PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 7, NO.

2, AUGUST 2004 g g Carfax Publishing

ARTICLE

The Familiar and the Strange:

Western Travelers' Maps of Europe and
Asia, ca. 1600-1800

JORDANA D Y M
Department of History, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA

Abstract Early Modem European travelers sought to gather and disseminate knowledge
through narratives written for avid publishers and public. Yet not all travelers used the same
tools to inform their readers. Despite a shared interest in conveying new knowledge based on
eyewitness authority. Grand Tour accounts differed in an important respect from travelogues
about Asia: they were less likely to include maps until the late eighteenth century. This paper
examines why, using travel accounts published between 1600 atid 1800 about Italy and France
(Europe) and India and Japan (Asia). It argues that maps of different types—coastlines, city
platis, country topographies—appeared more frequently in accounts of Asian trips in part
because of Europeans' more limited geographical knowledge about Asian destinations. More
important, however, zvas the purpose of travel, the type of information gathered, and the
intended audience of accounts. Seventeenth-century authors of Grand Tour experiences focused
on single topics, ignored what seemed to be the familiar countryside they passed through, and
showed little interest in geography. Their counterparts visiting Asia took an opposite tack,
covering a wide range of subjects, including space, and cartographic representation was an
important element within the account. Only in the eighteenth century, when the strange locale
had become familiar and the familiar European destination became strange with new types of
travel through it, were maps an important part of narrative.

Europeans not only traveled extensively in the early modem period, they also wrote
prolifically about their voyages on the familiar Grand Tour circuit to Italy, France, and
Germany as well as about excursions to more distant locations in Asia. As numerous
journals, epistles, and narratives of travel attest, elite youths making the Grand Tour ran
into friends and acquaintances in the inns and salons of Dover, Paris, and Venice in the
seventeenth century, and a hundred years later thousands of high- and mid-ranking
leisure travelers annually undertook parts of or the entire trip.' While the more arduous
overland and sea journeys to Asia remained the preserve of a more limited number of
businessmen, adventurers, and govemment officials in these two centuries, numerous
ISSN 1090-3771 pnnt/ISSN 1472-7242 oiiIme/04/020155-37 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1090377042000285390
156 J. DYM

travelogues describing Japan and, increasingly, India, also appeared on publisher's lists
throughout Western Europe."
One might be tempted to argue that authors writing about European journeys
would acknowledge the repetitive or derivative nature of their familiar content, while the
stranger or more exotic destination would produce more original commentary. How-
ever, between 1600 and 1800, travelers to both regions consistently argued that they
sought to gather and disseminate knowledge through travelogues that publishers and
public eagerly consumed, and both also relied on previous authors to help shape the
form and function of their texts.^ Still, there is a striking difference in the elements
considered necessary in a seventeenth-century published travelogue describing Europe
from one covering Asia: Grand Tour accounts were unlikely to include travelers' maps
or, indeed, maps of any kind, and included little discussion of geography or navigation;
almost all accounts describing India and Japan not only included several maps but
usually discussed the state of geographic knowledge about places visited and opined on
its level of accuracy. By the late eighteenth century, this distinction ended, and travelers
to both regions took care to prepare or procure maps depicting everything from political
divisions to soil conditions for their accounts, or left them out entirely.
This paper argues that in this period, the convergence emerged not from increasing
familiarity with distant countries, but from a conscious effort to find, or coax, the
strange from the familiar. Examining over four dozen accounts written by elite and
professional Britons, Frenchmen, Italians, Swedes, and Germans who traveled to India,
Japan, France, and Italy between 1600 and 1800, what becomes clear is that the
purpose of travel accounts describing these different regions infiuenced the author's
relationship with cartography more than the existence of geographic information. Such
analysis undermines Henry Ashwood's poetic distinction between geographers and
travelers inserted at the front of Edward Terry's seventeenth-century voyages to India,
that "Geographers present before men's eyes/How every Land seated and bounded
lies/But the Historian and wise Traveller, Decry what mindes and manners sojourn
there. "^ The wise traveler might be as much geographer as historian, with the predilec-
tion to take geography into consideration increasing and expanding the more established
the genre of travel writing became.

Historiography
Despite the ubiquity of maps in travel narratives—narrative accounts about first-hand,
or eyewitness, experiences during a voyage^—and even travelers' comments about them,
the importance of cartography to sail-, carriage-, steam- and rail-age travelers as a means
to create, recreate, personalize and define the countries traveled to in published
accounts of their journeys has been a theme rarely touched on in academic studies of
travel narratives or popular science literature, despite a large and growing bibliography
and audience in both areas. In part, this is because more scholars of history and
literature than of cartography or historical geography have chosen the genre of travel
narratives as an area of study. The often workmanlike, seemingly incomplete, and
sometimes wildly inaccurate maps produced to accompany travel accounts have not
attracted geographers' attention to the same extent that travelers' texts and images have
been adopted into historical analysis, literary criticism, and studies of visual culture.
In part, as James Duncan and Derek Gregory rightly note, this lacuna owes much
to methodology and the "fractured" analysis of different elements of travel narratives by
different disciplines with different ends.'' Fields with textual biases^history and literary
 THE FAMIUAR AND THE STRANGE 157

analysis—have traditionally done little analysis of travel narratives' visual elements.'

Literary scholars who discuss "romantic geographies" or "imaginative geography" of
travel narratives might plausibly be expected to pick up with a more categorical analysis
of geographical discussion within text or of actual mapping. However, such authors use
terms such as "geography" and "topography" as metaphors; the imaginative geography
is one of words, not pictures or designs.'^ Even literary analyst Mary Louise Pratt, who
draws evidence from both text and illustration for a study of travelers in nineteenth-cen-
tury Latin America, excludes cartography as an intervention in imperial economic,
pohtical, and social projects.''
Yet, assignment of different elements of travel narratives to different scholarly fields
is not entirely responsible for lack of work on travelers' cartography, for those that might
be expected to have discussed it, scholars of visual culture, focus on travelers' photo-
graphs and illustrations rather than their maps.'" This oversight extends to the theorists
as well as the practitioners; Duncan and Gregory assign the study of photographs to
historians of photography and illustrations to an historians, but do not even list maps
as an element of the travel narrative to be evaluated." Inversely, a field that does address
mapping by a category of travelers—British imperial surveyors—situates maps, both
official and public, within an extensive scholarship of scientific, imperial, and carto-
graphic history, not in the context of the history of travel and its accounts.'*^ Ironically,
just as literary and historical scholarship of the travel narrative has not embraced the
visual representations of travelers, historical geographers have not investigated real travel
narratives as a source of maps contributing to cultural, imperial, and other histories.'^
Scholarly fragmentation has also existed in defining narratives to study, as scholars
rarely find it fruitful to simultaneously compare and contrast travel writing across time
and space. As Barbara Korte pointed out in the introduction to her analysis of almost
a millennium of British travel writing, "most monographs ... [are] confined to accounts
of travel to particular regions (Italy, North America or the East) about a particular mode
of travel (Grand Tour or voyages of exploration), of specific periods, or by individual
authors. Such studies have the advantage that they can explore their subject in detail and
with a suitable degree of differentiation. They cannot, however, provide an overview of
a genre which is fascinating precisely in its great variance and its several lines of
historical development."'^ Korte's own work is strong temporally. Yet in dealing with
only British travelers and refusing to periodize because of "many parallel lines of
development" that distinguish "certain kinds of travel,"'^ Korte does not see that using
time and place as simultaneous controls can in fact prove useful in establishing
periodicity. The problems with a narrow temporal lens become evident when looking at
Nicole Hafid-Martin's argument that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
European travelers pioneered the "voyage d'etude" (defined as a private undertaking to
expand the occidental concept of knowledge). Hafid-Martin fails to see that what the
author terms a "multiform" curiosity that was the living symbol of the encyclopedic
spirit of the century existed in earlier accounts. Yet, as this article shows, seventeenth-
century accounts often share this trait with Enlightenment narratives.""
This paper has two purposes. The first is to consider the role of maps and
cartography in Early Modem European travel narratives. The second is to attempt an
analysis that meets Korte's challenge of choosing an extended time period, two
centuries, but includes travelers of many European nationalities, and two different kinds
of travel. Grand Tour and Asian, to consider how place and time, when taken together,
help explain why some European travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
expressed interest in geographies and cartographies and others did not.
158 J. DYM

The Seventeenth Century

Geography and cartography had their place in seventeenth-century travelogues written
by Europeans visiting Asia. In accounts discussing travels within Western Europe, such
subjects and their pictographic or textual representations—maps, navigational charts,
itineraries—were infrequent. While the state of European geographic knowledge about
each area provides a partial explanation for the difference, and will be discussed further
below, a more fundamental reason for the divergence is in the intent, audience, and style
authors thought would be interested in their accounts.
Although publisher Jean-Frederic Bemard claimed in 1727 that "[tjravel accounts
have less need of prefaces than other books; a map suffices to make known the situation
and bearing of the country a voyager describes; the other specifics he collects on the
subject of religions, mores, customs, commerce &c demand neither introduction or
commentary,"'^ he was only partly right. More authors considered that their travelogues
required prefaces than maps (although these were frequent), helping the reader to
identify not only the territory visited but also the author's purpose in voyaging and
justifications for reporting back. Justificatory prefaces grew elaborate as the numbers of
travelers and their published narratives increased, allowing us to understand how
authors hoped to position their works within the crowded field of travel writing. At
heart, the fundamental justifications of why any travel writer chose to direct his relation
to a general public were quite similar, regardless of the destination chosen: to add to a
body of knowledge.
Travel narratives covering the "Grand Tour," tended to share certain characteris-
tics in the seventeenth century. Written by highly educated tutors or young gentlemen,
they largely followed an itinerary format, whether presented in epistolary or narrative
form, taking the reader either from the point of origin or arrival on the continent
through the towns visited and leaving the reader upon the tour's completion. The
content was equally formulaic and often limited to a single subject. Books about Italy
focused almost exclusively on architecture, antiquities or the arts, with most providing
little information about what later travelers call the "customs and manners" of the
country, that is, the people and day-to-day experiences of the writer. Some authors,
including French Protestant Maximilien Misson (1650?-1722) and British tutor Richard
Lassels (1603?-68), by the late seventeenth century included information on ceremonies
seen, theatrical events attended, and individual librarians or collections visited which
might interest a reader.'" However, as a rule and earlier in the century, very few of these
mundane observations appeared. Accounts of France were less intent on antiquity,
emphasizing more recent sites to be seen, including castles, gardens, and the country's
"delights."'" Yet, overall, the pedagogical element pervades the texts, and the "omnium
gatherum" style of travel writing—that identified by Barbara Korte as the tendency of
travel writers to include any and every kind of topic in their narratives—was not
common.""
The contents of most Asian accounts differed from those of the Grand Tour. In
these, authors also wrote from departure to return, but took the "omnium gatherum"
approach to travel writing and included information about travel itself, geography and
cartography, human and natural history, politics, religion, customs, commerce, and
agriculture. Such broad scope was evident in the full titles listed for works such as the
first edition of the account of Westphalian scholar and doctor Engelbert Kaempfer
(1651-1716) of his late seventeenth-century travels in Japan, The history of Japan: giving
an account of the ancient and present state and govemment of that empire; of its temples,
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 15 9

palaces, castles, and other Buildings; of its minerals, trees, plants, animals, birds and fishes; of
the chronology and succession ofthe Emperors, ecclesiastical and secular; ofthe original descent,
religions, ctistoms, and manufactures of the Natives, and of their Trade and Commerce with
the Dutch and Chinese Together with a description ofthe kingdom of Siam. ... Illustrated with
many Copper Plates (London, 1728). Throughout this period, the lengthy title revealing
an expansive approach was more common than not.
Much had already been written about both types of destination in the seventeenth
century, yet what was familiar from printed accounts was not the European destination,
but the Asian one. Numerous guidebooks published in situ since the late fifteenth
century depicted Grand Tour destinations, but abundant ambassadors' reports and
Renaissance-era joumals such as Michel de Montaigne's account of a trip through Italy,
Germany, and Switzerland in 1580 were largely available only in manuscript; published
travel narratives of those taking the trip seem to have started in the early seventeenth
century.-' On the other hand, the travel account reporting on far-off destinations had a
long histoo'- Pilgrimages to the Near East were abundant. And, as travelers themselves
acknowledged, India had been visited and written about since the time of Venetian
Marco Polo (1254-1324), who had even provided information on a distant place,
Cipangu Japan), that he had not seen. Subsequent missionaries, merchants, and
ambassadors like Portuguese Fernao Mendes Pinto (d. 1583), Roman Scipione Amati
and Frenchman Fran(;ois Garon (1600-73) not only arrived in Japan, but set up
missionary settlements and trading posts that produced substantial information subse-
quently made available to a literate public by the early seventeenth century in manu-
script form."' Subsequently such texts were included in the great compilations of travel
narratives published by Richard Hakluyt (d. 1616) and Samuel Purchas (d. 1626) in
England"' and Arnoldus Montanus (1625P-83) in the Netherlands.'^ Dozens of Eu-
ropean travelers' observations and information contributed both text and cartographic
information to such works, as well as to the atlases that were increasing in number and
information."'
Despite awareness of previous works on both destinations, and even a good deal of
repetition of themes and content among travelogues, in this period there was yet room
for authors of both genres to claim their presentations were both novel and useful.
Briton William Bromley noted in the preface of his 1691 account of travels in France
and Italy "how many have with good judgment and great accuracy describ'd the Grande
Tour, especially the voyage of Italy," but proudly stated that the focus of his account—
transcription of the numerous ancient inscriptions to be found there—was new."" The
1687-88 Italian travels of Misson, companion to the young Gount of Arran, claimed the
"diversity" of subjects covered ("I've tried to profit from all, which is why I've informed
myself about ever5^hing") would "not be disagreeable" and provide an antidote to texts
focused on antiquity or painting or architecture or libraries or private collections or
churches and relics. Thus the variety of subjects covered, rather than the specific
observations about any one topic, meant to contribute something new to accounts of
Grand Tour destinations.
The twin justifications of novelty and eyewitness authority were as common to
travel accounts of Asia as of Europe. Like their peers on the European Grand Tour,
each traveler to Asia also sought to bring back novelty, either through more "reliable"
explanation of what was done before or treating a new subject. As early as the 1620s,
Thomas Herbert (1606-82) suggested in his preface that "more Authours might I have
used, and rendered myself to some more useful in this way." However, he preferred to
rely on his observations of "the situations and present beings of Gities and territories."'^^
160 J. DYM

John Fryer, in 1698, admitted that he followed the example ofthe "ingenious" Herbert,
and indeed copied not just the narrative format, but presentation of material including
putting inserting images directly into the text rather than appending separate foldouts.
Yet Fryer justified publication of his work for the "novelties" it provided, arguing that
the originality of his contribution derived from his itinerary and length of residence.
"[T]hose Travellers before me had few of them been in those parts where I had been,
or at least not dwelt so long there," he wrote, so novelties Fryer presented had been
"passed over by them or else not so thoroughly observed."'" Edward Terry, wrote ofthe
"Novelty" of the material he collected as an "eye-witnesse of much here related" in a
voyage of almost four years to India and back (1615-19), including two years' residence
at the court of the Great Mogol."^ He also emphasized that he hoped his work would
"contain matter for instruction and use."^" The French shared esteem of the eye-wit-
ness, and if an author would not report on his power of observation, his editor well
might. Frani^ois Bemier (1620-88) was praised in his first edition as a paragon among
voyagers; as editor de Monceaux rhapsodized in 1670, "never a traveler went from home
more capable to observe, nor has written with more knowledge, candour and in-
tegrity."" That is, to European audiences ofthe seventeenth century, travelers to Asia
returned not with novelty based on finding exotic lands, but increasingly accurate,
reliable, and detailed information about distant peoples, customs, institutions, and
places derived not from second-hand "Authuors" but on interaction and observation.
Another trait which some accounts, especially those to the Levant, shared with the
seventeenth-century Grand Tour accounts was that authors not only were interested as
much in past monuments, histories, and ideas as present residents, but also that
curiosity rather than commerce or politics motivated their voyages. Pietro Della Valle
(1586-1652), a Roman patrician, was considered by Sir Henry Yule, editor of Hakluyt's
reprint of his narrative, as the "Prince of all ... travelers" because Della Valle traveled for
curiosity's sake alone, and was "the most insatiate in curiosity, the most intelligent in
apprehension, the fullest and most accurate in description."'" Yet this encomium
described not a trip to Western Europe but farther east; between 1614 and 1624, Delia
Valle traveled to Turkey, India, Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine. His voyage lasted longer
than the Grand Tour which (if titles of travelers' accounts provide a good indication)
tended to last one to three years, but in other respects was quite similar to it in
conceptualization and execution.
Yet for all of the similarities in claims of authors for the necessity of their accounts
and the authority on which they based them, there was a fundamental difference of
purpose in accounts that emerged from European and Asian trips in both textual
and cartographic content. For the most part, geography in travelogues about
seventeenth-century Europe appears only to set the stage, as writers begin their entries
with a date, time, and location, and often the distance between where they wake up in
the morning and where they lay their head at night. Narrators rarely describe scenery or
the countryside. Bishop Gilbert Bumet's (1643-1715) generic comments on rural
Switzerland in his epistolary account are more than such accounts usually included. He
writes, "I will not describe the Valley of Dauphine, all to Ghambery, nor entertain you
with a Landscape of the countrey, which deserves a better pencil then mine, and in
which the height and rudenes of the Mountains that almost push upon it together
with the beauty, the evenness and fruitfulnes ofthe Valley, that is all along well watered
with the river of Liserre, make such an agreeable mixture that this vast diversity of object
that do at once fill the Eye, gives it a very entertaining prospect."*' This generic
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 161

description provides the illusion of observation on the landscape without really provid-
ing a compelling or evocative picture.
Only exceptional places or circumstances precipitated overt acknovi'ledgment of
geographical importance, and even then, only occasionally. Misson, on arriving in
Venice said that to give a "true idea" of the city, "I must in the first place describe those
waters in the midst of vi^hich it is seated." While averring that the "general opinion of
geographers is that Venice is built in the sea," he seems to have had no map and relies
on being rowed around the city to determine the answer.''' However, for Misson this
exceptional detour to the geographic refiects Venice's unique properties, not a general
interest in the topic. Moreover, even this limited reflection on topography was not
common to his peers' reports on the same city.
Not only was there little interest describing geography in Grand Tour accounts,
none seems to have had a map. The accounts of naturalist John Ray (1673), tutor
Lassels (1670), Bishop Burnet (1686), and Bromley (1691), had no illustrations of any
kind, including maps.^^ Even Misson's text originally lacked a map, although it included
select illustrations from its first edition and devoted a section to practicalities of travel,
proudly stating its intent to be "useflil for those who would like to make the same
voyage." Although wildly popular—appearing in five French editions between 1691 and
1743, as well as appearing in English and German versions—it seems that only the 1714
Enghsh edition eventually provided two maps: a street plan of Venice to illustrate the
anecdote and a map of the Pezzuoli region."'
Why did Grand Tour travel accounts have so litde room for geographic discussion
and representation? An important reason derives not from the accounts' form but rather
their purpose. If few Grand Tour narratives had been published at the turn of the
century, general guides on what a young man ought to attempt while traveling, like
those of Justus Lipsius (1592) and Francis Bacon (1625) already existed, along with
itineraries and guidebooks to key cities and their attractions.^' The Grand Tour traveler
was supposed to turn to abundant locally-produced guidebooks and itineraries, which
often included city plans as well as country maps, atlases, and for some countries,
manuscript or printed road maps for cartographic materials.*" France had guidebooks
written by Frenchmen and Englishmen as early as the mid-sixteenth century describing
the whole country or just individual cities like Paris, Versailles, and Lyon.^'' Italy, too,
boasted books on Rome, Venice, and Naples.''^ Some travelers translated these guide-
books upon return. Giacomo Barri's The Painter's Voyage in Italy (1679) and Edmund
Warcupp's translation of Italy, in its original glory, mine and revival... (1660) fit this
model, and both include a map at the beginning of the work."^' There were even guides
for the Tour itself.^"^ John Ogilby's frequently-reprinted book of British road maps first
appeared in the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century, those traveling to
Germany could turn to a series of twenty folding maps—printed in London and issued
in a pocket—of the different districts of the country (Figures 1-4).^'
So travelers' accounts competed with guidebooks for the reader's attention, and
intended less to provide a comprehensive view or new information to an armchair
traveler but rather useful material to merit selection as one of the texts to accompany the
author's countryman on his own trip. Misson itemized travel information on currency
exchange, post roads, and lodging as separate sections in their accounts, making this
purpose clear. Lassels included a section of "instructions concerning travel," and used
his five voyages to Italy to describe the "several ways" into Italy, with major stops, so
that not only will the reader know which he prefers "for speed and conveniency" but the
others so "that my young Traveller may know how to steer his course, either in time of
162 J. DYM

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plague or war."^' Thus Grand Tour accounts from the seventeenth century tended to
be not only extremely dry and erudite in tone, but small enough to fit in a hand or
pocket, and contain almost no illustrations and very few maps.
Another contributing factor to Grand Tour narratives' maplessness was that Europe
was such a familiar destination that travelers could specialize their travelogues and tailor
them to a specific market: the Grand Tour's next generation who possessed maps and
atlases, and the returnee who had collected specialized maps and plans. The Grand
Tour traveler not only expected to procure his maps from a source other than
travelogues, he presumed that any armchair travelers in his audience would also have
maps. While this assumption was generally implicit, the occasional instruction by author
to reader is revelatory. In 1691, Bromley began his first letter to William Duncombe, the
recipient of his letters, stating "I must refer you to your maps, if you will read this
letter." Even when he hoped to "talk to you of roads and hills that are not to be found
upon record," the honest writer felt compelled to add, "unless taken notice of in one of
the vast volumes of Atlases."^^ That is, the implication was that much if not all of the
Grand Tour countries had been sufficiently mapped that anyone at home might have a
general map against which to plot the traveler's peregrinations and more specialized
works, such as the atlas, for the most specific details. If not, the traveler would be happy
to supply them, as Misson did for his correspondent by sending a street-plan of Venice
to prove a point about the ubiquity of canals in that city.""'
The two exceptions to the maplessness of European travel cartography prove the
rule. The first were works emphasizing the living culture of a country rather than Grand
Tour subjects of a country's antiquities and past, which tended to include some
illustrations and also a map showing the basic political and geographical divisions of a
country under discussion.^' By the 1652 edition of George Sandy's (1578-1644)
"travailes" in Italy, the Turkish Empire, Egypt, and the Holy-Land "begun in A.D,
1610," the publisher proudly claimed to "Illustrate with Fifty Graven Maps and
Figures."^" One map, opposite the title page, was a three-section fold-out image of the
entire region visited by the author, starting with the Midland Sea, going around Italy,
with the Caspian Sea and Black Sea, on via the Arabian Desert and Red Sea to the Gulf
of Persia. Antiquarians visiting European destinations beyond the confines of the Grand
Tour circuit also might include maps. French physician Jacob Spon (1647-85) went
beyond the Grand Tour destinations, visiting Greece, Dalmatia, and the Levant, and
early editions his account included several maps and plans, including fold-out maps of
Attica and the island of Delos. At the end of the 1678 second volume, there was also
a fold-out map of Athens with numbers indicating almost fifty key sites in the city and
its environs, and half a dozen named routes to attractions signaling direction with dotted
lines. A numbered list of the main attractions, keyed to the sites on the map, followed
on the next page (see Figure 5).''' Because of the extension of both authors' journeys
beyond the familiar Grand Tour confines and even beyond Europe, the author or
publisher wished to provide a cartographic representation of the less familiar itinerary
even if, as in the case of Spon, the subject—antiquities—was the same. While there is
no direct evidence that the authors themselves produced the maps, the presence of
cartographic elements tailored for individual texts suggests that authors or publishers
expected to use images to complement text, and would either create or procure them
when either subject matter or location of European travel left the confines of the Grand
Tour.
Conversely to the approach taken to Grand Tour writing, most travel accounts of
visits to the Great Mogul in India included a map of his empire, and occasionally a
 THE FAMIUAR AND THE STRANGE 167

"platform" or city view, while accounts to Japan had at a minimum a map of the island,
and frequently route maps of land trips to the court at Jedo (Tokyo) and maps of cities
visited as well. Those who discussed the sea voyage as part of the account might, like
Terry Herbert, include important navigational data, including wind directions and
latitudes of specific locations, drawings of coastlines such as appeared on navigational
charts, and tables of navigational data (Figure 6). And almost all the authors, regardless
of their professions as doctors, clerics, and embassy secretaries, also observed and
discussed the lands they traveled through as well as the current state of European
geographic and cartographic representation of them.
Why did those accounts discussing Asia not only include maps if at all possible, and
integrate discussion of geography and cartography into the narrative? One important
aspect was the intent of and audience for the reports. Most European voyagers to India
and Japan had a different purpose in reporting back in a travel account than a Grand
Tour reporter. A substantial and ever-increasing body of knowledge discussed Asian
peoples, histories, politics, economics, cultures, and religions, for those traveling to and
from the Middle East and Asia. However, no independent guidebooks were yet
available. While Europeans could and did read the itineraries of France prepared by
Frenchmen and the catalogues of antiquities authored by Romans, they could not rely
on extant Japanese or Indian (Mogul) sources to complement the travel accounts that
Western voyageurs used as the vehicle to convey their idea of new knowledge to their
fellows.^'^' Although such sources existed (as travelers readily commented), either no
copies had reached the West, or those that had arrived had not yet been translated.
In addition, the expected audience of an account to Asia tended to be international.
Some travelers prefaced their accounts with nationalistic rhetoric, like Fryer who
declared he had "no other Design than the good of my country, setting before them the
true state of their trade in East India and Persia ... to inform those busy translators, that
the industry of our own Nation is not fallen beneath that of France, whose Language
and Manners we so servilely affect."''' However, the intended audience of most Asian
accounts was not just the nationals of the author's homeland, who would read
comfortably at home or follow his footsteps. Instead, the public was a broader com-
munity, including scholars, who would find in the text not just information useful to
follow in the author's literal, physical footsteps, but sought to wring from the new source
information on scientific, philosophical, historic, or other intellectual fields. It was the
reader's "inquirie" that Thomas Herbert anticipated in 1634."'- Most authors of travel-
ogues documenting their experiences in traveling to, engaging with the societies of, and
returning from Japan and India in the seventeenth century succeeded in disseminating
knowledge throughout Europe with the rapid translation of most of these accounts from
the native English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Swedish into three or four
additional languages.^^
The emphasis on geographic knowledge in accounts to the East also lies partly in
the state of European knowledge about the destination. European knowledge of Eu-
ropean geography and topography might have been incomplete, but existing maps did
an acceptable job of representing space. The gaps in knowledge regarding the East were
more obvious, even to the amateur. While he praises the cartography of ambassador Sir
Thomas Roe, his employer, Briton Edward Terry (1590-1660), is critical of other
geographers' published maps of Asia "And here," he writes, "a great errour in geogra-
phers must not escape my notice, who in their globes and maps make East India and
China near Neighbours, when as many large Countries are interposed between them
168 J.DYM

which great distance may appear by the long travel of the Indian merchants ... in their
journey and return ... two full years from Agra to China."^^ Engelbert Kaempfer, when
arriving "of the country of Kui" in June of 1690, commented on the steep rocky coasts,
which "though not unlike the coasts of Sweden" were worthy of mention because of the
author's surprise that "there is not the least hint of any such thing in our maps, and
indeed I cannot forebear observing in general that most Sea Maps are so ill done, that
I wonder misfortunes don't happen oftener, there being nothing in the least to be
depended upon their certainty. "^^ With such glaring errors in representations of land
and sea, it is no wonder that travelers to Asia often assumed the mantle of amateur
geographers.
There were several ways to integrate cartographic data and analysis into their
narratives. One, the less common, was to rely primarily on textual description rather
than the insertion of picture-maps. An example of this approach is the popular and
oft-translated work of Frenchman Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne (1605-
89), whose account of his travels is more in the style of the seventeenth-century Grand
Tour itineraries covering almost forty years and sixty thousand leagues of land travel (ca.
1627-70), in which he saw Persia, Turkey, and "all India," including "famous Diamond
Mines where no European had been before me."'''' Because Tavernier waited until the
end of his traveling career to publish, the structure of his book differed from that of
other travel accounts. He separated each journey, so while destinations overlapped,
routes in general did not, and each discrete journey began with an itinerary-map of the
whole, describing traveling conditions as well as routes and problems to anticipate.
In the introduction, Tavernier emphasized why he needed to provide extensive
guidance, both geographical and practical. He observed first that infrastructure for
travelers was lacking, then, he added, there was the land itself to confront. That is "[a]
Man cannot travel in Asia, as they do in Europe; nor at the same Hours, nor with the
same ease. There are no weekly Coaches or Wagons from Town to Town; besides, that
the Soil of the Countries is of several natures. In Asia you shall meet with several
Regions untill'd and unpeopl'd, .... There are vast Deserts to cross, and very dangerous,
both for want of Water and the Robberies that the Arabs daily commit therein. There
are no certain Stages, or Inns, to entertain Travellers. The best Inns, especially in
Turkie, are the Tents which you carry along with you, and your Hosts are your servants,
that get ready those victuals which you have bought in good Town.""" So Tavernier
"resolv'd to make an ample exact Description, and I will begin with the several Roads
which may be taken from Paris into Persia.""*" That is, instead of a map to start the
book, the subsequent and first chapter of his account is essentially an itinerary map of
his journey, which seems to assume that his audience might be interested in taking the
same trip. Overall, Tavernier saw maps as inspiration rather than guide, "[To] the daily
discourses, which several Learned men had with my Father upon Geographical sub-
jects ... I was with much delight attentive; [they] inspir'd me betimes with a design to
see some part of those Countries, which were represented to me in the Maps, from
which I never could keep off my eyes."''"
Yet even Tavernier could not resist introducing cartographic representation into his
own travel account. While no country maps appeared in early versions of the book, the
original French edition included several "platforms" or city plans that Tavernier and a
probable relative, Daniel Tavernier, apparently contributed, as well as a sketch map of
the Persian Gulf that included navigational data (depth soundings), indications of where
to find routes inland to Ispahan from the coast, and the location of the caravansary
where a fellow-traveler was buried (Figure 7).*''^
^^•ftfv-^-^ ri?'^
170 J. DYM

Despite Tavernier's efforts at accuracy, the limitations of an interested, but un-

trained, observer are dear. No cartographer would be able to create an accurate
geographic representation of the author's trip based on his language or his sketch maps.
While Tavemier occasionally had recourse to distance in leagues between two points
("Merdin is not above two leagues from Cousasar")) he more often observed distances
in varied ways from "about twice Musquet shot from thence" or "a journey of six
hours."^' With such vague description, subsequent travel accounts dismissed Tavemier
as "scarce able to read or write ... [and] too superficial in his description even of those
countries, where he had been and too apt, not only to take things upon trust at first
hand, but afterwards also to confide too much to his memory to be any ways depended
on." So Tavernier's potential contribution to geographical knowledge—that his ship
sailed around Japan and proved it an island, rather than a peninsula, as geographers like
De L'isle still postulated—was considered suspect.**'
Tavernier's approach of including few maps was the exception rather than the rule
for travelers to Asia. Where travelers in Europe like Bromley enjoined readers to consult
their own maps, those journeying to Asia had no illusions that their readers might
already own relevant cartographic material. In part to demonstrate their own authority
and learning, and in part to attend to reader's needs, most included several types of
maps located strategically throughout the text. Thomas Herbert included three maps in
his 1634 first edition of A relation of some yeares travaile in Africa, Asia, and Persia: of
Madagascar, the Caspian Sea, and the bay of Mauritius as well as numerous sketches
of the bays his ship docked in, inserted with no comment. By the second edition of
1638, he had added two maps of India as well as a bigger map of the Caspian Sea and
the surrounding territories, so "that you [the reader] may better go along with us, and
especially in that the latest maps of Persia are so erroneous, both in rivers, the situation
of places and their true names (for to say truly none of them have five right names), I
have therefore inserted this of the Persian Empire in which neither the position of places
are false, nor names of towns fictitious or borrowed" (Figure 8).''' Forty years later, this
logic still applied, as Bernier added to his account of travel to the empire of the "Great
Mogol" a "map of that country, which I do not put forth as absolutely correct, but
merely as less incorrect than others that I have seen," in order "that you may the better
understand my narrative."'''
Edward Terry's account of his travels to India indicates in the preface that the
account will include a map to "express" that "huge Monarchy" which is "further
described in the following discourse." He then inserts a list of provinces on the printed
page next to a fold-out page with "the most exact affixed map, first made by the special
observation and direction of that most able and honourable gentleman. Sir Thomas
Ro[e], here contracted into a lesser compass, yet large enough to demonstrate, that this
great empire is bounded on the east by the Kingdom of Maug, west with Persia, and
with the main ocean Southerly; north with the Mountains Caucasus and Tartaria ...."
The map, inserted at a page near the text in the original edition, migrated opposite the
title page by 1715, remaining otherwise unchanged despite significant advances in
knowledge of Indian terrain.''^ Why the map had to remain contemporaneous with the
text—and the extent of this phenomenon—is an issue for future exploration. That
cartography complemented and embellished text, enhancing authenticity, was already
clear to Terry.
The voyager to Asia's rhetorical strategy for justifying inclusion of maps was
twofold. On the one hand, he referred to maps as important resources: the reader was
supposed to refer to them to better understand the progress of the narrative, as Terry
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 171

* / Defertption of Fsrrahaut^ and tbi

Figure 8 i'lr Thomas Herbert, A relation of some yeares travaile (1634), Caspian Sea. Counesy of the Library
of Congress, Rare Books Division.
 172 J. DYM

F i g u r e 9 Engelbert Kaempfcr. T h e Hisior\- of Japan (!72S). MciiuniL Counc^^y of ihe Library of Congress, Rare
Books Division.
 THE FAMIUAR AND THE STRANGE 17 3

States.''*' On the other hand, as Terry, Kaempfer, and Bernier's comments attest, maps
were also likely to be inaccurate, and thus the author sought to contribute to the
knowledge used to compile them. Thus, regarding the classification of Mauritius,
Herbert wrote that "some hold that it is pan of America, others of Africa or Asia." He
himself (correctly) concludes Africa, suggesting that his opinion on this matter {based
on his status as "an eye-witnesse in part and partly expert in the rest") might influence
future geographic representations.''^ Even before arriving in Japan, Kaempfer went to
great lengths to map, mentioning that in Bangkok, he will not name certain places in the
text because "I have set them down in a map of this river which I had the opportunity
of making at this time in going up, and which I corrected afterwards in several places
as we fell down again."'"^ Once in Japan, Kaempfer not only sought to convince his
Japanese interpreters to share geographic information, including Japanese maps his
editor published with the book, he also sketched his own maps as he traveled using a
"large mariner's compass in order to measure the directions of the roads, mountains and
coasts." Because such information was not meant to leave the island, Kaempfer
dissembled, keeping the compass "privately" in a Javanese box which "openly exposed"
an inkhorn filled with plants and clothing.''" Some maps accompanying his account bear
the designation "Eng. Kaempfer delin" crediting the author for his sketches, like that of
the river Meinam (Figure 9); others mention that his information formed the basis of
route maps or town plans which engravers prepared for publication.'"
Yet it was not only by mapping that travelers showed their interest in increasing
European geographical knowledge; they also did so by interpreting local knowledge for
a European audience and discussing geography with their interlocutors. An example of
the first strategy is Delia Valle, who as he sailed into the "Southern Sea" informed his
reader that the ship had passed the Cape of Arabia, "which the Portugals vulgarly call
Rosalgate, as it is also set down in the maps, but properly ought to be call'd Ras el Had,
which in the Arabian Tongue signifies Capo del Eine, or the Cape of the Confine,
because t'is the last of that Country and is further than any other extended into the sea;
like that of Galicia in Our Europe, which for the same reason we call Finis Terrae."''
Delia Valle judged the Arabic form of naming more appropriate than the Western,
suggesting that geographers and cartographers consider a method of naming which
carried useful navigational content.
The second tactic is clear in Bemier and Delia Valle. Bernier used the arrival of two
Ethiopian ambassadors to Delhi (one Muslim, one Christian) to engage in conversation
on the source of the Nile. While Bernier doesn't suggest that the three of them pored
over a map in their discussion, he does know European cartography, expressing surprise
that the Mahometan ambassador claims that the source of the Nile should be much
more "de^a" (on one side) of the line represented on European maps that follow
Ptolemy rather than the "dela" (on the other) shown.'" Although the first Erench edition
(1670) provides no map to accompany the text, one appeared in the first English
edition, and the Erench publisher copied a 1683 French map into the 1709 edition,
presumably more interested in drawing attention to this question than providing the
most updated information.'^
Even the rare few whose published accounts had no maps, like Delia Valle, were
attuned to geography, unlike Grand Tour travelers, and opined on the strengths and
weaknesses of the measurers and measurements on which cartography was based. In
particular, those who sailed were often exposed to the constant act of collecting
knowledge for navigation. Delia Valle was so impressed with the process that he
explained to their reader how navigational charts were made and who had a role in
 i as
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E -^. r"^—' tz < a '^ "^^ '^ zi AUdW
176 J. DYM

collecting the necessary information. On his way to India, the Roman reported that the
captain of his vessel had "shew'd me a Chart or Plat-form of the whole Streight of
Ormus, made by himself during that time with the highest exactness, for he had not only
taken the most just measures and distances of all the adjacent places, but also sounded
all the Coast with a plummet to find all the convenient places where great ships, such
as theirs, might ride and cast anchor when occasion should require.'""* In addition, Delia
Valle provided substantial information on the measurement taken every day of the
meridional altitude of the sun, and reported on his latitude and longitude as well as the
habits of captain and pilots who performed their measurements openly each day,
inviting "twenty or thirty mariners, masters, boys, young men and of all sorts" to make
the observations alongside them, encouraging alternate measuremems in ways that
Portuguese pilots "jealous of their affairs," would not."^^
In sum, seventeenth-century travel accounts of European nobles in Italy and India
could bear a strong family resemblance, with similar elements clear in the accounts of
Bromley, Lassels, Tavemier, and Delia Valle, particularly when the purpose of travel
was to learn rather than to trade. Yet for the most pan the two types of travel narrative
diverged in content and purpose, as well as audience. The travel accounts of the Grand
Tour were more guidebook than account, and the texts from further afield had practical
information for a traveler on navigation and the conditions of travel, but were meant to
serve as source material that the authors full expected geographers, historians, and
others to cannibalize for creation of maps, drafting of histories, and developing of
scientific theories. While a map was already important as a separate accompaniment of
travelers on the Grand Tour, either their guidebooks or as separate documents,
cartography remained a process for travelers to Asia, in which travelers had clearly
consulted maps as part of their planning or imagining of travel, but tended more to
correct existing maps as part of the act of traveling than relying on them as sources of
accurate information. The familiar lands of Europe required no geographic analysis but
the foreign or exotic locales of Asia did.

The Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, one might expect the initial trends to extend themselves, with
cartographic and geographic topics of greater interest to those traveling far afield and
seeking to provide new knowledge in their accounts. The popularity of travel narratives
remained high, and at least some remained important sources of information, as
evidenced in the new compilations compiled and disseminated by John Harris {d. 1719)
of London and Jean-Frederic Bernard (d. 1752) of Amsterdam.''' So one might expect
that the Grand Tour, ever more familiar and the subject of ever more publication as the
middle classes (including women) began to "tour" Europe, would continue to inspire
poorly illustrated accounts meant to accompany voyagers and perhaps serve as a tool of
memory for those who had traveled previously. The Asian accounts would reflect a
stabilization of existing geographic knowledge, resulting in less traveler interest in the
topic.
To a certain extent, this expectation was achieved. Although by the eighteenth
century, the monopoly of the didactic antiquarian or social-polishing account of
European travel had come to an end, Grand Tour accounts of European travel
continued and, like their seventeenth-century predecessors many did not include maps.
Examples include Edward Wright's heavily illustrated tour of France and Italy in
1720-22 and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall's (1751-1831) tour of France in 1777.'' Even
 THE FAMIUAR AND THE STRANGE 17 7

Hester Lynch Piozzi felt no need to include a map in her epistolary account of traveling
abroad in 1784-87 with a female companion for shopping, edification and, in writing,
the reader's entertainment.'*^ The Grand Tour tradition of looking to guidebooks or a
map procured on the spot, continued when German tutor Johann Georg Keysler
(1693-1743), author of a Grand Tour travel narrative covering the entire route, noted
of Turin (Italy) in 1730 that "I have never yet been able to procure a good Plan of this
city; that published by Bodenehr in Augsburg is full of errors, but his map of the
adjacent country is very exact."'' As had his predecessors a hundred years earlier,
Keysler clearly expected to consult a specific and locally-produced map of places he
visited, providing detailed itineraries and stage routes in his itinerary rather than a map
of his own.
Yet, by the time Keysler's account appeared in English in 1756, a map had
weaseled its way into the volume. In the elaborate frontispiece illustration placed across
fi-om the title page lay an illustration in which Hermes, god of travel, unrolled a wall
map of Italy, entitled, "Keisler's travels" which contains Keysler's route through
Europe. Further, an extended passage describing a particularly difficult route across a
Tyrolean mountain pass appeared opposite a drawing of the pass with its obstacles and
routes mapped out and labeled for the reader. Geography was beginning to appear in
both word and image, even in Grand Tour accounts. Why some Grand Tour accounts
moved from considering territory traversed familiar to strange is discussed below.
Equally, in the later eighteenth century, mapping as a concern of travelers to India
and Japan was changing. By this period, familiarity with world geography (and Eu-
ropean efforts made to express it in maps) could allow accounts of travels to the Far East
to join those of the Grand Tour in eschewing maps. By the time Swedish doctor Karl
Peter Thunberg (1743-1828) wrote up his ten years of travels in Europe, Asia and
Africa (1770-79), which included substantial time in Japan, he contributed only a few
illustrations of people and some curious objects to his volume. Although this voyager
had covered half of the world in his peregrinations, neither he nor his publisher sought
to include maps to show the journey in the original Swedish (1788-91) or subsequent
German (1792), English (1793), and French (1794) editions."" Thunberg's specialized
interest in natural history produced a separate volume on the plants of Japan, not greater
geographic information."'
Western relations with the Japanese as an independent empire, familiar through
many years of contact but still a separate entity, perhaps contributed to a shift from a
place of geographic novelty to one of familiarity. However, by the middle of the
eighteenth century, India was in the process of becoming a British colony and mapping
its interior became part of the British imperial project.^" Civil servants like George
Foster continued to include route maps when taking unusual inland trips, like a 1798
trek from Bengal to England via Saint Petersburg (Russia).'^' Their audience remained
international: Forster's trip was like those a century ago almost immediately translated
into French (1798) and German (1800) editions, as well as collected for a British travel
compilation.*^' Men like Major James Rennell (1742-1830) were commissioned survey-
ors and geographers, contributing to and later putting together a substantial body of
information collected by the geographers and surveying pilots the East India Company
employed to take a mathematical survey "of a tract equal in extent to France and
England taken together; besides tracing the outline of near 2000 miles of sea coast and
a chain of islands in extent 500 miles more."**' The fruits of Rennell's labor were made
public in his 1780 Atlas of Bengal and 1783 Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, which
provided a large and detailed folding map of India, a complete index of place names tied
178 J. DYM

Figure 12 James RenncU, Memoir i;/ a Aliip D/ Hiiidoosiari (London: M Bruwn, 1785), Plan of Pan of the
Course of the Ganges. Counesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Books Division.

to a grid to enable individuals to find specific spots, and a narrative of the process of
selection and observation and sources relied upon to create the end product.^'' By the
1785 edition o( Memoir, additional maps showing inland waterways, a small map of
Hindoostan showing principal roads and distances between cities, and part of the flow
of the Ganges accompanied the large general map (Figure 12).^^
Rennell's work fits somewhat awkwardly into the category of travel writing, since
his focus is uniquely on the process of mapping and not of his own travel."^ What is
important is that this public map marked (if not instigated) an important change in
treatment of collective wisdom in cartography that, as we will see, was shared by the end
of the century in travel writing focused on European destinations. Rennell's map was a
modem product, for while he admired the amount of "geographical matter" collected by
Europeans until the late seventeenth century, he also dismissed their findings, stating
that "we must not go back much farther back than thirty years [that is, to about 1750]
for the basis that forms [my] map."**'' Travelers' reliability is particularly suspect;
Rennell found French geographer M. D'Anville's maps of Asia and India of 1751/2
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 17 9

surprisingly good, especially considering "that this excellent Geographer had scarcely
any materials to work on for the inland parts of India, but some vague itineraries and
books of travels."'"'
Rather than being the best sources of accurate geographic information, Rennell
dismisses travelers' accounts and itineraries as questionable; their accuracy is surprising
rather than expected. So the sources Rennell turns to in the construction of his map are
threefold. First come his own observations and results of his survey. Second, he relies
on specialists' reports: Mr. Dalrymple's collection of sea coast surveys, the itinerary of
Golam Mohamed, a Sepoy officer sent by a British colonel to explore "roads and
country between Bengal and Deccan," "M. Buffy's marches in the Deccan ... for fixing
the positions of many capital places there;" and a half dozen British officers and East
India company officials "for manuscript maps, sketches and various articles."'" Finally,
Rennell uses recent translations of Indian maps and books, similar to the local
guidebooks available to Grand Tour travelers of the seventeenth century, including
information from Bogton Rouse, who translated Ayin Acbaree, an Indian account of the
provinces, from Persian, and Major Davy, who translated names on a Persian map of
the Punjab that provided "names and courses of the five rives as well as the general
geography of a country that has hitherto been less known to us than any of the Indian
provinces."^^ If earlier cartographers had welcomed travelers' geographic and topo-
graphic information about distant locales, the expectation by the mid-eighteenth century
was that geographers and specialists should conduct their measurements in person.
As mapping as an acceptable sideline of the commercial, diplomatic or scientific
voyager was replaced with specialists' cartography in eighteenth-century Far Eastern
narratives, the traveler within Europe worked to make the familiar strange and began to
take on the role of cartographer eschewed in Grand Tour accounts of the previous
century'. As authors of a greater variety of backgrounds produced more readable and
individualistic accounts injected a more personal tone and greater analysis, bringing
writing about European travels closer to that on Asia by taking on the more general role
of interpreter of peoples, places, customs, nature, and geography as well as that of guide
to principal sites. Grand Tour accounts, like that of German Count Friedrich Leopold's
account of travels in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy might include general maps."^ In
some instances, a famous geographer could lend weight to the map, as when Captain
John Northall included a map of "Italy after D'Anville" to illustrate his "omnium-
gatherum" relation. Northall drew attention to this innovation in his title, which claimed
to be "Illustrated with A Map of Italy, a route of this Tour, and several copperplates,
engraved from drawings taken on the spot.""* Clearly, the distinctions between travel-
ogues that required maps to guide readers and those that did not were blurring, and one
change in European accounts was the appearance of generic or guiding maps in books
on traditional Grand Tour subjects.
Moreover, this new generation of authors challenged the idea of Grand Tour
Europe as familiar territory requiring only reporting rather than exploration, and used
language and image to represent the countries visited foreign or strange, and thus
requiring substantial explanation and interpretation. At this point the map becomes not
just an occasional but a regular element of the European travel account, taking the form
of a traditional representation of a politico-geographic territory, a route, or a thematic
illustration of an author's interests. For France, the newly strange or unfamiliar included
the interior countryside, the island of Corsica and the Alps, which had become a
destination on their own as travelers, sought a respite from urban life. For Italy, the
180 J. DYM

Figures 13-14 Arthur Young, Travels during the years 1787, 1788, and 1789: undertaken more particularly with
a vieiu of ascertaining ihe cultivation, wealth, resources, and national prosperity of the kingdom of France. (Dublin,
1794), Climate (Detail), Soil. Counesy of the New York Public Library/Courtesy of the Library of Congress,
Rare Books Division,

undiscovered or at least less well described area were the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples.
Travelers to these territories generally included maps in their publications.''"'
Arthur Young's trip to France on the eve of the French Revolution is a clear
example of this new genre of travel literature. Young (1741-1820) more thoroughly
explored the French countryside than many of his predecessors, moving away from the
urban centers and architecture to which previous generations had devoted their time and
observations. A well-known agriculturalist. Young's tour was motivated by an interest in
understanding French farming practices, and much of his account analyzed the pro-
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 181

duction of French farms and farmers. In the travel account proper. Young consciously
chose to present his daily journal with observations on his travels and the individuals and
places he encountered, as well as discussions about the impact of the French Revolution
which began while his 1789-90 tour was underway. In the two volume set, he
consciously separated his "farming journal" information into a hefty appendix with
essays on France's territorial extension, the produce of different areas, harvest, enclo-
sures, farming and other aspects of political economy, and maps representing some of
his findings. Like the travel accounts describing seventeenth-century Asia, Young's text
swiftly found an international audience. Two London editions (1792, 1794) were
followed by a Dublin edition in English (1793), a German edition (1794), and a
3-volume French edition with "a new map" and a promise to include additional data
provided by a French scientist (1794).'"'
With topographic and geographic information largely excised. Young presented
readers with three versions of a map of French origin. City and province names float in
undefined spaces, with no indications of what territory they encompassed; internal
political borders were not of interest although France's separation from its neighbors
was clearly shown. Neither were geographical features apparent: the maps show no
mountain ranges, suggesting to the uninitiated a flatness that might well apply to some
parts of France, but misleads as to the character of the mountainous Jura and Pyrenees
regions Young visited. On this rather empty outline map. Young's first thematic map
claimed to highlight France's climate and navigation. The means by which this was
achieved was drawing angled lines to indicate which crops grew in different zones of the
country: olives, com, and vines. No actual climactic information accompanies these
too-absolute claims (Figure 13). The second map superimposes Young's route on the
empty background, and the third establishes boundaries distinguishing the qualities of
soils in different regions and includes a legend with a key of the color each type of
soil should receive for hand coloring (Figure 14). Clearly, France's geography and
topography were sufficiently familiar for Young to leave them out. However, by
addressing a new type of study of France, that of its agriculture, this eighteenth-century
Briton succeeded in making the familiar strange, and thus justified the adaptation of not
just one but three maps for his account. The map of Young's itinerary established his
credentials as a traveler, and that of the book as a travelogue; the two maps of his
scientific analysis situated the text as one of exploration of a novel topic, if not a novel
land, and purveyor of new information.
Another Englishman who contributed to the new travel account of unfamiliar
Europe was Henry Swinburne (1743-1803). This Briton spent three years (1777-80) in
the company of several travel companions exploring "the two Sicilies" on horseback,
with sketchbook in hand.**' His epistolary account was in the style of the romantics of
the day, containing more of personal impressions and human interactions than descrip-
tion of antiquities. However, Swinburne also presented much information that would be
useful to fellow-travelers, including engaging stories of people he met, chasms he
crossed, food he ate, fleas he escaped, tarantulas encountered and interviews conducted.
In each of his letters, Swinburne made the present of the trip the most important
element, not the discovery of the past, while continuing the tradition of referring to
classic Roman authors to describe and understand modern Sicily.
Swinburne presented himself as an artist, commissioning engravers to turn a few
dozen of his sketches into elaborate illustrations for the large (and presumably expens-
ive) text he produced for armchair travelers to savor his journey. Like other Grand Tour
narrators of his period, he placed a map across firom the title page of Volume 1 that
182 J. DYM

provided basic information about Italy's geography and the location of its cities, lakes,
and mountain chains, along u-ith a key to the distances in the map available in modem
Italian, ancient Roman, French, and English distance measurements (Figure 15). A
similar map of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, "from the most approved foreign
maps and charts" began Volume 2. By choosing an Italian destination relatively distant
from that of Grand Tour voyagers, Swinburne meant to cast himself in unfamiliar
territory, reporting back findings and observations meant to be savored rather than
emulated, and thus situates his audience with maps. In addition, several of Swinburne's
sketches contained geographical qualities, intending to direct the reader's understanding
of the image by naming key buildings and landscape features, much like the seven-
teenth-century "platform" or cityscape, like one of the seaport of Bari (Figure 16).
This cartographic trope was paralleled in the text as the author described the act of
travel as something filled with surprise despite the plethora of information on itineraries
available. For, he noted, the "route given me at Naples having made no mention of
Carigliano as a sleeping change" so he had not prepared himself with a letter of
introduction to procure lodging at one of the duke's residences and lodged as a result
"at the house ofa dealer in oil.""'^ All pointed to the unfamiliarity of the region visited,
or at least Swinburne's emphasis on its strangeness.
Although not a surveyor or cartographer, even the text of this educated, curious
author showed substantial geographical awareness. His discussion of geography, top-
ography, and cartography recalled the skeptical approach of travelers to seventeenth
century Asia. Instead of assuming that existing maps were accurate, Swinburne
questioned the accuracy of various parts of the science. When situating the mountain
ranges of Naples, Swinburne found that "in this point, as well as in many others
concerning these provinces, I have had opportunities of discovering errors in the best
maps.""" Regarding navigation, when the ship he was traveling in passed the island of
Elba, the captain told Swinburne that compasses were of no use in the island's vicinity
"as the needle veered about continually with great irregularity." The traveler not only
informed his reader that some disputed this finding, but presented his own observation
to resolve the question. "Without attempting to argue the point, I shall cotitent myself
with mentioning, that I perceived the utmost confusion and variation in the needle most
part of the day, though we constantly kept at the distance ofa league from Elba.""^'^ In
these instances (and many others), the traveler questioned the foundations of his
cartographic sources and geographers' methods in the same way that those who have
traveled to the East Indies had for over a century.
What is new in Swinburne is the same mindset that informs Rennell's regarding the
need to have geographers travel and make their own observations and to compare them
with those already made. Swinburne is quick to criticize existing maps not because of
the lack of skill of geographers, but their sources. For example, he finds that the
"four-sheet map" of Naples by astronomer Giovanni Antonio Rizzi-Zannoni (1736-
1814) assembled in Paris "as it was put together from memory, the combination of
different observations, and old maps, it is not surprising that it should not be exempt
from errors.""" In a footnote, the author reinforces the point of the need for geogra-
phers to create their own surveys, adding that "Zannoni has lately been prevailed upon
to come to Naples, and is actually employed in surveying the domain. We may therefore
expect a better map of the two Sicilies."'"" For Swinburne, sedentary geographers
listened to the wrong sources—inaccurate travelers rather than erudite ancients like
Virgil, who accurately described a "low" terrain with hills, rather than the mountainous
one appearing on many maps.'**^ Eighteenth-century French geography's turn to favor-
C/3

O ^- M

a >- %

o
 THE FAMIUAR AND THE STRANGE 18 5

ing on-site surveying rather than collection of unverified information identified by

scholar Anne Marie Claire Godlewska may well have been a more general move to
demand expertise of the eyewitness.'"^
By the close of the eighteenth century, what had been familiar had become strange:
Europe required geographic consideration by travelers. At the same time, consistent and
extensive mapping of India and failure to further penetrate or trade with Japan had
contributed to a shift in travelers' interest in cartography in these regions. Specialists
began to take over the work of improving geography and travelers' accounts lost their
appeal as sources of new and accurate information. The strange was becoming familiar
as methods and interests changed.

Conclusion
The merits of a broad and comparative approach to analyzing the content of early
modern Western European travelers' observations of lands near and far, rather than
voyagers ofa single nation to a single destination, seem to have borne fruit. Such a study
cannot hope to—and does not intend to—provide a complete analysis of the ways in
which individual travelers mapped, nor a complete view of the relationship between
travel and mapping, the publishing of travelers' maps, the impact of political, social, and
scientific revolutions on the role of travel and cartography in this period, nor even the
full range of ways in which travelers interacted with maps before, during, and after their
journeys. However, there are some preliminary conclusions to be reached that suggest
that those traveling from the region of Western Europe shared certain assumptions in
their approach to travels and travel writing and developed specific reasons to include or
exclude geography and cartography in their accounts that depended more on their own
interests than on specific geographic knowledge.
Europeans traveled extensively in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, com-
menting and reporting copiously on what they saw. In some ways, destination had little
influence on the form and approach of the travelogues they produced and travelers like
Delia Valle in the seventeenth century and Thunberg in the eighteenth wrote lengthy
accounts of their experiences in Europe, Asia, and even Africa, in order to provide a
report on the whole. However, the two kinds of destination largely produced narratives
with distinct agendas in the seventeenth century. Travelers to European Grand Tour
destinations emphasized investigation of past and sometimes present high material
culture in largely urban environments while most travelers to distant places focused on
all aspects of life—from history to politics to religion to commerce, reflecting a broad
interest in "strange" places and customs. It was not until the eighteenth century that
both near and far locations could be seen as equally distinct from home societies and
thus open for a broader range of investigation. As familiar became strange, and strange
sometimes familiar, the cartography of travel narratives refiected the overall shift.
Seventeenth-century European travel accounts were small books of useful information
designed to be used on-the-spot in studies of antiquities and alongside locally-procured
maps and guidebooks, and so left maps out. In the same era, travel narratives focused
on less well-known areas—from the Greece visited by Jacob Spons but more regularly
on Asian countries including India and Japan, whose treatment in European carto-
graphic matter was more easily found wanting and where no local productions could be
counted on to fill in missing information—not only provided maps. In addition, authors'
discussion of geography, topography, and navigation were de rigueur.
Yet by the mid-eighteenth century, the writing of the "lumieres" travelers sue-
186 J.DYM

ceeded in making all destinations unfamiliar and thus demanding the more "omnium-
gatherum" treatment of information and the inclusion of maps as well as discussion of
geography in accounts to covering both Europe and Asia. Grand Tour countries were
no longer seen uniquely as places to investigate the past and elite social interactions in
metropolitan centers, but as places for scientific investigation of soils and rural retreats
in the Alps or Sicily. India proved fertile ground for new expert surveyors to create
detailed maps and civil servants to explore new routes of travel. Swinburne and Rennell,
artist and scientist, both felt that on-the-spot information was the best sort for mapping,
and expected geographers to be the experts taking measurements and making the
observations. While the surveyor might disdain the amateur traveler's observations—and
Young's maps of French climate might reinforce such disdain—there was a clear
convergence in believing that all land and landscapes had sufficient "unfamiliar"
qualities to merit cartographic consideration.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the generous support of the National Endowment for
the Humanities, whose 2003-04 fellowship made the research for this paper possible.
Additional thanks are owed to Dr. James Akerman of the Newberry Library and Dr.
Matthew Edney of the University of Southern Maine for encouraging development of
the project, "They Also Mapped; Travelers' Cartography, 1750-1950," of which this
paper is pan. The librarians of the Rare Books and Geography and Maps Divisions of
the Library of Congress and of the New York Public Library have been invaluable points
of reference. Finally, thanks to Skidmore College's Office of the Dean of Faculty for
granting a leave year to undertake this research and computer resources to support it.

Notes
1. Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Palgrave
Macmilian, 2000), 12. See also Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcalonial
Explorations, trans. C. Matthias (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000); Katherine Turner, British Travel
Writers in Europe 1750-1850: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot (UK): Ashgate Press,
2001); Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (Beckcnham: Croom Helm Ltd., 1985); Paul F,
Kirby, The Grand Tour in Italy (1700-1800) (New York: S.F, Vanni, 1952); and Nicole Hafid-Martin,
Voyage et comiaissance au toumant des Lumieres (1780-1820) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995),
2. For early modem travelers lo Japan, see Marc Cooper (ed.). They Came to Japan: An Anthology of
European Reports an Japan, 1543-1640 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), and Beatrice
M. Bodart-Bailey and Derek Massarella (eds). The Furthest Goal: Engieben Kacmpfer's Encounter with
Tokugawa Japan (Sandgate: Japan Library, 1995); for India, see Joao-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology
in the Renaissance. South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000); N. Bhattacharya, Reading the Splendid Body: Eighteenth-Century British Writing on India
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978); Ramacandra Prasada, Early English Travellers in India: A
Study in the Travel Literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Periods with Particular Reference to India
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsi Dass, 1965).
3. Of the few studies of the consumption of popular literature, some argue that the sheer volume of travel
accounts and compilations published bespeak an eager public. See John Brewer, Pleasures of the
Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), Chapters 1—4 for
a case study of Bristol, England's library lenditig patterns that show travelogues among the most popular
genres.
4. Henry Ashwood in Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London: J. Martin and J. Allfrye, 1655), no
pagination,
5. For a working definition ofthe travel narrative, see Korte, English Travel Writing, 1. For the importance
of the eyewitness, see Rolena Adomo, "The Discursive Encounter of Spain and Atnerica; The Authority
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 187

of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 49, no. 2
(1992): 210-28,
6. In the useful introduction to an interdisciplinar\' edited volume. Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing,
the co-editors note how the study of travel narratives is fractured, with historians and literary scholars
examining textual artifacts, art historians examining pictures, and historians of photography studying
travelers' photographs. Striking in its absence in this list of travelers' production are the historical
geographer and study of maps. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (eds), "Introduction," in Writes of
Passage: Reading Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 1999).
7. See, for example, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturarion (New York;
Routiedge, 1992); Patrick Brantlinger, "Victorians & Africans: The Genealogy ofthe Myth ofthe Dark
Continent," Critical Inquiry, 12, no, 1 (1985): 166-88; Christopher Mulvey, Angb-Amencan Landscapes:
A Study of Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983); and Hafid-Martin, Voyage et comiaissance.
8. See for example, Amanda Gilroy, "Introduction" W. M. Verhoeven, "Land-jobbing in the Western
Territories: Radicalism, Transatlantic Emigration, and the 1790s American Travel Narrative" and N.
Leask, "Francis Wilford and the Colonial Construction of Hindu Geography, 1799-1822," in Romantic
Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775-1844, ed. Amanda Gilroy (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000), i-xii, 185-222. See also the introduction to Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand
Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830 (New York: St, Martin's Press, 1999).
9. Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
10. For studies of illustrations, sec Michael Jacobs, The Painred Voyage: An, Travel and Exploration,
1564-1875 (London: British Hydromechanics Association, 1995), and Barbara M. Stafford, Voyage into
Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge: M I T Press,
1984). For analysis of photography as part of empire-building, see James R. Ryan, lecturing Empire:
Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Regarding photography as an act of travelers, see J. M. Schwartz, "The Geography Lesson: photographs
and the construction of imaginative geographies," Journal of Historical Geography, 22, no, 1 (1996):
16-45.
11. See Note 6.
12. David G. Bumett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000); John Keay, The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was
Mapped and Everest Was Named (New York: HarperCollins, 2000); Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire:
The Geographical Construction of British India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Such work
sometimes discusses ways in which changing goals of travel influence image content. For an unusual
article that considers a map as an important travel construct, see Richard Phillips, "Writing Travel and
Mapping Sexuality: Richard Burton's Sotadic Zone," in Writes of Passage, 70-91.
13. The invisibility of travelers' maps to scholarship is such that a geographer has written a fascinating book
on how maps in adventure stories, or fictional travels, undermine the ideals of empire, without thinking
to consider maps in real travelogues. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of
Adventure (New York: Routledge, 1997).
14. Korte, English Travel Writing, 2.
15. Kone, English Travel Writing, 17.
16. Hafid-Martin, Voyage et cannaissance, 4—6,
17. Jean-Frederic Bernard (ed.), Recueil des Voyages au Nord, 8 vols. (Amsterdam: Chez Jean-Frederic
Bernard, 1727), 8, Preface,
18. Maximilien Misson, A New Voyage to Italy, 2 vols. (London: R. Bonwicke, 1714), 204. The first French
edition appeared in the Hague in 1691; the first English in London, 1695. For a study ofthe Catholic
Lasseis' exile in Europe and contributions to travel writing see Edward Chaney, Tlie Grand Tour and the
Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and "The Voyage of Italy" in the Seventeenth Ccnrury (Geneva: Slatkine,
1985).
19. Franijois-Savinien Alquie, Les delices de la France... (Amsterdam: Chez G, Commelin, 1670); Peter
Heylyn, The Voyage of France, or, A Compleat Journey through France ... (London: William Leake, 1673);
the first edition appeared in 1656.
20. Korte, English Travel Writing, 4.
21. Michel de Montaigne's late sixteenth-century travels apparently first appeared in print in 1774, See
Michel de Montaigne, Journal du voyage ... en Italie, par la Suisse & VAllemagne, en 1580 & 1581
(Rome/Paris: Chez le Jay..., 1774). Edmond Bonnaftc's study of Renaissance travelers. Voyages et
Voyageurs de la Renaissance (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970 [Paris 1895]) relies almost entirely on
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publications of manuscript accounts.
188 J. DYM

22. Francois Caron, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam (London 1653); Fem3o
Mendes Pinto, Peregnna^am (Lisbon: P. Crasbeek, 1614); Scipione Amati, Historia del regno di Vaxi' del
Giapone, ... Fatta per il dotlor Scipione Amati Romano, interprete, & historico dell' ambasciata (Rome: G.
Mascardi, 1615).
23. Richard Haklu>i's first edition appeared in 1589, and was republished in 1598j The prindpedl navigations,
voyageS) and discoveries of the English Nation, made by sea or ouer land. To the most remote and farthest dvitant
quarters of the earty at any rime within the compasse of these 1500... (London: Bishop and R. Newberie,
1589). The first edition of Purchas' Pilgrims appeared in 1613. Samuel Purchas, Pirchas his I^lgnmage.
Or, Relations of the world and ihe religions observed in all ages and places discouered, from the creation unto
this present. ... (London: H. Fetherstone, 1613). By 1672, there was a French compilation of Hakluyt,
Purchas' and other texts. Relations de divers voyages curieux: qui n'ont point esle publiees; ou qui one este
traduitcs de'Haduyt, de Purehas, 6= d'autres voyageurs anglois, hoUandois, portugais, allemands, espagnols
(Paris: Jacques Langlois, et al., 1672).
24. Montanus' compilation of the Dutch company's embassies to Japan in the 1630s went tjom a small
Dutch edition (1654) to elaborately illustrated and mapped German (1669), English (1670), and French
(1680) editions. The English edition was tellingly called Atlas Japanemis.
25. For a recent history of early atlases, see Paul Binding, Imagined Comers: Exploring the World's Eirs! Atlas
(London: Review, 2003).
26. William Bromley, Remarks in the Grand Tour of France and Italy ... (London: John Nutt, 1705), Preface,
iv-v.
27. Sir Thomas Herbert, A relation ofsomeyeares travaile, begunne anno 1626. Into Afnqite and the greater Asia,
especially the territories of the Persian monarehie, and some parts of the Oriental Indies and iles adiacent
(London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634), 2.
28. John Fryer, A new account of Fast-India and Persia, in eight Letters. Being Nine years travels. Begun 1671
and Finished 1681 (London: RR for R.I. Chiswell, et al., 1683), Preface.
29. In 1625, about forty pages of Terry's account appeared in Samuel Purchas, l*urchas' Pilgrimes (London:
Printed by W. Stansby for H. Fetherstone, 1625), Vol., 2, Book 9, 1463-82; the first edition, Edward
Terry, A Voyage to East India, in 1655. Additional editions appeared in Leyden (1707, 1727) and
London in the 1770s and early 1800s.
30. Terry, A Voyage to East India, 2-4.
31. Francois Bemier, The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol, 2nd ed. (Paris: C.
Barhin, 1676), Preface. The text was published originally in 1671 in French, and in 1693 in Parma in
Italian.
32. Pietro Delia Valle, The Travels of Sig. Pietro della Valle, a Noble Roman, into East-India and Arabia Deserta
(London: Printed by J. Macock, 1665), Preface.
33. Bishop Gilbert Burnet, Some Letters Containing, An account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland,
Italy & c. (Rotterdam: Printed by Abraham Acher, 1686), original spelling. Additional English editions
appeared in Rotterdam and Amsterdam in 1687, 1688, 1689, and in London in the eighteenth century.
The first German edition appeared in 1688, and the French in 1718.
34- Misson, A new voyage, 1: 228-29, Lener 16, 20 January, 1688.
35. Richard Lassels, Gentleman, The voyage of Italy, or, A compleat journey through Italy in two pans ... with
instructions concerning travel (Paris: [s.n.], 1670); John Ray, Observations Made in a Journey through Italy
(London: John Martin, 1673); and Bumet, Letters. Bumet's accounts appeared in several editions into
the eighteenth century in English, French, and German; Lassels' in EngHsh and French.
36. The first English edition of Misson's A new voyage was published in London in 1695; the French in
Amsterdam in 1691. I have not been able to consult all editions; however bibUographic entries suggest
no maps in the seventeenth-century texts.
37. Justus Lipsius, A Direction for rravailers (London: R. Blower, 1592); Francis Bacon "Of Travel," in The
essayes or covnsels, civill and morall (London: John Haviland, 1625); Leandro Alberti, Descrittione dt tvtta
Italia (Bologna: A. Giacarelli, 1550); Gilles Corrozet, Les antiqvitez histoires et singvlaritez excellentes de la
Ville, Cite, & Vmversite de Paris, capiiale du Royaume de Frame (Paris: ... boutique de Gilles Corrozet,
1550); Roben Dallington, A method for trauell: The View of France, as it stoode in theyeare of our Lord 1598
(London: Thomas Creede, 1605). For the German market, see Manin Zeiller, hinerani Gailiae et
Magnae Britanniae (Strasbourg: Lazari Zetzners s. Erben, 1634) and ltinerarium Italiae nov-antiqua
(Frankfurt: Matthaei Merians, 1640).
38. For example, Frangois Desrues, et al.. Description contenam toutes les singularitez de pius celebres vUles ct
places remarquabks du Royaume de France: ... reueu, eorrige, et augmemente du sommaire de lestat, cartes des
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 189

provinces (Rouen: Chez David Geuffroy, 1620). This included eight woodcut bird's-eye views of over a
dozen French cities and six full-page woodcuts, including a map of France, and regional maps.
39. Charles Estienne, La guide des chemins de France (Paris: C. Estienne, 1553); N. G. D, Baron, Le
gentilhotnme etranger voyageant en France; les melieures routes qu'il faut prendre ... (Leiden: B. Vander,
1699).
40. Sabellico, De situ urbis Venetae; De viris illustribus {[Venice: Damianus de Gorgonzola,) 1494); Girolamo
Francisi's Le cose maravigliose dell'alma cittd di Roma...: eon la guida romana, che insegna faeilmente
a'forastieri di ritrovare le cose piu notabili di Roma (Rome: Giacamo Mascardi, 1621) was in print from the
sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (first edition, 1566) in French and English.
41. Warcupp's preface stated, "You have here the Itinerary of Italy, a Guide to all dnat travel thither, a
memorial after their return." Edmund Warcupp, Italy, in its original glory, mine and revival... {London:
S. Griffin, 1660), iv.
42. See, for example, Jacques Signot. La totale et vraie descnptio de tofusj les passaiges, lieux & destroictz: par
lesqlz on peui passer & enlrer des Gaules es Ytalies ... (Paris: [Toussani Denys], 1518).
43. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, John Ogilby, A pocket-guide to the English traveller,
being a compleat survey and admeasurement of all the principal roads and most considerable cross-roads in
England and Wales ... {London: J. Tonson and J. Watts, 1719); and Atlas portatif d'Allemagne, or the
German pocket atlas... (London: R. Sayers, 17xx), The first comprised one hundred small folding maps
of England and Wales, and the second twenty maps of German districts, folded up into a ponable
palm-sized container,
44. Lassels, An Italian Voyage (1698), 22-23.
45. Bromley, Remarks, 2.
46. Misson, A new voyage, 2: 484-85, Letter 24, Rome, 27 March 1688.
47. William Winstanley (attrib.), Poor Robins Character of France, or, France Painted to the Life (London:
[s.n.], 1666).
48. George Sandys, Sandys Travailes... Turkish Empire ... Egypt... Holy-Land... Italy (London: Richard
Cotes, 1652). This original English edition {1627) also had maps; the 1652 edition later appeared in
German (1669) and Dutch (1665).
49. Jacob Spon, Curieuse Reise durch Italien, Dalmatien, Greichenund Morgenland (Nurmberg: Johan Hoffman,
1686). After a first edition appeared in Lyon in 1678, Spon was in print until the mid-eighteenth century
in German, Italian, Durch, English, and French editions.
50. Such sources existed for Japan, which travelers noticed had an extensive system to help them move on
the island. Among works brought out of Japan by Engelbert Kaempfer in 1692 were "several roadbooks
for the use of travellers, giving an acct of the distances of places, the price of victuals, and carriage, and
the like with many figures of the buildings, and other remarkable things to be seen on the road ...."
Engelbert Kaempfer, The Histnn' of Japan (London: Printed for the Publisher, 1728), 1.
51. Fryer, A new account of East-India., Introduction.
52. Sir Thomas Herbert, A relation of some yeares traz'aile (London: R[ichard] B[ish]op, 1638), 300. Herbert
points out "I hold it the best way to direct your eyes in finding out such exotique places of East Indya
and the adjacent lies as I intend to speake of, in two Mappes ,,. that thereby our Travel] may be the lesse
difficult to your inquirie."
53. This paper includes several prominent examples, including the works of Kaempfer, Tavemier, Bemier,
and Herbert.
54. Terry, A Voyage to East India, 86.
55. Kaempfer, The History of Japan, 1: 13.
56. Jean Baptiste Tavemier, The si.x voyages of Jean Baptists Tavemier... through Turkey into Persia, and the
East Indies, finished in the year 1670 (London: R.L. and M.P,, 1678), preface. T"his book, originally
published in French (1676) was quickly translated to English (1678), published in French in Amsterdam
(1678), and then German (1681), Italian (1682), and Dutch (1682).
57. Tavemier, The six voyages. Chapter 1.
58. Tavernier, The six voyages. Preface.
59. Tavemier, The six voyages. Preface.
60. Jean Baptiste Tavemier, Les six voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavemier, ... 2 vols. (Paris: G. Clouzier,
1676-77), 1: 692.
61. Tavemier, The six voyages, 67-68, Chapter 4.
62. Translator's Introduction, Kaempfer, The History of Japan, Preface, xix-xx.
63. Herbert, A relation (1638), 149.
64. Bernier, History, Preface.
65. Terry, A Voyage to East India (1715 re-print of 1655 edition), 85 (map), 86 (text).
190 J.DYM

66. I use the masculine pronoun advisedly. In terms of printed sources, almost no women's travel narratives
appeared until the cusp of the eighteenth century. In this period, published writers were men.
67. Herbert, A relation (1638), 342.
68. Kaempfer, The History of Japan, 1: 14,
69. Kaempfer, The History of Japan., 1: xxi; 2: 399. The editor commented that while Japanese cartography
was not as accurate as European efforts, for lesser knowledge of mathematics and physics, they were
extensive and detailed, so he used one of "several" maps which "were brought out of the country by Dr.
Kaempfer himself, which I have follow'd in the map annex'd to this history."
70. Kaempfer, The History of Japan, 3; opp. 43, Table 7, Mappa Meinam Fluvij Ad orig eng kempfer delin
igs, C Moore Sculpt.
71. Delia Valle, Travels, 6.
72. Francois Bemier, Histoire de la demiere revolution (Paris: C. Barbin, 1670), 13: 266.
73. Bemier, Histoire, 2: 137; Franijois Bemier, The history of the late revolution ofthe Empire ofthe Great Mogol,
trans. Henry Oldenburg (London: Moses Pitt, 1671-72), The full title of both editions also indicates
that the book contains a letter to Colbert on the extent of Hindustan.
74. Delia Valle, Travels, 8-9.
75. Delia Valle, Travels, 6-8.
76. John Harris, Navigantium atque itirierantium bibliotheca: or, A compleat collection of voyages and travels: in
the English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German or Dutch tongues ...2 vols. (London: T .
Bennet, 1705); Bernard, Recueil de voyages au Nord.
77. Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, A tour through the Western, Southern and interior Provinces of France (London:
Charles Dilly, 1784); Wraxall had previously authored a travel account with one map, A tour through
some of the northern parts of Europe, particularly Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Petersburgh (London: T.
Cadell, 1775) and a historical guidebook to France with no map. Memoirs ofthe kings of France, ... To
zvhieh is added, A tour through the western, southern, and interior (Dublin and London: Edward and Charles
Dilly/Messrs. S. Price, W, Watson, et al,, 1777); Edward Wright, Esq., Some observations made in
travelling through France, Italy, &€. in the years 1720, 1721, and 1722 (London: T, Ward and E.
Wickseed, 1730; A, Millar, 1764).
7S. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy and
Germany (London and Dublin: Messrs. Chamberlain, 1789).
79. John George Keysler, Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy and Lor-
rain. ... carefully translated from the 2nd Edition ofthe German ... 3rd edn, 4 vols in 2, (London: G. Kety,
A. Unde, 1756), 1: 262,
80. Karl Peter Thunberg, Resa uti Europa, Africa, Asia, fcerreettad dren 1770-1779 (Upsala: J. Edman,
1788-91). The Swedish was quickly followed by editions in German (Berlin, 1792), Enghsh (London,
1793), and French (Paris, 1794).
81. Karl Peter Thunberg, Flora Japonica: sistens planias insularum Japonicarum (Lipsiae: In Eibliopolio I.G.
Mulleriano, 1784),
82. See Edney, Mapping an Empire.
83. George Foster, A journey from Bengal to England, through the northern pan of India, Kashmire, Afghanistan,
and Persia, and into Russia, by the Caspian Sea (London: R. Faulder, 1798).
84. French editions appeared in 1798 (Basle) and 1802 (Paris), and a German edition by 1800. "Extracts
from Forster's travels, conceming the northem pans of Persia," appeared in A general collection ofthe best
and most interesting voyages and travels ... (London, 1808-14), Vol, 9 (1811), 279-319.
85. James Rennell, Memoir ofa Map of Hindoostan (London: M. Brown printed for the author, 1783), ii. In
1764, at the tender age of twenty-one, Rennell was hired by the East India Company to sur\'ey Bengal,
a task which occupied him until \111. For more on Rennell and his work, see Sir Clements Markham,
Major James Rennell and the Rise of Modem English Geography (London: Cassels/MacMillan, 1895).
86. James Rennell, A Bengal Atlas ([London], 1780).
87. Rennel!, Memoir ofa Map (1785).
88. For an analysis of Rennell's maps as part of the history of travel, see Michael T. Bravo, "Precision and
Curiosity in Scientific Travel: James Rennell and the Orientalist Geography of the New Imperial Age
(1760-1830)," in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, eds Jas Eisner and Joan-Pau
Rubies (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 162-83. Bravo considers the Memoir a " cartographic memoir"
and a travel account,
89. Rennell, Me?noir of a Map (1783), ii.
90. Rennell, Memoir of a Map, vii-viii.
91. Rennell, Memoir of a Map, viii-ix.
92. Rennell, Memoir of a Map, v-vi.
 THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE 191

93. Graf Friedrich Leopold Stolberg, Travels through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Sicily (London: G.G.
and J. Robinson, 1796). English translation of German original.
94. Captain John Northall, Travels through Italy containing new and curious obseruations on that country
(London: S. Hooper, S. Bladon, 1766).
95. In addition to the two examples discussed, see three works by Albanis Beaumom on the Alps for a
"mapping" account of this region. Travels through the Rhcetian Alps, from Italy to Germany, through Tyrol
(London: C. Clarke, 1792); Travels through the Maritime Alps, from Italy to Lyons (London: T. Bensiey,
1795); Travels from France lo Italy, through the Lepontine Alps (Ijindon: S. Hamilton ..., 1800).
96. The first Ijindon edition included all three maps. The map or maps included in the 1794 French edition
were missing from the volume I consulted at the New York Public Library. However, the title page
claimed the hook had been published "[a]vec des corrections considerables et une nouvelte carte." The
editor also intended to publish an addition hy Charles Casaux whose illness prevented publication.
Arthur Young, Travels during the years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (London: J. Rackham ..., 1792); Voyages
(Paris: Buisson, 1794); Reisen (Mtinster: Osnabruck, 1794).
97. Henr>- Swinbume, Travels in the two Sicilies, m theyears 1777, t778, 1779, and 1780 (London: P. Elmsty,
1783-85; Dublin: Price, 1793); Voyages. ... (Paris, 1785); Reisen (Hainburg, 1785).
98. Swinbume, Travels, 2: 299.
99. Swinbume, Travels, 2: 152.
100. Swinbume, Travels, 1: 40.
101. Swinbume, Travels, 2: 151-52.
102. Swinbume, Travels, 2: 151-52.
103. Swinbume, Travels, 2: 211-12.
104. Anne Marie Claire Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt
(Chicago: University' of Chicago Press, 1999).

Notes on contributor
Jordana Dym is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Skidmore College. She is working on a
project on the cartography of Western travel writers from the Enlightenment to the age of air travel, with
funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has published articles and edited volumes on
topics ranging from travelers representations, and maps of nineteenth-century Central America to political
ideas and institutions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Central America, with emphasis on the role ofthe
municipality on nation-state formation.