Delegated encounter and descriptive authority in early nineteenth-century Africa: the connected careers of Henry Salt, Nathaniel Pearce, William Coffin and Giovanni Belzoni
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13645145.2012.702444
ISSN1755-7550
Autores Tópico(s)Biblical Studies and Interpretation
ResumoAbstract By the early nineteenth century, traditions of travel and knowledge referring to the Christian empire of the Ethiopian highlands were increasingly adapted to novel European ideals of exploration and description. Travellers from Europe were employing more or less innovative legitimating strategies in order to build careers from their sojourns in North-Eastern Africa. One important approach was the delegation of descriptive authority by a social superior, by which inferiors might eventually gain expert status in their home society. George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, could thus link his employees Henry Salt, Nathaniel Pearce and William Coffin in a chain of advancements. Yet, excessive immersion into foreign worlds always carried the risk of de-legitimising a potential cultural mediator. Moreover, not everyone was content to remain within the mobilised, yet internally stable hierarchy of such a system. Salt's problems with his employee Belzoni point to alternative, independent possibilities of self-fashioning for well-versed experts on Africa. Keywords: AbyssiniaEthiopiaauthoritydelegationdescriptionhierarchyidentity Acknowledgements The first version of this text was presented at the conference ‘Encountering Strangers – Strange Encounters’ organised by Dr Stefanie Fricke at the Munich Center for Advanced Studies in 2011. I would like to thank Dr Fricke and all conference participants for their valuable questions and comments. Notes 1. Nathaniel Pearce, The Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce, Written by Himself, During a Residence in Abyssinia, From the Year 1810 to 1819, 2 vols, ed. John James Halls (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), ii, 284–6. 2. Use of the term ‘Abyssinia’ for the Christian regions of the Ethiopian highlands throughout this text is to be understood as the wording of the European historical sources, most of which, up to the mid-nineteenth-century, did not accord pejorative value to the term. 3. Pearce, Life, ii, 329. 4. Jowett's impression of Pearce's arrival is published in his printed travel report: William Jowett, Christian Researches in the Mediterranean, from MDCCCXV. to MDCCCXX. In Furtherance of the Objects of the Church Missionary Society (London: R. Watts, 1822), 123–4. 5. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, […] (London: John Murray, 1820), 25. 6. Pearce, Life, ii, 332–3. 7. Pearce, Life, ii, 333. 8. Pearce, Life, ii, 334. 9. For the history of European-Abyssinian contacts, see Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia, updated edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Paul B. Henze, Layers of Time. A History of Ethiopia (London: Hurst, 2000; reprint 2001); Berhanou Abebe, Histoire de l'Ethiopie, d'Axoum à la révolution (c. IIIe siècle avant notre ère - 1974) (Paris: Centre Français des Etudes Ethiopiennes, 1998); Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians. A History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003; original edition 1998); Tadesse Tamrat, ‘Ethiopia, the Red Sea and the Horn’, in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. iii: From c. 1050 to c. 1600, ed. Roland Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 98–182; Mordechai Abir, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. iv: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, ed. Richard Gray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 537–77. 10. Henze, Layers of Time, 70 and 79–80; Marcus, History, 27–8. 11. Henze, Layers of Time, 85. 12. See on European advisors, from the missionaries of the mid-nineteenth century up to entrepreneurs under Haile Selassie in the early twentieth century: Henze, Layers of Time, 125–209. 13. The Portuguese voyages of discovery have been attributed to a combination of religious, economic, and political motivations, among which the search for the supposedly rich and powerful Prester John of the Indies was a decisive factor. While the prevalence of economic reasons had to be carefully contested in the 1970s (see Thomas Henriksen, ‘Portugal in Africa: A Noneconomic Interpretation’, in African Studies Review 16, no. 3 [1973]: 405–16), the authors of introductory textbooks now give a multi-causal explanation. See for example, Ronald S. Love, Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415–1800 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 10–11. 14. Francisco Álvares, A verdadeira Informação das terras do Preste João das Indias, 2 vols (Lisboa, 1540; reedited Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1989). See Abebe, Histoire, 47; Henze, Layers of Time, 108. 15. Miguel de Castanhoso, Dos Feitos de D. Cristovam da Gama em Ethiopia [1564], reedited by Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira (Lisboa: Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1898). 16. Abir, ‘Ethiopia’, 537. 17. Abir, ‘Ethiopia’, 543–9. Also Henze, Layers of Time, 94–100. 18. Abir, ‘Ethiopia’, 550–1. 19. Richard Olson, ‘The Human Sciences’, in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 436–62. See Paul Wood, ‘Science, Philosophy, and the Mind’, in Cambridge History of Science, ed. Porter, 800–24, here particularly 809–14. 20. See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World. Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 12–13. I use the gendered noun deliberately. 21. James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773, 5 vols (Edinburgh: printed by J. Ruthven, for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, London, 1790). 22. I laid down this somewhat tragic mechanism of public confrontation elsewhere: Anke Fischer-Kattner, ‘(K)Ein idealer Entdecker: Erfolge und Scheitern der Heimkehr des Abessinienreisenden James Bruce (1773–1790)’, in Figurationen der Heimkehr. Die Passage vom Fremden zum Eigenen in Geschichte und Literatur der Neuzeit, ed. Sünne Juterczenka and Kai M. Sicks (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), 51–70. 23. The history of early modern ‘apodemics’ (or texts about the art of travel) has been treated by Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity. The Theory of Travel 1550–1800 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishing, 1995). 24. The German ‘orientalist’ Michaelis drew up a collection of questions for a Danish expedition. See Christoph Bultmann, ‘Michaelis, Johann David’, in Neue Deutsche Biographie 17 (1994), 427–9, at http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118783726.html (accessed May 11, 2011). Joseph-Marie Degérando, Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (Paris: Société des observateurs de l'homme, 1800). See Sergio Moravia, Beobachtende Vernunft. Philosophie und Anthropologie der Aufklärung (Munich: Hanser, 1973), 173–82. 25. Sven Rubenson, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence (London: Heinemann, 1976), 29. 26. See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth. Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 27. Valentia had sued his former friend John Gawler for damages as the latter had had sexual intercourse with Valentia's wife Anne, but there were rumours that the Viscount had actually encouraged the relationship. See Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 181–2. 28. George Annesley Mountnorris, Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, in the Years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806, 4 vols (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811). 29. The Italian had died during the voyage, and his various contributions to the final publication of the voyage were hardly mentioned in the published text. See Ib Friis and Paul Hulton, ‘Luigi Balugani and his Relationship with James Bruce’, in Luigi Balugani's Drawings of African Plants. From the Collection Made by James Bruce of Kinnaird on his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile 1767–1773, ed. Paul Hulton et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, Rotterdam/A.A. Balkema, 1991), 41–60. For contemporary criticism of Bruce's textual treatment of Balugani, see ‘ART. I. Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and, 1773’, in The Annual Review and History of Literature 4 (1805), 2–16, here 7–8. However, the personal dimension of this conflict should not be overemphasised as there was clearly a structural dimension to difficulties in travellers’ relationships with European travelling companions and skilled servants. 30. The most detailed biography of Salt is that by his friend and fellow student of painting, John James Halls, The Life and Correspondence of Henry Salt, Esq., F. R. S. &c., His Britannic Majesty's Late Consul General in Egypt, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), here i, 1–66. A more recent overview of his life, but with only a sketch of his youth is given by Deborah Manley and Peta Rée, Henry Salt. Artist, Traveller, Diplomat, Egyptologist (London: Libri Publications, 2001), 1–13. 31. Salt's friend and biographer John James Halls later published this letter and other material by Pearce. (Pearce, Life, i, 1–36.) 32. Pearce, Life, i, 2. 33. E.g. Pearce, Life, i, 23–7. 34. Pearce, Life, i, 29–34. 35. Pearce, Life, i, 35. 36. Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, 122. 37. Valentia, Voyages, i, 41. 38. E.g. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 33–9, 42–5. 39. Valentia, Voyages, i, 139–40. 40. Valentia, Voyages, i, 110–11. 41. Thus, Antoine d’Abbadie, a later traveller to Ethiopia, quarrelled with his servant Domingo Lorda, who resented treatment that did not allow him a marked distinction from indigenous servants. The problem is only superficially mentioned in the travelogue published by Antoine's brother Arnauld d’Abbadie, Douze ans de séjour dans la Haute-Éthiopie (Abyssinie), vol. i, new critical edition of the 1868 original by Jeanne-Marie Allier (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1980). For wider implications of such conflicts, see my forthcoming doctoral dissertation. 42. E.g. Valentia, Voyages, i, 72, 91–3, 102–4, etc. 43. E.g. Valentia, Voyages, i, 6, 221. 44. Valentia had them printed in a folio volume to accompany his travelogue. He explicitly refers to the illustrations in his text and points to Salt as their author. (Valentia, Voyages, i, 8.) 45. Valentia, Voyages, i, 334–5, 379–88. Halls, Life, S. 79–82. 46. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 1–3. For the diplomatic significance of this trip, see Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, 36–43. However, diplomacy was certainly not the only important objective of the voyage. 47. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 16, 18, 26, 32, 42. 48. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 33–9. 49. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 50–1. 50. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 75. 51. Sophie Blanchy, Karana et Banians. Les communautés commerçantes d’origine indienne à Madagascar (Paris: L’Harmattan: 1995). 52. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 86–201. For Pearce's return, see Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 22; Halls, Life, i, 85–6, 91. 53. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 207–21. 54. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 377–87. 55. Donald Crummey, Priests and Politicians. Protestant and Catholic Missions in Orthodox Ethiopia, 1830–1868 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 25. 56. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 475. 57. Valentia, Voyages, iii, 105–21. 58. Valentia, Voyages, iii, 37–8. 59. Salt even used Bruce as a precedent in his dealings with indigenous requests for payments and met people who had known him: Valentia, Voyages, ii, 473; iii, 43–4, 99–100. 60. E.g. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 465–84; iii, 75, 89–93, 269–78. 61. Valentia, Voyages, iii, 136–8; Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 31–2; Halls, Life, i, 124–5. 62. Valentia, Voyages, iii, 328–482. 63. Henry Salt, Twenty Four Views Taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, Abyssinia & Egypt. With descriptions to illustrate the voyages and travels of George Annesley, Earl of Mountmorris (London: Miller, 1809). See Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 40–1. The question of imperialistic implications in Salt's (still highly prized) collection of aquatints has been raised, e.g. Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 246–9. Yet the images are counted among the earliest realistic representations of Ethiopian landscape. 64. Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, 43–4. 65. Halls, Life, i, 140–6. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 41–3. 66. Halls, Life, i, 148, 157–60. 67. In Ethiopian history, the so-called ‘Era of the Princes’ (Zamana Mesafent) between roughly the middle of the eighteenth century and the coronation of Tewodros II in 1855 is commonly regarded as a period of decline and chaos. The emperors had lost authority and the regional lords engaged in seemingly endless violent struggles to gain control: Mordechai Abir, The Era of the Princes. The Challenge of Islam and the Re-unification of the Christian Empire, 1769–1855 (New York: Praeger, 1968). See Abir, ‘Ethiopia’, 555–74; Henze, Layers of Time, 106–32. 68. Letters by Pearce's wife to Salt are printed in Sven Rubenson, ed., Acta Aethiopica, vol. i: Correspondence and Treaties, 1800–1854 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 1987), nos 9, 14. 69. BL Ms. Add. 19347, Correspondence of Viscount Valentia with Salt, Pearce and others, relative to Abyssinia and Egypt, 1804–1826, f. 11–14: Nathaniel Pearce to Valentia, Antalo, February 2, 1806. 70. Pearce, Life, i, 48–9. 71. Henry Salt, A Voyage to Abyssinia and Travels Into the Interior of that Country Executed Under the Orders of the British Government in the Years 1809 and 1810 […] (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1814; reprint London: Frank Cass & Co., 1967), 310. 72. Halls, Life, i, 181–6. 73. Salt, Voyage, 238–9. 74. E.g. Salt, Voyage, 198. 75. Salt, Voyage, 203–4. 76. E.g. Salt, Voyage, 423, 475–85 (for the history of European–Ethiopian relations). 77. Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, 46–8; Halls, Life, i, 199–200. 78. Salt, Voyage, 148–9. Halls, Life, i, 219. 79. Salt, Voyage, 332–3. 80. Halls, Life, i, 213, 217–8. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 51–3. 81. For example, he touches on all these topics in his report of an excursion to the river Tacazze: Salt, Voyage, 202–11. 82. Pearce, Life, i and ii. 83. BL Ms. Add. 19347, f. 97: Pearce to Salt[?], Chalicut, May 28, 1811; f. 99–102: Pearce to Salt, Abyssinia, November 14, 1812; f. 149–50: Pearce to Salt, Chalicut, Abyssinia, August 29, 1815. 84. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 63–4. 85. Halls, Life, i, 468–70. 86. Halls, Life, i, 464–5, 472–3, 485. 87. Halls, Life, ii, 104–11, 143–5. 88. Pearce, Life, i, 52–3. 89. Pearce, Life, i, 52. 90. Halls, Life, ii, 153–66. 91. Salt had married the 16-year-old daughter of an Italian merchant in 1819. She died in childbirth in 1824. The consul then sent his surviving elder daughter Georgina to live with her grandmother in Italy. (Halls, Life, ii, 146–52, 225–31.) 92. Halls, Life, ii, 262–3. 93. Rubenson, Acta Aethiopica, nos 21–2. For a discussion of the various interests involved in this diplomatic mission, see Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, 58–68. 94. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 256–7. 95. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 269. 96. Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, 64–5. 97. Crummey, Priests, 29–55. 98. For Coffin's diplomatic role as the almost continually disregarded Ethiopian contact of the Foreign and the Colonial Office, see the study by K. V. Ram, The Barren Relationship. Britain and Ethiopia, 1805–1868. A Study of British Policy (New Delhi: Concept Publ. Co., 1985), 9–11, 29–31. Profound investigations into Ethiopian foreign policy are undertaken by Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, 91–3, 168. 99. d’Abbadie, Douze ans, 551. 100. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 387. 101. Valentia, Voyages, ii, 484. 102. Valentia, Voyages, iii, 98. 103. Salt, Voyage, 330, 332–3, 383–4. 104. Pearce, Life, i, 47. 105. See various letters in BL Ms. Add. 19347. 106. E.g. BL Ms. Add. 19347, f. 99–102: Pearce to Salt, Abyssinia, November 14, 1812, where Pearce provides information on natural history, politics, and linguistics. 107. BL Ms. Add. 19347, f. 240: Pearce to Mountnorris, Cairo, February 9, 1819. 108. BL Ms. Add. 19347, f. 218–22: Salt to Pearce, Cairo, June 29, 1818: ‘You must not expect to be a gentleman but a comfortable maintenance with little work – such as looking after my garden or collecting antiques.’ 109. BL Ms. Add. 19347, f. 305: Salt to Banks, Cairo, May 31, 1820. See for Banks, John Gascoigne, ‘Banks, Sir Joseph, baronet (1743–1820)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, May 2009 at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1300 accessed February 14, 2012. 110. Thus Coffin inspected the smaller ones among the caves at Low Ghur: Valentia, Voyages, ii, 152. 111. Salt, Voyage, 198–202. 112. Pearce, Life, i, 198–260. 113. BL Ms. Add. 19347, f. 161–4 Consul general Salt to Pearce, Cairo, April 28, 1816 and f. 165–6: the same to Coffin. 114. ‘List of “Corresponding Members”’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 3 (1836), cxxix. 115. Pearce, Life, i, 201. 116. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 84–6. See the latest biography by Ivor Noël Hume, Belzoni. The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 1–42. 117. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 87–91. Halls, Life, i, 489–502. A copy of the contract signed by Salt, Burckhardt and Belzoni is found in: BL Ms. Add. 19347, f. 167–8: Instructions, Boulak, June 28, 1816. 118. See Ronald T. Ridley, Napoleon's Proconsul in Egypt. The Life and Times of Bernardino Drovetti (London: Rubicon Press, 1998). 119. Manley and Rée, Henry Salt, 94–5. 120. Belzoni, Narrative, v. 121. Biographers of the protagonists have tended to emphasise the dimensions of psychology and personality in the conflict; see, for example, Hume, Belzoni, 151–4. The structural side has been disregarded. 122. Halls, Life, ii, 1–30. 123. [Lucy Sarah Atkins Wilson], Fruits of the Enterprize Exhibited in the Travels of Belzoni in Egypt and Nubia; Interspersed With the Observations of a Mother to Her Children (London: Harris and Son, 1821).
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