Travel Writing as Historiography: Philip Mason Sears's Unpublished Travel Writings

Many of the most important accounts of expeditions and exploratory travel, reach the historian through a tissue of woven narratives: in diaries, log books, memoirs and correspondence, these experiences fascinate and often challenge readers.While each individual account may be internally coherent and consistent, it is the synergy derived from the combination of these narratives, full, fragmentary, and positioned, that provides the historian with an understanding of the 'bigger picture' and the significance of the journey.But the genre is, as Clifford and others have argued extensively, complex, and such accounts can seldom be taken at face value. 1)A good example of how such narratives may be brought together in a rewarding synthesis is R.D. Keynes' The Beagle Record: Selections from the Original Pictorial Records and Written Accounts of the Voyage of HMS Beagle (1979), which draws together the various accounts of this landmark journey, written by the principal participants Charles Darwin and Captain Fitzroy.To these two narrative totems are added other narratives created by participants on whom the lens of history seldom falls, including sketches and other forms of representation.Each full or partial account gives a different perspective of the voyage, a particular 'slant' derived not only from the experiential independence of individual sentient beings, but also from the different capacities in which they were journeying: as sailors, officers, scientists and so on.Studying these narrative strands gives historians insight into the historical process by which composite narratives are formed, become dominant, and then widely accepted within the public sphere.Only rarely, however, are expeditions written about by participants with similar educational backgrounds and social status, in which divergence of factual accuracy and interpretation cannot stem from differences in function, role, or purpose, but from a fundamental difference of perception, which supports postmodern critiques of epistemology, and more importantly, the demands of narrativization.