands, he claimed to experience ‘the great barrier of Asiatic and European
 European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 451

manners’. Of course, such an impression made no geographical sense at all, since

Leydard was far from the boundary between Asia and Europe. Therefore, he invoked
the concept of ‘philosophic geography’ to justify a judgment that conventional
geography would have flatly refuted:
I do not know where to fix the Philosophic Geography of the other parts of Europe,
but if my Vanity should ever tempt me to do it I should be sure of one spot to fix the
foot of my Compass. There is something singularly decisive in the limits here
marked by the great Frederick. I wish to God he had been a Tartar; his rich Genius
would not have cursed all Asia with the useless conquests of the half formed Zengis
Chan, but would have chased from that ignominious & almost useless quarter of the
World with equal address & vigour the baneful Sources of those Vices which have
even to this very day retarded the bold & noble advances made by the Sons of Europe
to a state of Society only worthy of mankind, & if I dare to subjoin the approbation
of God.31
Philosophic geography thus governed relations between east and west, defining the
perspective of western civilization on eastern lands. That perspective was defined by
the ‘sons of Europe’, including Ledyard himself, an American son of Europe who
identified himself completely with Western Europe.
Philosophic geography could even, in the spirit of imaginative experiment, envision
intercontinental warfare between Europe and Asia, spinning the fantasy of Frederick
the Great as western civilization’s answer to Genghis Khan, the ultimate imperialist. In
Kortum’s imaginative experiment Eastern Europe was stripped of its Germans; in
Ledyard’s fantasy Eastern Europe was purged of its Tartars. In both cases,
philosophical geography appeared as an operational science, capable of envisioning
the transformation of the map. In the next generation, Napoleon Bonaparte would
give life to Ledyard’s fantasy, invading Russia in 1812, crashing the barrier and
overturning the balance between east and west, redrawing the map of Europe, while
claiming to represent the beneficence of imperial French civilization. Already in the
late eighteenth century, however, as ‘civilization’ acquired its motley range of unstable
modern meanings, philosophic geography had invested the concept of relative
civilization with a global significance, relevant to comparative ethnography and the
ideology of empire.

Notes
[1] John Ledyard’s Journey, 3 – 31; Wolff, ‘Between the Eastern and Western World’; Wolff, Inventing
Eastern Europe, 343 –355; Zug, American Traveler.
[2] John Ledyard’s Journey, 144; see also Elias, The History of Manners, 35– 50.
[3] John Ledyard’s Journey, 178.
[4] Ibid., 127.
[5] Ibid., 106– 107.
[6] Ibid., 108.
[7] Ibid., 140.
[8] Ibid., 114, 127.
[9] Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook, I: cclxxxii– cclxxxiii.
452 L. Wolff
[10] Ibid., 395 (23 August 1770).
[11] Ibid., 397– 399 (23 August 1770).
[12] Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook, III: 427 (29 August 1778); 429 (31 August 1778).
[13] Ibid., 431 (2 September 1778); 431 (3 September 1778); 433 (4 September 1778).
[14] Ibid., 441 (16 September 1778); 449 (8 October 1778).
[15] Ibid., 449– 50 (8 October 1778).
[16] Ibid., 456 (16 October 1778).
[17] Ibid., 459 (16 October 1778).
[18] Ibid., 459 (16 October 1778).
[19] Carrère d’Encausse, L’Impératrice et l’Abbé, 128– 129.
[20] Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 199.
[21] Carrère d’Encausse, L’Impératrice et l’Abbé, 290.
[22] Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 196.
[23] Fortis. Saggio d’osservazioni sopra l’isola di Cherso ed Osero, 44; Wolff. Venice and the Slavs: The
Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment, 173– 181.
[24] Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 311– 312.
[25] Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 161, 193.
[26] Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 317– 318.
[27] Cosgrove, ‘Global Illumination and Enlightenment’.
[28] Wolff, ‘Inventing Galicia’.
[29] [Kratter], Briefe über den itzigen Zustand von Galizien, Erster Theil (I), 165.
[30] [von Kortum], Magna Charta von Galizien, 205– 206.
[31] John Ledyard’s Journey, 228– 229.

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RÉSUMÉ : Cet article commence par discuter le terme de géographie philosophique noté
dans le journal de John Ledyard dans les années 1780s, dans le contexte de son projet de
voyage à pied autour du monde et en particulier à travers la Sibérie pour rejoindre
l’Amérique du Nord. Le concept de géographie philosophique se rapportait aux définitions
de Ledyard de la différence entre ‘civilisation’ et ‘incivilisation’. Cette géographie
demandait des jugements sur les terres et les peuples d’après les valeurs des lumières. La
vision de Ledyard était globale dans la mesure où elle se rapportait à ses voyages autour du
globe et dans ses comparaisons entre les peuples de la Sibérie et de l’Amérique du Nord.
Cette vision épousait les aspirations impériales américaines et russes et émergeait de sa
participation au troisième voyage de Cook dans le Pacifique nord et en Alaska qui mena
Ledyard à la jonction entre la Sibérie et l’Amérique du Nord. Cette article se penche sur la
façon dont la Sibérie ou Tartarie et l’océan pacifique servaient de points de référence
globaux pour la géographie philosophique de la fin du dix-huitième siècle et comment ses
points de référence pouvaient avoir une application pour des projets impériaux aussi
divers que la Dalmatie Vénitienne ou la Pologne des Habsbourg, la Galicie.