Peter Burke

The Cultural History of the

Travelogue
Przegląd Historyczny 101/1, 1-11

2010
R O Z P R A W Y

PETER BURKE
Emmanuel College
Cambridge

The Cultural History

of the Travelogue

A little over thirty years ago, in 1978, Antoni M ą c z a k published his well–
known book about travellers: „Życie codzienne w podróżach po Europie w XVI
i XVII wieku”. This book was and remains a pioneering study of Alltagsgeschichte
that concentrated on what might be called the social history of travel, the twin ex­
periences of being on the road and also outside one’s own culture, thus escaping
temporarily from the everyday constraints of one’s social status, whether it hap­
pened to be high or low. Princes sometimes travelled incognito, while commoners
presented themselves as noblemen.

The first question to be discussed in what follows is what has happened to this
area of study since Antoni Mączak’s book appeared a generation ago. One answer
is to say is that the topic of travel has become an academic ‘field’ in the sense in
which Pierre B o u r d i e u employed the term.
Studies in the history of travel had of course been published before 1978,
sometimes by literary scholars and sometimes by historians such as the Oxford
scholar John S t o y e. Stoye’s excellent book „English travellers abroad, 1604–
1667; their influence in English society and politics” appeared in 19521.
All the same, it was only in the 1990s that the scholarly interest in travel turned
into a specialized academic field, with its own name or names: ‘travel studies’, via­
jologia or even itérologie, as the French novelist Michel B u t o r called it in the
1970s2. One sign of this institutionalization is the foundation of centres of research
such as the Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerche sul Viaggio in Italia. Another is

1
J. W. S t o y e, English travellers abroad, 1604–1667; their influence in English society and po­
litics, London 1952.
2
M. B u t o r, Le voyage et l’écriture, „Répertoire” vol. 4, 1974.
PR ZEGL Ą D HISTORYCZN Y, TOM CI, 2010, ZESZ . 1, ISSN 0 03 –2186
2 PETER BURKE

the appearance of specialized journals such as „Studies in Travel Writing” (started

in 1996), or „Journeys” (which began publication in the year 2000).
The third and most important sign of the emergence of a new field is the large
number of books on the history of travel, including, fortunately, a significant pro­
portion of good ones, that have been published in the 1990s or later, on topics as
varied as travel in the ancient world, foreigners in Scandinavia, the art or method
of travel, female travel writers, the Grand Tour, Cook’s Tours, and the invention
of Eastern Europe by travellers from Western Europe3. In a globalizing age, books
in western languages now include studies of Muslim travellers, and more rarely
Japanese and Chinese visitors to the USA and elsewhere4.
At the same time, the approach adopted by many of the writers of these books
has shifted from social history to ‘the cultural history of travel’ or the history of
‘travel cultures’5. One sign of this cultural turn is the rise of interest in the texts
that were produced by travellers to record their experiences, texts which I shall call
‘travelogues’. These travelogues are sometimes studied as sources for social and
cultural history but also — with increasing frequency — as historical phenomena
that are of interest in their own right6.
There is of course nothing new in the idea of using travelogues as sources. The
Brazilian scholar Gilberto F r e y r e, for instance, was already doing this in the
1930s in two famous studies of his own country, known in English as „The Masters

3
J.–M. A n d r é, M.–F. B a s l e z, Voyager dans l’antiquité, Paris 1993; H. A. B a r t o n, Northern
Arcadia: Foreign Travel in Scandinavia, 1765–1815, Carbondale, Illinois, 1998; A. B r i l l i, Quando
viaggiare era una arte, Bologna 1995; E. B o h l s, Women Travel Writers 1716–1818, Cambridge
1995; I. G h o s e, Women Travellers in Colonial India: the Power of the Female Gaze, Delhi 1998;
E. C h a n e y, Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo–Italian cultural relations since the Renaissance,
London 1998; Ch. C h a r d, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative
Geography, 1600–1830, Manchester 1999; L. W i t h e y, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: a History
of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915, London 1998; L. W o l f f, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of
Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford 1994.
4
Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination, eds. D. F. E i c k e l m
a n, J. P. P i s c a t o r i, London 1990; W. G. B e a s l e y, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese
Travellers in America and Europe, New Haven 1995; D. H o w l a n d, Borders of Chinese civilization
: geography and history at Empire’s end, Durham 1996; In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel
Writings in the 17th Century, ed. N. M a t a r, London 2003; R. L. E u b e n, Journeys to the other Shore:
Muslim and Western Travellers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton 2006; M. A l a m, S. S u b r a h ­
m a n y a m, Indo–Persian Travellers in the Age of Discoveries, Cambridge 2007.
5
Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, eds. J. E l s n e r , J.–P. R u b i é s,
London, 1999; R. K o s h a r, German Travel Cultures, Oxford 2000.
6
AAVV, Les récits de voyage, Paris 1986; M. L. P r a t t, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation, London 1992; The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. P. H u l m e,
T. Y o u n g s, Cambridge 2002; N. L e a s k, Curiosity and the aesthetics of travel writing, 1770–1840:
‘from an antique land’, Oxford 2002; The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, ed.
A. B e n d i x e n, Cambridge 2009.
 THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TRAVELOGUE 3

and the Slaves” and „The Mansions and the Shanties”7. All the same, the practice
has become more frequent as the interests of historians have shifted towards the
history of society and culture, especially popular culture, an area of study where
more conventional sources are often lacking.
For example, in a study of popular culture in early modern Europe that was
published in 1978, the same year as Antoni’s book, I drew on the testimony of trav­
ellers to Italy, Spain, Dalmatia, Russia and Poland (among them the eighteenth–
century English archdeacon William Coxe), because these travellers provided
information about the popular customs in some of the places they visited, informa­
tion that is very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain by other means8.
Using this testimony obviously means running risks. Travellers are outsiders.
Most of them do not know the local languages. Some of them do not stay very long
in any one place. For these reasons the danger of their misunderstanding elements
in the local culture is a considerable one. Even in the case of Europe, sixteenth– or
seventeenth–century English or French visitors to Venice at the time of Carnival,
who comment on female participation in the event, were not necessarily capable
of distinguishing upper–class women from the more expensive courtesans. When
European travellers moved further afield, the risks were multiplied.
But what else can historians do? Written accounts of early modern European
popular culture, viewed from inside, are rare, not only because most ordinary peo­
ple could not write but also because even the literate saw no need to describe cus­
toms that everyone in the community knew. For instance, the sixteenth–century
Venetian patrician Marin Sanudo, who kept a voluminous diary, now published in
no fewer than 57 volumes, wrote of Carnival in some years only that the ‘usual’
celebrations took place. Only outsiders found the Venetian Carnival worth describ­
ing in detail9.
Like other sources, travelogues obviously need to be examined with a criti­
cal eye. They are much less transparent than they look at first sight. The rhetoric
of the texts emphasises first–hand observation, but this claim is not always jus­
tified. Travellers sometimes reproduced the ideas of local informants, including
professional guides for tourists, the ciceroni, a species that had already come into
existence by the seventeenth century, if not before. However, the travellers rarely
acknowledged their debt to these mediators, on whom they were necessarily de­
pendent if they did not know the local languages, in Europe as well as in Asia

7
G. F r e y r e, Casa grand e Senzala, Rio de Janeiro 1933, English translation: The Masters and
the Slaves, New York 1946; idem, Sobrados e Mucambos, Rio de Janeiro 1936, English translation:
The Mansions and the Shanties, New York 1963.
8
P. B u r k e, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn, Ashgate 2009.
9
Idem, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, Cambridge 1978, introduction.
4 PETER BURKE

and Africa10. They sometimes incorporated passages from earlier travelogues or

guidebooks in their own work, again without acknowledgement. Travellers who
did make their own observations sometimes waited for years before writing down
their fading impressions, despite their use of what might be called ‘the rhetoric of
immediacy’, composing ‘letters’, for instance, in order to make the reader imagine
that they are in Florence or Paris now (the parallel between these travelogues and
the epistolary novels of the eighteenth century, which also depend on the rhetoric
of immediacy, is clear enough).
Travellers observed the foreign ‘scene’ (a theatrical metaphor that regularly re­
curs in travelogues) not with completely innocent eyes but on the contrary, with all
sorts of expectations and prejudices. Some of them had read books on the ‘art’ or
‘method’ of travel, the ars apodemica, a genre that emerged during the Renaissance
to assist young noblemen making the Grand Tour. These books told their readers
what to look for and so shaped their perceptions of the unfamiliar11.
Well–educated travellers often saw foreign countries and cities through the
eyes of artists and writers who had already visited the same places and published
their impressions. Robert Browning, Henry James and Marcel Proust all took John
Ruskin’s book „The Stones of Venice” with them and they saw Venetian churches
and palaces in a Ruskinian light. As for Ruskin himself, he remarked that ‘My
Venice, like Turner’s, had been chiefly created for us by Byron’12.
However, travelogues are much more than sources for historians and they are
now receiving more and more attention in their own right, as a variety or genre of
autobiography or, to use the wider Dutch term, as a type of ego–document, a text
written in the first person whether it takes the form of a diary or letters or an essay.
From this literary or cultural point of view the prejudices expressed in the texts are
no longer seen simply as a distortion but on the contrary as a fascinating object
of study in themselves, part of the history of the collective imagination or imagi­
naire social. They tell us about earlier images of other cultures or if you prefer, the
‘Other’ with a capital O (or perhaps with a capital A, since French theorists, from
Jacques L a c a n to Claude L é v i–S t r a u s s, are the ones who have written most
about l’Autre)13.

10
M. T y m o w s k i, How did European explorers communicate with indigenous African people
in the 15th century?, „Africana Bulletin”, vol. L, 2002, p. 43–74. My thanks to Professor Tymowski for
giving me a copy of his article.
11
J. S t a g l, The Methodizing of Travel in the 16th Century: a Tale of Three Citie „History and
Anthropology”, vol. 4, 1990, p. 303–338; J.–P. R u b i è s, Instructions for Travellers, „History” vol. 9,
1995, p. 1–51; idem, Travel Writing as a Genre, „Journeys”, vol. 1, 2000, p. 5–33.
12
Ruskin quoted in M. P f i s t e r, The fatal gift of beauty: the Italies of British travellers: an an­
notated anthology, Amsterdam 1996, p. 350.
13
In the context of travel, see especially T. T o d o r o v, La conquête de l’Amérique: la question
de l’autre, Paris 1982.
 THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TRAVELOGUE 5

Thanks to these theorists, readers of travelogues have been encouraged to pay

attention to the ‘gaze’ of travellers, le regard, or more exactly to a variety of gazes:
male and female, for instance, scientific, ethnographic or colonialist. Above all,
especially from the late eighteenth century onwards, there is the gaze of the tourist,
defined as someone for whom travel is an end in itself. The tourist regards every­
thing abroad from the point of view of someone detached from what he or she is
looking at, knowing no one and without local responsibilities14. Incidentally, the
term ‘tourist’ in English and French at least goes back to the early nineteenth cen­
tury. Stendhal’s „Mémoires d’un touriste” was published in 1838.
One kind of tourist gaze is aesthetic, that of the traveller in search of the ‘pic­
turesque’, most obvious in the case of Westerners in the ‘Orient’ but also to be
found in accounts by Northern Europeans of Italy, Spain and elsewhere. The aes­
thetic traveller sees ragged beggars, for instance, as if they were part of a painting.
After the invention of photography, travellers came to view the local inhabitants as
‘kodakable’, in other words as objects appropriate for a snapshot15.
Alternatively, the traveller and especially the tourist, views life in foreign
countries, especially in the Mediterranean and the Orient, in terms of theatre. As
Henry James once remarked, ‘to travel is, as it were, to go to the play’16. This is
a perceptive remark, but it needs to be turned back on itself. It is the tourist’s gaze
that turns the natives into actors. For the locals, the spectacle is provided by the
tourists themselves, whose activities often follow a ‘script’17.
A book published in the same year as Mączak’s, the late Edward S a i d’ s
„Orientalism”, has of course been extremely influential in the last thirty years on
the cultural history of travellers and travelogues. To my mind the most successful
part of this study, which concentrates on the nineteenth century, when travel to the
Middle East became fashionable, especially among the French — Delacroix, for
instance, Lamartine, Dumas, Nerval and Flaubert — the most successful part is not
Said’s well–known attempt (following Michel F o u c a u l t), to treat orientalism
as an institution, but the part where, using his skills as a literary critic, he examines
texts that were not always intended to be literary, discovering conscious or uncon­
scious stereotypes of oriental luxury, passivity, effeminacy and so on.
Said concentrated on hostile or patronizing Western stereotypes of Arab coun­
tries. Neutral or favourable stereotypes of the other are also to be found in trav­

14
J. U r r y, The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies, London 1990;
M. L. P r a t t, op. cit.; I. G h o s e, op. cit.; B. J e z e r n i k, Wild Europe: the Balkans in the Gaze of
Western travellers, London 2004.
15
D. S l a d e n, Oriental Cairo: City of the Arabian Nights (1911), D. G r e g o r y, Scripting
Egypt: Orientalism and the Culture of Travel, in: Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, eds.
J. D u n c a n, D. G r e g o r y, London 1999, p. 145.
16
H. J a m e s, Italian Hours, Harmondsworth 1995, p. 82.
17
D. B o o r s t i n, The Image, or, What happened to the American dream, London 1961 p. 111;
D. G r e g o r y, op. cit.
6 PETER BURKE

elogues, like the image of Venice as the home of liberty in the seventeenth century,
or the home of pleasure in the eighteenth.
Travellers also try to domesticate the exotic landscapes through which they
are passing by comparing them to something more familiar or nearer home. Thus
eighteenth–century English travellers in the South Pacific saw the inhabitants
through the spectacles of the classical tradition. The hard and frugal life of the
Australian aborigines reminded them of the Spartans and the Scythians, while the
inhabitants of Tahiti seemed by contrast to live in the Golden Age, enjoying the
gifts of a beneficent nature without the need for much effort18. An Englishman vis­
iting Ireland in the late eighteenth century viewed near Cork what he described as
‘a variety of beautiful landscapes which the genius, fancy and spirit of Poussin or
Claude Lorraine could never exceed’19. Again, nineteenth–century English visitors
to Sri Lanka (which they called Ceylon) compared the highlands around the city
of Kandy to that of more familiar places such as Italy or Switzerland or their own
Lake District20.
In short, travellers, like the rest of us — but more visibly than the rest of us —
engage in a practice that has come to be known as ‘cultural (or intercultural) trans­
lation’, in other words attempts to understand the unfamiliar through the familiar.
All understanding is a kind of translation into our own terms of what is outside
and foreign to us, and travellers, faced with an especially unfamiliar outside world,
reveal this process with exceptional clarity.
Attempts at cultural translation may of course produce misunderstandings,
sometimes serious ones. When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and his
men first landed in India, they entered a Hindu temple. Seeing an image with three
heads — Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the so–called trimurti — they immediately
concluded that it represented the Holy Trinity and that they had set foot in a church.
It is easy enough, perhaps too easy, to see what went wrong in cases like this.
All the same, none of us would understand very much if we did not make use of
analogies. The trick, perhaps, is to try to become aware of what might be called the
‘dis–analogies’.

II

Let me now turn to a brief case–study of foreign travellers in South America

and especially Brazil, their experiences and the often stereotyped ways in which

18
B. S m i t h, European vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: a study in the history of art and
ideas, Oxford 1960.
19
Ph. L u c k o m b e, Tour through Ireland, London 1780, p. 182.
20
J. D u n c a n, Dis–Orientation: On the Shock of the Familiar in a Far–Away Place, in: Writers
of Passge, p.151–163.
 THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TRAVELOGUE 7

those experiences were described. In order to make it clear that I am not taking up
any position of superiority, I shall begin with my own experiences as a traveller to
the city of São Paulo.
When I first visited the city, in 1986, I arrived, like most visitors, with a bag­
gage full of expectations. I imagined the city as a kind of tropical Milan — after
all, the image of the locomotive pulling the rest of the country behind it is common
to both cities. I expected to observe a great deal of activity in the street, many traf­
fic problems, and much apparent chaos — and all this was roughly true (the sight
of barbers without shops cutting the hair of their customers sitting in chairs in the
street remains vivid in the memory).
I also expected shady squares, cafés with outside tables, and men dressed in
elegant white suits — and this was not the case. So far as the white suits were con­
cerned, I must have been remembering some images from the 1930s, when a young
Frenchman named Claude Lévi–Strauss took many photographs of the city, two
decades before the publication of his travelogue „Tristes tropiques”.
So I had to revise my ideas. There are indeed parallels between São Paulo and
Milan, but also great differences. I had not taken into account the fact that São
Paulo is an American city, sharing important features with Los Angeles, for in­
stance, or with Mexico City — a historic centre that is either decaying or invisible,
for instance, and urban spaces that are dominated by cars and leave little room for
the pedestrian.
In Europe, the best way to get to know a city is on foot, and this technique
works from Paris to St Petersburg, but not in many cities in the Americas, wheth­
er North or South. Feet are not completely useless in São Paulo and it remains
a pleasure to walk along Avenida Paulista, the equivalent of Fifth Avenue in New
York. All the same, it is only realistic to regard that avenue as an island in an urban
sea, or an oasis in an urban desert that can only be crossed by car, bus, motorbike or
(for the rich) helicopter. The exhaust fumes and the frequent absence of pavements
help explain the lack of the expected café tables in the street.
Turning now to the experiences of earlier travellers, the travelogue in South
America and especially in Brazil has a long history. In the sixteenth century, ac­
counts of the Indians of Brazil were published by the French Protestant Jean de
Léry, „Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil” (1578) and by the German
soldier Hans Staden, who was captured by the Tupinambá and according to his
own story was being fattened up in order to be eaten had he not been able to
make his escape, surviving to publish a book with the colourful title „Warhaftige
Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen
Menschfresser–Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen” (1557).
In the seventeenth century, by contrast, the most memorable European images
of Brazil were the work of artists rather than writers, notably two Dutchmen, Frans
Post and Albert Eckhout, who formed part of the entourage of Johan Maurits of
Nassau, governor of the short–lived Dutch colony in Pernambuco and the man who
8 PETER BURKE

gave his name to the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where some of Post’s paintings are
still to be seen21.
It was only in the early nineteenth century, however, around the time that the
Portuguese royal family, on the run from Napoleon, had established themselves
in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, that accounts of Brazil by French, German and English
travellers become common. So common indeed that as noted earlier they were ex­
ploited as a major source by Gilberto Freyre, especially in the three–volume social
history that he published between 1933 and 1959. Freyre went so far as to claim
that ‘for the social history of Brazil there is, perhaps, no source of information
more reliable than travelogues by foreigners’22.
Nineteenth–century travellers to Brazil were an extremely varied group.
They included the philosopher William James and the adventurer Richard Francis
Burton (best known for his travels in Arabia); merchants, such as the Englishmen
Thomas Lindley and John Luccock; artists such as the German Johann Mauritz
Rugendas or the Frenchman Jean–Baptiste Debret, who called his collection of
prints his „Voyage pittoresque au Brésil”, revealing the picturesque gaze or appeal­
ing to what might be called the picturesque market.
The scientific gaze may be illustrated by the German naturalist Johann Baptist
von Spix, who went to Brazil to collect plants and animals, the English botanist
George Gardner and the Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz, who became a special­
ist on Brazilian fish. There were also soldiers such as the English Major Lisle
and General Wilson, as well as naval officers, and there were engineers such as
a certain Ulick Burke, possibly an ancestor of mine. An especially acute observer
of ‘significant details’, as Freyre noted, was Maria Graham, the daughter of an
English admiral and the governess of the daughter of Don Pedro I. She illustrates
the female gaze, though not the gaze of just any female, since Maria was also
a gifted painter of landscapes.
Cultural and social historians are deeply indebted to these travelogues and to
the sketches and photographs that accompanied them — besides Lévi–Strauss, the
photographers include the German–Brazilian Augusto Stahl, active in the 1860s,
and the Frenchman, Pierre Verger, a scholar who was himself initiated into Afro–
Brazilian cults such as candomblé.
Historians cannot do without these sources, especially if they are interested in
unofficial and popular worlds, poorly represented if at all in official documents.
The problem is how to read the travelogues. We surely need to engage in what the
literary critics call ‘close reading’, to force ourselves to become aware of the strat­
egies of the authors, their rhetoric, and the stereotypes of Brazil that they produce
and reproduce. Brazil has been presented in travelogues and is still presented in
films and television programmes — made by Brazilians as well as foreigners — as

21
Ch. R. B o x e r, The Dutch in Brazil: 1624–1654, Oxford 1957.
22
G. F r e y r e, Ingleses no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro 1948.
 THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TRAVELOGUE 9

both Heaven and Hell, a paradise for some and an inferno for others, associated
with sex and violence, carnival and corruption.
Examples make these points more clearly than generalizations can, so let me
now turn to a handful of witnesses, all nineteenth–century English travellers. They
do not offer a uniform impression: far from it. Major Lisle, for example, writing in
1800, was impressed by the city of Salvador, by the hospitality of its inhabitants
and especially by their clothes: they dress, he said, ‘with more taste and richness
than in any town I have seen’23. General Wilson, by contrast, visiting the same city
sixty years later, wrote that ‘a more abominable place does not exist’24.
Certain impressions or stereotypes recur. English visitors tend to find
Brazilian cities to be dirty and badly paved. Even Maria Graham, who usually liked
what she saw, complained that the lower town of Salvador was ‘the filthiest place
I ever was in’, while the merchant Thomas Lindley called it ‘disgustingly dirty’25.
As for the people, they are often described by the English travellers as if they were
sick, childlike or even animals. According to these travellers, the Brazilians suffer
from ‘want of forethought’, ‘indolence’ or ‘lassitude’. The Lindley, more vigor­
ously prejudiced than his colleagues, claimed that the people of Salvador ‘vegetate
in a senseless apathy’26. We are close to an orientalist gaze here, even if Brazil is
located to the west of Europe!
Lindley’s prejudices against what he calls the ‘faulty manners of Brazil’ are
so strong as to suggest a special category of gaze, the ‘splenetic or irascible gaze’
or ‘savage eye’ — in our time the travelogues of V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux
vividly illustrate this category27.
Lindley offers a relatively extreme case of a visitor accepting the common
stereotype of the foreign as a world turned upside down. As a Protestant, Lindley is
repelled by what he calls Brazilian ‘superstition’. Obviously a man of regular hab­
its, he is shocked by the ‘irregularity’ of the Brazilian hours for eating and sleep­
ing. Respecting hierarchy, he objects to the ‘licentious freedom’ of lower–class
Brazilians. He must have been a tea–drinker, since he denounces what he terms
‘a filthy liquid called coffee — — rendered still more disgusting to the eye by be­
ing served in glasses’. When he had just arrived in Porto Seguro and was visited by
some of the inhabitants, he described them as ‘just like monkeys — — ignorantly
peering into everything’28.

23
J. G. S e m p l e L i s l e, The Life of Major Lisle written by himself, second edn, London 1800,
p. 292.
24
Quoted in: H. R a n d o l p h, Life of General Sir Robert Wilson, vol. I, London 1862, p. 273.
25
M. G r a h a m, Journal of a Residence in Chile, London 1824, 133; cf. Th. L i n d l e y,
Narrative of a Voyage to Brazil, London 1805, p. 244.
26
Th. L i n d l e y, op. cit., p. 220.
27
Ibidem, p. 36; V. S. N a i p a u l, India: a wounded civilization, London 1977; P. T h e r o u x,
The Old Patagonian Express: by train through the Americas, London 1979.
28
Th. L i n d l e y, op. cit., p. 19, 27, 68, 268, 17.
10 PETER BURKE

Lindley also found what he called the Brazilian custom of eating with the fin­
gers ‘indelicate and disgusting’. „The Travels to Brazil” (1816) by Henry Koster,
a merchant who later settled in the country, also noted the lack of knives at meals.
Another English merchant, John Luccock, in his „Notes on Rio de Janeiro” (1820),
despite his frequent criticisms of Brazilian customs, was rather more discriminat­
ing, observing that the men used knives while it was the women and children who
ate with their fingers29. The American missionary Daniel Kidder, on the other hand,
writing a generation later than the others indignantly criticized earlier travel writ­
ers for asserting that the Brazilians did not use knives and forks at meals. The
divergence should serve as a warning to scholars who are tempted to follow the
assertions of travellers without criticizing them.
A number of the English travellers to Brazil make conscious attempts at
cultural translation, drawing analogies with places more familiar to them. General
Wilson, another irascible traveller, saw Salvador as ‘a medley of the worst Italian
and Turkish styles of city’. George Gardner, more favourably impressed by Rio
de Janeiro, called the Rua d’Ouvidor ‘the Regent Street of Rio’. Maria Graham
thought that one or two streets in Rio reminded her ‘in their general air’ of the
Corso in Rome. Given the current situation you may be surprised to learn that an
American missionary, James Fletcher, declared that ‘I felt greater personal security
at a late hour of the night in Rio than I would in New York’30.
Again, Ulick Burke compared the view of Rio from a neighbouring hill to the
view of Italy from the Alps. Drawing on his earlier experiences in India, he com­
pared the nearby town of Petropolis to ‘an Indian hill station’ and described his
hotel in Rio as ‘more like a large Dák bungalow, or say a Mofussil hotel in India,
than anything in Europe’31.
Some of these comparisons naturally sound strange today, but as I discovered
on my first visit to Brazil, analogies do have their uses. Understanding something
unfamiliar is a kind of translation, whether conscious or not, from new experiences
into our intellectual vocabulary. What makes travelogues particularly interesting
and illuminating is that they show this process of cultural translation at work with
particular clarity. They testify both to a sense of cultural distance and to efforts —
on the part of some travellers at least — to overcome it.
To conclude. The history of travel, now part of the larger package or enterprise
of ‘travel studies’, can be practised in different ways. In the first place, we still

29
H. K o s t e r, Travels in Brazil, Philadelphia 1817; J. L u c c o c k, Notes on Rio de Janeiro,
London 1820, p. 121.
30
H. R a nd o l p h, op. cit., p. 273; G. G a r d n e r, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, London 1846,
p. 8; M. G r a h a m, op. cit., p. 169; D. K i d d e r, J. C. F l e t c h e r, Brazil and the Brazilians, 9th edn,
London 1879, p. 126.
31
U. R. B u r k e, R. S t a p l e s Jr, Business and Pleasure in Brazil, London 1884, p. 35, 47–48,
52. ‘Mofussil’ is Indian English for ‘up–country’.
 THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TRAVELOGUE 11

need to use travelogues as historical sources, which like other sources need to be
subjected to criticism. In the second place, we still need to do what Antoni Mączak
did so well, to study travel as a social practice, part of social history. It has turned
out to be illuminating to adopt his approach not only for the early modern period
but also in studies of the nineteenth and twenteenth centuries, as the Swedish an­
thropologist Orvar Löfgren has done in a book on vacations32.
Historians also need to study travelogues as a literary phenomenon, a genre
with its own rhetoric and topoi, the study of which requires what the American
critic Mary Louise P r a t t has memorably described as ‘fieldwork in commonplac­
es’33. Linking up with the history of the book, they might devote more attention to
the marketing of travel books and the responses of readers. In nineteenth–century
Britain, for instance, the publisher John Murray was a specialist in travel books,
some of which sold well34.
Finally, perhaps most important, we need to adopt a cultural perspective, read­
ing travelogues as part of the history of the imagination and as records of cultural
encounters. These texts provide precious evidence of the experience of cultural
distance or difference and the way in which differences were both perceived and
managed. They offer evidence of attempts at understanding, as well as refusals to
understand, other peoples, their customs and their cultures.

32
O. L ö f g r e n, On Holiday: a History of Vacationing, Berkeley 1999.
33
M. L. P r a t t, ‘Fieldwork in Commonplaces’ in: Writing Culture, eds. J. C l i f f o r d,
G. E. M a r c u s, Berkeley–Los Angeles–London 1986, p. 27–41.
34
This aspect of travelogues is well discussed by my former student Angel Gurría in his (unfortu­
nately unpublished) Ph. D. dissertation, ‘British Travellers in Mexico’, Cambridge, 2001.