The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing by Thompson Carl

Author:Thompson, Carl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134105212
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2016-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

While, in sum, the narratives of discoverers and explorers point to a dominant discourse of conquest and appropriation, individually they reveal a variety of opinions, impressions and representational modes. Greenblatt suggests there is a contradiction between the ‘overarching scheme’ of ‘inexorable progress’ in the West’s imposition of Christianity and empire on the rest of the world, and the ‘disorganized’ and ‘fragmentary’ nature of the individual explorers’ narratives that supposedly chart that progress (Greenblatt 1991: 2). In the Middle Ages, narratives of discovery were valued according to their capacity to reveal and locate wonders. Since Columbus, however, this process of assimilation worked in tandem with a modern interest in the use-value of discoveries.

Taxonomies (especially of natural products), maps, charts and world systems allowed empires in the modern age to act at a distance, centralizing and exploiting this knowledge to global effect. The dumbstruck wonder of first encounters was rationalized, with the original sensory experience converted to ethnographical knowledge and incorporated in the published narrative. Flora and fauna were shot, transplanted, crated and shipped as valuable resources fuelling global trade. So while scientific explorers worked selflessly in the field to gather useful knowledge, on a global scale there was little contradiction between an overarching scheme of Western imperialism and the seemingly random, disorganized and sometimes sensationalist nature of explorers’ narratives. They begin with the mapping of wonders in the Middle Ages, steeped in the legends of antiquity, and carried forward into the imaginary cartographies influencing modern explorers. But the history of Western exploration as a whole is dominated by imperial designs leading to the systematic exploitation of nature and native cultures.

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