The study of women travel writers is often centered around the writings of Victorian women. Travel writing critics like Alison Blunt, Gilian Rose, Karen R. Lawrence, Sara Mills, and Susan Morgan most often concentrate on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century travel writers such as Mary Kingsley. Their analyses are integral to understanding the imperial gestures that took place in the Victorian era, arguably the age of imperialism in Britain and the U.S., but what is missing from the time line are the writings of women from much earlier in the century. Britain's relationship with the East and Africa during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was often a precarious one, and little was known in the West about the people of those lands. Women travelers, whether purposefully or not, found themselves in foreign lands and later wrote about their experiences at a time when, even more so than in the Victorian era, a female traveler was the exception. I say these early travelers may not have purposefully found themselves in foreign lands because my paper will concentrate on the narratives of those women whose travel plans were drastically revised because their means of transportation, a ship, was wrecked. Most of the shipwreck narratives describe the wreck as being off of the coasts of alien lands, particularly Barbary, Algiers, and the islands of the "South Seas," countries and coasts often perceived as hostile by British and American audiences. More specifically, I will examine Hannah Hewit; or the Female Crusoe by Hannah Hewit, Eliza Bradley's Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley, the wife of Captain James Bradley of Liverpool, commander of the ship Sally, which was wrecked on the coast of barbary in June 1818, and Maria Martin's History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs Maria Martin who was six years a slave in Algiers . . ..
My presentation first of all will place these narratives within the travel writing tradition being developed by women at that time, by referring to such works as Mrs. Kendersley's Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to the Sierra Leone, and Mrs. Carmichael's Domestic Manners . . . of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies. Each of these works in some way begins to legitimate and establish the contours of women's writing about the empire--about women's role in its building and maintenance and/or her contribution to a critique of colonialism. Second, I will investigate how shipwreck narratives, like Bradley's and Martin's, utilized the burgeoning tradition of women's travel writing to publish narratives about their captivity in countries hostile to Europeans, i.e., hostile to her colonizing efforts and therefore "savage." Finally, I will address the issue of the authenticity of these narratives, because I feel this question ironically parallels the status of women as inauthentic, peripheral participants in empire-building.
Many of the sources in my presentation have never been republished since their initial edition. Women's shipwreck narratives have been relatively ignored by historians and literary scholars, while shipwreck narratives by men are usually rather accessible. Women's shipwreck narratives however are useful and informative for their ability to contribute to a variety of genres (travel and discovery narratives, captivity narrative, ethnography, autobiography, short story), and most importantly, for what they say about white Western women and colonialism when that woman finds herself in the most unladylike of predicaments.
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