TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Views and Visions of the Tropical World - Felix Driver, Luciana Martins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0001
[tropics, empire, sketch, maps, painting, photography, topographic]
This book brings together contributors from various disciplinary backgrounds—principally, art history, cultural geography, literature, imperial history, and the history of science—to consider the visualization of the tropical world. This book is especially concerned with the ways in which “the tropics” have been represented as something to be seen—a view to be had or a vision to be experienced. In the book, spaces of the tropics have been imagined in a wide variety of ways, within diverse forms of writing, sketching, mapping, charting, panoramas, painting, and photography. In very general terms, the words “view” and “vision” are used here to capture two contrasting modalities through which the tropics have been pictured. The view emerged in the context of a topographical aesthetic in which landscapes are depicted at a distance, their surface features translated into a recognizable visual code. In this very general sense, the term belongs equally to landscape sketching, coastal survey, and terrestrial mapping; it is part of a topographic culture in which the world is apprehended from afar. (pages 3 - 20)
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Voyages
“On the Spot”: Traveling Artists and the Iconographic Inventory of the World, 1769–1859 - Claudio Greppi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0002
[traveling artist, voyage, tropics, landscape art, naval surveyor]
This chapter deals with the work of a succession of traveling artists, from William Hodges, who accompanied James Cook on his second voyage and subsequently worked in India, to Thomas Ender, who traveled extensively in South America. This body of work had a significant impact on European visions of the tropics, mediated as it was through the figure of Alexander von Humboldt, who was inspired by Hodges's representations of tropical nature. Humboldt's keen reflections on landscape painting and the aesthetics of landscape observation were in turn appropriated by a new generation of traveling artists, just as his observations on tropical landscape inspired naturalists such as Charles Darwin. The result was a way of seeing, and knowing, in which the tradition of landscape art was fused with a new spirit of observation informed by the experience of voyaging around the world in the company of naval surveyors, meteorologists, and astronomers. This emergent epistemology of landscape is also evident in contemporary views and visions of European landscape itself. (pages 23 - 42)
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The Stimulations of Travel: Humboldt's Physiological Construction of the Tropics - Michael Dettelbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0003
[travel, tropics, physiology, philosopher, nature]
This chapter discusses Humboldt's preoccupations with tropical travel that is connected here to a late Enlightenment culture of sensibility. Humboldt—and those who followed in his footsteps, many quite literally—saw the tropics as a site for enacting a new model of the self, which visions of tropical nature helped to sustain. Humboldt's account of the American tropics is pervaded by physiology, especially a close attention to his own physiological and aesthetic responses to outside stimuli—a trait shared with many diarists and letter writers of the late eighteenth century. This physiological scaffolding was put in place in the decade before he left for America, as an experimental philosopher and Prussian official. This chapter examines the function of one's own physiology through several examples. It suggests that attending to the effects of the tropics on one's own physiology (including aesthetic effects) was critical to establishing one's authority as a philosophical traveler. The tropics exemplified the rule of nature for Humboldt; they could only perform this function in relation to other, quite different sites for fashioning self and nature: the laboratories and mines of Europe. (pages 43 - 58)
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“The Struggle for Luxuriance”: William Burchell Collects Tropical Nature - Luciana Martins, Felix Driver
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0004
[tropical landscape, naturalist, resources, independent traveler]
This chapter focuses on Burchell's attempt to capture the pattern of a tropical nature—not only in his collections of natural objects such as plants and animals but also in his creation of proxy specimens in the form of precise calibrated drawings. For Burchell, as for Humboldt, the art of visual representation—the depiction of nature's forms—was a vital tool of scientific description. The chapter is concerned with the practices of naturalists and collectors in the field on particular sites. The focus here is on the ways in which images of tropical nature may reflect or translate the experience of collecting and its disappointments as well as its successes. It is based on the account of William Burchell's travels in Brazil and his graphic depictions of the forms of tropical nature. While ostensibly a more independent traveler with access to a variety of resources to sustain him in the course of his journeys as well as on his return, Burchell too was far from in control of his own collections. The focus in this chapter is especially on Burchell's cultivation of a new sensibility, that of the philosophical naturalist, specifically through the art of drawing. For Burchell, as for Humboldt, the art of visual representation—especially the depiction of landscape—was a vital tool of scientific description. (pages 59 - 74)
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Mappings
Dominica and Tahiti: Tropical Islands Compared - Peter Hulme
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0005
[landscapes, tropical island, outsiders, tropicality, Dominica, Tahiti]
This chapter discusses how the space of the tropics was constructed as a space of comparison and circulation, using the examples of two very different islands: Dominica and Tahiti. This chapter compares the ways in which the peoples and landscapes of Dominica and Tahiti have been described by outsiders. As tropical islands, Dominica and Tahiti have some general similarities: they are roughly the same size, both are mountainous, they have roughly the same population, and Dominica is about the same distance north of the equator as Tahiti is south. However, the histories of Dominica and Tahiti are different in so many respects that the challenge is to find more meaningful ways of bringing them together, ways that might illuminate the nature of “tropical visions.” In trying to bring the islands together, particular attention is given to the ways in which they have been brought together over the past two and half centuries, the ways in which frames of reference have been created in which Tahiti and Dominica both have a particular place, and often a special place—the principal frame being that of the imaginative construction we have come to think of as tropicality. (pages 77 - 90)
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Imagining the Tropical Colony: Henry Smeathman and the Termites of Sierra Leone - Starr Douglas, Felix Driver
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0006
[tropical, colony, termites, entomologists, Henry Smeathman]
This chapter discusses Smeathman's writings on termite colonies. It examines the visual mapping of tropical nature through the work of naturalist Henry Smeathman. In the course of his travels in Sierra Leone and the Caribbean during the 1770s, Smeathman effectively followed the route of the triangular trade, using this experience to draw parallels and contrasts between tropical nature in both its “rude” and its “cultivated” state. Smeathman's spectacular sketches of termite colonies provided a different kind of mapping of tropical nature, resulting in a composite image of landscape simultaneously picturesque, topographic, and analytical in form. His paper in Philosophical Transactions was accompanied by a series of striking illustrations, including a spectacular sketch of the habitations of the Termes bellicosus that has attained something of an iconic status among entomologists. The story of these images, their own natural history as it were, provides a particular focus for this chapter. These images constituted particular ways of constructing tropical nature. Their combination in a single composite image rendered tropical landscape in simultaneously picturesque, topographic, and analytical terms. This fusion of modes of depiction usually considered distinct, if not contradictory, raises more general questions not only about composition and genre but also about the visual cultures of natural history. (pages 91 - 112)
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Matthew Fontaine Maury's “Sea of Fire”: Hydrography, Biogeography, and Providence in the Tropics - D. Graham Burnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0007
[hydrographic mapping, tropical, science, oceanography, Matthew Fontaine Maury]
This chapter discusses the hydrographic mapping of Matthew Fontaine Maury. The significance of his mapping methods was important for the development of oceanography and for his particular conception of tropicality. It lay firmly in the tradition of natural theology. But far from being an obstacle, this provided a congenial frame for his Humboldtian vision of science. The chapter also discusses Maury understanding of the earth's tropical zones. Maury's natural theological vision of the sea is not a blind ally in the history of oceanography but a legitimate, significant, and even, potentially, a constitutive episode in the history of the sciences of the sea. Maury not only extended a metrical, collative natural theological framework to the dark spaces of the sea, he also extended a system of enlightening scientific observation to sailors, a notoriously benighted population. (pages 113 - 134)
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Sites
Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848–1850 - David Arnold
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0008
[tropics, naturalist, landscape, literary, flora, aesthetic, scientific]
This chapter discusses Joseph Hooker's journey to India in 1848 and the extent to which it was initially inspired and subsequently described in terms of a conventional repertoire of tropical views. Hooker's prior apprenticeship as a naturalist and, especially, his experience of life at sea were instrumental in shaping his vision of the Indian landscape. His expectations of tropical scenery had a variety of literary and scientific sources, though his actual experience of travel through India often resulted in expressions of disappointment. The Himalayan foothills, with their combination of tropical and temperate flora, brought forth a variety of more Humboldtian associations. For Hooker, tropicality was something to be written about as much as measured or mapped, and his Himalayan Journals, reflected the aesthetic as well as the scientific impulses within Victorian natural history. (pages 137 - 155)
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Eyeing Samoa: People, Places, and Spaces in Photographs of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries - Leonard Bell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0009
[Samao, images, tropical, late nineteenth century, early twentieth century]
This chapter examines a number of images produced locally within a commercial studio in Samoa, which tend to disrupt our expectations of stereotypical tropical scenes and portraits. These photographs suggest more complex and nuanced viewings of Samoa during the 1890s, drawing attention to the fractured, unstable quality of the sites and spaces of the colony. These photographs, too, can be seen to constitute a kind of borderland, in which relationships cannot be marked out with certainty but are characterized, rather, by a shifting quality. In this context, tropicality emerges as a complex of intersecting phenomena and conditions, attitudes and experiences. The tropical, or what was frequently so regarded, was certainly not natural, nor was it simply constituted by that set of opposing and limiting stereotypifications, as has commonly been asserted. (pages 156 - 174)
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Returning Fears: Tropical Disease and the Metropolis - Rod Edmond
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0010
[tropical disease, metropolis, leprosy, medicine, temperate zone]
This chapter emphasis on the complex and entangled geographies of so-called tropical diseases during the period under discussion in this book, on both the global and the metropolitan scales. The new science of tropical medicine is understood as a fraught project, seeking to protect European people and European space from the degenerative effects of tropicality, both within the tropics and within the temperate zone. Leprosy is treated here as the exemplary disease of tropicality not because it is in any way limited to the tropics but precisely because of its uncomfortable positioning within the discourse of “tropical medicine” that was designed to contain it. The focus in this chapter is on disease and degeneration, with leprosy providing the particular example. The underlying argument will be the impossibility of understanding what was meant by the tropics at this time without also taking account of the national self-constructions of the period. (pages 175 - 194)
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Afterword
Tropic and Tropicality - Denis Cosgrove
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.003.0011
[tropic, tropicality, equator, voyages, mappings, sites]
The chapters in this book variously parse the discursive usages of “tropicality” as the concept evolved during the period of most intense European penetration into the geographic spaces and human worlds that bestride the equator. The term “visions” implies and as various chapters here testify, that Europeans did not arrive in tropical latitudes free from presumptions or anticipations about these regions of the globe. The framework of “Voyages,” “Mappings,” and “Sites” suggests a complex interplay of representation and experience within which encounter with actual places and peoples was mediated through the long premodern history of “Western” ideas and images about how the world between Cancer and Capricorn might be. Negotiation of meanings has been continuous between tropical imaginings and the sensuous, embodied experiences and subsequent representations of visionaries and voyagers, merchants and missionaries, conquerors and colonists. (pages 197 - 216)
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Notes
Select Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
