The Evolution of England's First Encounters

In the late 16th century, England was yet to become Great Britain, the colossal colonial power ruling the seas and the place from which curious and fortune-seeking citizens spread themselves around the world to document its contents and exploit its richness.

The beginning of the first colony for the English came late compared to Spain and Portugal. Finally, in 1588, after many failed attempts and numerous journeys of discovery, mathematician and scientist (as it was known at the time) Thomas Harriot visited the North American coast and authored “A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,” in which he describes nearly every detail of potential interest to the establishment of English colonies, somehow avoiding any detailed physical description of the native Indians he encountered. Under the heading “Of the nature and manners of the people,” Harriot does discuss the Indian’s clothes, houses, farms, cultural practices, and also adding “In respect of us they are a people poore, and for want of skill and judgment in the knowledge of use of things” (25).

Harriot finds the natives wanting “in respect of” the English, but he never holds them to be any less human than Europeans or other civilized peoples. In fact, he thinks that they will be compliant to English goals of establishing plantations, finally making some headway in the New World when Spain and other nations were already stuffing their monarchical coffers with gold and silver. Harriot, to borrow a phrase from our modern empire system, sought a “kinder and gentler” exploitation of the New World and its human inhabitants that would shame England’s rivals and bring honor home.

Fast-forward to 1845, with Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle,” and one can see how both science and fortune seeking had changed the relationship between the English and the New World inhabitants. England was now Great Britain, flexing its dominance of the seas with brute force, and foraying to still more distant and remote locations to inspect the fauna and peoples with a scientific rigor Harriot could not imagine nor comprehend. Landing in Tierra Del Fuego, Darwin, unlike Harriot, writes detailed descriptions of the people he encounters, and finds no need to curtail his biting judgments of appearance and habits. The English no longer needed to sell the virtues of colonization and the ease with which it could be accomplished.

A Hibiscus on Bourbon Street

I have been in New Orleans, and though tardy in my posts, my travels revealed a pleasant hibiscus growing in our courtyard rental on Bourbon St, emerging only after a violent thunderstorm; my indoor variety seems barren, woody, naked, and ashamed compared to this dynamic beauty in its sub-tropical home!

The Evolution of the Beagle

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A Dear Darwin Memo

Reading the birth or racism abetted by science made keeps me thinking about a class (Todd Butler’s TransAtlantic Lit. ) looking at early English voyages to the New World. We read a Thomas Harriot’s quasi-scientific book written about 1590 about a trip to an area they were calling “Virginia,” which is raising some issues when confronted with the themes and historical patterns we have read about in this class. What I’m talking about is how the scientific (curious and serious) and economic purposes (plantations, transplanting exotic species in Europe) gets fused with the cultural milieu, and ultimately forces those same headlong pursuits to a showdown over Christian genesis and teleology. Thomas Harriot and many others portrayed the Indians of Roanoke Virginia as the children before the Fall, and the book that resulted does attempt an admirable scientific bent, with descriptions of villages, plants, the social and other practices of the Roanoke Indians as well. Overall, it is a poorly funded venture and a naturalist/economic expose. It is practically an advertisement. The book with engravings (modeled by fairly accurate naturalistic drawings by a guy named John White?) softened the features of nearly everything. The villages were pristine and orderly, the Indians were transformed into Greeks, with unnatural poses and long curling locks about their Europeanized faces. It is remarkable, and it appears to be both the need to show the English that it was safe to venture to the Northern portions of the Americas (above the cannibals the Spanish encountered), and it spoke to the belief in the one-time creation of the Bible. At what point did the Biblical, or Golden Age, Inhabitant of the New World become a racialized being?
Somehow it would be fun to connect the early views of the new world peoples with the formation we start to see crystallizing in Darwin. I’m not sure how much Darwin draws upon Blumenbach, but it does seem that his “truth” of evolutionary processes did help spread that scientific glaze over racial identity. The idea of progress is a strong feature of linear European ways and calendars. Who can deny that things have progressed in so much that Cook, Humboldt, or Darwin could easily see the technological and cultural differences (better!) that clearly showed the new world peoples (new to Europeans that is) to be in the early stages of becoming more European. Darwin, unlike so many others came to see and record (he was not seller of wares and travel brochures) but he did manage to somehow build a scientific fiefdom to scrape the cream off the luscious lands he encountered with his brutally eloquent theory. The persistence of Social Darwinism might be the touchstone to how the economic, scientific, and teleological join forces to make something as forcefully true as Darwin’s theory something equally false, and forcefully so.

The Palouse Tourist

Dear ________

I’ll confess I stopped skimming Lucy Lippard’s article “The Tourist At Home,” after this part:
“Tourism is the apotheosis of looking around, which is the root of regional arts as well as how we know where we are. Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around” (13).

Here is a little test: What kind of birds hang out in your neighborhood? What is the last varmint (defined as anything furry and pesky that some people like to shoot) you have seen scampering around? How high is the Palouse River that runs through downtown Pullman, and how many feet must the river rise before it floods the Subway parking lot?

O.K, I’ll accept just about any bird or critter you mention, and I’ll give credit if you know that the river well above its normal level.

I don’t know if you have ever thought why people smoke (not including the addictive part), but in searching for an answer to why people smoked cigarettes, one old roommate suggested it had to do with breathing, which is something everyone does (kinda like “live free or at least breath, or die” as a motto for life’s license plates) but not very deeply or with much conscious effort. Just as smoking gave people permission to breath deeply and with conscious effort (something this roommate thought was important to one’s physical and spiritual health) looking around and taking in the visuals of one’s environment is deeply seated human activity that too often requires special locations and lots of time set aside. We are tourists because we need to breathe, that is, we need to know what the birds look like, how the trees arrange themselves, the pitch of the sky, the color of the rivers, the scum in the gutters, the smell of urine in an alley—we can’t just take in these sights sounds and smells when we get two weeks off, or go to an academic conference.

For example, the human penchant to gawk and marvel at the natural world is now perverted (like smoking and breathing) into an unnatural alliance. Wrong! Remember what Frank Sinatra said about “love and marriage” –“can’t have one without the other” but that is too easily laid to waste. Surely we can look around without Birkenstocks and Nikons, or even return tickets. What would happen if people started to breath in the sights around them, even if they think there is nothing worth looking at?

I know when I do travel, I find the birds to be more exotic than they really are. The birds are supposed to be more colorful in tropical places, but I am shocked at how exotic regular brown birds can be when you give them a good look. The patterns on a few Warblers inspired me to get out my binoculars the other day, which I often use to gaze out my windows at the birds milling about the low shrubs and empty lots near my house. I am amazed at how the blue tints in Magpies wings can be so rich and varied, sometimes shimmering metallic rays of grey and white. I swear, if I ran into one of these big loud Magpies for the first time in another state or country, I’d be sure to think of them as exotic. In fact, I have begun to see my environs as exactly that—exotic, colorful, rich—as if I was a tourist in my own town. I often wonder what real tourist see when they come to Pullman, and pick out things to do that tourist might find amusing or edifying. I went to Kamiak Butte because its too close for locals to visit, and the same for the Boyer Park on the Snake river, both not an hour away, but full of people from places very far.


It is easy for me to talk about looking around where one lives, well, because I don’t get around all that much. Above 40 years of age, I thought by now I would have spanned the globe (my childhood visions globe trotting await my second childhood, which is coming soon!).

I sing the corporate body electric

This photo comes from this site, and explains:
"An ad placed at the Johannesburg International Airport to greet arriving and departing passengers. It’s a world first, a 5000 m2 billboard which required 1000 liters of paint and 9 separate permits from different regulatory authorities."

“Place” is a word that (corporate trademark reference alert), like the Yellow Pages ad says, “gets used”-- a lot. Sometimes “location” is the primary meaning:
“Is this the place?” “I need directions to your place.”


But usually there is some tinge of “judgment,” approval or disapproval:
“What kind of place are you running here?” “I love that place!” “This place is a dump” “There’s no place like home.” "Is this the place to put an ad?"


In addition to location and judgments, place is always tied to “relationships” between oneself and others, and one’s environment--relationships like:
“I don’t belong in this god-forsaken place.” “How the F#@% did I get in this place” “I can’t seem to find my place” “Everyone deserves a place at the table”


Edward Relph’s critical look at corporate colonization of the world’s airports claims that corporate culture has spawned clones to replace real places. These black holes of place only partake of “placelessness,” undeserving of a full place at the table (of course, puns always get a place).

The sense of the loss of “authenticity” reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s criticisms of modern photography in the industrial age, which he thought stole a bit of the allure from the real thing (say, the Virgin Mary or a Tomato Soup can), making reality less magical than it would be otherwise, and reducing all substance to the mere similitude of a photograph. Pierre Bourdieu (yes, another French theorist gets a place at the theory table) is more positive, seeing the ability of specific “locations” with their peoples and traditions to create a sense of authenticity, to give or withhold approval, and to build and maintain relationships in concert with their own notions of place-ness.

I’m not sure any of this matters too much in the airport bar, so of course
“Save me a place”

Collection Inspired Narrative: Truth or (Con)Sequence?

A plausible or pleasing narrative can be pieced together with complimentary components, say, a sequence of events, which anchors the collection spatially and temporally. What if the "neatness" of sequential ordering inspires "veracity-light," less truth, but more (in the words of Colbert) "truthiness"?

I like true stories to end happily (despite my love of suffering as an art form), so I've inserted the last photo to show that my children survived the loss of their favorite car (the youngest was crying also about her crayons that had melted into the back seat upholstery), even though the picture was actually taken before we knew the car was toast.

Long Distance Confabulations

“Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmellow pies,
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,
That grow so incredibly high” Lennon & McCartney

You don’t have to drop acid to feel the childish thrill of traveling into unknown places. In Nigel Leask’s Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, he cites the work of Kames, who ”formulated the aesthetics of distance in terms of a rhetorical question which illustrates the dynamic relationship between curiosity and its cognates such as novelty, singularity, and wonder” (25). So, moving away from Bruno Latour, where the “mobility” of curious discoveries and collected objects is central to the purpose and context of scientific travel, Kames sees the retention of “distance” as essential to maintaining the allure of travel writing. Desire to forage among the new and fantastical could be a described as a circle of confabulation, a half-real half-conjured memory, a recurrent proclivity to seek new experiences valued for their ephemeral connection to remote lands and peoples. “Seeing” is believing, but seeing from a distance is conjuring too.

I can name all the places I’ve been that I think count as distant, and they are not many. For example, the closest I ever came to leaving the U.S. was a year in Hawaii, so I still harbor childish notions of what it means to travel and what I might find there. Rare and wonderful as the a Pacific island can be, the reality of day-to-day activities lets the some of the air out of those fanciful thoughts, but still bobbing and hobbling closer to the earth.

As a child I remember asking people from “distant” places like New York State what the birds, trees, and mountains looked like there. People seemed remarkably unimpressed with the question and not many offered anything more than “pretty much same as here, only some bigger, some smaller.” The best answer was about trees: “The branches of pine trees back East grow all curly, not straight like these.” I sat with that one for a long time. Twenty years or so later I went on a trip to the East coast and I see one of those twisted armed trees. The arms curled much more vigorously and energetically in my confabulated trees.

Narratives of Omai

“At the heart of these enterprises was the desire to find evidence of the origins of human civilization, the basis from which their own society had self-evidently progressed so far”
Michelle Hetherington, The Cult of the South Seas.



The three readings form the Cult of the South Seas demonstrates the rich context of the encounters and travels of the English voyagers. In Hetherington’s piece, the “cultural assumptions” of the Europeans as the epitome of the advanced human condition (the upper-crust of evolutionary and cultural refinement) means that European audiences of travel literature expected “tales of difference” that “throw their own culture into high relief.”


Question: Do readers of scientific travel literature still expect “tales of difference,” if so, how is it changed to suite our cultural assumptions?


Scientific discoveries are often couched in terms of finding out what and who we are. The space telescope looks at the “birth” of our universe, other planets tell us what the earth was like billions of years ago, the human genome finds a common ancestor. It all seems to point to the origins of life, whether in the lines on Mars or hot springs in the deep ocean.

Question: Is scientific travel a kind of rational theological exercise, in the sense that discovery seems prone narratives of human teleology and genealogy?

Along the same lines, Peter Raby describes the two-directional properties of the finding oneself through tales of difference in his chapter of Bright Paradise “Through the Looking-Glass.” Like Alice, who realized the mirror held much more than the reflection could show, scientists, travel junkies, and collectors of every stripe, found themselves crawling through the observation glass and falling into a topsy-turvy world that threatened to cut off the very head that led them there.

Question: Is the traveler in control of the experience?

Predictably, Omai’s travels to England inspired notions of the noble savage, perhaps best exemplified by the legacy of Montainge’s more deliberate tinkering with travel tales about New World encounters used to contrasts “discovered” peoples from Europeans, and to belittle and chastise the state of European society. Just as looking through the other end of the telescope makes things look smaller rather than larger, Omai comes to stand for both noble savage and the savage European. In a sense, Omai comes with the baggage of a stock character embodying a kind of difference that suggested Europeans might have taken a wrong turn along the evolutionary road to become poor substitutes for humanity in the buff. That is, humanity stripped of its gadgets and universal god might show Europeans to be less dignified and honorable than they imagined themselves. It is notable, Hetherington points out, that the embrace of the idea of the Noble Savage “bore a direct relation to one’s class and education,” which suggests that this early-stage relativism relied upon knowledge of the classics, a bit of leisure time, and a serene assumption of natural social privileges associated with class that could be surprisingly brittle under inspection. It seems that those with the most to lose could be the first to see it coming.


Question: Why does the upper-class grapple with “difference” in specific ways as Hetherington suggest?

Question: How did working-class people in England interact with the “difference” found in New World encounters?


In Ian McCalman’s look at the Omai incident, Spectacle of Knowledge: OMAI as Ethnographic Travelogue,” the narrative of difference becomes popular spectacle, taking advantage of the tension inherent in the binaries created by looking outward to see one’s inner self. The tales of Cook’s murder seems to tap directly into the narrative of difference that at one moment basks in the Eden-like simplicity of life in the Sandwich Islands and the next moment must contend with the bludgeoning of a famous sea captain. The tension between the beautiful and the grotesque, magic and science, study and destruction, travel literature and Biblical dogma, superior and inferior peoples, adulthood and infancy, seems to keep the spectacle moving like a spinning top, always more fascinating while it oscillates. And then there is “realism,” a concept of authenticity that seems ripe to peel coins from earnest onlookers and novelty enthusiast. I am reminded of a comment of a survivor of Pearl Harbor who went to see the movie “Pearl Harbor,” which, he exclaimed, “was louder in the theater than the actual attack.”


Question: McCalman notes commentators praised De Loutherbourg’s spectacle of Omai for its realism. Thinking of modern film that reproduces historical accounts with claims to accuracy, how does realism in travel narratives manage to be both aesthetically pleasing and authentic?


Finally, In Harriet Guest’s “Omai’s Things,” the concept of collecting takes an interesting turn in the other direction. As Omai is carried to the Banks’ sanctuary along with other collectibles, he too is laden with items to store in a newly built English-style house in Tahiti. The notion that Omai had been contaminated by European society inaugurates a long-lived and persistent narrative of the defiled Noble Savage, and the satirist who took jibes at the odd and “useless” items Omai took home assume a kind of paternal high-ground that ironically unleashed a guilt-laden and more destructive ambition to turn New World peoples into god-fearing Christians.

Question: You live in England when Omai arrives and have two weeks to spend with Omai, what do you do? What will the satirist write in response?

Darning Socks with Narrative Threads: The Essay, Collection, and Liberation

In Douglas Hesse’s article, “Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy,” he seeks to “wrestle back the ‘essay’ from its history” in answer to some academics who seek to define a new kind of literacy in the computer age against the confines of the scholastic essay. Hess points to a contradiction, namely, that the logos driven academic essay with its well-defined topic and methods of documentation and perspicuity has moved far a field from the kinds of things the father of the genre, Montaigne, had actually written. Montaigne’s essays are not the articulation of airtight logical relationships in a linear development, but rather a series of overtly biased disjointed explorations steeped in rhetorical patterns more commonly found now in journalistic writing and yes, on the internet. The logical thread is there, but it is not the industrial thread of the machine age that nosily stitches along prefab patterns, rather it is more like a single strand darning a pair of well-worn wool socks with a cat and a fire and glass of good port--spectacles if you need them. It is as if the mind-stuff itself, those bits of refection, repose, and memory mix with the coinage of novel discoveries and armchair philosophy: The collection of the mind and the collection of things of the world.

In order to address some logical relationship, I am compelled to include some forms of scientific travel writing in the category of the self-conscious pathos and ethos-driven essay of the kind Montaingne and the early English essayist like Addison and Steele wrote. Unashamedly biased, subjective, and determined to make even the most specious or neglected subject matter a worthy good read. The early essayists used pity, humor, emotion, juxtaposition, irony, and biting satire. And if all these bells and whistles of weaving a narrative become too forceful (a cudgel when a hand trowel will do), understatement could darn a sock quite nicely.

My thread finds me thinking now about “collections and narratives” (the ostensible subject of this essay) and the kinds of writing seen in scientific travel literature. Thankfully, Hesse makes a connection for me: “It is telling that the essay’s rise paralleled the rise of the scientific method in the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment and that Francis Bacon, that author of “ The Advancement of Learning,” should its first prominent English practitioner. It is as if Bacon himself recognized the limitations of the single method and sought to establish a counter method, one that later essayists would call anti-methodical” (37). Well then, the history of collecting the world’s novelties and the history of the essayist’s narrative find common footing.

In “Collecting: Body and Soul,” Susan M. Pearce connects the notion of narrative to the collection, noting that “[c]ollections are a significant element in our attempt to construct the world, and so the effort to understand them is one way of exploring our relationship to the world” (37). I like Pearce’s willingness to see collecting as something everyone does. I am not the collector Susan Stewart describes in On Longing, in which the true collection “supercedes the individual narratives that ‘lie behind it’ (153).

I am the anti-collector, the lunatic hobbyist, pack rack, hoarder, or keeper of camp and kitsch, and everything I keep carries an aura of narrative kinetic energy. My old 1975 Volvo is the car I left Salt Lake City in twenty years ago (I can and do recount the various collections of parts I have replaced), but it is losing its use value, and so it is too burdensome to carry around like I do other things of no real use, such as my horrible and maudlin (some passable) poetry I’ve kept since the age of twelve. But the Volvo will be a bitter (and liberating) goodbye. I lament the loss of this huge orange leaking hulk, the tangible connection to my bachelor past through 16 years of marriage, the kids, the places it’s been (the time it broke down in Wells Nevada, we had to go to Salt Lake to have a customized piece made; Malibu, Triple A was pissed at how far they had to drag it away from the glamour; that overpass 70 miles from Burley when that nice old guy stopped to show the kids a mammoth tooth; drag racing bikers in Huntington Beach until oil spewed; Reno, Huntington Beach, Portland , the Olympic Peninsula, . . .)

The stories connected to my stuff that I drag around are unstable, because memory is, and they are hallucinatory, mundane, exalting, fleeting, and sometimes bitter. I must confess (confession being a long tradition of the essay genre) that my collections will not survive my death intact like the collections donated to museums and such. However, I take solace in the equanimity of a common narrative: The natural ending to the story of collecting is losing and liberation, whether by choice, circumstance, or death. Go not easy into that.

Don't Get Dyer Started, You'll Love it to Death

After reading Geoff Dyer’s dust jacket blurb about how D.H. Lawrence did a study of Thomas Hardy, I searched my shelves.

Going and Staying
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,---
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

Seasons on blankness as of snow
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,--
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.
--Thomas Hardy


Anyone still read Thomas Hardy? I guess they do, I just did, but I tried to sell this book for a quarter at our latest yard sale. I last remember my six-year-old daughter coveting the book’s peeling imitation red leather cover, sections of open wounds of corrugated cardboard and glue. She thought the strangely dignified carcass of 1920 edition of Modern British Poetry was an ideal make-believe book of magic spells. Maybe it is. There were no takers, so I took pity on it and keep it just in case.

Now, some twenty years have passed since I purchased it at a flea market, and in this blog it finally becomes a bone fide textual subject, a focus of study. This is why it leads this week’s blog, because every study needs a place to start.

Editor, Louis Untermeyer, writes in the introduction that he is not interested in “hairsplitting,” but in the interest of some place to start he designates “modern” as beginning in 1885 (the year D.H. is born) and characterized by several historical periods and “chief tendencies.” This pre-post-modern modern literary analysis is not abstract, but kind of like old-fashioned cause-and-effect physics. Some are easy to understand today, like “The decay of Victorianism,” but others provoke amused ignorance, such as “The muscular influence of Henley.” Not the guy from the Eagles. As I read on, I didn’t get angry, I got bored, but I suppose that is why criticism grew into more than simple introductions to works and anthologies, why it started to provoke and get more abstract. The blasé aesthetic of “modernism,” gave way to the angst of “post-modernism” and then “post-everything.”

Geoff Dyer doesn’t get bored when he reads The Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, which surprises me. He rages about the state of criticism, “it kills everything it touches.” While I sympathize with his take on “this group of wankers huddled in a circle,” he displays a flair for his own literary histrionics. What imagery! This is not boring, and I can see why he compares literary scholars to “morticians,” but even dressing the dead can be a beloved act, a kind of acceptance of the temporal mixed with violence and reverence. “Going and Staying” like old Hardy says, the dead old fart.

This is the place

I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and one of the things that every Utahn learns in school is that "this is the place"--an utterance attributed to Brigham Young when the tired Mormon pioneers decided to give the unimpressive valley of swamps and rocks a go. That place is gone, replaced by the place the valley has become under the stewardship of time, growth, and progress. It sticks out of the desert like the dream that started it all.

Now having lived outside of the belly of the whale of my youth, I find that every place is the place, at least for me when I take up habitation and especially employment. For example, I spent 9 months on the big island of Hawaii over 20 years ago, planting coffee trees and serving seafood in a tourist-trap restaurant dressed like a sailor in a Popeye cartoon. The island had no roads home, no way to hitchhike out in case things turned sour. I will always remember to buy a return ticket when going to an island.

When I came back to the mainland (Hawaii gets boring for a 21 year old with few job skills and a full tan) I had a slew of dreams showing me how I could get back to Hawaii by simply taking a few back roads never before taken near my house. These uncommonly used roads that could take me to the middle of the Pacific Ocean were there all along. The Hawaii in my dreams was only remotely similar to the physical place I had been, but more like an idealized village of how I wanted the whole world to be. Even so, the dreams showed me how “place” is at the crossroads of reality and wishful thinking, real things and imagined things. Place physically distant is somehow accessed by emotion and instinct. As long as you touch the ground, even if only once, the ground touches you back whenever it wants.