Daniell's and Ayton's 1813 Coastal Voyage from Land's End To
“Two Navigators…Sailing on Horseback”: Daniell’s and Ayton’s 1813 Coastal Voyage from Land’s End to Holyhead By Patrick D. Rasico Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in History May, 2015 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: James Epstein, Ph.D. Samira Sheikh, Ph.D. Peter Lake, Ph. D. Catherine Molineux, Ph.D. Humberto Garcia, Ph.D. 1 The othering of Welsh persons would remain a feature of English “home tour” travelogues throughout the nineteenth century. But in the English popular imaginary of the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Welsh landscape had begun to take on new meanings as a locus of picturesque topographical beauty. This was particularly true among visual artists. As early as 1770, the famed painter and aquatinter, Paul Sandby, made several tours through the Welsh countryside and produced multiple aquatint landscapes depicting the region.1 Sandby’s works opened the floodgate of tourists over the next decades. As Joseph Cradock avowed in 1777, “as everyone who has either traversed a steep mountain, or crossed a small channel, must write his Tour, it would be almost unpardonable in Me to be totally silent, who have visited the most uninhabited regions of North Wales.”2 The Wye Valley in Wales became the epicenter of British home tourism following the 1782 publication of William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye,3 one of the first English travel guides detailing the home tour.4 This treatise provided the initial conceptual framework of the picturesque topographical aesthetic.
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