Traveling in Search of Truth

The Tempest was a really great jumping off point for my final thoughts about the course in general, because I've been contemplating the nature of truth in travel writing a lot. In the texts we have read, written as they were before the advent of tourism, the truth undergoes almost inevitable distortion because of the secondhand nature of many of the accounts, such as in the case of Marco Polo, Herodotus, and Odysseus. Even when the adventurers are direct authors of the text in question, as with Cabeza de Vaca and Columbus, the presence of the royal audience for which the written work was intended is inescapable and must be taken into account. Despite this, Cabeza de Vaca struck me as by far the most honest travel writer within the canon that we read, perhaps because his personal story ties into a development of the land explored in and of itself. Cabeza de Vaca's appreciation of the New World as a place, rather than just a chance for glory, is evidenced by his desire to go back there immediately after being lost in its wildernesses for years. In contrast, Columbus' desire for royal patronage color his accounts far towards the positive. The same desire to impress an audience, though perhaps more innocuously, emerges within the texts of Herodotus and Marco Polo. Both of these texts assert some measure of superiority or at least normalcy to their own cultures and contrast their observations of otherness with their own societal values. Yet despite the condescension towards the inhabitants of foreign lands, as well as the ridiculous exaggerations, both accounts belie an innate curiosity as to the diversity of human culture, to say nothing of the world itself. In reading Herodotus' and Polo's descriptions of what they find strange or noteworthy, some aspects of the authors' own respective societies begins to emerge. Thus these travel classics serve as documents of both the culture being visited and the culture doing the visiting. While Ibn Battuta was similarly prone to stretching the truth, his intentions were to reinforce the teachings of Islam; indeed, Battuta's exposure to cultures outside of the Islamic region of the world was very limited. Nevertheless, his account is also chock full of details unique to one region or the other, as variable in their believability as the various accounts of Herodotus and Polo. This perhaps reveals an innate human desire to, when sharing stories of travel, infuse their own imagination within the narrative in an attempt to make the story as magical for the audience as the journey was for them.