In American history before the Revolutionary era, travel and exploration were naturally important activities; as a colonial outpost of Great Britain, the colonies on the East Coast had to be explored, and Americans also read the literature of travel and exploration produced by Spanish and French explorers on other parts of the North American continent.

For generations, it was the case that a large percentage of the American population were immigrants, with significant travel experiences of their own, or were the children of immigrants. In the early national era, the United States acquired new territory, and even before the Louisiana Purchase, Americans—especially political and business leaders—were eager for news that explorers had found a passage by water to the West Coast to open trade across the Pacific Ocean.

The literature of travel thus had practical functions, and yet it also had enormous entertainment potential. Travel and adventure writing as a genre thus spans the boundary often drawn between fiction and nonfiction: within the body of travel writing, some texts are easily identifiable as fiction; others are easily identifiable as nonfiction; and a third group of texts are difficult to categorize in terms of what is “true” and what is invented.

Travel writing is inevitably part of the colonizing process; that means it necessarily involves questions related to colonialism: attitudes toward the land and its appropriate ownership and use; attitudes toward the native inhabitants; and ideas about nationality, history, and progress. This does not mean that travel writers could not represent a range of political perspectives, but it does mean that both cultural and political issues are always at stake in travel writing.

One of the first major travel texts of the Revolutionary and early Republican era—and one of the most widely reprinted American travel texts—Jonathan Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768 (1778), is a good example of many of the basic trends in early American travel writing. Carver was later criticized for stretching and manipulating the truth, but his work influenced many school texts. Carver’s book is an interesting point of departure and comparison for other travel works, since it brings up many of the recurring issues of travel writing: depictions of the native peoples, the quest for a grail of sorts (in this case, the Northwest Passage), and meditations on future national expansion.

A similarly optimistic account of new territories is John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (1784), including an appendix about Daniel Boone. More-serious travel accounts include the first published account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, crafted by Nicholas Biddle: History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence across the Rocky Mountains and down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean (1814), based on the journals kept by the leaders of the expedition.

William Bartram’s account of his four-year journey in the Southeast, Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida (1791), more commonly referred to as Bartram’s Travels, was both respected and highly influential. This poetic account, which—like Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia—often invoked the sublime in its accounts of nature, was a source of inspiration to nineteenth-century writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bartram’s Travels, with its clear literary overtones, suggests how easily travel writing adapted to more-traditionally literary forms. Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer was both clearly based on much of Crèvecoeur’s experiences and clearly fictionalized, while other works of pure fiction adopted the conventions and interests of travel writing.

Brackenridge’s novel Modern Chivalry (1792–1797) made use of motifs common in writing about the western frontier, as did Gilbert Imlay’s novel The Emigrants (1793). At the end of the period under consideration here, one of the most fictionalized of travel narratives appeared: Symzonia: Voyages of Discovery (1820), by “Captain Adam Seaborn,” is a pseudonymous text, with several proposed candidates for its authorship. A fictional account of voyages to the poles of the earth, Symzonia fictionalized ideas propagated as truth by John Cleves Symmes, who claimed that the earth was hollow, with openings at the poles that a ship could enter. Symmes’s theories famously appeared again in American literature, in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).

As with novels of the period, some of the important travel writings are available in easy-to-locate editions, but others are more difficult to find and are most easily accessed in electronic editions. Bartram’s Travels and Jefferson’s Notes are available in multiple editions, including from the Library of America. Imlay’s The Emigrants is available in a Penguin edition (edited by Wil Verhoeven). Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America is available in several electronic editions, including one from the Wisconsin Historical Society (http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/search.asp?id=383). Biddle’s account of the Lewis and Clark expedition is available through Google Books.

Readers seeking to contextualize American travel writing will find an excellent selection of texts from around the time of the British Empire, including North America, in Travel Writing 1700–1830: An Anthology, edited by Elizabeth A. Bohls and Ian Duncan (2005). Two volumes from Cambridge will be useful for students wishing to develop a deeper and broader knowledge of travel writing as a genre.

The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (2002), covers Western traditions of travel writing since the Renaissance, including chapters at the end on gender, ethnography, and theoretical approaches to travel writing. The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, edited by Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera (2009), traces the American tradition in travel writing, beginning with the colonial period.

A study that focuses specifically on the Revolutionary period is Robert Lawson-Peebles’s Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down (1988). Martin Brückner’s book The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006) will be useful to students wishing to examine the connections between travel literature and political ideology, especially the drive toward westward expansion.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

1. Representations of Native Americans and of Anglo-Native relations are a recurrent theme in American travel writing. How do these writers treat the legal and moral issues involved in exploration and appropriation of other people’s land? What image do they present of the native people and their relationship to the land? An excellent study of the relationship between cultural attitudes and policy can be found in Brian Dippie’s The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1982).

2. The earliest travel narratives about the New World often saw North America as a kind of Eden, a part of the world in which it might be possible to build a utopia. How do these themes appear in later travel writing? Specifically, students might wish to consider the relationship between the “newness” of formerly unexplored territories and the “newness” of the nation, paying close attention to publication dates in relationship to domestic politics.

3. As noted, travel writing often challenges the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Students might wish to consider the texts that appear to be “pure” fiction or nonfiction and examine those texts in light of awareness of the fictionalizing of travel in other texts. To what extent are the conventions of fiction applied even in “straight” travel narratives?

4. Most American travel writing is written by men. What gender attitudes are revealed in these writings? In The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975), Annette Kolodny, focusing mostly on nineteenth-century texts, argues that American writers saw the land as feminine. In these earlier texts, how do the male writers depict masculinity? Do they use metaphors that imply the land as female?

5. Bartram’s Travels influenced later writers we call Romantic. How does travel writing generally relate to the literary shift between the eras we call “Enlightenment” and “Romantic”? Students are encouraged to investigate Enlightenment conceptions of balance, moderation, and reason as well as Romantic ideas of the sublime.

Categories: Literature, Travel Literature

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