Latin American Travelogues

The Role of Travel Writing in Reconstructing the History of Latin America

Mia Waliszewski

From Homer's The Odyssey to Herodotus' The Histories, travel narratives have existed for thousands of years as fundamental and enticing styles of writing. Travel writing in its earliest form consisted of a flat, systematic retelling of events devoid of any personal reflections by the narrator. Travelers were more focused on sensationalizing the cultures they observed than on inserting their personality into the narrative. The sixteenth century saw the rise in popularity of both the sentimental and scientific narrative. The former consisted of the narrator as a central character in the story and borrowed elements from popular fiction, while the latter contained dry facts and descriptions meant for economic, scientific, and political purposes (Blanton 11). In the eighteenth century there was the proliferation of the conscious narrator who is an active participant in the exchange between the observer and observed and who is changed through contact with new cultures. The last great transformation of travel literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century placed travel as a symbol for the inner journey the narrator takes towards self-discovery.

Though constantly evolving to meet the writing conventions of the time period, travel writing has remained a popular form of narrative. According to Casey Blanton, travel writing's enduring popularity stems from human curiosity for the other as well as the travel narrative's ability to fuse the inner world of the mind of the traveler and the outer, observable world: The travel narrative is a compelling and seductive form of storytelling. Its reader is swept along on the surface of the text by the pure forward motion of the journey while being initiated into strange and often dangerous new territory. The traveler/ narrator's well-being and eventual safe homecoming become the primary tensions of the tale, and the traveler's encounter with the other its chief attraction (Blanton 2).

The traveler's portrayal of the other is the main focus of most of the critical analyses written about Latin American travelogues, especially the development of the paradigm of conquest, that is, how language in travel accounts encouraged the categorization of the world in terms of superior (Northern Europe and the United States) and inferior (the rest of the world) in order to justify the conquering of regions that were considered less civilized. In-depth study of travelogues is essential in understanding the role of discourse in setting the foundation for the complex, cross-cultural relationship between colonizer and colonized that would continue for centuries after the first travelogues on the New World reached European and U.S. audiences. Latin American travelogues represent a model through which to study trends in travel writing throughout the world, mainly how travel writers have sought to recreate Latin America to suit their purpose and establish an ideological dominance over the region.

This essay will explore a few of the main themes exhibited throughout Latin American travel writing from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and the ways in which representations of common themes have changed in response to shifting ideologies. First, the symbol of the cannibal provided European explorers with an initial justification for the brutal oppression and violence against Native Americans. Second, the scientific travel narrative functioned as a framework for the ideological conquest of Latin America by recreating the region as inferior to Europe and the United States because of the racial composition of its population and the debilitating effects of its climate. Third, through the discourse of scientific travelogues, Europeans could distance themselves from the atrocities of conquest by creating the persona of the innocent, harmless naturalist. Last, the sentimental travelogue reconstructs Latin America as a sublime, uninhabited wilderness in order to assert that the white narrator "discovered" and claimed the region for his home country.

Travel writing has played an essential role in creating and disseminating imperialist theory that supported the inherent superiority of Northern Europe over other societies. Travelogues provided an inferior Other with whom to contrast European and U.S. supremacy, thereby creating a framework for European and U.S. dominance over subjugated cultures. A popular symbol throughout early Latin American travel literature for recreating natives as the savage other was the cannibal. According to Ted Motohashi, the cannibal represents the ultimate othering of native South Americans because cannibalism represents complete transgression of societal norms (Motohashi 85). By consuming members of their own species, cannibals are portrayed as merciless, savage beasts that are completely incapable of comprehension. However, travel writers only assigned the label of cannibal to societies they saw as defying European authority. In response to Columbus's arbitrary labeling of certain natives as cannibals, Motohashi writes, "the one was by nature gentle and servile, hence cooperative to the Spanish, attentive to Christian dogmas and fearful of and victim to the 'canibales'; the other was the opposite, simply because they possessed and were ready to use their 'weapons'" (Motohashi 88). The cannibalism symbol was appropriated as a justification of European supremacy because by acting under the guise of the protector of natives against the fearsome and mysterious cannibals, Europeans could justify the brutalities of conquest as the lesser of two evils. Nevertheless, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, foreign scientists traveling through Latin America considered the cannibal as a mere curiosity worthy of study, not the fearful monster of centuries ago. The less-rational South Americans were considered foolish for fearing cannibals, as the anthropologist Arnold Henry Savage Landor wrote in his travelogue Across Unknown South America:

We were supposed to be then in a country infested by cannibal Indians— swarms of them. My men were quite amusing in their fears. Four of them were troublesome and insisted on the whole expedition turning back in order to see them safely out of danger. I remembered on those occasions an old Italian proverb which said that to 'women, lunatics, and children' the wisest thing is always to say 'Yes'" (Landor 309).

To the rational scientist, the men's fear of cannibals is equivalent to the child's fear of imaginary monsters. The function of the cannibal symbol varies from Columbus' travelogue to Landor's travelogue because the purposes of their respective travelogues differ. Like many travel writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Columbus recorded what he saw on his travels for economic and political purposes: by casting the natives as either savages or people in need of European protection from cannibals, Columbus could justify the use of natives for labor and the appropriation of their land to develop colonies. However, Landor, as an anthropologist, views cannibals as a population he could study, not as an exotic and subversive other.

The rise in popularity of scientific, rational thought over colonialist discourse in travelogues occurred in the eighteenth century with the upsurge in travel expeditions by scientists. Mary Louise Pratt attributes this surge in scientific exploration to Carl Linnaeus' development of a classificatory system for categorizing plants, which set off a movement aimed at categorizing all species (Pratt 15). Pratt argues that the "planetary consciousness" the movement engendered became the main vehicle for Eurocentrism in other parts of the world: "as an ideological construct, it makes a picture of the planet appropriated and redeployed from a unified, European perspective" (36). By controlling representations of Latin America in their travelogues, European travel writers could recreate the region and its people in any way they desire, whether they portray Latin America as a territory in need of Europeans' civilizing power, as a land full of exotic danger and excitement, or as a picturesque world inhabited by countless undiscovered species.

The travel writer's ability to characterize Latin America in multiple ways stems from what Peter Hulme calls the writer's "independence of perspective," which he defines as the travel writer's capacity to defeat speculation over the veracity of his account because he has observed with his eyes the contents of his travel narrative (Hulme 4). The term "independence of perspective" is misleading, however, because the travel writer carries the preconceptions and perceptions of his society with him on his journey. For example, European travel writers approach the idea of race from the perspective of Northern European superiority. Europeans normalized the idea of their superiority over other societies through the same classificatory system Linnaeus used to categorize plant species. The classification was based on physical appearance as the marker for differences in "race," with white-skinned individuals purer and thus superior to other groups. Linnaeus himself categorized humans into six different races based on physical characteristics as well as personality traits he deemed representative of the entire group. For instance, whereas Linnaeus describes Europeans in a positive light as "gentle, acute, [and] inventive," he portrays Native Americans as "obstinate, content, [and] free," and Africans as "crafty, indolent, [and] negligent," stereotypes that many later travel writers like the scientist Louis Agassiz perpetuate in their descriptions of the people of Latin America (Pratt 32). In his travelogue A Journey in Brazil, Agassiz generalizes the characteristics of children of both African and Native American heritage to match the stereotypes of the time period: "the negro type seems the first to yield, as if the more facile disposition of the negro, as compared with the enduring tenacity of the Indian, showed itself in their physical as well as their mental characteristics" (Agassiz 246). By stressing that the characteristics of each "race" are inherited, the scientist naturalizes the idea of European dominance over other ethnicities. Since the large majority of the Latin American population is of indigenous or African origin, Agassiz in effect validates European perceptions that Latin America is inferior to predominately white regions.

In the paradigm of European conquest, differences in culture between European society and other societies are conveyed as deficiencies rather than variations. For instance, even though the scientist Henry Walter Bates initially critiques the failings of the colonial system, he then criticizes the Native American population for what he views as their uncivilized lifestyle: "there can be no doubt that if the docile Amazonian Indians were kindly treated by their white fellow-citizens, and educated, they would not be so quick as they have hitherto shown themselves to be to leave the towns and return into their half wild condition…. The inflexibility of character, although probably organic, is seen to be sometimes overcome" (Bates 191-2). According to Bates, the Amazonian Indians' nomadic way of life detracts from their humanity because it is the opposite of, and therefore inferior to, the civilized European's ideal of a settled lifestyle. The perceived inferiority extends as well to entire countries in Latin America. For many travel writers, the blame lies in the sultry climate, which travelers from colder climates insist causes idleness in the population. In his travelogue The Spanish-American Republics, Theodore Child denigrates the Peruvian people for their indolence, which he attributes to the debilitating effects of the tropical climate: "Lima, with its motley population…, its indolent men and placid women, and its general air of bankruptcy and want of energy, is not a desirable place to stay in for any length of time. The climate, too, though not absolutely unhealthy, is decidedly enervating; and if one lived in it for a few weeks even, one would probably become as lazy and slow as the natives themselves, who even do nothing with effort" (Child 203). Instead of accepting the differences in lifestyle between Latin America and the United States, Child reinvents Latin American society as stagnant because he does not see the same work ethic or behavior that he associates with more "civilized" people.

The science narrative also allowed the narrator to distance himself from the realities of conquest and colonialism by casting himself as a harmless researcher with no overt desire to exploit the native population. Pratt argues that the science travelogue acted as a key agent in Europe's "anti-conquest" of its colonies, which she defines as "a utopian, innocent vision of European global authority" (Pratt 39). According to Pratt, by casting agents of European power as innocuous scientists, "Europe could project itself as an expanding 'planetary process' minus the competition, exploitation, and violence being carried out by commercial and political expansion and colonial domination" (34). For instance, in a memoir of his childhood spent in Nicaragua, Charles N. Bell criticizes the Spanish colonists for forcing the natives to adopt a more European lifestyle by arguing that the Native Americans "invariably find that the whites are blind guides leading the blind, and that if they change their old way of living there is only one option left to them, and that is the grave. This has been the invariable result of 400 years' messing and meddling by Europeans with the habits and lives of savage people" (Bell 5). Despite the fact that Bell was one of the same "messing and meddling" Europeans he condemns, Bell maintains his innocence by blaming other Europeans, mainly Spaniards, for the degeneration of the Native American lifestyle.

In addition to the scientific narrative, sentimentalism in travel writing became very popular in the eighteenth century. In all sentimental travel narratives, the narrator takes on the role of the daring hero who comes across many dangers in a foreign, exotic land, in this case Latin America. According to Theodore Roosevelt, the true sentimental hero travels previously unexplored terrain accompanied by many hardships and perils: "Genuine wilderness exploration is a dangerous as warfare. The conquest of wild nature demands the utmost vigor, hardihood, and daring, and takes from the conquerors a heavy toll of life and health" (Roosevelt 301). As the hero of his travelogue, Roosevelt himself encounters starvation, death, sickness, and attacks by hostile Native American tribes. Sentimental travel narratives reconstruct Latin America as a perilous, unexplored land that is untouched by civilization. By emphasizing the wildness of the land, Roosevelt portrays Europeans and Americans as explorers "discovering" uninhabited land that Native Americans have in reality occupied for thousands of years, thereby placing white people in a dominant role over Latin Americans. Pratt calls the genre of the self-stylized explorer the "monarch-of-all-I-survey" genre because the white explorer claims authority over the land by having "discovered" it for his home country through the use of a solemn, self-congratulatory tone (Pratt 201, 209).

A key element of sentimental travel writing is the theme of nature as sublime, or god-like. Unlike in science narratives, nature in sentimental travelogues is depicted using emotional, highly stylized adjectives. For instance, John Esaias Warren writes of the transcendent beauty and unspoiled solitude of the scenery of Para, Brazil:

All around seemed to be wrapped in the most profound repose. Not a sound disturbed the silence of the interminable solitude save the hushed and mournful notes of evening birds, the distant howling of prowling jaguars, or the rustling of the wind through the forest trees. Nature appeared to us, for the first time, in all her pristine loveliness, and seemed indeed, to our excited imagination, to present but a dreamy picture of fairy land (Warren 6).

Warren relegates the land to the imagination of the explorer by recreating Para as a lush "fairy land." Unlike in scientific narratives, nature is depicted as mysterious, lush, and untouched by human civilization. Another common theme in sentimental travel writing is the representation of scenes as "picturesque." Miguel Cabanas argues that the picturesque places the narrator in a dominant position because only the observer can present a comprehensive picture of the land and find a deeper meaning in the landscape. Furthermore, the narrator "fetishizes difference on the basis of a 'self-evident' normalcy attributed to home" (Cabanas 77). Cabanas contends that the comparison between the lush and exotic land in Latin America produces a clear picture of Latin America as inferior. By portraying events on their trip in the form of a picture, travel writers can maintain a remoteness from the society they visit and thus remain "untainted" from their contact with less civilized society.

From a sublime, exotic land occupied by savage cannibals and filled with economic potential to an inferior, multiracial society marked by indolence and stagnation, travelers reconstructed Latin America repeatedly to suit their needs. By defining Latin America in terms of European ideologies towards diversity and superiority, Europeans could subsequently assert their dominance in other areas, including trade, politics, and culture. Latin America, in effect, became a blank canvas onto which travelers could project their desires and ambitions, to the point where the fictionalized depictions of Latin America from the sixteenth to nineteenth century persist today.

Works Cited

Agassiz, Louis. A Journey in Brazil. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868.

Bates, Henry Walter. The Naturalist on the River Amazons, A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life and Aspects of Nature Under the Equator During Eleven Years of Travel. London: J. Murray, 1863.

Bell, Charles N. Tangweera: Life and Adventures Among Gentle Savages. London: E. Arnold, 1899.

Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Cabañas, Miguel A. The Cultural 'Other' in Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives: How the United States and Latin America Described Each Other. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.

Child, Theodore. The Spanish-American Republics. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891.

Hulme, Peter and Tim Youngs. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Landor, Arnold Henry Savage. Across Unknown South America. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1913.

Motohashi, Ted. "The Discourse of Cannibalism in Early Modern Travel Writing." In Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, edited by Steve Clark, 83-99. New York: Zed Books, 1999.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Roosevelt, Theodore. Through the Brazilian Wilderness. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1914.

Warren, John Esaias. Para; or, Scenes and Adventures on the Banks of the Amazon. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1851.