Felix Driver - Imagining the Tropics- Views and Visions of the Tropical World

IMAGINING THE TROPICS: VIEWS AND VISIONS OF THE TROPICAL WORLD Felix Driver Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Editor’s Note: The following is the third in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Lecture Series. It was presented at a special session of the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in London on 4 September 2003.

It is appropriate that a journal such as this should periodically take stock of its raison d’être, which in our case means reflecting upon the multiple histories and geographies resonating within its very title (Grundy-Warr et al., 2003; Savage, 2003). Recent work published in these pages has raised farreaching questions concerning the genealogy and the spatiality of the subdiscipline of “tropical geography”, most notably in relation to contemporary concerns with colonialism, postcolonialism, the politics of development and fieldwork (Driver & Yeoh, 2000; Bowd & Clayton, 2003; Sidaway et al., 2003). In the present paper, my focus is less on the origins and evolution of tropical geography as a component of the modern geographical discipline than on the history of ideas and images of tropicality, and the role these have played in the construction of knowledge about the tropical world over a longer period of time. Such issues of epistemology transcend and in a sense precede the formation of particular subdisciplines. To an extent, they also extend beyond particular “national” research schools and traditions. For example, that great theorist of tropical geography, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), was a Prussian who (following his return from his travels in the Americas) spent the most productive years of his long working life in Paris and whose influence was felt across the English-speaking world and beyond (notably in Latin America; see Holl & Reschke, 1999). During his lifetime,

which approximately corresponds to the period under scrutiny in this paper, a series of exemplary tropical sites – the tropical forest, the desert island, the mountain scene and the coastal view – was brought into focus, not for the first time, but in ways which left a lasting impression on the discourses of tropicality. While I am principally concerned here with an era before the institutionalisation of modern academic geography, this paper addresses in rather a precise sense the disciplining of geographical knowledge. The production and circulation of authoritative knowledge about the tropical world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially the making and recording of observations in situ, required a particular kind of discipline of the senses. This sort of discipline has often been conceived by historians of science in terms of the heightened emphasis on instrumentation within the field sciences during this period and the impetus to precision which this represents, as for example in the celebrated case of Humboldt himself (Cannon, 1978; Bourguet et al., 2002). While this focus on instruments is in itself necessary and tells us much about the epistemology of contemporary natural science, it is as important to recognise that the making of observations in the field also required the deployment of specific kinds of embodied skill in the production of images and inscriptions – as reflected, for example, in what might be called the “instrumentalisation” of hand and

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 25(1), 2004, 1-17  Copyright 2004 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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eye. In this paper, I focus especially on the place of a particular kind of visual image – the sketch made “on the spot” – within two connected spheres of knowledge: natural history and navigation.1 In both these fields, the application of graphic skills in the depiction of tropical nature’s forms was regarded as essential to the production of authoritative knowledge. Here we are concerned as much with practice as with representation; or more precisely, with practices of knowledge-making, and what happens to them in the process of circulation through the tropical world.

(Christ is supposed to have named them Boanerges, or “Sons of Thunder”, because of their fiery zeal. They had called on God to throw down fire from heaven in order to punish the Samaritans.) Divided by these ten circles together with 24 Meridians, Ruskin (1904:445) wanted his globe to be simply coloured:

IMAGINING THE TROPICS

In place of the divisions and boundaries on nineteenth-century globes, then, Ruskin had substituted a graphic design with an ancient pedigree. His representation of global space, which would generally be regarded as fanciful today, was in fact designed to enhance students’ appreciation of principles of projection and their application in the graphic arts. The key point in the present context, however, is that his nomenclature and his system carry no more symbolic meaning than those on a conventional globe.

The modern dictionary definition of the tropics tells a story of limits and the spaces between them: in one form or another, it refers us to two parallels of latitude stretching around the earth, one 23°27´ north of the equator and the other 23°27´ south of the equator, together defining the boundary of that region in which the sun may shine directly overhead. The circles of Cancer and Capricorn, which have since ancient times constituted the cartographic definition of the “torrid zone”, yield a variety of further stories, connecting astronomy, astrology, cosmography and myth. The Greek root of the word “tropics” means a turning, which refers both to the rotations of the spheres and the notion of limits, here both natural and moral. The inter-tropical zone has frequently been imagined, as it was in antiquity, as a realm of otherness, beyond the habitable human realm (Cosgrove, 2001:29-53). There are of course an infinite number of ways of dividing global space. In an essay entitled “Of Map Drawing” published in 1878, for example, John Ruskin (1904) proposed a new design for globes for use in schools. These globes were to be inscribed with ten latitudinal circles, each with its own name, such as the Arabian, the Venetian, and the Christian. Those nearest the equator, enclosing the most glowing space of the tropics, he called St John’s and St James’s circles, after the apostles.

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within the Arctic circles, the sea pale sapphire, and the land white; in the temperate zones, the sea full lucia, and the land pale emerald; and between the tropics, the sea full violet, and the land pale clarissa.

But we can go further than this, in so far as “the tropics” were and are conceived as a conceptual as well as a cartographic space. Whether the adjective “tropical” denotes a particular kind of experience, a look, a species, a landform, a soil or a meteorological event, the term carries with it a powerful array of associations which may or may not be tied very specifically to a particular geographical zone or location. In this paper, I am particularly concerned with what constitutes a “tropical” view or vision, and with some of the ways in which the tropical has been imagined as itself a view or a vision to be experienced. The representation of the tropics as a discrete space, or perhaps more accurately as a distinct set of associations, constitutes an important part of this story. Indeed, the contrast between the “tropical” and the “temperate” is one of the most enduring themes in the history of global imaginings. Whether represented

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Imagining the Tropics positively (as in fantasies of the tropical sublime) or negatively (as a pathological space of degeneration), tropical nature has frequently served as a foil to the temperate, to all that is modest, civilised, cultivated. In this sense, as has recently been suggested in the pages of this journal, we might think of ideas about tropical difference as part of a wider discourse, akin to the discourse of Orientalism which works to define and delimit the essential difference between East and West. Just as the discourse of Orientalism has its genealogists following in the tracks of Edward Said, so too the discourse of “tropicality” has attracted the attention of an increasing number of historians (see, for example, Arnold, 1996:141-68; Driver & Yeoh, 2000; Stepan, 2001; Livingstone, 2002; Bowd & Clayton, 2003). Over the centuries, notions of the “tropical” have thus been enrolled in a variety of philosophical, political, scientific, medical and aesthetic projects. Within the discourses of natural history, travel and exploration, for example, the theme of tropicality has had a remarkably sustained influence, even when – perhaps especially when – the actual experience of tropical travel has failed to live up to expectations. Its presence can also be detected in a host of other cultural forms, from epic poetry to landscape painting, as well as in historical and philosophical reflections on human nature and the wealth of nations. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we see tropical difference given institutional expression in the emergence of distinct subdisciplinary specialisms – tropical climatology, tropical geography and, most notably, tropical medicine – though in each of these fields the definition and limits of the “tropical” have been anything but settled. In the course of the last 50 years, the discourse on tropicality has further proliferated under the influence of decolonisation, development, global tourism, commodity advertising and environmental politics. Images of the tropics, then, have long been the site for European fantasies of selfrealisation, projects of cultural imperialism and the politics of human or environmental

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salvage. In the post-colonial world, these fantasies have, if anything, become more pervasive, if distinctly less enchanting. And the imaginative flow has certainly not at all been one-way. Artists and intellectuals seeking new cultural forms to describe their work in what we now call the global South have themselves appropriated the language of tropicality for their own ends. Think, for example, of the aesthetic of tropical modernism which informed the work of the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (Stepan, 2000); or the ambivalent cultural politics of the tropicália movement in Brazilian popular music, as represented in the work of Caetano Veloso (Dunn, 2002). In both these cases, moreover, we move beyond the tired oppositions between core and periphery: here the problematic relationship between indigenous and cosmopolitan cultural forms is empowering, not disabling. In fact, this process of cultural exchange – transculturation, if you like – brings into question some of the ways in which discourses like Orientalism have often been conceived. In particular, the model of projection which drives many accounts of colonial discourse – the “West” projecting its sense of cultural difference on the “rest” – is badly in need of repair. One obvious risk is that images (like “the Orient” or “tropicality”) are conceived as already fully formed, readyto-be-projected, a position which greatly exaggerates their coherence and consistency. Another is that the cultural and natural worlds are represented as a homogenous screen on which these images are depicted. In such a perspective, the discourse of tropicality would project an image of the tropical world which was produced by and for Europe, uncontaminated as it were by anything in between. Instead, we might develop ways of conceiving this process in terms of transactions rather than projections: to think of images, certainly, but to understand the process of their being made as negotiated in various ways (Driver & Yeoh, 2000:2-3). This would enable the production of knowledge about the tropical

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world to be understood as a more differentiated, more uneven and ultimately more human process; moreover, it would give more agency, and autonomy, to the world being represented. No longer a screen, but now a living space of encounter and exchange. One of the limitations of the language of projection is that it tends to collapse an argument about particular kinds of cultural production into an argument about global history as a whole, in which some cultures – and some spaces – are essentially active and others passive: in a nutshell, the West represents the Rest. Yet, the thing which today is called “Europe” has actually come into being through various kinds of exchange with the rest of the world. Culturally as well as economically speaking, this “Europe” has never been self-sufficient: it has always learned, borrowed or stolen from elsewhere. We have become so used to thinking of European expansion – including the exploration and colonisation of the tropical world – as the means of extending and dramatising an already existing worldview that we have underestimated the extent to which the process of extension is actually transformative of the European sense of self, culture, history (Hall, 1992). A fascinating if relatively late (and in the grand scheme of things, rather minor) example of this process at work may be found in the career of the French historian Fernand Braudel, who like several of his peers (including the anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss and the geographer Pierre Monbeig) spent a formative period teaching in Brazil in the 1930s. Reflecting on his career in later years, Braudel once remarked that it was his period in Brazil that turned him into a true intellectual. It is, indeed, a striking revelation – the design of that masterwork, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Braudel, 1976), conceived not in France, but in the very-nearly tropical São Paolo. Or rather, in the transatlantic shuttling between these worlds which Braudel experienced during the late 1930s, wintering in the archives of Europe, spending the rest of the year in

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Brazil (Paris, 1996; Skidmore, 2003). With that other great geographical historian Lucien Febvre, whom he met by chance on one of his transatlantic crossings, Braudel later edited a special issue of the journal Annales devoted to the Latin Americas (in the plural, significantly). The words of the introduction still resonate today, half a century on: Are we going to forget that we, historians of the Old World, face the Atlantic?… This is recognised, even today, in the quality and considerable importance for us of a history that is as much European, as fully European, as it is powerfully South American. A history that is an integral part of our national histories, but still more of our cultural history. A history of back-andforth movement, of loans and repayments, of borrowings and refused borrowings, of adventurous comings and goings with composite interest. It is already one of the first and most important chapters in this history of exchanges of worlds that each of us begins in our dreams to develop for the near future (Febvre, 1948, cited in Mattelart, 1996:194-95).

TROPICAL VIEWS AND VISIONS The remainder of this paper addresses one theme in this multiform “history of exchanges of worlds”: specifically, the ways in which “the tropics” were visualised by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travellers, and the role of graphic images in the production and circulation of knowledges about the tropical world. In this context, we can understand the view as developing within a topographic aesthetic, through which landscapes are depicted at a distance, their surface features translated into a recognisable visual code. In this very general sense, the term belongs equally to landscape sketching, coastal survey and terrestrial mapping, referring as it does to the apprehension of

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Imagining the Tropics portions of the earth‘s surface at a distance. The vision, in contrast, is something which in principle takes hold of the observer in a more transformative way: it engages the imagination, turning the spectator into an active participant in the scene. Where the view is the product of an enlightened rationality, the vision is the means of asserting a new sensibility: not just of an image of a discrete portion of space, but the realisation of a new sense of the whole, in which the eye of the observer is itself brought into the frame. In practice, of course, the distinction between “views” and “visions” is more about epistemology than practice or effect, or indeed affect. In particular, it is quite possible (as I shall argue below) to treat the charts and views of the surveyor as vestiges of experience – especially the experience of trial and error – rather than merely as inanimate data from which all traces of subjectivity have been erased (see also Carter, 1999; Burnett, 2000:67-117; Driver & Martins, 2002). In considering the visualisation of the tropical world during this period, the figure of Alexander von Humboldt looms large, not least because of his influence on subsequent generations of naturalists and artists across Europe and the Americas. The aesthetic depiction of landscape was an integral part of Humboldt’s philosophy; and it was of particular significance in his representations of the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics. For Humboldt, the tropical world was a privileged site, where the true variation and order of nature could be observed in all its majesty (Nicholson, 1990; Dettelbach, 1996). His lyrical descriptions of tropical landscape left their mark on those who travelled in his wake. In April 1832, for example, Charles Darwin wrote of his first sight (near Rio de Janeiro) of what he called “a tropical forest in all its sublime grandeur”, as if the scene demanded such a response from any truly philosophical traveller. “I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him; he alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind of first entering the Tropics” (Darwin, cited in Cannon, 1978:87; see also Martins, 2000).

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Humboldt’s significance in this context is clear. For those aspiring to the status of the truly philosophical naturalist, as opposed to what they regarded as the mere surveyor or collector, the view had to be framed by a wider vision. Humboldt’s vision of the natural world was essentially physiographic: hence his abiding concerns both with the spatial distribution of natural phenomena over the surface of the earth, and with their visual representation, notably in the form of his celebrated iso-maps (Dettelbach, 1999; Godlewska, 1999). Cartography was, however, only one such means of representation, and Humboldt also made full use of other sorts of diagrams, tableaux, panoramas and descriptive narrative in his depictions of landscape physiognomy in various regions of the globe. His famous cross-sectional landscape profile of the Andes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, first sketched “on the spot” at the foot of Mount Chimborazo (Figure 1), was in fact a hybrid production (Nicholson, 1990:173-78; Dettelbach, 1996:26772). It was intended to allow relationships between such variables as vegetation, altitude, topography and climate to be seen in one allembracing view. Combining a topographic picture with text denoting the names of plants typical of different altitudes, together with a table of data in 16 columns alongside, the image fused very different modes of representation, creating what Nigel Leask (2002:25354) calls “a sort of scientific hyper-text”. In some respects, Humboldt’s celebrated tableau is an ingenious development of something rather more commonplace in the literature of travel and exploration during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; that is, the combination of graphic representations with other kinds of data, including textual descriptions. As Michael Bravo (1999) has argued, the culture of precision associated with Humboldtian science was not confined to the use of refined instruments or numerical data: it was also reflected in approaches to evidence in the form of narratives, maps and visual images generally. For Humboldt, as for

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Figure 1. Alexander von Humboldt, “Géographie des plantes près de l’Equadeur”, 1803, ink and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia. many of his contemporaries, the sketch of nature’s forms made “on the spot” was thus a vital source of knowledge. In the hands of a skilled draughtsman, it promised something more authentic than received wisdom. If more synoptic and philosophical visions demanded other sorts of skill available only to the savant in his library, they nonetheless depended ultimately on the accurate rendering of the view in the field. In the remainder of this paper, I shall consider the making of such views by the hands of two exemplary figures, both of whom travelled extensively within the tropical world in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. These vignettes are drawn from my current research with Luciana Martins on the image-making of naturalists and navigators during this period (Driver & Martins, 2002; Martins & Driver, 2005).

Natural history: Burchell and his specimens In 1826, having travelled for 14 months in Brazil, William Burchell (1782-1863) wrote to a

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fellow naturalist about the “botanical riches” of tropical nature. Its luxuriance defied even his expectations as an experienced traveller – so much so, indeed, that he was tempted to turn “from Natural History to Painting”.2 The sentiment was entirely proper for a Humboldtian; and in Burchell’s case, it was no mere flight of fancy. His education had included classes in landscape drawing with Merigot, a French émigré in London, and by the time of his journey to Brazil he was already an accomplished artist. During a period of 15 years spent working as a naturalist in St. Helena, Southern Africa and Brazil, Burchell used his considerable skills as a draughtsman, in tandem with his scientific expertise, to document the features of landscapes, peoples, flora and fauna. He also collected a large number of botanical, zoological and geological specimens, which were packed up for transport back to England. If Burchell can be treated as an exemplary figure, it is because his work so clearly

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Imagining the Tropics illustrates the connections between new paradigms of natural history, cultures of collecting and the graphic depiction of specimens. Consider for a moment how the naturalist’s knowledge actually travels. How was information about distant places to be gathered? What forms should observation take? By what means was it made available to metropolitan science? How could its credibility be assured? One of the prime ways in which the knowledge of travelling naturalists could be trusted, according to the rhetoric of Banksian natural history, was through the precise recording of information in a manner laid down by metropolitan scientific institutions: most commonly, through the use of appropriate instruments, techniques of observation, collection and inscription (Driver, 2001). Hence the proliferation of instruction manuals for botanical and zoological collectors emphasising the importance of recording perishable data in words and sketches made “on the spot”. In her study of early nineteenthcentury British zoology, Anne Larsen (1993) distinguishes between two categories of such data: that relating to the form of a living being, such as colour, shape, and habits, and that concerning its context, that is, where it was located and the characteristics of its natural habitat. As she contends, the detailed examination of landscapes was one of the most fundamental aspects of natural history; instruction manuals usually taught their readers how to see, gather and record objects that conveyed a sense of an area’s particular natural features and characteristics” (Larsen, 1993:198). To put instructions into practice, however, was not so simple. Apart from an abundance of time – for collecting and drawing are both timeconsuming activities – sketching also required well-trained hands and eyes. What we witness from the mid-eighteenth century, then, is the refinement of a whole methodology of field observation, designed

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to ensure that reliable and unvarnished information could be collected, stored and eventually transmitted back to the centre. Such a model of observation is securely represented in Burchell’s portrait of his wagon, in which he travelled across southern Africa in 1810-15 (Figure 2). Though Burchell’s African journey was not quite tropical in the cartographic sense, I have argued elsewhere that this small watercolour sketch does faithfully represent key aspects of the practice of Humboldtian natural history (Driver, 2001:17-19). Most obviously, it is crammed with instruments of all kinds – compass, telescope, thermometer, weighing scales, maps, specimen cases, plant press and pistols – as well as botanical and zoological specimens, ethnographic portraits, flag, hammock and flute. And of course plentiful drawing materials. The first volume of Burchell’s (1822:108-11, 118-20) Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa includes a painstaking description of the design of the vehicle, which was adapted from the standard Cape ox-wagon. The wagon effectively functioned both as a mobile laboratory and as an instrument itself, the rotations of its wheels providing a means of calculating the distances travelled. In fact, Burchell regarded his mobile home as the most perfectly designed of any of his instruments, and this is presumably why he painstakingly composed this intimate portrait.3 On the one hand, the wagon was literally a vehicle for the pursuit of metropolitan science; on the other hand, its disarticulated construction was also well adapted to the uneven terrain. Global functions, as it were, calibrated to local conditions. Burchell’s commitment to accuracy in recording information in graphic, textual and numerical form is striking. Typically, he made a precise record of the time it took to complete the watercolour sketch of his wagon (120 hours), just as he did when arranging and labelling his botanical and zoological specimens (Poulton, 1907:40). Burchell’s abilities as a draughtsman are just as evident in his depictions of the forms of tropical nature within his St Helena sketchbook. Amongst

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Figure 2. William J. Burchell, “Inside of my African Waggon”, 1820, watercolour. Courtesy of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, United Kingdom (UK).

Figure 3. William J. Burchell, “A group of plantains from nature”, St Helena, 20 February, 1807. Courtesy of the Royal Botanic Gardens Archives, Kew, UK.

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Imagining the Tropics numerous profiles of the island drawn from the sea, there are several landscapes and detailed drawings of natural history specimens. One of these deserves attention in the present context (Figure 3). This is a small but remarkable sketch entitled “A Group of Plantains from Nature”, dated 20 February 1807. Upon this drawing are drops of the plantain’s own juice which have fallen on the page, whether by accident or design. As Luciana Martins and I have argued, these drops are themselves used as a sort of evidence – “not blood but drops of Plantain juice”, writes Burchell in pencil on his sketch. In this way, the visual image becomes something more than mere representation: stained red by the specimen itself, the very scrap of paper itself acquires scientific value. No longer just an “illustration”, Burchell’s sketch provides confirmation by proxy of the authentic presence of the observer in the field, thereby affirming his credibility as a faithful witness (Martins & Driver, 2005). As with many travelling naturalists, Burchell’s vision of the tropical world was activated by the drive to collect and to label, to preserve what could be seen on the spot in order to transmit knowledge at a distance. In his case too, drawing and sketching came to play a key role in the accurate rendering of the forms of nature as well as human landscapes. (Burchell, like Humboldt in fact, was keenly interested in panoramas, and executed a large panoramic view of Rio de Janeiro during his stay in the city; see Martins, 2001.) He regarded his sketches of natural forms, landscapes as well as botanical specimens, as more than accurate representations: they also constituted material evidence in themselves, specimens by proxy. In describing Burchell as exemplary, however, I also mean to draw attention to his failures as well as his achievements: in particular, to his inability to master his vast collections. His mania for collecting was extraordinary, and he spent much of the last 35 years of his life trying to comprehend the results: for example, it took him three years to unpack and rearrange the 49,000 botanical

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specimens gathered in his five-year journey through Brazil, and he spent four more years relabelling them (Poulton, 1907:54). In later life, Burchell complained constantly of lack of space and time, his frustrations at what he perceived as a lack of official support, and the sheer scale of the task he had set himself. In contrast to his work in South Africa, he failed to publish anything of his travels in tropical Brazil.

Navigation: Roe and his logbooks For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the art of navigation, no less than that of natural history, depended on the ability to compose and to recognise an accurate sketch from nature. The visual archive of tropical travel is heavily stocked with charts, sketches and more finished landscapes produced by naval officers and midshipmen. The history represented in this archive is perhaps less heroic and more mundane than that of the more philosophical naturalists in search of new worlds, or even the travelling artists seeking their fortunes from the making of exotic views: the Navy is not, after all, the place where you would expect to find visionaries. And yet perhaps this story deserves more attention from historians of geography, especially given the role of naval officers and Admiralty officials in the foundation of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 (Driver, 2001:24-48). In the early nineteenth century, in contrast with later periods, servicemen were at the forefront of earth science in a number of respects: indeed, they were active in some of the most avantgarde scientific programmes of the period, from astronomy to terrestrial magnetism. As in the discussion of natural history, my concern in this second vignette is with the epistemology and aesthetics of sketching. The ability to render accurately the dimensions, detail and colour of coastal scenery was a vital element in the art of navigation and charting. To recognise and to reproduce coastlines was an essential aspect of the surveyor’s task, providing a record of the ship’s voyage and

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Figure 4. John Septimus Roe, Views of the Sugar Loaf, Rio de Janeiro, June 1817, from the logbook of the transport Dick. Courtesy of the State Library of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

Figure 5. John Septimus Roe, Views of the coastline between Cabo Frio and Rio de Janeiro, May 1817. Courtesy of the State Library of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

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Imagining the Tropics enabling others to follow in its tracks. The coastal view was thus an integral component of maritime charts and logbooks, part of a common visual code rendering the maritime world intelligible to navigators (Martins, 1999). Consider, for example, the images in Figures 4 and 5, drawn from a logbook kept by midshipman John Septimus Roe (1797-1878) on a voyage from England to New South Wales in 1817 (Driver & Martins, 2002:145, 156). They depict the topography of the Sugar Loaf and adjacent features at Rio de Janeiro, a common port of call for British ships bound for South Africa, India, China and Australia during this period. In some respects, these images represent a way of seeing the tropical world from the point of view of the British coastal surveyor, part of a much wider network, coordinated from the Admiralty, through which the maritime empire, whether formal or informal, was secured. More particularly, these images reflect Roe’s training (as a would-be midshipman) in the arts of drawing and mapping at Christ’s Hospital (London), and the subsequent development of his technique at sea. The logbook itself, of course, had a key role to play in both the practice of navigation and the politics of naval discipline. Its page layout in a sense mirrored the strict spatial organisation of the ship: every little bit of information had its proper place, the entries designed to make optimum use of the available space. But these images also had other functions. They could also express more personal aspirations, in so far as drawing – like writing – could provide a means of self-advancement. Several of Roe’s logbooks, which today are held in the State Library of Western Australia (Perth), are immaculately produced, including ornate frontispieces clearly designed to impress his superiors and his relatives (Driver & Martins, 2002:152). From his letters home to his family, which also survive, it is clear that the logbooks and charts provided an opportunity to develop his skills as a draughtsman, in a context of intense competition for naval posts in the post-1815 era. From 1817, Roe worked under the

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supervision of Phillip Parker King, who had been given the task of undertaking a coastal survey of tropical Australia. The Admiralty had specifically instructed him to supervise Roe’s drawing and colour-washing on the journey out (Hordern, 1997:24-26). The physical labour of drawing, mapping and sketching is painfully visible in Roe’s correspondence. Indeed, throughout his early naval career, he never ceased to lament the effect of constant observation, sketching and drawing on his overworked eyes. In December 1818, writing from Port Jackson, he complained: My sight has been so much impaired by constantly looking out, since my being employed in this service, that I now find it difficult to distinguish objects plainly without the aid of a glass.4 It seems that, together with his books and drawing instruments, Roe’s most precious possession was the eye-water made up to his mother’s recipe. What he called the “heat and glare” of tropical climes,5 as well as the countless hours spent confined in candle-lit cabins preparing his charts, would strain even the most imperial eye. Roe’s sketches, then, served a number of purposes. Seen from the perspective of the Admiralty in London, they provided more or less reliable descriptions of the shape of coastlines, within and beyond the tropics. Seen from on board ship, they appear not only as laborious experiments in a way of seeing, but also as the far from certain means of an attempt to secure a place in the world. In comparison with Burchell, John Septimus Roe began his career a lowly figure, without a private income to support his ventures in science and survey; but he did eventually secure a position for himself as a colonial surveyor in Western Australia. Years later, in his letter of retirement (cited in Jackson, 1982:166), Roe impassively recorded the physical effects of his labours on behalf of

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the imperial state, in a manner which speaks volumes for the ways in which such service was performed: whilst actively employed in the Public service the sight in one eye has been completely destroyed, that of the other eye very much damaged, the head has twice been severely injured, as also the left hand, and incurable hernia has been contracted whilst forcing [sic] almost impenetrable country. Roe was no doubt seeking further reward for services rendered; but his letter also reminds us that there was nothing disembodied about the work of colonial survey (Carter, 1987; Driver & Martins, 2002).

REFLECTIONS ON THE VISUAL What can we make of these stories of imagemaking in the tropics? My aim here has been to investigate the ways in which images may be crafted as tools of knowledge, ways of apprehending the world – in this case, the tropical world. There is a wider point too. In treating the subject of visual images and their role in the production of geographical knowledge, we do not have to choose between representation and practice or performance, as some recent claims for “non-representational” theory tend to suggest. Here we have been concerned with a specific practice of image-making, namely the art of drawing, and its application in the production and circulation of bodies of knowledge like natural history and navigation. In these contexts, image-making was clearly a highly regulated affair involving the deployment of certain conventions and skills, as well as being embodied and performed in various ways. The visual images considered in this paper have been images of a particular kind: often, they are sketches made from nature. As Martin Rudwick (2000) has recently argued in a notable essay on Georges Cuvier’s (1769-1832) “paper museum” of fossil bones in the Paris

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Museum of Natural History, this sort of sketch may be understood as a kind of proxy specimen, the embodiment of evidence seen and recorded in the field, destined in principle to be brought back and fitted into a wider archive of knowledge. This at least was the epistemology of drawing as it was described in contemporary manuals of natural history and navigation: observation meant inscription and depiction “on the spot”, trusting nothing to memory. In practice, of course, these images cannot simply be regarded as unvarnished originals, snapshots of the scenes they were supposed to witness. Roe’s sketches, for example, were composed according to conventional rules: but they were worked and reworked, ultimately serving as crucial resources for his own selffashioning. Burchell’s drawings were similarly intended to be fitted within a system, partly of his own making, and they too were worked and reworked. Such images were certainly mobile, but as Rudwick (2000) also shows they were not immutable, even in this form. Today, in fact, these images continue to have a life of their own, though they are likely to be valued more highly in the auction room than in the laboratory. There is a more specific point here about the status of the finished image, notably in the context of landscape art. Oil paintings of tropical landscape by artists such as Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-58) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), inspired by Humboldt’s sublime vision, had a major impact in Europe and North America during the nineteenth century (Manthorne, 1989; Diener & Costa, 2002). The iconography of tropicality relied on the recognition of typical or emblematic landscape forms, so that certain visions could transcend the particularities of the view and stand in for aspects of tropical nature as a whole, most notably of course the “tropical forest” scene. There is room here for further research on the geographies at work in this process of circulation of ideas and images, as well as people, plants and resources, through the inter-tropical zone. Writing about India’s place in the tropical world, for example, David

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Figure 6. Charles William Browne, “Sugar Loaf and Cockovado [sic] from the sea”, c.1818. Courtesy of the Geyer collection, Museu Imperial, Petrópolis, Brazil. Arnold (1998:6-9) has noted what he calls “an important piece of intra-tropical semantic exchange”: while the term “hurricane” travelled from the Caribbean to the East Indies, the word “jungle”, which originated as a Sanskrit term meaning waste or uncultivated ground, came to signify dense, damp forests throughout the tropical world.6 Such exchanges have their visual equivalents: thus, the tropical forests of the Americas, as described by Humboldt, were imaginatively transported to the old world by European travellers. Alternatively, the scenery of the Orient could be mapped onto the topography of Rio de Janeiro, as in the case of Figure 6, a pencil drawing by another midshipman (discussed in Martins, 1999). This delicate sketch, which bears the traces of the experience of travelling across the globe in the early nineteenth century, provides yet another instance of that history of “exchanges of worlds” described by Lucien Febvre in 1948.

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EMPIRE AND DISTURBANCE Nicholas Thomas has recently questioned the emphasis place on imperial designs in much work on the history of cultural encounters. “It has become increasingly evident”, Thomas (1999:2-3) argues, that the present range of approaches exaggerates and reinscribes precisely those western hegemonies they wishfully challenge… The tendency is to insist upon the will to dominate in imperial culture, science, and vision, without investigating the ways in which the apparatuses of colonialism and modernity have been compromised locally. The argument here is not of course that empire is unimportant, but rather that its effects were not always predictable or

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contained. In this spirit, I have been particularly concerned in my work to explore the ways in which images of tropical nature may reflect, or translate, the experience of travel, its disappointments as well as its successes (further developed in Driver, 2004). We have heard much in recent writing about the sheer ambition of the naturalists, navigators and explorers who sought to make the world an orderly place in the name of enlightenment during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Stafford, 1989; Miller & Reill, 1996; Edney, 1997; Drayton, 2000). These world-makers imagined the creation of vast archives of texts, images, artefacts and specimens, patiently assembled, through which the geography of the earth could be made known. They created great empires of learning, presided over in Britain by such influential figures as the naturalist Joseph Banks, the geographer-geologist Roderick Murchison and the botanist Joseph Hooker, whose networks extended the reach of power and knowledge across every continent and every sea. Theirs was a suitably imperial vision, of order, system and progress, in which the scientific traveller’s role was to fill in the blanks: the keepers of the imperial archive would do the rest. If we look more closely at the archive of tropical travel, however, it is clear that such projects raised as many questions as they answered. How was the experience of travelling itself to be put into words and images? To what extent did the encounter with difference, in nature and culture, undermine or affirm existing conventions? Such questions as these were addressed long ago in Bernard Smith’s (1985) seminal work on the impact of the Pacific voyages on the development of European scientific theories and landscape art, first published in 1960. If European Vision and the South Pacific remains an inspiration today, it is partly because of its concerns with the epistemological status of image-making – in what ways, precisely, can seeing be the

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equivalent of knowing? – and partly because in its treatment of the history of voyaging, the space of experience is left open.7 The archive of tropical travel yields evidence of something more fragile and unpredictable alongside imperial ambition and planetary consciousness: in a word, disturbance. Jonathan Lamb (2001:7), referring to eighteenth-century voyages of discovery, puts the case well: The commanders of these expeditions may have been committed to large and comprehensive views, and believed devoutly in systems of classification and cadastral measurement; but their data proved intractable, their experiments prone to failure, and they became periodically distracted, behaving unlike themselves owing to the stress of isolation, disease, fear – and occasionally exquisite pleasure. The more we look for it, indeed, the more the evidence multiplies, and continues to multiply, well beyond the late eighteenth century. We can see the signs in the more humble experiences of both Roe and Burchell, even though they struggled hard to insure themselves against the disturbing effects of tropical travel. While the imperial eye sees the history of knowledge-making in terms of the establishment of a more or less coherent system or network, there are other stories, in which knowledge is anything but settled. In attempting to trace the outlines of these other stories, it is sometimes better to begin with a sketch than a vision.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper forms part of an ongoing research project with Luciana Martins on the theme of tropical views and visions. I am indebted to her for allowing me to draw on some of our joint work here. The project was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) of the United Kingdom.

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ENDNOTES On related issues in the practices of travelling artists, see Greppi (2005) and Martins (2004). 1

Burchell to [Richard] Salisbury, letter, 11 August 1826, Linnean Society Archives, London, UK. 2

3 Of course, the space of the wagon was actually far from self-sufficient: throughout his travels, Burchell relied on the labours of his servants, the cooperation of local inhabitants, and last but not least the health of his oxen (Driver, 2001:19).

John S. Roe to J. Roe, letter, 7 December 1818, J.S. Roe Papers, State Library of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. 4

John S. Roe to J. Roe, letter, 29 January 1821, J.S. Roe Papers, State Library of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. 5

6 On later readings of “jungle”, see Birtles (1997) and Sioh (1998).

7 There have been many attempts to rework these themes in the light of postcolonial concerns; see especially Thomas and Losche (1999).

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