Natural History As Compilation. Travel Accounts in the Epistemic Process of an Empirical Discipline

NATURAL HISTORY AS COMPILATION.
TRAVEL ACCOUNTS IN THE EPISTEMIC PROCESS
OF AN EMPIRICAL DISCIPLINE

Bettina Dietz

Never have so many travel reports appeared, and never has interest in them been greater.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀin addition, they represent an inexhaustible source of treasure upon which naturalists, geographers, artists and classicists draw; also political writers, economists, and even moralists.1

Travel reports were a central medium of information until well into the nineteenth century. Various fields of eighteenth-century knowledge—in particular, geography, natural history, the history of mankind, statistics, and anthropology—drew their data from the corpus of travel writing that expanded enormously during the second half of the eighteenth century. The project of a history of mankind,2 which aimed to define the level of civilization of all the peoples in the world and locate them within a framework of cultural development, drew its information specific to each country almost exclusively from this source. Practically all the available itineraria (contemporary travel and guide books) went into the making

of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte

der Menschheit, where whole passages are quoted almost without modification.3 Natural history, however, which aimed to achieve worldwide

1ꢁGilles Boucher de La Richarderie, Bibliothèque universelle des voyages, ou notice com- plète et raisonnée de tous les voyages anciens et modernes dans les dif f érentes parties du monde, publiés tant en langue f rançaise qu’en langues étrangèresꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(reprint of Paris 1808

edition, Genève 1970), 6 vols., I: V.
2ꢁOn the history of mankind see Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle

des Lumières (Paris 1971); Helmut Zedelmaier, Der An f ang der Geschichte. Studien zur Ursprungsdebatte im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg 2003); Thomas Nutz, “Varietäten des Men- schengeschlechts”. Die Wissenscha f ten vom Menschen in der Zeit der Au f klärung (Köln et al.

2009).
3ꢁSee references to the relevant travel authors in the commentary on Johann Gottfried

Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [orig. 1784–1791], ed. by Wolf-

gang Proß, vol. III/2: Kommentar (München and Wien 2002), 911–972; as well as Hans-Wolf Jäger, ‘Herder als Leser von Reiseliteratur; Appendix: Von Herder in den “Ideen” erwähnte Itinerare und historisch-geographische Schriften’, in Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger (eds.), Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg 1986), 181–189. On how French historians of mankind worked with travel literature, see Duchet 1971 (note 2), 65–136.

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registration, description and classification of flora, fauna and minerals, developed probably the greatest need for global information. The gap between the empirical claims of natural history to operate on the basis of eyewitness accounts and the difficulty of delivering on this could often be bridged only by consulting travel reports. Complementing the archives of objects assembled in the cabinets of natural history collections, they served as stores of essential information, on which natural history had to rely.
The following analysis of how natural historians worked with itineraria and topographies will concentrate on the process of procuring and processing information. The first section will introduce the navigation aids that allowed eighteenth-century natural historians to orient themselves and find information in the expanding contemporary book market and, in particular, gain access to the corpus of travel literature: first, specialist bibliographies covering either the whole spectrum of natural history themes or individual specific branches; secondly, catalogues of private libraries; and thirdly, bibliographies and compilations of travel reports on various regions and thematic areas. The second section will discuss the problem, relevant to both writers and readers of natural history, of establishing the authenticity of the information collected in this way. The final section will trace the reading of itineraria and topographies, the creation of excerpts, and the compilation of an information base that legitimated an author’s own arguments into the working processes of individual natural historians.

Travel Reports and the Library of Natural History

The aim of the Bibliothèque universelle des voyages quoted above, accord-

ing to the editor, was provisionally to mark the end of the exponential growth in the number of travel reports being produced. It presented itself as a compendium of all the travel literature that had so far been published, and thus as the ultimate source of information on all questions raised by a desire to know about countries and peoples. Given the huge number of travel reports already available and the new ones constantly being published, the introduction explains that this collection includes only accounts that provide information on the climate, flora, fauna, population, topography, ways of life, trade and military affairs of the countries travelled to, without restricting themselves to just one of these aspects. Explicitly excluded are the many travel accounts that concentrated on

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natural history as compilation

705 only one area of knowledge, especially geography, individual branches of natural history, or classical studies.4
The genealogy of earlier projects which Boucher de La Richarderie presents in his introduction and which he sees his compilation as completing discusses the many previous attempts to organize travel literature and thus make it available for systematic use. Against the background of a long list of work which he assesses as being more or less full of gaps, only a few titles stand out that the author deems worthy of praise as being generally useful. Completeness appears to be an impossibility.5 He lists the whole spectrum of compilations published in French, English, Dutch, Spanish and German, organized by language and with comments on the selection of texts, quality of illustrations and price. These compilations, as the wealth of references to them in the footnotes of natural history works reveal, served practitioners of natural history as an obligatory source of information, and will be discussed in what follows, taking the Histoire générale des voyages, edited by Prévost, as an example.
English collections of travel writing dating from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by Richard Hackluyt,6 Samuel Purchas,7 John Churchill,8 and John Harris,9 provided the foundation for Thomas Astley’s

New General Collection o f Voyages and Travels,10 published between 1745

and 1747. This was one of the first comprehensive compilations with a critical commentary, and provided a model for the monumental undertaking by the Abbé Prévost, which was intended as its French counterpart. The Histoire générale des voyages began as a translation of the English model. What emerged was a compilation, consisting of original passages grouped thematically, “which presents both a system of modern geography

ꢀ4ꢁIbid., XVI. ꢀ5ꢁCf. Boucher de La Richarderie 1970 (note 1), VII.

ꢀ6ꢁRichard Hackluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traf f i ques and Discoveries o f the

English Nation (London 1598–1600), 3 vols.; see also G.R. Crone and R.A. Skelton, ‘English Collections of Voyages and Travels, 1625–1846’, in Edward Lynam (ed.), Richard Hackluyt

and His Successors (London 1946), 63–140.

ꢀ7ꢁSamuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes (London 1625), 5 vols.

ꢀ8ꢁJohn Churchill, A Collection o f Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed f rom Origi- nal Manuscripts, Others Now First Published in Englishꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(London 1732), 8 vols.
ꢀ9ꢁJohn Harris, Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, or a Compleat Collection o f Voyages and Travels (London 1705), 2 vols.
10ꢁThomas Astley, A New General Collection o f Voyages and Travels: Consisting o f the Most Esteemed Relations which Have Been Hitherto Published in Any Language (London

1745–1747), 4 vols.

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and history, and a corpus of travel descriptions, andꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀdepicts the present condition of all nations.”11
When Astley’s New General Collection ceased publication after the seventh volume, Prévost continued his undertaking without a model. Volumes eight to eleven were largely based on the original method, but thereafter he followed his own ideas, which he explained in the foreword to the twelfth volume. The source criticism called for there was provided by the juxtaposition of observations of the same object by various travellers, whose convergence or divergence made it possible to rank the quoted authors in a hierarchy of reliability. Amédée Frézier’s report of his journey to Chile and Peru published in 1716, for example, leads the rankings of writers on Central and South America created in this way.12 Prévost preferred Frézier’s description of Peru to the better-known one by Garcilaso de La Vega,13 followed by Charles Marie de La Condamine,14 and Antonio de Ulloa.15
Prévost had explicitly explained that in many cases he did not reproduce travel reports in the original, but in a version which he had stylistically purified; his compilation was criticized from various sides,16 and the publication of newer travel reports increasingly compromised its topicality.

11ꢁAntoine-François Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, ou nouvelle collection de

toutes les relations de voyagesꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(Paris 1746–1789), 20 vols., I: V. The English and the French versions were quickly translated into German by Johann Joachim Schwabe, Allgemeine

Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande; oder Sammlung aller Reisebeschreibungen, welche bis itzo in verschiedenen Sprachen von allen Völkern herausgegeben worden,ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.; durch eine Gesellscha f t gelehrter Männer im Englischen zusammengetragen, und aus dem- selben [und dem Französischen] ins Deutsche übersetzt (Leipzig 1747–1774), 21 vols. See

Peter Boerner, ‘Die großen Reisesammlungen des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Antoni Maczak

and Hans Jürgen Teuteberg (eds.), Reiseberichte als Quellen europäischer Kulturgeschichte. Au f gaben und Möglichkeiten der historischen Reise f orschung (Wolffenbüttel 1982), 65–72;

Horst Walter Blanke, ‘Wissen—Wissenserwerb—Wissensakkumulation—Wissenstransfer in der Aufklärung. Das Beispiel der “Allgemeinen Historie der Reisen” und ihrer Vorläufer’,

in Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (ed.), Das Europa der Au f klärung und die außereuropäische kolo-

niale Welt (Göttingen 2006), 138–156.

12ꢁAmédée Frézier, Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chily et du Pérou

(Paris 1716).
13ꢁA French translation of the Spanish version was published as: Le commentaire royal,

ou l’histoire des Incas roys du Peru, escritte en langue peruvienneꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀtraduitte sur la version espagnolleꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(Paris 1633).
14ꢁCharles Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage f ait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale, depuis la côte de la mer du sud jusqu’aux côtes du Brésil et de la Guiane, en descendant la rivière des Amazones (Paris 1745).
15ꢁAntonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América meridional (Madrid 1748),

5 vols.
16ꢁSee Duchet 1971 (note 2), 85 and 107.

707
Nevertheless, even in the late eighteenth century, his Histoire générale des voyages was still a much used and indispensable source of information for natural history. The fact that the title crops up in the correspondence of mainly French natural historians and in the footnotes of their publications17 shows how closely they worked with it. Nor did the publication of an abridged version18 squeeze the original Histoire générale des voyages in twenty quarto volumes off the market. Carefully produced visual material, maps and plans gave it the status of an illustrated encyclopedia and ensured that demand for it continued.
The explosive growth in both general travel accounts and travel literature that specialized in natural history topics not only drove up the number of compilations but also increased demands on the data-processing capacity of those compiling subject bibliographies. In 1716 Johann

Jakob Scheuchzer’s Bibliotheca scriptorum historiae naturalis, a bibliog-

raphy encompassing all subfields of natural history, could still claim to list titles on all three natural kingdoms (plants, animals and minerals) and all regions.19 Writers of travel accounts and descriptions of countries account for about one third of the authors listed according to continents. Later bibliographies of natural history reduced their scope to particular branches of the subject. The year 1736 saw the publication of Linnaeus’s Bibliotheca botanica in one volume;20 in 1771 the Swiss botanist Albrecht von Haller published a project of the same name in two volumes.21
At a time when scientific books from abroad could be obtained only through an individual’s personal network of contacts or not at all,22 printed catalogues of big private libraries of natural history were not only status symbols or a medium for announcing forthcoming auctions, but also served as international bibliographies on specialist subjects. In 1798 the catalogue of one of the greatest private collections of books on natural history in the eighteenth century was published, still in the lifetime of its

17ꢁSee below.

18ꢁJean-François de La Harpe, Abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages, contenant ce qu’il y a de plus remarquable, de plus utile et de mieux avéré dans les pays où les voyageurs ont

pénétréꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(Paris 1780–1801), 32 vols.

19ꢁCf. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Historiae Naturali omnium Ter- rae Regionum inservientium (Zürich 1716).
20ꢁCarl von Linné, Bibliotheca botanica recensens libros plus mille de plantis huc usque editos (Amsterdam 1736).
21ꢁꢀAlbrecht von Haller, Bibliotheca botanica, qua scripta ad rem herbariam f acientia a rerum initiis recensentur (Zürich 1771–1772), 2 vols.

22ꢁOn this point, see Bettina Dietz, ‘Making natural history: Doing the Enlightenment’,

Central European History 43 (2010), 25–46.

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owner: the Catalogus Bibliothecae Historico-Naturalis Josephi Banks. Of its

five volumes, the first is dedicated to general writing on natural history.23 The publication series of the academies and learned societies of the whole of Europe are followed here by eighty-two densely printed pages under the heading “Itineraria et Topographiae”. The obligatory travel collections and circumnavigations of the world are listed, as well as travel reports dating from about the last two hundred years, sorted by continent and destination, and complete listings are provided for a number of regions. The eight titles in the section headed “Itineraria et Topographiae Africae Australis”, for example, include a number of lesser-known writings as well as the indispensable reference works on South Africa: Peter Kolb’s description of the Cape of Good Hope,24 in a Dutch version; Nicolas de la Caille’s Journal

historique d’un voyage f ait au Cap de Bonne-Espérance;25 descriptions of

the Cape and surrounding regions by Anders Sparrman,26 a pupil of Lin-

naeus; and François Levaillant’s Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’A f rique, par le

Cap de Bonne Esperance.27 Similarly complete is the considerably longer section entitled “Itineraria et Topographiae Imperii Russici”.28
The catalogue by the Berlin natural historian Friedrich Heinrich
Wilhelm Martini,29 published in 1779, provided a model in German-

23ꢁJonas Dryander, Catalogus Bibliothecae Historico-Naturalis Josephi Banks (reprint of

London 1798 edn., Amsterdam 1966), 5 vols.

24ꢁPeter Kolb, Caput Bonae Spei hodiernum, das ist, Vollständige Beschreibung des A f rica- nischen Vorgebürges der Guten Hof f nung: worinnen in dreyen Theilen abgehandelt wird, wie es heut zu Tage nach seiner Situation und Eigenschaf f t aussiehet; ingleichen was ein Natur- Forscher in den dreyen Reichen der Natur daselbst f i ndetꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(Nürnberg 1719).

25ꢁParis 1763. 26ꢁThe following are specified: “Andreas Sparrmann, An account of a journey into Africa from the Cape of Good-Hope. Philosoph. Transact. Vol. 67. pp. 38–42; id., Resa tilll Goda Hopps udden, södra pol kretsen och omkring jordklotet, samt till Hottentot-och Cafferlanden, åren 1772–1776. Stockholm, 1783; id., Reise nach dem Vorgebirge der Guten Hoffnung, den südlichen Polarländern und um die Welt, hauptsächlich aber in den Ländern der Hottentotten und Kaffern, frey übersetzt von Chr. Heinr. Groskurd, mit einer Vorrede von Ge. Forster, Berlin, 1784; id., A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the antarctic polar circle, and round the world, but chiefly into the country of the Hottentots and Caffres, London 1785.” Dryander 1966 (note 23), I: 131.
27ꢁParis 1790. 28ꢁSee Dryander 1966 (note 23), I: 118–121. See also the following catalogues of private

libraries specializing in natural history: Verzeichniß des Vorraths von Büchern, physika- lischen und mathematischen Instrumenten auch Naturalienꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀJ.Ch.P. Erxleben (Göttingen 1777); Catalogus bibliothecae Bornianae publica auctione vendetur (Wien 1791); Verzeichniß der hinterlassenen Bücher von Georg Forster (Mainz 1797); Verzeichniß der vomꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀBlumen- bach nachgelassenen Bücher (Göttingen 1840).
29ꢁBibliotheca Martiniana sive catalogus librorum varii argumenti, praecipue tamen ad historiam naturalem spectantium (Berlin 1779).

709 speaking Europe, and a number of follow-on projects referred to it. In 1782, for example, Joseph Paul von Cobres from Augsburg, a collector of natural objects, published a systematic catalogue of his library in two thick octavo volumes.30 Most of the titles listed in the section Books and Writings Ancillary to Natural History [Zur Naturgeschichte gehörige Hilfsbücher und Schriften] come under the headings “travel reports” and “musea” (i.e. inventories of collections). Cobres’ holdings of itineraria comprise the canon of international travel literature which, organized according to the format of the books, fills twenty pages.31 Among those in quarto format we find a selection of the older and more recent titles which formed the core holdings of any library of natural history: Seventeenth-century Oriental journeys by Jean Baptiste Tavernier32 and Adam Olearius,33 Hans Sloane’s Caribbean voyage,34 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s Relation d’un voyage du Levant, held up by contemporaries as a model botanical journey,35 Albrecht von

Haller’s Iter Helveticum,36 Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin’s Reise durch Rußland,37

and various writings by Peter Forsskål, a pupil of Linnaeus who travelled in Arabia. Among the books in octavo format we find La Condamine’s

canonical Relation abrégée d’un voyage f ait dans l’Intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale,38 Reise nach Palästina by Fredrik Hasselquist, another pupil of Linnaeus,39 Linneaus’s Reisen durch Oland und Gothland (first published

30ꢁJ.P. Cobres, Deliciae Cobresianae. Büchersammlung zur Naturgeschichte (Augsburg
1782), 2 vols. The Natur f orschende Gesellscha f t in Halle bought Cobres’ catalogue for its library. See Abhandlungen der Hallischen Natur f orschenden Gesellscha f t 1 (1783), XVII.

31ꢁꢀCobres 1782 (note 30), I: 78–97.

32ꢁLes six voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernierꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀen Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indesꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(Paris

1678), 2 vols.

33ꢁAdam Olearius, Of f t begehrte Beschreibung der Newen orientalischen Reise (Schleswig

1646).

34ꢁHans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christopher and

Jamaica (London 1707–1725), 2 vols.

35ꢁJoseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un voyage du Levant f ait par ordre du Roy, contenant l’histoire ancienne et moderne de plusieurs isles de l’Archipel, de Constantinople, des côtes de la Mer noire, de l’Arménie, de la Géorgieꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ.ꢀ(Paris 1717), 2 vols.

36ꢁGöttingen 1740.

37ꢁSamuel Gottlieb Gmelin, Reise durch Rußland zur Untersuchung der drey Natur-

Reiche (St. Petersburg 1770–1784), 4 vols.
38ꢁParis 1745. 39ꢁHasselquist travelled to Egypt and Palestine in 1749, searching for biblical plants and animals. He died on the expedition. His notes, which were sent back to Sweden, were edited by Linnaeus and published in 1757. Fredrik Hasselquist, Iter Palaestinum eller resa