Critical Analysis of Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (2006)

Picture from: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1501593.Travel_Narratives_from_the_Age_of_Discovery

For my American History to 1865 course at Metro I actually had to do a book review of Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology by Peter C. Mancall. I’ll give this book 3 stars out of 5 or a C rating. This book could be helpful for people looking from primary source material on related topics. It is just not a book that you would read for the fun of it. Below is my detailed analysis.

Peter C. Mancall collected many firsthand accounts from explorers to create his book Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology. From his introduction to the pieces it seems that he collected them into one source to show how the explorers’ experiences and mind set was shaped by the cultures they were coming from. The book is broken down into four main sections based on where the observer was writing about: Africa, Asia, America, and Europe. Mancall gave a short introduction to each piece which included information about the person who wrote it. This was done to help build a base to understand why the writer wrote what they did and to explain their perspective a bit.

Mancall never directly makes his thesis known, but through the introduction he focuses on the relationship between observer and observed while stressing what biases can arise in these first person accounts. From Mancall part of the book no bias can be found and he directly addresses the biases that people can run into when looking at documents from this time period.  One such example of this is when he talks about how gender can influence peoples’ perspectives and that finding documents from women during this period is really hard (Mancall, 11). He also tries to dispel biases that readers may have when he states, “the texts that survive should not be dismissed as revealing more about the observer than the observed” (Mancall, 13).

It cannot be judged if his work is reliable or not since it was mostly a collection of other peoples’ work (primary sources). The best way to look at this is by going back to two main points (arguments?) he made in his introduction. The first point is that the explorers had three main goals: to spread Christianity, assess the peoples they met while establishing how savage they were when compared to Europeans, and to make a profit from their travels (Mancall, 22). The other main point was that explorers “often wrote with contempt” about the native peoples of the Americas (Mancall, 33). One example of this was the Columbus letter that said, “They explored for three days, and found countless small communities and people, without number, but with no kind of government, so they returned” (Mancall, 209). This supported the natives as being a lawless bunch that needed European help to make them civilized. All the works picked for this anthology supports these ideas. It could have just been “cherry picking” that helped the works fit into Mancall’s themes or it could just be a good representation of the works coming from this time period. If it was the latter then it would have these two concepts fitting in with his thesis of how things could be deeper than just what one would get from a surface read of the material.

These arguments/thesis are convincing when compared to other books, such as the book from class. The goals of the explorers that he pointed out show up all the time in media (books and films) from this time period and is supported by what is taught in schools. The second argument  about contempt a bit less so from past experience, because most other classes I have taken showed that it depended more on what part of Europe the explorer came from that would influence their perspective of different peoples. The blanket statement about observers in America goes against his concepts of what all influences biases.

           Overall, this book does fit into the topic well and it can be seen why Henretta chose to use this book not only for their resource, but to also recommend it to readers for further information. This book was effective in providing primary sources that people could use for research and also the introductions that Mancall did were also good for helping readers to understand some base information/mindset of the explorers. This book enhanced my understanding of the topic because it allowed me to compare explorers’ view of the old world versus the new world when it came to how they described people. There were less similarities then I expected. I had gone into reading this book expecting that the Europeans would look down on everything that wasn’t European, but I was wrong. One example of this was Duarte de Sande’s writing on China where he seemed amazed at how well the Chinese were able to overcome building problems when they were putting the great wall over rivers and the overall expanse of the project (Mancall, 166). This shows just how well Mancall chose the documents to include in order to get a reaction from his readers.

Bibliography

Henretta, James A., et al. America: A Concise History-Volume 1: To 1877. Boston: Bedford/ St, Martin’s, 2015.

Mancall, Peter C., ed. Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology. 1^st ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.