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Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies

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Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies 5 Augustus Earle’s pedestrian tour in New Zealand: or, get off the beach Ingrid Horrocks Dubbed the ‘wandering artist’, Augustus Earle briefly studied at the Royal Academy in London before, in the words of the Quarterly Review of 1832, he perambulated America, North and South, from Canada to Paraguay: he has passed the Alleghanies and the Andes, and made sketches of numberless cities and harbours, which subsequently, being transferred to the panorama-limners, have enlightened most of us either in Leicester Fields or the Strand. He has wandered all over India in like fashion, and brought home the materials for panoramas of Madras, Bombay, and we know not how many more places in our Eastern empire.1 During this life of global mobility, Earle also lived in New South Wales, Australia, and, most pertinently for this chapter, in Aotearoa New Zealand, writing the travel book A Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand, in 1827 (1832).2 Although Earle’s works were originally produced primarily for a metropolitan audience in London, they have since made him one of the most important European visual artists of Aotearoa New Zealand working immediately prior to formal colonisation, as well as a key figure in early colonial Australian art. Earle’s many sketches, watercolours, oil paint- ings, and hand-coloured lithographs of New Zealand scenes and of Maˉ ori people have become instantly recognisable to those with even a casual inter- est in the history of New Zealand, even if they could not attribute them to Earle. His prose narrative, too, was republished in the 1960s as an early contribution to New Zealand literary culture in English. In this chapter, I want to suggest ways by which we might go about re-reading the various ‘worldings’ that emerge from imperial-era travel books such as Earle’s by applying greater scrutiny to how movement is fig- ured within them. This mobilities studies approach calls for a range of scales to be treated alongside one another, from the global movements of transoce- anic travel such as that evoked above, to mundane ‘embedded material prac- tices’ such as a day’s walk in the bush in company.3 Here I heed recent calls made in fields as diverse as mobilities studies and postcolonial ecocriticism Ingrid Horrocks - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 05:48:11PM via free access Augustus Earle’s pedestrian tour in New Zealand 121 to pay attention to competing epistemologies of nature and place, and of different possible relations not only between peoples, but between peoples moving in place.4 My contention is that the methods of postcolonial ecocrit- ical literary humanities can be enriched by being brought into closer relation with work on mobilities that treats the minute alongside the global. I am particularly interested in what happens when we read mobilities within prose travel texts alongside – and to an extent against – the perhaps more dominant worldings evoked by the visual art of precolonial and early colonial periods.5 What I hope to do in this chapter, more specifically, is to outline a model for approaching European-authored travel texts of the nineteenth century (and potentially travel writing more generally) that helps to move beyond an approach to their aesthetics shaped by moments of arrival and meeting, and prospect views. A scholarly focus on arrival and prospects in relation to European-authored travel writing about the southern hemisphere, and in particular about the Pacific, still leans towards producing readings that highlight explicit moments of cultural encounter. This in turn lends itself to a focus on the development in these texts of what Mary Louise Pratt and others term the ‘imperial eye’6 – that is, a European eye and accompanying discourse that works to organise and process information for ‘a society intent on both territorial and epistemological mastery of new lands’.7 Using the example of Earle, I am interested in what happens when we approach texts such as these, instead, by pushing beyond moments of explicit encoun- ter to pay attention to more mundane, local, and embodied movements within them – movements of both the European traveller(s) in the text and of Indigenous peoples, in this case Maˉori. Writing on the middle ground Earle’s work is especially relevant to those concerned with the ‘contact zone’ as evoked in travel writing because it was composed when the geo-political balance of power had not yet shifted in New Zealand, and organised Euro- pean colonisation was not a certain outcome. I approach this work as a Paˉkehaˉ New Zealander of British descent, a position of culpability that makes the continued consideration of this moment especially important. In the 1820s, New Zealand was among the places in the Pacific still least known to Europeans.8 Even the first Anglican mission was not established until 1814, and the ship on which Earle arrived in 1827 was bringing to Aotearoa New Zealand one of the first groups of Wesleyan missionaries and their wives. There were small communities of Europeans living in the north of New Zealand by this stage, such that Earle’s account of the early days of his visit reads like so many house calls. At one point, he is pleased to come Ingrid Horrocks - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 05:48:11PM via free access 122 World/Globe across a ‘snug little colony of our own country’.9 However, Europeans had no jurisdictional authority in New Zealand in 1827 and were exponentially outnumbered. The estimated population of 100,000–160,000 Maˉori when James Cook’s Endeavour first made landfall in 1769 had dropped to 70,000–90,000 by 1814, mostly due to the new diseases Europeans brought with them. Even by the later date, however, the resident European popula- tion in Aotearoa New Zealand, consisting of sealers, shore whalers, traders, escaped convicts, and missionaries, is estimated to have been only in the vicinity of 1,200.10 It cannot be understated, then, ‘the degree to which this world peculiarly, and predominantly, belonged to and was controlled by Tangata Whenua [people of the land]’.11 In part as a result of such demographics, Earle’s text is not saturated by the sense of an ‘Old New Zealand’ (read: Maˉori culture) strategically evoked as already being lost that tends to mark even very early colonial-period texts of subsequent decades. Large-scale land seizures leading to Maˉori disposses- sion were still to come, while the rapid and violent transformation of New Zealand’s nonhuman environments by the ‘ecological imperialism’ of for- estry and pastoral agriculture was only just beginning.12 Written in the late 1820s, Earle’s Narrative of a Residence in New Zealand can be seen as inhabiting what has been called in other contexts ‘the middle ground’, a phrase drawing on the model of American historian Richard White. This model has been applied to a very specific phase in the contact and encounter (and invasion) process, which historian Vincent O’Malley argues in New Zealand ran from around 1814 to 1840 and, at its best, was characterised by efforts towards mutual accommodation and understanding.13 It is a space that ideally allowed for the creation of diverse, hybrid, and mobile practices and understandings. Given this context, it is unsurprising that leisure travellers to New Zealand such as Earle were a new and still rare, although not unknown, phenomenon in the 1820s. In not having an explicit aim for his visit, Earle as author is distinct from the majority of his predecessors and near contemporaries. Unlike James Cook, for example, he had no letter from the Admiralty instructing him to assess possible new territory for the Empire, nor was he an official voyage artist like William Hodges. He was not an evangelical mis- sionary like William Yate and William Wade, who wrote books based on their experiences in New Zealand in the 1830s. Nor was he travelling for clear financial reasons like Richard Cruise, who wrote a book about his ten months in New Zealand in 1820 in charge of the military detachment on a convict ship from Australia commissioned to replace its human freight with a cargo of spars for the return journey to England.14 Nor was Earle a natu- ralist like his friend Charles Darwin, who visited in 1835, or Joseph Banks or the Forsters before Darwin, in New Zealand to collect botanical specimens. Ingrid Horrocks - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 05:48:11PM via free access Augustus Earle’s pedestrian tour in New Zealand 123 The original introduction to Earle’s work presents him, instead, as some- one driven by ‘“a love of roving and adventure”’.15 He stayed for such a length of time in New Zealand, for the most part living with local Maˉori, because he was effectively stranded when his ship was commissioned for other work. His New Zealand narrative was published alongside his shorter work of travel about his time shipwrecked on Tristan da Cunha. This fram- ing of Earle as adventurer, artist, and travel writer, combined with the par- ticular historical moment in which he visited, by no means removes his narrative from the discourses of imperialism or mercantile capitalism. In fact, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey reminds us, the accidental arrival is a ‘power- ful and repeated trope of empire building and British literature’ in this moment, so should be treated with scepticism.16 It does, nonetheless, when combined with the historical moment of his visit, subtly shift the emphasis of Earle’s narrative nonfiction text and thereby the kinds of ‘apprehensions’, to use Rob Nixon’s term, that prove possible within his narrative.17 Arrival and first encounter Although I will ultimately argue that we need to move beyond it, the arrival scene in such texts remains the obvious place to start, both because it is such a marked feature of travel texts of this sort, and because it has underpinned so much conceptual thinking about the history of encounter and colonial history.
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