A bay to be dreamed of: British visions of Rio de Janeiro.

Martins, Luciana

'... Finally there is Rio Bay--the Bay of Bays--to be expected, to be dreamed of' (1)--thus did Richard Burton announce his arrival in Rio de Janeiro, at the end of an uneventful sea voyage from England in 1865, en route for Santos, where he was to serve as consul for four years. (2) Burton's vision of Guanabara Bay was fired by anticipation, as the sight of Rio de Janeiro was one of the highlights of a well-established imaginative geography produced by European voyagers over the previous half-century, most notably in the two decades following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Its outlines had been repeatedly inscribed in a large and heterogeneous archive of sketches, paintings, charts, maps, diaries, letters, travel narratives and fictional tales. (3) A common feature registered within this burgeoning discourse of trans-Atlantic travel was the view of the harbour of Rio; a long-anticipated vision of a secure haven for navigators of the open seas, usually dissociated in visual terms from the hectic life of a tropical city. Such images composed an anticipatory geography which would have been familiar to any European traveller of the 1860s, not least the geographer Richard Burton. His depiction of the scene thus reiterated a familiar refrain, as for example presented in Herman Melville's tale of ship-board life, White Jacket:

Talk not of Bahia de Todos os Santos--the Bay of All Saints; for though that be a glorious haven, yet Rio is the Bay of all Rivers--the Bay of all Delights--the Bay of all Beauties. From circumjacent hillsides, untiring summer hangs perpetually in terraces of vivid verdure; and, embossed with old mosses, convent and castle nestle in valley and glen. (4)

The setting of Guanabara Bay was composed of a distinctive combination of natural landscape features and cultural forms, from the coffee plantations which had transformed the surrounding hills to the profusion of stone, brick and whitewash that was the city itself. But what rendered this ensemble into a landscape was the spectator: the observer who framed the view, selecting, illuminating or shading its elements in the process of making its meaning. As the literary critic Antonio Candido has argued, nineteenth-century travel accounts were instrumental in shaping the imaginative geography of Rio Bay and its reputation as a sight to behold; and its iconic status has been reiterated in countless other forms of material culture up to the present day. (5)

In the early nineteenth century, the landscape of Rio de Janeiro was in effect an outdoor laboratory for European travellers. For artists it provided an opportunity to experiment with colour and light, for naturalists like Charles Darwin it opened a window onto the tropical sublime, while for maritime surveyors its topographic profile provided a exemplary suite of coastal forms. In this context, the notion of a laboratory is more than incidental: in particular, it highlights the sense of experiment which often accompanied image-making in this period. In fact, the rendering of these views could be deeply problematic, as aesthetic and scientific conventions established in metropolitan Europe frequently had to be re-thought under tropical skies. If in some respects the ship itself was a privileged site for experiments in observation, (6) the experience of voyaging and the confined spaces of ship-board life necessarily brought different sorts of traveller, and different sorts of vision, into contact with each other. The consequent intersections between the gaze of the artist, the naturalist and the navigator are evident in the archives of travel and exploration.

As many studies of the visual culture of travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have shown, the task of rendering graphically the experience of encounter with distant places was far from innocent--or for that matter straightforward. At a time when exploration, science and art were intertwined in complex and sometimes (to our eyes) unexpected ways, European voyagers were faced by a multiplicity of challenges which often out-stretched the strict metier in which they had been trained, whether as artists, naturalists or surveyors. (7) Access to foreign territories was by no means guaranteed, and the business of traversing, observing and recording the features of distant lands required considerable resources, often in the form of commercial or government patronage. (8) Having negotiated the terrain, and made their observations, travellers then had to face the challenge of assuring metropolitan audiences--the art institutions, scientific academies and naval authorities of the day--of the veracity and significance of their records and reports. Claims to novelty based on primacy, on being the first to traverse or to chart unknown territory, inevitably had a limited life: in the case of Rio de Janeiro, the age of 'discovery' was in any case long past. 'In the month of April I embarked for Rio de Janeiro', wrote the naturalist William Swainson, in 1819, 'more for the sake of comparing the southern with the equinoctial regions of Brazil, than of increasing my collections in a part already well explored.' 99) Swainson travelled to Rio from Bahia after a journey to Pernambuco, where political unrest had restricted his investigations. To such naturalists, as well as many other British travellers during the first half of the nineteenth century, Rio was a welcome port of call for ships bound for Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

Rio de Janeiro as Imperial City

In order to understand what brought European travellers, and the British in particular, to Rio in this period, we need to consider its location within wider networks of economic, military and political power. Rio de Janeiro was no ordinary port of call: indeed, for a crucial part of its history, it functioned as an imperial capital in the tropics. (10) In 1808, following the French invasion of the Iberian peninsula, the city became the capital of the Portuguese empire, the entire royal court moving from Lisbon to Rio, where it was to remain until 1821. (11) Having been the capital of Brazil for 45 years, Rio was in 1808 a medium-sized settlement, with an estimated population of 50-60,000 people. As a harbour, it had for centuries been effectively--if not always legally--'open' to the cultures of the four corners of the Portuguese empire, including its colonies in China and India. The material culture and everyday life of its inhabitants, the architecture, furniture and decoration of their houses and public buildings, and the vegetation that covered the landscape, all bore traces of these Oriental connections. This multicultural aspect of Portuguese imperialism was skilfully portrayed by Carlos Juliao, a military engineer who served in various parts of the empire in the late eighteenth century. In his depiction of the ports of Goa, Diu, Rio de Janeiro, and Mozambique, profiles of landscape features are combined with images of their inhabitants, displaying the variety of cultures embraced by the Portuguese (Fig. 1).

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With the arrival of the Portuguese royal party in March 1808, escorted by a British squadron, and the subsequent wave of immigration over the next few months, it has been estimated that the population of Rio grew by approximately 30 percent. (12) Contemporary evidence suggests that there was also a considerable increase in the African slave trade in the years which followed, and certainly the composition of the population marks it out effectively as a slave city. (13) In the wake of the transition from colonial city to imperial capital, the social, political and economic structure of Rio experienced substantial change: the physical boundaries of the city rapidly expanded; the urban economy grew and diversified; and the cultural life of the city underwent a metamorphosis, as the Prince Regent attempted to transform a provincial capital into a European metropolis. However, the modernization process, if such it was, is best understood as contradictory: for example, during this period Portuguese absolutism was supported by British liberalism, and a market-economy arose alongside the expansion of slavery. This critical moment of urban transformation was the product, ultimately, of the intersection of multiple global processes--the expansion of global trade, the hegemony of British sea-power, the intensification of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the emergence of industrial capitalism. (14) For the British, Rio represented not only a new market to be conquered, but also a vital naval base: in 1808 its harbour became the headquarters of the Royal Navy's South American station.

The site and city of Rio offered a striking series of first impressions: successive generations of British travellers were to wonder at the grandeur of its scenery, the luxuriance of its vegetation and the unexpectedly hybrid character of its cultural and political life. This sense of wonder--or rather, in its less rehearsed form, bewilderment--is worth taking seriously in its own right, and not merely as a rhetorical device. Today, the views of the bay of Rio de Janeiro are crystallized in a relatively narrow collection of post-card cliches. But in the early nineteenth century its forms, colours and atmosphere often seemed to defy the representational conventions of European vision. (15) This was not merely a problem of tropical nature: the city of Rio presented a racially mixed yet highly stratified society, whose complex character was not always readily discernible to visitors. In principle, different kinds of travelling observer directed their gaze at different elements of the Brazilian landscape, the artist's vision, for example, contrasting with that of the naturalist and the navigator. In practice, there was much scope for cross-cultivation, as various sorts of traveller mingled in the same spaces; and within each of these endeavours, of course, the perspective of the privileged observer--artists accompanying major scientific missions or participating in artistic missions, such as Jean Baptiste Debret, for example--could differ significantly from that of more humble travellers. In what follows, I focus on the image-making of three lesser-known British travellers--the artist Augustus Earle, the naturalist Maria Graham, and the midshipman Charles William Browne--each of whom visited Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century, a generation before Richard Burton sailed into the 'Bay of Bays'.

An Artist's Impression: Augustus Earle depicts Rio

Augustus Earle, the 'wandering artist', first travelled to Brazil in April 1820, at the age of 26, and remained there (apart from a visit to the Chilean coast and a few months in Lima) for four years. His travels had previously taken him (in 1815-16) to North Africa, Sicily, Malta and Gibraltar; and in 1818 he had embarked for New York, and then Philadelphia, from where he left for Brazil in February 1820. In 1824, Earle left Rio for the Cape of Good Hope, bound for Calcutta. The ship in which he was sailing (the Duke of Gloucester) was forced to anchor off Tristan da Cunha, and Earle remained there for eight months. Four months later he was in Sydney, from where he journeyed extensively into the interior. In 1827 he travelled to New Zealand, staying there for six months. Having returned to Sydney, he then went to the Caroline Islands, Guam, Manila, Singapore and finally Madras, where ill-health apparently forced him to return to England. In 1831, Earle was appointed Artist Supernumerary on the Beagle expedition under Captain Fitzroy. Back in Rio, Earle lived in a cottage at Botafogo Bay with Charles Darwin, who seems to have enjoyed the artist's companionship. (16) Continued poor health however forced him to resign his post, and he returned in November 1833 to London, where he died five years later, of 'asthma and debility'. (17)

The images that concern us here are the ones produced--very likely 'on the spot'--during Earle's first voyage to Brazil in the early 1820s. One of the most striking of these sketches is a watercolour entitled 'From the Summit of Cacavada [sic] Mountains, near Rio de Janeiro', now in the National Library of Australia (Fig. 2).

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The artist pictures himself in his top hat, and through his pose and gesture he registers his astonishment at the sight of the Guanabara Bay, rendered as a panoramic view of the surrounding topography. Not a vestige of the city can be seen; and the vegetation is represented in an allegorical rather than a descriptive manner, in order to highlight the artist's response to the scene rather than to delineate the form of any particular tropical specimens. Although the composition of the image plays on the theme of sublime landscape, the artist's presence in the foreground gives it an almost anecdotal character, the graphic representation of hand and finger pointing to the specificity of the moment. Here the artist's hand denotes astonishment at the spectacle of nature, but in another of Earle's images from this period--a depiction of a slave punishment in the Calabouco prison--the hands play a quite different role. As Leonard Bell has argued in a suggestive essay on Earle's abiding concerns as a travelling artist, this image invites us to reflect on the brutality of the scene, in contrast to the more picturesque, and in some ways more voyeuristic, images of Brazilian slavery found in the work of Debret and Rugendas, amongst others. Here, as elsewhere, Earle's compositions present us with a play on the politics of looking and not looking, or rather of 'lookings which may be in conflict'. (18)

Earle was also unusual in actually naming many of the Afro-Brazilians he portrayed, as for example in his contemporaneous image of 'Rita, a Celebrated Black Beauty at Rio de Janeiro' (Fig. 3).

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By contrast, most travelling artists during this period--notably those accompanying major scientific expeditions--tended to depict non-Europeans within the template of Enlightenment reason. Rather than seeking out the individual, their mission was to identify and observe the 'type', especially the racial type, by which the singular characteristics of individuals would be subsumed within the visual features of the group. (19) Many contemporary accounts of travels in Brazil thus include plates of 'racial types' in which the faces of indigenous peoples were diagrammatically exhibited, in frontal and profile views. In Earle's hands, however, Rita is depicted quite differently, as a notably proud woman displaying a somewhat blase expression, yet allowed a dignity and individuality which are rare in other contemporary works. This and other images present a more intimate picture of the 'other', in which the artist's own subjectivity is also in question. Perhaps it was Earle's cultivation of his identity as a 'wandering artist' that gave him the distance from convention that other European travellers, especially those accompanying major scientific missions, could not afford.

Even when he himself was absent from the scene, Earle's images invite the viewer to join in, as for example in the cheerful painting 'Negro Fandango Scene, Campo St. Anna nr. Rio' (Fig. 4).

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The boy on the left of this image is hailing the painter, as if to greet him--or us?--in a gesture that seems to bridge the distance between viewer and viewed. At the same time, through the figure of the policeman standing marginally on the right, Earle refers more subtly to the strict surveillance to which slaves and freed blacks were subjected within the public spaces of Rio. Another distinctive aspect of Earle's work in Rio during the 1820s is reflected in his images of the monarchy (Fig. 5).

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In a scene of the emperor's coronation, for example, we are presented with a humble, somewhat pathetic figure, in a setting entirely lacking in the pomp and circumstance of the scenes produced by Earle's betterknown French counterpart, Debret. Images such as this one clearly did not conform to the self-image of the Portuguese monarchy.

In engraved versions, Earle's depictions of social life in Rio were sometimes subtly modified in a way which diluted their most troubling features. For example, in the illustration of the 'Slave Market at Rio de Janeiro' (Fig. 6; now in the British Museum) which was published in the frontispiece of Maria Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (Fig. 7), the transformations between watercolour and print are noticeable.

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The subtle shades of Brazilian bodies in the original were thus reduced to a dichotomous pattern of black and white, with the former acquiring a brutish appearance, very distinct from the melancholy figures represented in the original, while the slave merchant on the right is represented more sympathetically. Like many other British writers on Rio during this period, including Darwin, Maria Graham openly criticized the institution of slavery. Earle, a friend of Graham, stayed long enough in Rio to familiarize himself with the sophisticated social and racial hierarchy which existed amongst masters, slavers, recently-arrived Africans and their descendants. The subtle shades of his pencil reveal his sensitivity to both the specificity of social distinction and the individuality of personality. In addition, as in this slave-market scene, it was the groteseque aspects of the institution of slavery that both attracted and repelled him, as we can see in the caricature of the slave-owner. Either by chance or design, all these details faded in the hands of the engraver, leaving the British reading public with a stereotypical vision of Brazilian society. In contrast, Earle's original watercolours of Rio confront the viewer with his own highly individual perspective. (20)

Attention to Nature: Maria Graham's Botanical Drawings

In her sketches and writings on Rio de Janeiro in the 1820s, Maria Graham paid particular attention to the forms of tropical nature, an interest she shared with many other European travellers. In Britain itself during the Georgian and early Victorian periods, the practice of natural history was both a specialist field of knowledge, the preserve of gentlemen naturalists, and a popular pursuit, made available to an increasingly large number of men and women through a variety of cultural forms. Genteel natural history societies and working-class clubs proliferated in the cities and towns of industrial Britain, inspired by and contributing to a burgeoning literature devoted to the observation, collection, depiction and exchange of botanical, entomological and zoological specimens. (21) On a larger scale, the gathering of information about all aspects of natural history was also a prime concern of many of the major trans-oceanic expeditions of the period, enabled in large measure by the extension of British commercial and naval interests across the globe.

In this context, the image of the tropics as a zone of circulation, a portion of the globe within which plants could be exchanged from one place to another, was already well established, notably through the work of institutions such as the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In addition to their medical, scientific and commercial significance, as emphasized by the likes of Sir Joseph Banks, tropical plants came to be appreciated as much for their aesthetic value as for their utility. The cultivation of exotic species became a much-prized aspect of the popular culture of gardening during the nineteenth century. (22) The practice of drawing botanical specimens, promoted and applied in the increasing volume of periodicals and books devoted to the flora of Britain and the empire, was also an integral part of this culture of natural history. A working knowledge of the forms of tropical vegetation was acquired not only by travellers and collectors themselves, but also through sketches and diagrams reproduced in botanical publications, as well as dried specimens and seeds cultivated in local nurseries and gardens.

Maria Graham, the daughter of a naval officer, was a woman of considerable talents who travelled across the world during the early nineteenth century, describing many of her exotic journeys in words and images intended for publication. The British Museum holds one of her sketchbooks of Rio, including images from her first voyage to Brazil from 1821 to 1823 and the second, from 1824 to 1825. (23) Here, panoramic views of the harbour are intermingled with more detailed depictions of popular sites of interest which also attracted the attention of other visitors, such as the view of Corcovado from Laranjeiras or the English burial ground, both reproduced in her published Journal. There is nothing particularly remarkable in this set of views--they are very much in the manner of the picturesque idiom popular at the time, which was also evident in Graham's sketches of her previous voyages to India and Italy, from 1809 to 1819. (24) More distinctive than her landscapes, however, were her botanical drawings, and it is these that helped to shape a particular view of tropical nature.

Preparing to return to Rio for a second time in 1824, Graham offered her assistance to William Hooker, director of Kew Gardens: 'I do not habitually draw flowers but I could do that--and also any peculiar form of seed &c--Only let me know how I can be useful & I will try to be so'. (25) The drawings of Brazilian flora which she made in Rio from 1824 to 1825, around a hundred of them collected in a portfolio, survive in the Kew archives. (26) The front page bears a note by the director of Kew, dated 1933, when the portfolio was first received on loan: 'The drawings are certainly of value. Mrs. Graham evidently possessed enough botanical knowledge to enable her to make what appear to be accurate illustrations of plants, and clearly she had considerable artistic skill'. One of these sketches--the Heliconia--particularly caught my attention (Fig. 8).

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The imposing, vividly-coloured figure in the foreground contrasts with the pale view of the Lagoon and the Corcovado Mountain in the background. The point of view is low: indeed, it seems that Graham was kneeling when she produced the image, as if in a reverential posture. Such a stance is reminiscent of the poetic sensibility expressed in Thornton's celebrated illustrations in the Temple of Flora (1807). As Martin Kemp remarks, this sensibility 'played an essential role in the recognition of the dynamic drama of nature which came to feature so prominently in the writing of the nineteenth-century naturalists'. (27)

There is a more general point here: in order to give meaning to the forms of nature presented to their eyes and bodies, to make them recognizable, the philosophical observer had always to negotiate a set of aesthetic and scientific conventions. These conventions varied depending on the mode of publication and the intended audience. In this context, it is interesting to compare Graham's sketches, intended both for specialist use and for a wider reading public, with those of naval surveyors, whose profiles and charts were so vital to the practice of navigation.

The Arts of Tropical Navigation: Midshipman Charles William Browne

From the late eighteenth century, the Bay of Rio de Janeiro was regularly depicted in Admiralty plans and charts, together with topographic profiles of the neighbouring coastline. (28) Coastal sketches were designed, above all, to render unknown forms recognizable for future navigators. In approaching the entrance of a harbour, it was imperative to position the vessel on the right track, and instructions in Sailing Directions, plans and charts were crucial for the success of this operation. A common device used to enable an unfamiliar coastline to be recognized by navigators was to resort to comparison with known forms, including profiles of the human body, in whole or in part. The coastline at Rio, for example, was commonly imagined by navigators as 'a man lying on his back'. Baron Roussin's description of the 'peculiar figure of the land' visible from the approaches of the harbour is quoted in a nineteenth-century Brazilian Pilot: 'the Gavia forms the head, and the Sugar-loaf the feet. When the tops of these mountains are free from clouds or mists, it is almost impossible not to be struck with this appearance'. (29) It is equally 'impossible' to know how many seamen were indeed struck by such an appearance, for the 'man lying on his back' was of course a product of Roussin's imagination. Nonetheless, the same image was quoted in many other manuals of the period. The French artist Debret used it to illustrate his own account of a voyage to Brazil. (30) Debret was well aware of the colloquial description of the view--the 'sleeping giant'--used by navigators.

In considering the drawings made by navigators during this period, it is possible to identify three main types of image (though the boundaries between them were often blurred): firstly, coastal views, charts and plans associated with hydrographic surveys; secondly, sketches, often of a more picturesque kind, intended to illustrate official accounts of maritime expeditions; and thirdly, drawings in letters or journals, made as a personal record of voyages. The graphic archive of maritime travel is indeed vast and heterogeneous, and its significance for the visual cultures of geographical knowledge deserves more attention from historians. (31) In this context, we will consider the surviving drawings of one midshipman--Charles William Browne--which fall mainly in the latter two categories, though Browne was certainly involved in the business of surveying coastal landscapes on behalf of the Admiralty. Browne visited Rio on three occasions: in 1816 on board HMS Alceste (bound for China); in 1818 on board HMS Eden (bound for India); and in 1822 on board HMS Leven (bound for East Africa). In themselves, these itineraries draw attention to the significance of the 'Bay of Bays' in the global networks of British influence during this period, before the coming of the steam age drastically reduced the time and changed the routes of trans-oceanic voyages.

Browne's sketches of the landscape at Rio pose some intriguing questions about the circulation of images, as well as ships. Two of his drawings, probably made during the Leven's surveying expedition to the East African coast, survive in the Royal Geographical Society archives. In the first, entitled 'Corcovado and Gloria Church' (Fig. 9), the building on the right of the sketch is more reminiscent of an Indian temple than of a Catholic church in the baroque style.

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In the second, a sketch of the Corcovado mountain above the town of Rio (Fig. 10), we are confronted with another sort of displacement: the vegetation here bears little resemblance to the entangled banks of tropical plants and trees that clung to the steep slopes.

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Looking more closely at the image, the landscape appears as if clothed in a hybrid combination of the floral patterns of Indian and Chinese fabrics. Is it mere conjecture to suppose that Browne's extensive travels across South and East Asia, in particular his familiarity with oriental designs, may have left some trace in his image-making? (32)

The surviving corpus of Browne's drawings also raises broader questions about the relationships between mapping, travel and memory. By the mid-nineteenth century, the orthodox scientific view was that in the description of nature, nothing could be trusted to memory alone. According to W. J. Hamilton's instructions on geography, published in the Admiralty's Manual of Scientific Enquiry (1849), field observations 'should be noted down on the spot'. (33) As Darwin himself put it, on the basis of his experience during the Beagle voyage, 'trust nothing to the memory; for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when (34) The same advice was given in Hints to Travellers, a set of instructions for aspiring explorers published by the Royal Geographical Society from 1854, in which it was stressed that the 'less left to memory the better'. (35) Instant material record of what was seen 'on the spot' was widely treated in this instructional literature as a necessary condition of truthfulness. The travelling observer, it was argued, simply could not trust his own memory sufficiently to render the knowledge useful for future explorers. In this context, Browne's drawings provide some clues to the sources of such anxieties about observation and memory. The available evidence suggests that he himself enhanced his drawing skills significantly while travelling around the globe on board ship, under the influence of superior officers, travelling naturalists and artists. (36) And as we have seen, his sketches of Rio seem to have been made from memory, and exhibit telling signs of his engagement with oriental cultures in South Asia and the Far East. Here we are concerned less with the accuracy or otherwise of his representations of Rio, than with the extent to which they reveal aspects of a complex process of transculturation, by which representations of distant places were made in a process of circulation; a process which left its mark on British visions of the tropical world.

Voyaging

The small selection of images examined in this paper prompts some further reflection on the relationship between seeing, knowing and voyaging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, the maritime extension of European power went hand in hand with two fundamental developments in the epistemology of vision. Firstly, we see the emergence of what Jonathan Crary describes as the 'modern observer'--or, as I would prefer, the 'observer-in-transit'. (37) This is reflected in the increasing reliance on observing 'in the field' within the discourse and practice of contemporary natural science. Secondly, there is the formulation of a new conception of landscape observation based on measurement and mapping, evident in the emergent disciplines of geology, geography and botany, which Susan Cannon terms 'Humboldtian science'. (38) This said, it would be wrong to suppose that this sort of mapping impulse, and in particular the faith in the instrumentalization of vision which it implied, swept all before it. The knowledge produced by travellers and explorers continued to depend on matters of belief and trust. As Dorinda Outram argues, 'such trust could be built up by means of authorship, and it is not surprising that many explorers, most notoriously Alexander von Humboldt, invested perhaps as much in writing the narrative of travel as they did in travelling itself [...]. Even if he used instruments to extend and calibrate sense impressions, what the explorer himself saw was crucial to establishing the truth-status of his observations.' (39)

In the process of extension and expansion, a new geographical awareness of the variability of the natural world was emerging. For the observer-in-transit, the book of nature--whether it was composed on the basis of Linnean or Lamarckian principles--could no longer be contained within the boundaries of the European botanical garden. Equally, the outline spaces on the map of the world were acquiring different forms and colours, as new theoretical understandings of temperate and tropical nature took shape. (40) The new way of seeing landscape took different forms in different places, reflecting different social, cultural and historical circumstances. In this context, the history of natural history in Britain is of particular interest, for it was here that the maritime infrastructure necessary for global science was at its most developed, and here too that the mingling of scientific epistemology and landscape aesthetics was most in evidence at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Seen in this broader context, the various visions of the landscape of Rio de Janeiro examined here conveyed a much bolder aspiration: to embrace the world by rendering its image faithfully on paper. In recent studies of voyages of exploration and empire, the traveller's gaze has perhaps too readily been associated with the figure of the 'monarch of all I survey', and novelty too often reduced to repetition: the 'imperial eyes' of the European observer ('which passively look out and possess', to quote Mary Louise Pratt) (41) leave little room for the unexpected, for both surprises and disappointments. Yet the experience of travel could in fact make a difference both to what was seen--the eyes of the returning traveller were not quite the same as those of the departing traveller--and to what was recorded. The images composed by the observer-in-transit were constantly reconfigured through an active process of negotiation between intentions, conventions and expectations. As Greg Dening has put it:

Crossing beaches is always dramatic. From land to sea and from sea to land is a long journey and either way the voyager is left a foreigner and an outsider. Look across the beach from the sea, there is what the mind's eye sees, romantic, classic, savage but always uncontrollable. The gestures, the signals, the codes which make the voyager's own world ordered no longer work. (42)

I would like to conclude this essay by shifting scene, rather abruptly, to the twenty-first century. Today Rio de Janeiro is a city of more than six million people, its landscape criss-crossed with a network of highways and tunnels; many of its hills have been colonised by poor and rich alike, others have been levelled, their debris used to re-fashion the numerous islands, beaches and inlets around the bay. (43) In a city where the foreign traveller is now much more likely to arrive and depart by air than by sea, the port is now dominated by the import and export of goods, rather than people; and the citizens of Rio encounter the Bay only as an obstacle to be circumvented, or traversed via a huge bridge snaking its way across the water to Niteroi. In the midst of the structured chaos of urban life, surrounded by tower blocks and favelas, the pedestrian can hardly see the mountains that frame the city. At this level, Burton's vision of the 'Bay of Bays' seems to belong to a different world. And so it does.

But not entirely. In December 1996, after a year's research in British archives, I took a boat trip around the Bay for the first time in my life, hoping to glimpse something of the sensations felt by nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic travellers as they arrived, finally, in a safe haven. The experience was instructive, though the urban landscape of Rio has undergone many transformations since Burton's time, due in some measure to the British themselves. As Gilberto Freyre once pointed out, the contrast between luxuriant tropical nature and degenerate urban society which features so frequently in the writings of nineteenth-century travellers to Rio, including Darwin, pre-figured the commercial rhetoric of the 'before and after'. It was largely British capital and technology that first enabled this tropical city, with its oriental airs, to acquire a modern, European look, a little over a century ago. (44) Yet for all this, I am glad I took to the water in search of the remnants of another image of Rio, for it enabled me to see my own city with new eyes.

LUCIANA MARTINS

BIRKBECK COLLEGE LONDON

(1) Richard Burton, 'From London to Rio de Janeiro: letters to a friend', Fraser's Magazine 73 (436) (1866) Letter vi, p. 510.

(2) This paper formed part of a project on British views and visions of the tropical world, 1750-1850, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I am grateful to Felix Driver for his comments on an earlier version.

(3) Luciana L. Martins, O Rio de Janeiro dos viajantes: o olhar britanico, 1800-1850 (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001).

(4) Herman Melville, White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (London: John Lehmann, 1952), p. 205. The story was first published in 1850.

(5) Antonio Candido, Literatura e sociedade (Sao Paulo: Nacional, 1965), p. 93. See also Rafael Cardoso, 'O Rio de Janeiro que se ve e que se tem: encontro da imagem com a materia', in A Paisagem Carioca (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 2000), pp. 82-97.

(6) Richard Sorrenson, 'The ship as a scientific instrument in the eighteenth century', Osiris 11 (1996), 221-36.

(7) In this context, the pioneering work by Bernard Smith remains a profound inspiration. See Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).

(8) See, for example, the account of Robert Schomburgk's expedition to the British Guiana by Graham Burnett in Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

(9) William Swainson, 'Sketch of a journey through Brazil in 1817 and 1818', Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 1 (1819), 369-73.

(10) On the multiple histories of Rio de Janeiro as an imperial city, see Luciana L. Martins & Mauricio Abreu, 'Paradoxes of modernity: imperial Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821', Geoforum 32 (2001), 533-50.

(11) Kirsten Schultz, A Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy and the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001).

(12) J. S. Pizarro e Araujo, Memorias historicas do Rio de Janeiro, vol. 7 (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1948), p. 126; J. Luccock, Notes on Rio de Janeiro, and the southern parts of Brazil; taken during a residence of ten years in that country, from 1808 to 1818 (London: Samuel Leigh, 1820), p. 41; L. G. Santos, Memorias para servir a historia do Reino do Brasil, vol. 1 (Belo Horizonte/Sao Paulo: Editora Itatiaia/Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1981), p. 58. Nireu Cavalcanti has recently challenged this estimate, calculating that no more than 500 people arrived in Rio from 1808 to 1809. He nevertheless argues that the political impact of this historical moment on the life of the city should not be underestimated. See N. Cavalcanti, O Rio de Janeiro Setecentista: A vida e a construcao da cidade da invasao francesa ate a chegada da corte (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004), pp. 96-97.

(13) Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

(14) Martins & Abreu, 'Paradoxes of modernity'.

(15) The unsettling aspects of the art of tropical travel, with particular reference to the landscapes of William Havell, are discussed further in Luciana L. Martins, 'The art of tropical travel, 1768-1830' in M. Ogborn and C. Withers (eds), Georgian Geographies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

(16) On Darwin's visions of Rio, see Luciana L. Martins, 'A naturalist's vision of the tropics: Charles Darwin and the Brazilian landscape', Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (1) (2000), 19-33.

(17) Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Augustus Earle, Travel Artist: Paintings and Drawings in the Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia (London: Scholar Press, 1980), pp. 147-50.

(18) Leonard Bell, 'To see or not to see: conflicting eyes in the travel art of Augustus Earle' in Julie F. Codell & Dianne S. Macleod (eds), Orientalism Transposed (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 117-39 (p. 126).

(19) See Deborah Poole, Vision, Race and Modernity: a Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

(20) On Earle's Australian images, see Michael Rosenthal, 'The extraordinary Mr Earle' in The World Upside Down: Australia 1788-1830 (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2000), pp. 34-41.

(21) Anne Secord, 'Artisan botany' in Nicholas Jardine, James Secord & Emma Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 378-93; Jane R. Camerini, 'Remains of the day: early Victorians in the field', in B. Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 354-77.

(22) Rebecca Preston, '"The scenery of the torrid zone": imagined travels and the culture of exotics in nineteenth-century British gardens', in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: landscape, Display and Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 194-211.

(23) Drawings by Lady Maria Callcott, vol. 2 (British Museum, Prints & Drawings).

(24) Drawings by Lady Maria Callcott, vol. 1 (British Museum, Prints & Drawings).

(25) Letter from Maria Graham to William Hooker, 11 April 1824 (Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, Archives).

(26) Maria Graham, Portfolio of Rio de Janeiro (Kew Archives).

(27) Martin Kemp. 'Taking it on trust: form and meaning in naturalistic representation', Archives of Natural History 17 (1990), 127-88 (p. 133).

(28) See also Luciana L. Martins. 'Mapping tropical waters: British views and visions of Rio de Janeiro' in D. Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 148-68; Felix Driver and Luciana L. Martins, 'John Septimus Roe and the art of navigation', History Workshop Journal 54 (2002), 144-61.

(29) John Purdy, The Brazilian Navigator (London, 1844), p. 146. Roussin commanded a small mission sent out by the French in 1818 to survey the coast of Brazil and maintain a presence there.

(30) J. B. Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Bresil, au sejour dun artiste francais au Bresil (Paris, 1834), vol. II, p. 2.

(31) See, for example, Driver and Martins, 'John Septimus Roe and the art of navigation'.

(32) Browne's sketches are discussed at greater length in Martins, 'Mapping tropical waters'.

(33) W. J. Hamilton, 'Geography', in Robert Main (ed.), A Manual of Scientific Enquiry prepared for the use of Officers in Her Majesty's Navy and Travellers in General (London: John Murray, 1859 [first ed. 1849]), pp. 190-218 (p. 207).

(34) As quoted in Hamilton, 'Geography', p. 192.

(35) 'Hints to Travellers', Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 24 (1854), 328-58 (p. 355). See also Felix Driver, 'Hints to travellers: observation in the field' in Driver, Geography Militant: cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

(36) Martins, 'Mapping Tropical Waters'.

(37) See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995); Flora Sussekind, O Brasil nao e longe daqui: o narrador, a viagem (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990).

(38) Susan F. Cannon, Science in Culture: the Early Victorian Period (Folkestone: Dawson & Science History Publications, 1978).

(39) Dorinda Outram, 'On being Perseus: new knowledge, dislocation and enlightenment exploration' in David Livingstone and Charles Whiters (eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 283-84.

(40) Marie-Noelle Bourguet, 'The explorer' in M. Vovelle (ed.), Enlightenment Portraits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 257-315; Felix Driver and Luciana L. Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

(41) Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7.

(42) Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land. Marquesas 1774-1880 (Hawaii: University Press of Hawaii, 1980), p. 32.

(43) See Elmo da Silva Amador, 'Baia de Guanabara: um balanco historico' in Mauricio A. Abreu (ed.), Natureza e Sociedade no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, Turismo e Esportes, 1992), pp. 201-58.

(44) Gilberto Freyre, Ingleses no Brasil: Aspectos da Influencia Britanica sobre a Vida, a Paisagem e a Cultura do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio Editora, 1948).