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

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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 trea- sure 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 modi- fication.3 Natural history, however, which aimed to achieve worldwide 1 Gilles Boucher de La Richarderie, Bibliothèque universelle des voyages, ou notice com- plète et raisonnée de tous les voyages anciens et modernes dans les différentes parties du monde, publiés tant en langue française qu’en langues étrangères . (reprint of Paris 1808 edition, Genève 1970), 6 vols., I: V. 2 On the history of mankind see Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris 1971); Helmut Zedelmaier, Der Anfang der Geschichte. Studien zur Ursprungsdebatte im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg 2003); Thomas Nutz, “Varietäten des Men- schengeschlechts”. Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in der Zeit der Aufklärung (Köln et al. 2009). 3 See 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. © Bettina Dietz, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004243910_031 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Bettina Dietz - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:22:29AM via free access 704 bettina dietz 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 pro- cessing 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, special- ist 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 estab- lishing 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 pub- lished, 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, popu- lation, 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 Bettina Dietz - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:22:29AM via free access 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 com- pleting 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 of 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 under- taking 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 4 Ibid., XVI. 5 Cf. Boucher de La Richarderie 1970 (note 1), VII. 6 Richard Hackluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of 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. 7 Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes (London 1625), 5 vols. 8 John Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Origi- nal Manuscripts, Others Now First Published in English . (London 1732), 8 vols. 9 John Harris, Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, or a Compleat Collection of Voyages and Travels (London 1705), 2 vols. 10 Thomas Astley, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels: Consisting of the Most Esteemed Relations which Have Been Hitherto Published in Any Language (London 1745–1747), 4 vols. Bettina Dietz - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:22:29AM via free access 706 bettina dietz and history, and a corpus of travel descriptions, and . 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 trav- ellers, 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
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