288 Northern Antiquities and National Identities 14. Subaltern Travelers in a Conglomerate World. Michael Harbsmeier In recent years travel accounts have attracted a great deal of attention from all sorts of historians engaged in structuralist and subsequently post-structuralist, post-colonial and other postmodern projects of de­ construction. Their focus has been the naive assumptions underlying traditional approaches to travel writing as transparent sources for a better understanding of the people and places described or the life, development and Bildung of the - usually white, male, adult - traveler describing them. However, as Tabish Khair has pointed out, earlier en­ thusiasm about unmasking colonial discourse, Orientalism and Imperial Eyes seems by now to be giving way to a more nuanced understanding of the reciprocity and negotiation, appropriation and resistance at play in travel writing that does not fit the image of European travelers writ­ ing about and trying to dominate the rest of the world.639 In what fol­ lows I will be dealing with a case in point: a series of accounts written by (northern, protestant, male) European, but nevertheless in important respects subaltern travelers. At first glance, Danish travel writing from the eighteenth century seems to have quite a lot in common with contemporary European trends. While seventeenth-century travel accounts predominantly dealt with more exotic destinations in the East and West Indies, those of the eigh­ teenth century increasingly covered also European itineraries. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century the main focus was on the extraordinary and exceptional “curiosities” of the real world as well as the Kunst- und Wunderkammern closer to home, but later in the century travelers tended to pay much more attention to ordinary things, to the rules of daily life and the regularities of nature characteristic of the places they visited. Parallel to this metamorphosis of the travelers’ at­ tention we see also, both in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe, the emergence of travel writing arising from larger scientific expeditions. Finally we have a number of Danish examples of the general European Enlightenment trend to let fictitious visitors from other parts of the Northern Antiquities and National Identities 289 world or even from different worlds portray and criticise people and conditions at home. In Denmark, the best known example was proba­ bly the imitation of Monesquieu’s Lettres Persanes in Erik Pontoppidan’s “Asitatic prince” Me-noza (1742-3) who reportedly had been bom not far from Tranquebar in India. Much more numerous, however, were the reports about what native Greenlanders had to say about Denmark and the Danes. Superficially eighteenth-century Danish travelers or, more precisely, authors of travel accounts may thus seem to have done much the same kind of tiling as contemporary travelers and travel authors from other parts of Europe. On closer inspection, however, and here we come to the main argument in this paper, one can identity a number of cir­ cumstances and tendencies clearly differentiating the travel accounts originating from the Danish conglomerate kingdom from those origi­ nating from other parts of the continent. A fully convincing analysis would presuppose a comparative account of the differences and simi­ larities between the various traditions of eighteenth century European travel writing. For present purposes, however, I will content myself with a sketch of some of the features which I believe to be crucial for a bet­ ter understanding of the peculiarities of Danish travel experiences. A summary of diese features will introduce the subsequent presentation and analysis. As Niels Brimnes has pointed out, early modem Danish colonial rule seems to have been based on a comparatively weak und unstable con­ trol over the native subjects, whether in Tranquebar in India, trade sta­ tions in coastal Africa, the slave colonies in the West Indies or the Es­ kimos in Greenland. 640 The importance of native agency has of course been stressed in recent more or less revisionist colonial and postcolo­ nial studies in general, but it seems fair to assume that Danish authori­ ties found themselves in even more precarious situations than their Portuguese, Dutch, French or British, not to speak of their Spanish counterparts, if for no other reasons than demographic ones. One of the symptoms of this comparative administrative weakness can be seen in the conspicuous presence of missionaries in almost all the Danish colonies in the eighteenth century, and this is reflected in the fact that theology and clergymen dominate in Danish travel writing - another general characteristic of the Danish version of that genre. In Greenland, it was the Lutheran priest Hans Egede who in 1721 ini­ tiated modern Danish settlement, with the Moravian Brethren begin­ 290 Northern Antiquities and National Identities ning their work less than a decade later. In Tranquebar, it was the Dan­ ish king who was responsible for sending the pietist missionaries from Halle who worked there from 1706 onwards. Missionary work among the slaves in the West Indies only began during the second half of the eighteenth century, but here as well as in the other colonies clergy­ men (such as Wilhelm Johann Müller at Frederiksborg in Ghana641) and missionaries definitely were the authors of the most widespread, influential and informative accounts and descriptions published at the time. As we shall see, theology, pietism and clergymen also were to play a disproportionately prominent role in travels to other destinations than the colonies. Going to Arabia Felix or to Göttingen, Vienna and Rome was often motivated more by scholarly theological rather than secularly enlightened concerns and ambitions. Looking at the biographies of the authors of the travel accounts and the way in which they financed their travels can lead us to a third and more general peculiarity of the Danish variety of enlightened traveling. Even though this point certainly needs to be investigated more thor­ oughly, it seems fair to apply a kind of Weberian ideal type, namely that by far the most of die travelers who wrote and published about ihcii experiences did so as part of some official duty and thus from a subor­ dinate position. Among the travelers undertaking tiieir own voyages in die style of a conventional Grand Tour, strikingly few left any written, let alone published, account of tiieir travels, whereas those who had to apply for funds and grants or those who where ordered by their superi­ ors to go have left many more and much larger written and published records of their activities. Or to put it more crudely, Danish absolutism certainly did not prevent people from traveling of their own initiative, but writing accounts of voyages appears to have been the activity of people who in one or another kind of subordinate position had been paid or ordered to go where they did. Finally, and most importantly, there is a fourth particular feature of eighteenth-century Danish travel accounts which I think deserves even more attention and on which I will concentrate in what follows. Turn­ ing over the pages of the traders and especially missionaries writing about people and places in the colonies, the diaries and travelogues of students and scholars reporting about tiieir experiences in various European towns and universities, or the accounts and reports of clergy­ men and others engaged in all sorts of natural history and what then Northern Antiquities and National Identities 291 was called statistics inside as well as beyond the boundaries of the con­ glomerate parts of the kingdom of Denmark, one finds surprisingly many statements by different kinds of native informants. From the mis­ sionaries and traders reporting from overseas we learn a lot about the opinions of more or less recently converted fishermen, peasants and slaves in and around the colonies, the students and scholars happily tell their readers about the knowledge, wisdom and opinions of the learned of all confessions whom they had met in conversation, and among the travelers writing about such parts of the Danish conglom­ erate state as the Faroe Isles, Iceland and Norway almost the majority are in fact writing about their own province of origin. In other words, travelers from the Danish conglomerate state not only tend come from subordinate positions to their travels and writings, they also share a weakness for lending their pen to the views of others, sometimes the nobler and more famous, but more often to even more subordinate and remote subjects. If travel writing in general is characterised by a propensity towards the poly-vocal and multi-centered, travel writing originating from the conglomerate Danish state of the eighteenth cen­ tury seems to have been open for a strikingly rich multitude of subal­ tern perspectives and voices. Greenland, Arabia Felix, Tranquebar It would require a substantial monograph to substantiate these four claims about the peculiar characteristics of the travel accounts produced under Danish kings in the 18th century. Parts of the ground, however, have already been covered by recent work on the subject. Thus in his brilliant thesis from 2006, Allan Sortkær has analysed in considerable depth what the texts of the Greenland missionary Hans Egede, the ori­ ental explorer Carsten Niebuhr and the student and scholar Andreas Christian Hviid reveal about mental continuity and change during the Danish Enlightenment.642 Although apparently more concerned with how the Danish examples reflect more general European trends, Sort­ kær often arrives at conclusions not very different from the results of my own investigations of the material from Greenland643 and the case of Carsten Niebuhr and his expedition to Arabia Felix in 1761-67.644 In what follows more attention will therefore be paid to some of the so far less studied examples in the hope of being able at least to point out what they could turn out to have in common also on closer inspec­ tion.