UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE A Quest for Insularity: Thomas Forrest’s Voyage to New Guinea, and the Moluccas A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Panida Lorlertratna June 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Hendrik M. J. Maier, Chairperson Dr. John N. Kim Dr. Mariam B. Lam Copyright by Panida Lorlertratna 2012 The Dissertation of Panida Lorlertratna is approved: ________________________________________ ________________________________________ ________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude towards Professor Hendrik M. J. Maier for his incessantly rigorous mentoring that was instrumental in shaping the outcome of this research. My thanks go to Professor Mariam B. Lam for her thoughtful suggestions and to Professor John N. Kim for his remarkable theoretical insights. My appreciation is also extended to Professor Benjamin King for his help with the translation of Latin proverbs. I feel grateful for the Dissertation Year Program Fellowship in Winter 2011 from the Graduate Division of University of California, Riverside, which was crucial for the timely completion of the dissertation. My sincere thanks are offered to the colleagues and faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature and in the Southeast Asian Studies Program (SEATRiP) at UCR, who constituted a thriving academic environment in which I conducted my research. Finally, I feel greatly indebted to my family members, both human and canine, for allowing me the freedom to pursue my scholarly interests. ! iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A Quest for Insularity: Thomas Forrest’s Voyage to New Guinea, and the Moluccas by Panida Lorlertratna Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, June 2012 Dr. Hendrik M. J. Maier, Chairperson The research regards A Voyage to New Guinea, and the Moluccas, written by Thomas Forrest (c.1729-c.1802), as a piece of eighteenth-century English travel writing on Southeast Asia. It proposes three reading directionalities for the travelogue, namely, horizontal, vertical and spherical readings, in order to underscore the flexibility of textual interpretation. Horizontal reading entails a concatenation of events that turns the narrative text into chronologically sequenced segments without attempting to establish a relationship between the linguistic signs and their inherent meanings. Vertical reading configures the text in multiple layers of meanings as well as cultural and historical inferences, which interact with one another and require in-depth textual analysis. The reading approach does not look for hidden meanings; instead, it aims to base the generated meanings on the reader’s background knowledge. Spherical reading conceptualizes the narrative text in a ! v spherical shape, regarding Forrest’s voyage account as a story line that travels in the form of a circle, and as a cultural production anchored in the realm of eighteenth-century English travel writing, with its distinctive literary conventions. Additionally, the research considers Forrest’s travel account as island writing by pointing out the parallel between the instability of meaning in a text such as A Voyage to New Guinea, and the Moluccas and the definitional precariousness of “island” that historically defies monolithic interpretation of scholars in cartography, geography and literary studies. By drawing the connection between three reading directionalities, travel writing and island writing, the research wishes to establish itself as an intersection of three academic branches, i.e., Comparative Literature, British Literature and Southeast Asian Studies. ! vi Table of Contents Introduction.............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 Horizontal Reading 1.1 Social calls .............................................................................................. 13 1.2 Attempted dodgings: the Dutch and the Sooloos .................................... 24 1.3 Spicy searches: cloves and nutmegs ....................................................... 30 1.4 Negotiating the sea and the winds .......................................................... 33 1.5 The Tartar on the oceanic steppes ........................................................... 38 1.6 Navigating the tension .............................................................................43 Chapter 2 Vertical Reading 2.1 Textual strata ........................................................................................... 53 2.2 Cultural encoding .................................................................................... 63 2.3 Hierarchies of humans and knowledge ................................................... 108 Chapter 3 Spherical Reading 3.1 Textual loops: story time v. narrative time ............................................. 130 3.2 Literary conventions of eighteenth-century English travel writing: “voyage” as genre ................................................................................... 141 3.3 Circumnavigating the text: eighteenth-century English travel writing and its print culture......................................................................................... 153 ! vii Chapter 4 Island Writing 4.1 Island as a geographical reality ............................................................... 175 4.2 Island as a chronotope: paradise in the age of discovery ........................ 184 4.3 The surrounding sea ................................................................................ 194 4.4 Ship as a moving island ...........................................................................199 4.5 Hauling up the shore ............................................................................... 208 4.6 Islanded islanders .................................................................................... 210 4.7 Island in an ocean of travel writings ........................................................214 4.8 Locating and identifying islands: Thomas Forrest’s voyage of rediscovery .................................................217 Bibliography .............................................................................................................246 ! ! ! viii ! ! Introduction Gazing into the star-studded night, hoping the acquired maps are accurate and the navigational tools reliable, wishing for favorable winds to take the vessel to a desirable destination, making sure there is an adequate supply of sago cakes, coconuts, fishing nets, potable water, iron bars, and red handkerchiefs, an English captain commands a ship manned mainly with Malay crew and often finds himself communicating and interacting with speakers of various languages and cultures, e.g., English, Dutch, Spanish, Malay, Magindano tongue, Papua tongue, and Chinese. Many of these exchanges are facilitated by the help of an interpreter; yet, it needs to be reminded that those who live in the East Indies1 are able to converse in multiple languages. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The East Indies has been a problematic term, and related to the Indies, East India, and India. The Indies can refer to all the lands east of the Indus River, which is divided into: India intra gangem (all the lands lying between the Indus and the mouth of the Ganges, including the peninsula) and India extra gangem (all the lands further east, specifically Indochina and modern Indonesia). Meanwhile, the East Indies (or East India) is called East to distinguish it from America, which bears the name of the West-Indies. After Columbus landed on what he mistook as the Indies, the term “the Indies” was changed into the East Indies, or East India. The area subsumes the land from the eastern parts of the Persian Empire to the islands of Japan. India derived from the River Indus, or from the Hindows who were the ancient inhabitants, and from whom came the word Indostan and Hindostan. India covers the area between China to the east, Persia to the west, Tartary to the north, and the Indian Sea to the south. In the broadest sense, the East Indies, therefore, incorporates the land from the Indus to Japan, and all the islands in the Indian Ocean; in the narrowest sense, it refers to the islands in the Indian Ocean, excluding Ceylon, the Maldives, the Andamans and the Nicobars. For more details, see [Awnsham and John Churchill?], The Compleat Geographer: or, the Chorography and Topography of All the Known Parts of the Earth. 3rd ed. (London: 1709); [Champante and Whitrow?], The Britannic Magazine (London: 1794-1807); Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). ! 1 ! ! A great deal about Thomas Forrest (c.1729-c.1802) has to be circumstantially established. First of all, it may be surmised that he is of Scottish background since there is no standardization of spelling Gaelic names in English. “Iain” and “John” are interchangeable, and so are “Alasdair” and “Alexander.” “Forrest” is one of the spelling variations of “Forest,” which is associated with the clan of “Forrester.” It is possible that the Forrester clan is of Celtic druidic origin, founded by Sir Adam Forrester. Other associated names of the same clan with spelling variations