Christina Granroth

Does size matter? Travel books and Swedish knowledge of Southeast Asia in the eighteenth century.

Abstract

This paper examines some aspects of the role of travel literature in the diffusion of early modern European knowledge of the world. Locating the sources of Swedish knowledge about Southeast Asia within European travel literature the paper argues that - contrary to India and China - this region was known mainly through small, individual travel accounts.

The eighteenth century was a time when a number of Swedes came into direct contact with the region now known as Southeast Asia, mainly through the efforts by Carl von Linné to send out trained naturalists on board the ships of the Swedish East India company. The first part of the paper looks at travel literature read and referred to by Swedish travellers to Southeast Asia as well as the dynamism between preperceptions and actual encounter.

Until the end of the eighteenth century Southeast Asia was known in Europe almost exclusively through travel literature. The scarcity of new accounts in the first half of the century led to much of the published material being recycled from the big sixteenth and seventeenth century travel collections. This resulted in a contradicting overall picture: older tales of wonder, perils and riches mixed with endless accounts of commercial encounter.

Swedish visitors to Asia could not, unlike other Europeans, rely on earlier writings in their own language. Nils Matson Kiöping travelled widely in the region in the late seventeenth century and later published one of the most influential Swedish travel books of all times, ‘Beskrifning Om en Resa genom Asia, Afrika och många andra Hedna Länder’, reprinted several times in the following century. Kiöping’s book has so far been described as filled with imagined stories with a taste for the marvellous. In a context of earlier European writing on the region it seems, however, that a reappraisal can be done.

Christopher Henrik Braad was the most important of the eighteenth century Swedish travellers. He was a systematic and well-read observer who spent many years in India and visited the Malay peninsula as a commercial spy for the Swedish East India Company. Braad brought with him a recorded collection of books. His unpublished descriptions of the places he visited also reveal not only what he had read, but also what he sees as apparent misconceptions in previous travel accounts.

Braad’s critical attitude toward earlier literature, in combination with an emphasis on the importance of personal observation, would be characteristic of other Swedish visitors to the region. Klas Fredrik Hornstedt and Carl Peter Thunberg both relied on native informants for ethnographic enquiry. The Swedes then came to describe the inhabitants of Java in a more favourable light than the average European traveller. This stood out in sharp contrast to their descriptions of the savage inhabitants of Sumatra, based on reading of European travel books.

The second part of the paper looks at the use of travel accounts as sources for natural history, in a case study of Carl von Linné’s classification of man. In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758) Linné introduced two new types of human beings, linking the new ‘homo sapiens’ to apes: the tailed man and the troglodyte, both of which are said to originate from various parts of Southeast Asia. These creatures have been dismissed as symptoms of Linné's superstition and uncritical belief in the fantastic. A closer look at Linné’s sources, however, reveals that sightings of ‘troglodytes’ were not only commonplace in Dutch accounts, but would be described later in the century by Batavian naturalists. Similarly, the tailed men of Southeast Asia would be the object of scientific expeditions well into the nineteenth century.

The examples dealt with in the paper confirm that in Swedish knowledge of Southeast Asia size did matter, at least to some extent. Swedish writers on China and India made much use of French literature, in particular the big collections of Jesuit writing. These, however, deal with Southeast Asia only in passing. The bulk of information, especially on the archipelago, was to be found in the multi-volume Dutch and English collections, with which Linné apparently was unfamiliar.

Swedish reporting and its use by Linné highlight some important themes in European writing on Southeast Asia. The interior of the region was, at least in certain types of travel literature, still seen as unknown and a potential abode for marvels of the east. For descriptions of peoples of the interior Europeans often used native informants, which meant that much of European writing in fact reflected attitudes and tensions between native ethnic groups. This not only illustrates the sharp division between coast and interior, a long-standing theme in early modern Southeast Asian historiography, but also gives weight to arguments against a monolithic European construction of the East.

The scope given to the fantastic points to the wider issue of European inability to perceive cultural diversity. Descriptions of political, ethnic and cultural fragmentation clearly resulted in the ambivalent perceptions of Southeast Asia which only were emphasized by the use of ‘small’, often obscure travel books. Accordingly, Enlightenment writers hesitated to refer to the region in general discussions of the conjectural history of man, but instead continued to use it as the home of the curious and strange.