Tramps and Their Excuses a Study of the Writing of Travellers in Borneo in the 19Th and 20Th Centuries
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Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Tramps and their Excuses: A Study of the Writing of Travellers in Borneo in the 19th and 20th Centuries Thesis How to cite: Millum, Trevor (1993). Tramps and their Excuses: A Study of the Writing of Travellers in Borneo in the 19th and 20th Centuries. MPhil thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 1993 Trevor Millum https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000ff03 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Tramps and their Excuses A Study of the Writing of Travellers in Borneo in the 19th and 20th Centuries. M.Phil Thesis discipline: Literature r ' h ^ L.P/1 Trevor Milium, B.A. (Hons), Ph.D. submitted: February 1993 «y. IS TatE23.5.93 ProQuest Number: 27701235 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 27701235 Published by ProQuest LLO (2019). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Tramps and their Excuses A Study of the Writing of Travellers in Borneo in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Synopsis The aim of the study was to examine travel writing over a significant period of time in order to understand more about the nature of travel writing in itself and to determine what changes may have taken place within the genre over time. A secondary aim was to carry out an exploration of the S E Asia Collection in the Library of the University of Hull. In order to focus the study on a manageable body of work, the geographical ^ea was narrowed to that of the island of Borneo àhî the texts to those of book-length. The study began with a reading of a wide range of material which related to the subject of the thesis. From this essentially exploratory bibliographical research arose three things. Firstly, a body of material which could be reasonably defined as travel writing about Borneo was identified. Secondly, a broad categorization of sub-groups within that body of material began to emerge. Coincidentally, further ideas about the nature of travel writing, particularly in the context of the exploitation of East by the West, developed. There followed a detailed and careful review of the texts which served to refine the characteristics of the sub-groups and show the ways in which changes in the genre had taken place over time. The thesis concludes that while there have been significant changes in the nature of travel writing, there is an interesting de^ee of continuity, for example, curiosity as a motivating force and confidence as a characteristic., And where a writer writes from within the role of explorer, there is a remarkable number of characteristics which remain constant over time. Throughout the period under study, different kinds of writer have become travellers, with varying motives, producing new kinds of travel writing: as the world has become smaller, the focus of the travel writer has beconie narrower and the ethos more personal. * C ontents Chapter One Introduction ' page 3 Chapter Two Tramps with an Excuse page 15 Chapter Three Tramps with Different Excuses page 59 Chapter Four Tramps without an Excuse? page 84 Chapter 5 The Last Tramps? page 119 Bibliography pa gel 36 TatE23.5.93 Chapter One - Introduction The survey which follows deals with writings of travellers in Borneo in the 19th and 20th centuries. Within those boundaries, chosen for reasons of personal interest and experience, I have selected for detailed study a wide variety of books which reflect the range of travel writing available. In the process of the survey I hope to reflect on the nature of travel writing and to draw some conclusions applicable beyond its immediate geographical framework. The nature of the material I have been fortunate in having one of the best collections of literature from and about South East Asia available to me at Hull University Library. The University’s has a distinguished Centre for S E Asian Studies whose Professor V T King has provided invaluable assistance. Sifting through the S E Asia Collection enabled me to determine the body of texts which constitutes the material for the following study. The list of that body of texts provided in the Bibliography constitutes the Collection’s book-length works of travel writing about Borneo and, therefore, most of the major works in English together with a number in translation and two in French. To my knowledge, no survey of this material has been carried out apart from Professor King’s The Best of Borneo Travel which was published just as this thesis was being completed. The two works differ, however, in that the former is an anthology of Borneo travel writing while the latter presents an analysis of and commentary on the texts. The significant omissions from this survey of Borneo travel writing are likely to be untranslated Dutch texts, of which, of course, there are a number, given the Dutch colonial interest in the island. I have restricted the study to book-length texts about travelling in Borneo, excluding articles from newspapers or periodicals, though these would make an interesting additional study. Some books about the region I have excluded because they are essentially works of geography, botany, anthropology and so on rather than descriptions of travel. For example, I have not included Hugh Low’s ’’Sarawak - notes during a residence in that country with H H the Rajah Brooke”. From his TatE23.5.93 exploits in climbing Kinabalu and the history of his time in Sarawak and Labuan we know Low was an intrepid explorer and a great traveller on behalf of both Brooke and the British Government but - apart from three short chapters at the end - his book is not travel writing. I have included writers such as St John and Hose, who though resident (i.e. stationary) in the area for some time, wrote accounts of journeys made from their familiar localities to unfamiliar localities. It is, after all, the account of a journey, of movement, rather than of a stay which is the stuff of travel writing. A first reading of the material suggests that there is a continuum from the notes of the learned explorer on the one hand to the anecdotes of the largely ignorant tourist on the other. The explorer goes where others of his race or culture or nation have not been before, the tourist goes where others have cleared the way and in between there are various travellers who may do either. All can produce travel writing, though at one extreme the explorer’s account becomes purely academic and, at the other, the tourist’s becomes almost commercial: hints, tips and best buys for all. There are no agreed definitions of what constitutes travel writing, but ’’writing about travel” seems a good starting point. This, though, could include a bus timetable, a Thomson Holiday brochure, a poem about the London to Brighton rally as well as an account of the Oxford University Expedition to examine the flora and fauna of Guinea... Let us examine these examples more closely. A timetable is writing which concerns travel. What is it that makes us feel that it isn’t, however, ’’Travel Writing”? Above all, it isn’t personal - it is the most neutral form of writing, offering no opinions and telling no Story. A holiday brochure, on the other hand, certainly offers opinions - sun drenched beaches, crystal clear blue sea and romantic night life - but the opinions are merely commercial creations and still have no sense of personal experience. If Mr Thomson were to write a paragraph about his trip to Tunisia, that would be different... A poem about a trip from London to Brighton is another matter. I would be inclined to include it within the aegis of travel writing so long as it was based on a real and specific journey. Its form, though unusual for travel writing, need not debar it. Its subject, though familiar, is no reason to disallow it either. There is a feeling that Travel Writing should be about TatE23.5.93 the exotic, but Theroux's Kingdom By the Sea is as much a part of Travel Writing as Two Years In Tibet, perhaps more so. To return to the examples suggested above. The university's expedition may be written up in a variety of ways. If it is written in an academic register which excludes the personal from the description of what it was like to make the journey, which is central to Travel Writing, I would exclude it from consideration. However, there are very few expeditionary documents which take so impersonal a form. What then can we suggest as working criteria for travel w riting? • It is personal.