When the peoples of the Americas, Europe, and Africa met each other in the 16th century, they immediately began to generate stories about the other, and many of these stories soon found their way into manuscripts or printed books.
The idea of the travel narrative—a way for someone to take account of what he or she had seen in a new place— was not new in the 16th century. Its origins are, quite literally, ancient. Homer’s Odyssey, for example, is a lyric travel account; the Book of Exodus is another kind, though with a very specific theological agenda (and, as in Homer’s case, many moments of divine intervention). The genre’s appeal spread far beyond Europeans too. Ma Huan’s accounts of his three long-distance journeys in the 15th century, and the Baburnama by the prince of Fergana, Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad, known as Babur, reveal the vitality of the travel narrative as a mode of literary and political expression.
Authors of travel narratives often did not have access to a printing press, yet their stories (like the Odyssey and Genesis) could survive for generations, told from one keeper of the tale to the next or transmitted by hand through a process of scribal publication. Native Americans, too, used travel narratives to relate crucial aspects of their world. The Peruvian Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, for example, included what was in essence a travel narrative within his illustrated report to King Philip III of Spain when he sent it in 1615. And the history produced by Leo Aericanus was, in many respects, like a travel narrative in its format and structure. That was part of its appeal to Richard Hakluyt the Younger, the Elizabethan authority on travel accounts who arranged for its publication (with the title A Geographical Historie of Africa) in London in 1600.
In the European age of discovery, the travel narrative became one of the most popular kinds of books coming out of printers’ shops. This is hardly surprising. The first report of Christopher Columbus, the so-called Barcelona Letter of 1493, was a travel account, and it contained many of the ingredients that became consistent in this kind of writing in the 16th century. Columbus wrote about his voyage, his “discovery” of a place that he did not know existed, his encounters with the indigenous peoples of that place, his description of the new land’s climate, flora, and fauna, and his return home.
Virtually every European who described the Americas followed that formula. Accounts differed from one author to the next, of course, and the genre developed over the course of the 16th century. The earliest reports, like those by Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, often paid little attention to specific peoples or places and, instead, offered brief overviews, often laden with overt criticism of the peoples they described (such as Vespucci’s inability to understand Tupinamba facial piercing). Yet some who made long journeys—like the English mathematician Thomas Harriot, the Dutch traveler Jan Huygen van Linschoten, and the Huguenot missionary Jean de Lery—wrote with an ethnographic sensitivity that seems remarkable for an age in which Europeans routinely believed that they were superior to Native Americans and wanted to impose their culture on the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.
Over time, the collected wisdom that spread in travel narratives became incorporated into Europeans’ understanding of the wider world. Cosmographers, notably
Andre Thevet, were at times among the travelers, and their works routinely (if belatedly) took note of information generated abroad. Many narratives reflected the religious inclinations of the traveler. But here, too, some writers, such as the brilliant Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (whose “Discourse of the Kingdom of China” was first published in Rome in the 1610s and eventually appeared in an English translation when Samuel Purchas printed it in 1625), offered penetrating observations of distant lands without the overt condemnation. Such travelers did not abandon their bias when they left home, but among the thousands who sailed outward and the scores who wrote about their experiences there were some who were able to rise above their prejudices to offer what has become some of the most important testimony about the early modern world. Some, but not all: Travelers’ tales also included fantastic and impossible details when observers gave in to their prejudices or altered what they saw because they hoped to attract a larger audience.
It is impossible to dismiss the significance of these narratives. Some, like Harriot’s and Guaman Poma’s, provide details about populations that either no longer exist (like the Carolina Algonquians whom Harriot met at Roanoke) or who continued to suffer from the European conquest (as in the case in Peru, where Guaman Poma witnessed firsthand the long legacy of Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Atahualpa and the Inca empire). Others provide considerable insight into the ways that observers thought. Typically, a traveler described something in comparison to an object or place that he or she knew previously—such as Spanish conquiSTADoRes comparing buildings in Mexico and Peru with structures in Spain. This writing through analogy tells much about frames of reference and about how it was possible to incorporate news about novel situations into one’s mental universe. These reports also have been a boon to modern scholars, who recognize that travel accounts gave rise to the idea of ethnography (and eventually anthropology) and provide often extraordinary details about past worlds.
Further reading: Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrah-manyam, Indio-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964); Peter C. Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understanding: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other
Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
World History
