The last day of the conference there was a session discussing the use of images and photos in research and field work as a primary source. The talk by Martin Rudwick provided one example from Italy about how the Temple of Serapis-Pozzuoli, near Naples, was flooded (with images and accounts describing water mollusks on the temple floor) but now today due land-rise the temple is back to 1754 situation when there was no flooding. A curious example of retreading the steps to a historical site.
In the Q&A session, following the talk by Rudwick, I particularly enjoyed his comment on Charles Darwin and the “native banana tree” with reference to the fieldwork Darwin made in Tahiti. The point made here was that accounts about the work of Darwin made by other historians (that have never been there) made Martin suggest that some of these people ought to be sentenced to walk up and down and up (the mountains of Tahiti) to understand what Darwin was talking about.
This statement makes a call for recognizing of learning by doing (or the bodily experience) to remember and to fully understand the location when using travel accounts and letters as a source material from Darwin’s work.
Having said that, the account made in the travel diaries of Darwin from his trip to Tahiti with the ship called The Beagle is, I must say, very colourful and gives a tropical taste to any reader:
“The low land which comes down to the beach of coral-sand, is covered by the most beautiful productions of the intertropical regions. In the midst of bananas, orange, cocoa-nut, and bread-fruit trees, spots are cleared where yams, sweet potatoes, and sugar-cane, and pine-apples are cultivated. Even the brush-wood is an imported fruit-tree, namely, the guava, which from its abundance has become as noxious as a weed. In Brazil I have often admired the varied beauty of the bananas, palms, and orange-trees contrasted together; and here we also have the bread-fruit, conspicuous from its large, glossy, and deeply digitated leaf.”
Later on, Mr Darwin also got around to tasting some local tropical specialities after descending the mountains of Tahiti:
“When in the evening I descended from the mountain, a man, whom I had pleased with a trifling gift, met me, bringing with him hot roasted bananas, a pine-apple, and cocoa-nuts. After walking under a burning sun, I do not know anything more delicious than the milk of a young cocoa-nut. Pine-apples are here so abundant that the people eat them in the same wasteful manner as we might turnips.”
Source: Library online: The voyage of the Beagle.
Travel accounts like this one reminds me of the taste of banana bread and roasted bread-fruit and makes me me want to pay a visit – regardless if I am one of those scientists that are sentenced to “be there” or not.
