3 - ‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)

Summary

In 1814 translations of two further works by Humboldt went on sale in Britain. One was the English edition of the Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, entitled the Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America. The other comprised volumes one and two of the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804, which was gradually appearing on French booksellers’ shelves as the Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent. Translated by Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827), both pieces corresponded to the seventh and eighth works that Humboldt had planned to publish in collaboration with Bonpland, deriving from their journey to the Americas between 1799 and 1804. The Researches comprised chapters giving visual and textual descriptions of Mexican and Peruvian antiquities– architecture, sculpture, historical paintings and hieroglyphics– interspersed with picturesque scenes of the Andean cordilleras. The Personal Narrative, which would eventually span seven volumes, described Humboldt and Bonpland's journey across the mountains, plains and tropical rainforests of Venezuela, down the river systems of South America (notably the Orinoco), to the Catholic missions of Spanish America and the sugar haciendas of Cuba. While the two-volume Researches was relatively compact, the illustrations having been pared down from sixty-nine to nineteen plates, the Personal Narrative ranged across almost 2,000 quarto pages in the French original and over 3,900 in the seven-volume octavo English translation. A pivotal work in Humboldt's oeuvre, the Personal Narrative was as much the embodiment of Humboldt's struggle to combine aesthetic and scientific representation in an all-encompassing travelogue as it was a testament to the staying power of his translator.

By 1814 British critics were already showing signs of fatigue. ‘It may be doubted whether the method of publication adopted by M. de Humboldt is that in which either his interest or his reputation has best been consulted,’ declared John Barrow, Fellow of the Royal Society and author of travelogues on China and South Africa, in the Quarterly Review. While many reviewers (including Barrow) readily paid homage, in reviews routinely thirty pages long, to Humboldt's international repu¬tation as a scientific traveller, they were equally quick to criticise what they perceived as his poorly managed material, the dryness of the scien-tific sections and the crippling slowness with which the seven-volume Personal Narrative started to appear.