Reasons For Travel And Its Documentation

Peter Hulme while implying the significance of travel in writing says travel and movement are so fundamental to literary writing in general, “That there is almost no statuesque literature”. Travel and writing are closely connected because every traveler to an unfamiliar land wants to leave his traces behind and they usually do this by writing about it. Why do people travel? What is the relationship between the experience and the writing of the journey? How much of the traveler’s tale is truth, and how much is fiction? These questions lie at the heart of travel scholarship. The vast body of work constituting “travel literature” ranges from the time of Herodotus to the present. Its genres include tales of exploration, ships’ logs, private journals and letters, magazine articles, and a sizeable body of fanciful tales produced by those whom Percy Adams called “travel liars.” The motives for travel change, the writing styles differ, and the interpretation of the text can vary, but readers sense that, as travelers write about their experiences, they capture more than descriptions of place: they reveal something of their time, place, personality, circumstances, and prejudices. As in the words of Michel Butor, “to leave a trace of our passing is to belong to a spot, to become ourselves a Roman, Athenian, Cairote; therefore, we do it not only to return home with the light of these place-ideograms within us, but also to make our very existence a hopefully indelible ‘stroke’ on a visited spot.”

He further opines that, “I have always felt the intense bond that exists between my travels and my writing; I travel in order to write — not only to find subject matter, topics or events, . . . –but because to travel, at least in a certain manner, is to write (first of all because to travel is to read), and to write is to travel. This act of documenting gives the authority over land much prior to the conqueror because the explorer seizes naming the place taught to him by native instructor, with his language the land he crosses. Butor explains this process thus, “Where the textual fabric of the new land is already quite dense, the explorer will bring home the names taught him by native instructors, but even more often, he, the new Adam, will untiringly name each identifiable site; so, world maps will become covered with names. . . . Even before the conqueror, the explorer seizes with his language the land he crosses.”

William H. Sherman, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing is of the opinion that: “Documentation had always played an important role in travel and that it is a conscious effort taken by the writer meticulously. Inspiration serves as an important factor for the documentation of most of the travel narratives. Inspiration behind writing a travel narrative may differ according to the writer. This inspiration can be political, economic gains or appraisal in social status or popularity or the traveler’s personal interest in gaining knowledge and providing that information to others who doesn’t have a chance to visit those places and experience the life there. Traveling and its narration either in oral or written form has existed since the dawn of history. There are instances of reflections of travel experiences in oral traditions, such as Icelandic sagas recounting Norse voyages to Greenland and North America, orally transmitted accounts of Sundiata, the 13th -century founder of the Mali empire, and the numerous oral traditions of Polynesians and other Pacific islanders who recalled their migrations and other overseas ventures in stories passed down from one generation to another.

Records of travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and fragmentary travel accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in ancient times. After the formation of large, imperial states in the classical world, travel accounts emerged as a prominent literary genre in many lands, and they held especially strong appeal for rulers desiring useful knowledge about their realms. Some travelers who possessed a sense of alertness and a methodical mind often recorded their traveling experiences and facts as they appeared to them and these records are collectively termed as travel writing.

The very theme of travel, of the protagonist being but a traveler on this earth, has been, from Homer’s Odyssey onward, one of the most laden with magical, and symbolical, associations in literature, his episodic adventures offer a blueprint for the romance, indirection, and danger of travel as well as the joy and danger of homecoming. According to Gilles le Bouvier, the reason we travel and write is “Because many people of diverse nations and countries delight and take pleasure, as I have done in times past, in seeing the world and things therein, and also because many wish to know without going there, and others wish to see, go, and travel, I have begun this little book”. Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature defines traveling and documenting about it as such:

Travelling is an endeavor in which the writer moves through a selected region, giving information and commentaries about the place that he/she visits. The amount of writers reporting about the food they tasted in foreign destinations, books with history lessons about certain places and personal narratives about a person’s excitement and struggles of navigating through unknown territories and meeting foreign people are endless. The traveler can be an adventurer or a connoisseur of art, landscape, or strange customs who may also have been a writer of merit. Travel writings are the first literary production of mankind. The Epic of Gilgamesh by Sumerians and Homer’s The Odyssey deals with adventurous journeys of the two heroes, and their encounters with half-legendary and half real people in surroundings showing the proof of the travel writings being the first literary production of mankind. According to Claude Jenkins there is a close relationship between travel writing and "the instinct for travel" which he sees as "innate in some natures in all ages, perhaps in far more than we often realize". Francis Bacon writes about travel and documenting in his essay ‘Of Travel’ thus:

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be such a one that hath the language, and hath been in the country before; whereby he may be able to tell them what things are worthy to be seen in the country where they go, what acquaintances they are to seek, what exercises or discipline the place yieldeth; for else young men shall go hooded, and look abroad little. It is a strange thing, that in sea-voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation: let diaries, therefore, be brought in use.

Travelling and documenting about travel helps in the clearer understanding of humanity and answers many doubts that we have about our fellow beings across cultural, social, economic, political, and religious boundaries.

Human beings have travelled for many reasons more prominent among them for traveling and documenting from a particular perspective are empire, business, and mission. Mainly because they wanted to establish their rule through possessing knowledge about them or enable them to establish profitable trade and business relations, or because they sought understanding of foreign cultural and religious traditions in order to convert or cultivate them. These different aims were achieved not only through travel but by writing about travel. The topics that authors discuss in their travel narratives offer insights into their interests. Their perspectives and their motives play a very important part in achieving the above mentioned gains. However empire, business, and mission were present in the old times and also not the only reasons there have been personal, familial, and socio-cultural motives too which served as a motivation for visiting and understanding the world beyond. Today travel narratives have taken a whole new outlook and the motivations and interests have also reached all new areas. According to Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler, “Travel writing has made a new departure. A generation of writers who push the limits of the genre has emerged from the old adventure school. … Travel writers have become more literary and less literal. This fusion of biography, memoir and fiction – let’s call it New Travel Writing – is among the richest literature around’. In this new travel writing, what matters is ‘not what we see, but how we see’.