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Abstract
Scholars treating early American travel writing, like those working on literatures from other places and periods, have focused on the travel book to the exclusion of more widely read, if somewhat mundane, forms of travel writing, such as the brief, corporately authored accounts of travel found in every eighteenth-century colonial newspaper. Reading these banal sections of Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette foregrounds the creative roles of readers rather than the viewpoint of a singular narrator. The widespread consumption of periodicals suggests that colonists consumed travel writing primarily in newspapers, whose format and content cultivated the readerly authority theorised by Roland Barthes.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Studies in Travel Writing and especially Mary Fuller, whose flexibility, patience and insight made this essay possible; gratitude is also due to Kelly Wisecup and Jason Payton, who read and improved very early drafts, and to Tim Marr, whose encouragement always comes at just the right moment.
Notes
1. ‘The Sixteenth Ode of Horace's Second Book Imitated’, The Pennsylvania Gazette April 23, 1747, 1. Hereafter references to the 1747 Gazette will be noted parenthetically: (4/23, 1).
2. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1.
3. Anthony Payne, Richard Hakluyt and His Books (Norwich: The Hakluyt Society, 1997), 12.
4. Nathaniel Philbrick, ‘The Nantucket Sequence in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer’, The New England Quarterly 64.3 (1991): 414-15; for novelistic approaches to Crèvecoeur, see Grantland S. Rice, ‘Crèvecoeur and the Politics of Authorship in Republican America’, Early American Literature 28.2 (1993): 91-119 and Edward Larkin, ‘The Cosmopolitan Revolution: Loyalism and the Fiction of an American Nation’, Novel 40, nos. 1-2 (2006-2007): 52-76. For one recent approach to reading Crèvecoeur's Letters as a travel narrative, see John D. Cox, Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005).
5. Ed White, ‘Invisible Tagkanysough’, PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005): 752, 757.
6. Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
7. Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (New York: Twayne, 1997), xii; my emphasis.
8. As Julie Sievers argues, ‘the travel writer became “one of us,” a more (and mere) novelistic protagonist whose story was based on “personal experience and thought” and was valuable for precisely those qualities’. As the balance of this essay will deal with early American travel writing, I will illustrate the point by highlighting Philip Gould's representative survey of colonial North American travel texts, which confines itself to extended single-authored (novelistic) manuscripts, including William Penn's Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America (1681); Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682); Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal (1704–5); Ebenezer Cooke's The Sot-Weed Factor; or, a Voyage; William Byrd's A Progress to the Mines (1732), A Journey to the Land of Eden (1733), and Histories of the Dividing Line; Richard Lewis's ‘A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis, April 4, 1730’ (1732); Jonathan Edwards's An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend David Brainerd (1749); John Bartram's Observations (1751); Alexander Hamilton's Itinerarium; The Journal of Major George Washington (1754); Briton Hammon's Narrative (1760); William Smith's An Account of Bouquet's Expedition Against the Ohio Indians (1765); Robert Rogers's Concise Account of North America (1765); William Stork's An Account of East Florida (1766); The Journal of John Woolman (1774); Jonathan Carver's Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America (1778); and George Whitefield's Journals. Many of these texts, as Gould acknowledges, were excerpted or reprinted in newspapers. Colonists would have read these serialised monographs in conjunction with and in the context of the smaller snippets of travel writing that filled colonial newspapers. See Julie Sievers, ‘Drowned Pens and Shaking Hands: Sea Providence Narratives in Seventeenth-Century New England’, The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 765; and Philip Gould, ‘Beginnings: The Origins of American Travel Writing in the Pre-Revolutionary Period’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13-25.
9. As Susan Imbarrato notes, the eighteenth-century ‘travel narrative does not aim to espouse a particular message, but offers a collection of entries that in the end describe a journey, and that may or may not convey a coherent, overall meaning’. See Susan Clair Imbarrato, Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 24.
10. Payne makes this point with respect to Cook's Journals, which modern scholars prefer to the fractured or anthologised accounts of his voyage that were published in the eighteenth century and consumed by contemporary readers. Scholars interested in colonial North American travel have given Sarah Kemble Knight's diary narrating a 1704 trip from Boston to New York and William Byrd's 1728 histories of the dividing line survey between Virginia and North Carolina more critical attention than any other eighteenth-century American travel narratives written before the American Revolution, but neither of these texts was even published until the nineteenth century. In other words, a preference for the travel book (and, more particularly, the unpublished travel manuscript) has led scholars to focus their investigations on atypical manuscripts rarely read by the author's contemporaries rather than widely circulated accounts of travel such as those contained in eighteenth-century newspapers.
11. Judith Hamera and Alfred Bendixen, ‘Introduction: New Worlds and Old Lands’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, ed. Bendixen and Hamera (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3.
12. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 18.
13. Neither the year of publication nor the identity of the paper's publisher, Benjamin Franklin, is material to this study, although Franklin's fame is likely one important reason that copies of almost every issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette survive — a key consideration in my selection of this year and publication as a case study. My interest is in establishing a corpus that captures the reading experience of an average subscriber, allowing me to reconstruct their experience of travel writing and travel reading during the course of a given year.
14. As just one example of the careful reading given to expository texts, I offer an anecdote from Franklin Parks related to the 1731 Pennsylvania Gazette: ‘[Benjamin Franklin] had, in a previous issue, published an ad for a ship departing for Barbados, which included an N.B. that stated, “No Sea Hens nor Black Gowns will be admitted on any Terms”. The ad drew immediate fire from clergy who had no difficulty recognising themselves as the “Black Gowns” in the ad and considered the implied connection with “Sea Hens,” or prostitutes, as malicious and an attack on religion’. See A. Franklin Parks, William Parks: The Colonial Printer in the Transatlantic World of the Eighteenth Century (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 75.
15. As Barbara Korte explains, ‘Accounts of travel let us participate in acts of (inter)cultural perception and cultural construction [. . .]. These processes are undergone by the traveller on the journey and later as he or she writes the account; they are also, however, experienced by the reader as he or she is perusing the text’. See Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 5-6.
16. Barthes's views on travel writing as a genre are best gleaned from his Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). On that volume as a critique of travel writing's authorial emphasis, see Joanne P. Sharp, ‘Writing Travel/Travelling Writing: Roland Barthes Detours the Orient’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, no. 2 (2002): 155-66.
17. Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), xii.
18. Farley Grubb offers a helpful statistical breakdown of runaways advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette between 1728 and 1796. On average, the Gazette advertised 92 runaways per year: ‘There are a total of 6,157 escapes, i.e. 516 apprentices, 538 convicts, and 5,103 servants. Females comprise 526 of all escapes [. . .]. The ethnic distribution is 2,449 Irish, 1,004 English, 546 German, 297 American, 163 Scots, 107 Welsh, 28 French, 6 Spanish, 3 Portuguese, 3 Swedish, 2 Danish, 2 Italian, 2 Swiss, and 1,545 with undetermined ethnicity’. Grubb's data also includes a ‘geographic distribution of master towns, counties, and colonies from which these contract workers ran away’. Billy Smith and Richard Wojtowicz have collected similar data for 1,324 runaway slaves advertised in the Gazette between 1728 and 1790. See Farley Grubb, Runaway: Servants, Convicts, and Apprentices Advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1796 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, 1992), vii; Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 1-14.
19. Zweder von Martin, ‘Introduction’ to Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing, ed. Zweder von Martin (New York: E. J. Brill, 1994), xvi.
20. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Random House, 1991), 40-41.
21. John Law, ‘On the Subject of the Object: Narrative, Technology, and Interpellation’, Configurations 8, no. 1 (2000): 2. Identifying wives, slaves, servants, animals and objects as itinerants whose journeys equally authorise travel writing serves two functions. First, it acknowledges that a slave kidnapped in Africa possessed little more control over his or her final destination than a sack of sugar brought on board in Barbados; an absence or curtailment of agency does not invalidate the experience of travel or strip movement of interpretive significance. Although, as Markman Ellis acknowledges, ‘Slaves, like animals, were degraded to the status of things, considered as property, and as such, not human’ in the eighteenth century, no scholar would dare suggest that accounts of slavery ought to be treated as it-narratives like those revolving around the travels of sugar or a guinea; better, perhaps, to classify both types of text as travel writing, circulation narratives. Second, it makes present the semiology with which readers imbue things, drawing attention to the artificial — what Barthes would describe as the mythic — significance attached to objects. To break down this opposition between matter and meaning is to foreground the human narrative inhering to all matter as well as the inevitable materiality of meaning. See Markman Ellis, ‘Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility’, in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 95-6; Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). Substantial work beyond Ellis has been done on the treatment of slaves as animals; on the reciprocal identification of animals as slaves, see Ingrid H. Tague, ‘Companions, Servants, or Slaves? Considering Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 39, no. 1 (2010): 111-30.
22. Wall argues that ‘the unflagging market for descriptions of buildings and streets; the linking up of maps, journeys, and topographical description’ in travel writing ‘contribute over the eighteenth century to the gradual absorption of detailed description in literature, particularly in prose narrative (fiction, biography, historiography). They also underscore the increasing presence and awareness of things in the general culture’. See Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 42-3; more generally, see all of chapter two, ‘Traveling Spaces’, 41-69.
23. On the eighteenth-century travel of goods and people between Delaware and Philadelphia, see John A. Munroe, The Philadelawareans, and Other Essays Relating to Delaware (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 30-34.
24. Cathy Matson, ‘A Port in the Storm: Philadelphia's Commerce during the Atlantic Revolutionary Era’, in Revolution!: The Atlantic World Reborn, ed. Valerie Paley (New York: New York Historical Society, 2011), 68. As M. S. Anderson explains, by 1747, ‘Britain's command of the sea was now more effective than ever before during the war; and this meant that its ability to protect its own trade and destroy that of France was correspondingly increased’. In addition, ‘Spain's trade suffered severely [. . .]. Register-ships, those trading to the Spanish colonies, often the smaller markets there, under government license, were often captured by the British. One French calculation was that of 118 which sailed from Cadiz between May 1740 and June 1745, sixty-nine were taken’. Readers of the Pennsylvania Gazette might have known that they were destroying their adversaries' trade from occasional notices of rising insurance rates: ‘We are assured that the Premiums in Insurance on the French Ships . . . are risen from 25 to 45 Guineas, per Cent’ (9/3, 1). See M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748 (New York: Longman, 1995), 188-9.
25. David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 24.
26. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (London: Iohn Haviland, 1630), 137.
27. Mary C. Fuller, Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 37. The most horrific violence at sea recounted in the 1747 Gazette involved a group of Spanish sailors torturing an English captain after he had surrendered: ‘they shot poor Brown through the Belly and stabb'd him when on his Knees asking Quarter; and after . . . kick'd and struck poor Brown in a scandalous Manner’(8/27, 2). There were, of course, exceptions to this rule of foreign savagery; one seafarer recalled the gentility of French pirates: ‘They used us with great Civility, robbed us with the best Grace of any People in the World, and asked every Thing as if they were borrowing to return them the next Day’ (9/3, 1).
28. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content, 249.
29. Lisa Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial Newspapers: A Shifting Story (New York: Lexington Books, 2012), 103.
30. For a history of Whitefield's reception in the Virginia Gazette (the original source for this reprint in the Pennsylvania Gazette), see Parks, William Parks: The Colonial Printer in the Transatlantic World of the Eighteenth Century, 173-6; for a broader consideration of ministerial itinerancy and the meaning of ministerial travel, see Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). The 1747 Gazette also included meditations on the morality of purposeless travel, such as the warning that ‘This day I lost—so much Time (perhaps several Hours) in Sauntering’ (12/29, 1).
31. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content, 26.
32. Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 298.
33. Anderson explains that ‘the desire in Madrid to recover lost territories and prestige was sharpened by the ambitions in Italy of Elizabeth Farnese . . . [S]he quickly gained over her husband an ascendancy which lasted until his death in 1746 and which gave her for a generation or more real influence in the affairs of Europe’. See Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740-1748, 11.
34. For a summary of the battle and a description of Fort Massachusetts, see Robert B. Roberts, Encyclopedia of Historic Forts: The Military, Pioneer, and Trading Posts of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 405.
35. Payne, Richard Hakluyt and His Books, 16. Elaborating on the segmented structure of Principal Navigations, Payne suggests that ‘Hakluyt's readers may have perceived the Principal Navigations as a sort of gigantic commonplace-book, reflecting the ingrained tendency in the education of the time to emphasize the utility of texts, especially the utility of separable parts of a text, and to consider texts as collections of separate passages’ (10).
36. Charles E. Clark, ‘Periodicals and Politics’, A History of the Book in America: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Vol. 1, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 354-5, 361.
37. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4-5.
38. Sievers, ‘Drowned Pens and Shaking Hands: Sea Providence Narratives in Seventeenth-Century New England’, 748.
39. Viviès argues that the ‘travel account is indeed a “montage”. Situated as it is at the meeting point — or the point of contradiction — between sight and insight, between inventory and invention and between fragment and whole, it is characterized by its plasticity in terms of form’. See Jean Viviès, English Travel Narratives in the Eighteenth Century: Exploring Genres, trans. Claire Davison (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 107.