Routes & visions
The idea underpinning this research project is that travellers' knowledge
of places and regions is constructed imaginatively as well as experientially.
Naturalists, for example, composed a vision of tropical nature in order
to make sense of the landscapes through which they travelled. Navigators,
too, relied on graphic images (in the form of coastal profiles and charts)
in order to familiarise themselves with distant coastlines.
This project focusses principally on maritime routes and ports of call
for British travellers in Latin America, India, Australia and the Far
East. Images of tropical landscapes, as much as exotic species or commodities,
circulated around the globe.
Tropical nature
One particular focus of the research is the understanding of tropical
nature developed by travelling naturalists, including Charles Darwin,
Maria Graham and William Burchell, all of whom travelled in Brazil. We
investigate the ways in which their representations of tropical nature
negotiated the gap between their preconceptions of the tropics and the
bodily experience of travel through the field.
New ways of knowing the tropics were forged in the process of engagement
and encounter with tropical landscapes. The emerging vision of tropical
nature was a hybrid construction, composed from a variety of sites, settings,
memories and performances.
The visual archive
The imaginative response to the idea of the tropics took a variety of
forms, as is clear from the extensive visual archive of travel which survives.
The log-books, charts, views and sketches of maritime surveyors and ordinary
sailors provide key resources for this project. Such images may be interpreted
not simply as representations, but as material artefacts within the process
of producing knowledge about the tropics.
The research considers a range of such visual material, now scattered
in a variety of locations, including not only the National Maritime Museum
and the British Library in London, but also other archives around the
world, including Australia and Brazil.
Research agenda
The project has a number of objectives:
To identify and compare the ways in which images of a variety of tropical places were composed and interpreted.
 |
 |
||
 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
 |
|||