Graham Burnett extracts from: Schomburgk, “Fragments of Indo-
American Traditions.” The loss of the craft is also narrated in Journals of the Royal Geographical Society—JRGS
6: 280.
The following appendixes selected from Burnett, verbatim—
with the journal article page referred to in square brackets and Schomburgk’s own writings in parenthesis.
On Cassava bread:
‘The much-mythologized foray into the terra incognita of the Guianas depended entirely on the unglamorous, oversized pancake called cassava bread, the staple diet of explorer and crew alike. The narratives of interior expeditions sometimes read as journeys from cassava transaction to cassava transaction. In a part of one of his accounts (edited before publication by the RGS), Schomburgk pointed out his dependence on the ability and willingness of the native inhabitants to provide cassava. The difficulty of travel in the interior of British Guiana, he wrote, was that “weeks, nay, months may elapse sometimes before a human habitation is met with where the stock of provisions may be replenished.” (Burnett, quoting Schomburgk) Hillhouse warned prospective travelers that “it is absolutely necessary to start with at least one
cwt (hundredweight) of cassava bread, well dried, as it is a chance if any more can be procured for a week afterwards” (Burnett Quoting Hillhouse). Encounter with an Amerindian settlement meant that the expedition could replenish its stock of provisions, and this meant that several days would be spent in the settlement while the inhabitants made trips to their provision fields and the women began the laborious process of grating and pressing the cassava root and preparing the rounds of bread. The scene is repeated regularly in the journey [End Page 28] narratives: a greeting, a negotiation through an interpreter, and then the expedition pitches camp near the settlement to await the preparation of provisions, using the stop to collect botanical specimens, observe local activities, or take astronomical positions. A typical scene took place at the Taruma village on the Essequibo where Schomburgk and his party arrived on February 20, 1838: “We arrived in the afternoon at two Taruma settlements, one on the left bank and one on the right of the river Essequibo. We had there to replenish our provisions as the small size of our boats did …not allow us to provide for more than 4 or 5 days.”
Source: Graham Burnett
On the explorers’ dependence on Amerindians:
“S and H did a certain kind of colonial work, narrowly shaping the histories and characters of indigenous people to conform to the needs of the colony.
A close look at the role played by Amerindians in geographical exploration itself casts the incongruities of this depiction into high relief. In this section I examine how Amerindians participated in these geographical explorations in the interior in order to demonstrate that the written accounts of the expeditions largely obscured the real fragility and dependence of the European explorer. Not only did Amerindians provide the physical labor needed to paddle, portage, and hoist expedition corals up the stiff currents and stony rapids of Guyanese rivers, they also provisioned the expeditions with their knowledge of hunting and fishing and by their hospitality in providing staple foods from interior settlements. Native expertise, leadership, and geographical knowledge not only shaped the direction of particular incursions and parted the veil of a seemingly impenetrable wilderness but also provided the special knowledge later appropriated by interior explorers and transferred into scientific and colonial enterprises.
Schomburgk’s “leadership” of the expedition was further undermined by his near-total dependence on indigenous guides. The Amerindians were the memory and map of the land. The only way that Schomburgk and Hillhouse could be sure that they were in true terra incognita was to be assured by the local people that no white person had ever been where they were. The only way to do geography was to link place names with locations, and the only way to learn place names was to ask. As a rule, Schomburgk only indulged in onomastic coinages when he understood a site to have no local name. More important, the only way Schomburgk could find his way to the sources of the Essequibo was to keep asking at every fork, branch, and creek, “Which way is the Essequibo?” Neither Schomburgk nor Hillhouse ever actually recorded himself asking questions like these, but they did both record the necessity and (complexities) of depending on local guides. In 1835 the lieutenant governor wrote to the
RGS to explain that Schomburgk would need to work with the natives if he were to have any success as a geographical explorer, writing, “The more remote tribes will expect and demand presents; without these, he is unable to deal harmoniously with them and I am afraid he will never be able to get on.”
Not “getting on” with the local guides stymied Schomburgk’s expensive expedition up the Corentyn, a journey that he desperately wanted to succeed in order to appease his
RGS sponsors, who were becoming impatient for him to find some terra that was actually incognita. When his guides told him that the cataracts they encountered could not be rounded until the rainy season, Schomburgk was forced to pack up for the coast. Only later did he discover that his guides had fibbed in order to keep him from disturbing their slaving territory. Again and again in his journey narratives Schomburgk dismissed his guides as “stupid” or “sullen” and unhelpful, but this merely distracts the reader from the fact that they had gotten him to where he was and were his only hope of getting where he thought he was going, knowing that he was there when he arrived, and getting back again. In addition, Amerindians connected the expedition to the coast and provided the only way for Schomburgk to send progress reports to London during the course of his explorations, some of which lasted for more than a year. This vital Amerindian service is again obscured by a language of triviality: “Our people bartered for several of their commodities and [illegible] in exchange for knives and scissors, and after I soothed him and his wife with some trifling presents, he promised to take care of some letters to the colony.” [End Page 30]
Irregularly, in marginal or unpublished passages, we catch glimpses of the critical role played by the guide. “We met two Wapisanas,” Schomburgk wrote in a passage deleted from a published account, “who had been sent out by our advance party to show us the way, which became rather intricate.” “Only Indians could have guided us” on the path. “If it had not been for the chieftain, who walked before us and searched out the shallowest places to ford the torrent, we might have met with serious accident.” On the paths of the numerous portages, through the jungle to the sites where Schomburgk and Hillhouse collected their botanical specimens, we must suppose that Amerindians walked ahead and the explorer followed.
The guide and his special geographical knowledge were just one aspect of the “geographical gift” that formed part of the exchange of the contact zone. Hillhouse’s guide and pilot received a flintlock gun in addition to other payments for his work conducting the expedition up the Mazaruni. When Schomburgk sat down among the “Pianoghottos” (Farakoto) on his way overland back to the Corentyn in 1843, the exchange involved food and information. After they had presented “sugar cane, pine-apples and cashews (
Anacardium occidentale)” and some new-made bread, for which Schomburgk exchanged glass beads and fishhooks, the explorer quickly “directed inquiries towards the continuation of our route.” The expedition made its way by constant recourse to local knowledge, including the direction of routes, the character of inhabitants, and the possibilities of supply. Schomburgk would “halt, and collect every information with regard to the south ‘Eastern’ course of the Essequibo,” as he made his first expedition, but this allusion to the dependence on local knowledge was edited out of the published journal account. In another passage that does not appear in the published accounts of the journeys, an Amerindian elder traced on the ground a map, “remarkable in many respects,” which Schomburgk copied and sent back to the RGS. Not only did local knowledge physically shape the interior expedition, it also delimited the temporal boundaries of the penetration. The Amerindians could predict the rainy season with great accuracy from the behavior of turtles and winged ants, and the arrival of the rainy season coincided with the end of the season of expedition.
Both Hillhouse and Schomburgk relied on the Amerindians’ geographical knowledge not simply to figure out where to go and how to get there, but also to make determinations concerning colonial reconnaissance. The fertility of Amerindian provision fields indicated the suitability of the land for colonization and offered evidence concerning the appropriateness of particular crops. Hillhouse began his explorations of the interior because of his realization that native cultivars of various crops might usefully be transferred to coastal plantations. He also drew on local [End Page 31] knowledge of freshwater sources to determine the suitability of areas for settlement. The portages that Amerindians showed Schomburgk shaped his later (shelved) proposals for a system of canals to connect the rivers of the interior. Schomburgk even traded for fruit seeds to take back and transplant on the colonial coast, and beyond, at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.
Those aspects of the exploration that most explicitly sought to participate in the discourse of metropolitan science relied to a significant degree on native knowledge as well.
Perhaps the best examples of investigations that were entirely dependent on the participation of the Amerindians were the two explorers’ [End Page 32] ichthyologies. Not only did “an old Indian chief” provide Hillhouse with the life cycle of the pacu (which enabled him to make the fish an instrument of colonial geography and expedition navigation), but the entire process of catching and collecting the specimens relied on the Amerindians, who used the extract of a toxic root (
Hai-
arry) to poison pools of water and bring all of the fish to the surface. This technique allowed the naturalist to examine the distribution of particular species along the river, information, as we have seen, with broader geographical implications. Hai-arry root not only provided ichthyologists with detailed accounts of the river fish of Guiana, it also provided information to the colony concerning the resources of its fisheries and contributed to an understanding of its broader geographical contours. Hillhouse recommended that the explorer always carry some in order to be able to provision his expedition if the need arose. [End Page 131] Entangled in a bundle of muddy roots were colonial reconnaissance, scientific investigation, and expedition survival. A
Hai-
iarry fishing expedition featured prominently on the title page of Schomburgk’s book for the Naturalist’s Library.
….. Amerindians were by no means passive or childlike witnesses of geographical exploration in the interior of British Guiana. Close attention to the written production of those expeditions (and its omissions) reveals that the depiction of the Amerindian as fragile and dependent on European agency misrepresented the relationship that emerged in the contact zone. Amerindian identity may have been constructed for European readers by the written production of the interior exploration, but the Amerindian substantially constructed the expedition itself. This article has shown how geographical explorations alloyed science and colonialism in a project to extend metropolitan territory and enmesh foreign people in metropolitan commerce. I have tried to explain how geographical explorers actually made their way into the forbidding interior of a tropical region in order to chart, name, and appropriate. I have also shown how those same men emerged to write the expedition, the land, and the people for colonial and metropolitan consumption. Examining how Hillhouse and Schomburgk represented the Amerindian has demonstrated how expedition writing did a certain kind of colonial work, narrowly shaping the histories and characters of indigenous people to conform to the needs of the colony. Still closer examination of that writing provided dramatic evidence that this work involved minimizing Amerindian knowledge and power in an effort to reflect the superiority of the European and [End Page 33] to validate the virtue of the colonial project. Reconstructing the role of the Amerindian in the practice of expedition, in the acquisition of geographical knowledge, and in the “discoveries” of natural history not only points to patterns in the work of the explorer/authors who worked in the colonial context in the mid-nineteenth century, it also gives us a better understanding of the relationship between science and imperialism in the period. [End Page 34]
Belittling of Amerindians:
“They were indolent, sought a life of pleasure, behaved irresponsibly, and liked to tease. In the written accounts of expeditions, the Amerindian emerged as fascinated by curiosities: a compass, a fork, or the music box that Schomburgk played for them at a marionette show he mounted on the shore of the Corentyn. They played flutes that recalled toy quill whistles to “those who allow their imagination to carry them back to their childhood.” Their willingness to accept in trade what Schomburgk and Hillhouse considered “trifles” reinforced their apparent lack of any sense of value. Liberality with trinkets like glass beads and looking glasses “won their hearts,” and a bag of baubles could buy months’ worth of provisions. The labor of five or six days on a cassava grater might be exchanged “for a common knife,” because the American Indians appeared to possess no concept of the value of time. The Amerindian was capricious and lacked the notions of value and exchange which were to be expected of an adult. Like a child who demands prodding to be happy, the native had been “spoiled” by the distribution of “gifts,” gifts like those provided by the explorers.
However, the servile attitudes of the Native Americans (Pie Wie) in the film is prefigured by the distinctions:
Amerindian imitations of European manners like handshaking were represented in narratives of expeditions as a pantomime: entire settlements would clamor, in Schomburgk’s account, to shake his hand.
More seriously “ridiculous” were Amerindian “superstitions,” which Hillhouse dismissed as “nearly as absurd and obscene as the mythology of the Hindus.”
