Scientific Exploration and the construction of Geographical knowledge: hints to travellers

Abstract

The business of scientific exploration during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved more than simply the routine collection of geographical facts; it required the mobilisation of a wide range of cultural resources, in both its conduct and its representation. It could also be profoundly unsettling, as much for the explorers as the explored. How to explore, how to observe in the field, and indeed the very status of the explorer’s knowledge, were matters of contention. As Dorinda Outram has argued, the practice of exploration raised troubling questions about the relationship between movement, seeing and knowing, not only questions of authority (how can the explorer be trusted?) but also questions of identity (will exploration change us?). The Royal Geographical Society, established in 1830, sought to acquire the status of a scientific society and also to provide a public forum for the celebration of a new age of exploration. These two roles were not easily reconciled. In this paper, I consider the history of Hints to Travellers, the Society’s celebrated guide for prospective explorers, in the context of a wider European discourse of instructions to travellers on how and what to observe. On my understanding, this particular text appears less as a coherent assertion of a geographical way of seeing than as an unstable attempt to resolve some fundamental dilemmas: how was observation to become reliable? What were the limits of ‘geographical’ knowledge? And, above all, what attitude should the scientific establishment have towards the untrained traveller? Hints to Travellers was an attempt to exert authority on a field that was already too large and diverse to be mastered. The history of the Society’s faltering attempts to discipline the growing public interest in aspects of exploration demonstrates, I argue, a fundamental ambivalence over the relationship between popular and specialist forms of geographical knowledge.