TRAVEL
AND EXPLORATION
97
Idrisi
Geographia Nubiensis
Paris; Hieronymus Blageart, 1619
Prior to the early fifteenth century, one of the few works
available to Europeans which described distant lands such as Africa
and the Atlantic islands was the treatise compiled by the noted
Arab geographer Idrisi (ca. 1099-1154). Employed by Roger
II of Sicily (1101-1154) as court geographer, Idrisi sent
emissaries to observe and describe various countries and regions,
including Scandinavia, Germany, France, Italy, Syria, and Egypt.
Idrisi organized this material into his geography which he entitled
Al Rojari (1154) in memory of his patron. The title
Geographia Nubiensis comes from a misreading of a passage
relating to Nubia and the river Nile by the two Maronite scholars
who issued this first Latin edition in 1619. In composing his
treatise, Idrisi relied heavily upon Arabic versions of Ptolemy's
Geography, not generally available in Europe until Greek
and Latin manuscript versions began to circulate in the fifteenth
century.
98
Collectiones peregrinationum in
Indiam Orientalem et Indiam Occidentalem
Frankfurt a. M.: 1590-1634. Twenty-five volumes
Collected and engraved by Theodor de Bry et al.
Image
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a period of
unprecedented European expansion. The story of this adventure was
recorded in a wealth of literary accounts describing the many new
and exciting discoveries. By the latter half of the sixteenth
century there was a great demand for anthologies which brought this
information together. One of the most influential of these works
was that of the renowned German engraver Theodor de Bry (1528
1598), whose collection was a major, if not the major, source of
visual representations of exotic peoples in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Drawing upon prior voyage collections such
as Richard Hakluyt's, de Bry and his sons created intriguing
glimpses into distant lands and societies which fueled the growing
fascination with the New World and Asia.
99
Chinese Rites
Italy, ca. 1710
As European travellers found their way over the globe, they were
frequently accompanied by missionaries who sought the conversion of
newly discovered peoples. The Jesuits were especially successful in
establishing the Church in Asia by adapting Christianity to the
customs of local communities. In China, where they had begun active
mission work in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuits adopted
native dress and customs, allowing their converts to continue
rituals of respect to Confucius and to their ancestors, and to
express the Christian concepts of Heaven and God in Chinese terms.
The "Chinese Rites" controversy, which began in the mid-seventeenth
century, stemmed from the vigorous condemnation of this policy of
accommodation by other clergy who feared that Christian doctrine
was being perverted. The issues were debated well into the next
century, when this hand-written copy of pamphlets describing the
controversy was made. Bitterly disputed in Europe, the matter
finally led to the expulsion of all missionaries from China in 1724
and to the decline of Jesuit influence in Europe.
100
Adam Olearius
Moscowitische und Persianische
Reisebeschreibung
Hamburg: Zacharias Herteln and Thomas von Wiering, 1696
During the early seventeenth century, northern European
merchants saw Russia as a land through which secure trade routes
might be opened to Persia and points east without danger from
or taxation by the Turks, and unknown to Italy, Spain, and
Portugal. In 1633, Adam Olearius (1600-1671) was appointed
secretary to an embassy from the Duke of Holstein to Muscovy and
Persia which sought to make that Duchy an entrepot for overland
silk trade. Due to serious miscalculations concerning the proposed
route along the Volga and other factors, the commercial goals of
the five-year (1634 1639) mission were never realized. Yet
Olearius' account of his travels, first published in 1647, became
one of the major early descriptions of "Russia" by a European and
was a popular success. With his sharp wit and anecdotal style,
Olearius described the everyday life of nobility and peasant alike.
He considered the Russians, with some reservations, as a Christian
people, yet saw Russian institutions as so different from their
Western counterparts as to constitute a distinct
civilization.
101
Peter Simon Pallas
Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des
Russischen Reichs in einem ausführlichen
Auszuge
Frankfurt and Leipzig: Johann Georg Fleischer, 1776 78
Three volumes and atlas of plates
During the long reign of Catherine II, Russia became
increasingly receptive to Western science, technology, and culture.
The German-born empress invited scores of foreign scholars to take
up residence in Russia in the hope of developing the material
resources and intellectual life of her empire. In 1767 she called
the celebrated naturalist Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811) to a
professorship in natural history at the St. Petersburg Academy of
Sciences. The following year Pallas participated in a research
expedition through little-studied regions of the empire. This
fruitful journey resulted in his monumental Reise, first
issued 1771-1776. Pallas' work provided great amounts of data on a
variety of subjects, including botany, zoology, geology, geography,
ethnography, philology, and medicine. Employing the comparative
method, he laid the foundations of a new natural history that
excluded metaphysics and was influential in the development of
evolutionary theory.
102
Pierre Sonnerat
Voyage à la Nouvelle-Guinée
Paris: Chez Ruault, 1776
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, France made
serious attempts to break the monopoly in the spice trade which the
Dutch had long enjoyed. Having annexed the Seychelles islands in
the Indian Ocean (1743), they built permanent settlements (1768)
and spice plantations, later dispatching expeditions to India, the
Malay archipelago, and elsewhere. A naturalist accompanying one
such voyage was Pierre Sonnerat (1745-1814). During a journey to
the Moluccas, Philippines, and neighboring islands taken in
1771-1772, Sonnerat made extensive observations of primitive
societies and exotic wildlife, which he subsequently reported in
Voyage à la Nouvelle-Guinée. Although the
title of his work refers to New Guinea, Sonnerat did not actually
land there but rather on nearby islands. The many specimens and
curiosities which he brought to the king's cabinet further
stimulated the growing interest in the "noble savage," a popular
romantic image which persisted well into the nineteenth
century.
103
Pierre Trémaux
Voyage au Soudan orientale et
dans l'Afrique septentrionale
Paris: Chez Borani, [1852 62]
Prior to the early nineteenth century, vast interior regions of Muslim-dominated North Africa were closed to European travellers. But a combination of events led to the journey of French archaeologist Pierre Trémaux (b. 1818) and several European scientists through previously unexplored areas of eastern Sudan and Ethiopia from 1847-1854. Bonaparte's occupation of Egypt (1798 1799), Champollion's decipherment of the Rosetta Stone (1822), and the growth of "Orientalism" in Europe created a great interest in Egyptian and North African monuments and culture. An opportunity to advance far up the Nile valleys beyond Nubia was provided by the conquest of the Sudan by Pasha Mehemet Ali in 1820-1822. Desirous of exploiting the new mineral resources, the Egyptian ruler dispatched a European research team into the territory. Through a series of fortuitous circumstances, Trémaux was able to join the team and record the many ancient monuments and contemporary societies encountered along the way. Voyage au Soudan contains many examples of early photography, only then being introduced to field research.
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