Tim Berndtsson: "'But all that glitters is not gold.' On Carl Magnus Robsahm’s 'Travel Journals in Västerbotten and Lapland, 1797–1801'"

Abstract:

During the final decade of the 18th century, Carl Magnus Robsahm, a young clerk at the Board of Mines (Bergskollegium), traveled throughout what is now Norrbotten over the course of four summers. The trips were organized by Baron Samuel Gustaf Hermelin, a man in the process of establishing a major ironworks project from Gällivare along the Lule River. Robsahm’s role in the project was to investigate minerals, waterways, and the fertility of the soil. But although his journal had a scientific and descriptive ambition, the motive behind it was primarily economic. It can arguably be regarded as tool for grander socio-technological vision of how a chain of industries could be built to support a efficient mining district in the near future. New settlements would be established, bogs drained, meadows cleared, and fields plowed. My presentation will use this travel accounts as sources to discuss images of the colonization of the north at the turn of the 19th century.

But I will also address the travel narrative as a genre. Several different accounts remain from Robsahm’s journey: a travel narrative edited after the fact; a collection of reports to his employer, Hermelin; and a private travel diary. In part, they contain similar content, variants of the same observations. But they also provide somewhat divergent images of the journey. By placing these documents side by side, I hope to facilitate a discussion of the rhetorical functions of travel writing, as well as some thoughts on the relationship between the texts and the external reality they refer to.